There has been a lot of criticism of the decision by Eric Holder to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a N.Y. civilian court rather than in a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay. (Contrary to right-wingers, Barack Obama didn’t make that decision.)
Holder was on the News Hour this evening and Jim Lehrer asked Holder to explain his decision. Holder consulted with a lot of people (no, Obama wasn’t one of them) and came to his decision after weighing all options. It wasn’t an easy decision. Despite all the evidence against Mohammed, there are many legal problems involved since he was tortured into talking. The confessions probably won’t be allowed to be used and Mohammed’s legal defense will surely focus on the issue of torture.
Trying Mohammed in a public criminal trial has the possibility of turning Mohammed into some kind of hero among Islamic extremists. On the other hand, we have the opportunity to see our legal system in action and no matter what the crime, everyone in the United States is granted due process of the law. This view requires some level of confidence in our legal system.
There is little to no chance that Mohammed could be found not guilty, but if he were, he would simply be charged with other crimes and would never be allowed to walk free.
News Hour commentators Mark Shields and David Brooks commented on Holder’s decision. Brooks made the case that the 9/11 attack was an act of war. That may be the whole problem with how we’ve handled the aftermath of 9/11. The Afghan government offered to try Osama bin-Laden in Islamic court immediately after the attack but George Bush turned down the offer. Now, eight years after the attack, bin-Laden remains at large. Instead, we waged war on the people of Afghanistan and probably created more terrorists than we’ve killed.
Imagine having a war fought in your name. The war in Afghanistan was a war on one man: Osama bin-Laden. Had we taken the other route — that of treating the 9/11 as a crime — bin-Laden wouldn’t have been elevated to the hero status of radical Islamics. He also wouldn’t have been elevated to the villain status which propelled Bush to hero status in the eyes of many here in the United States, mainly due to his emotional rhetoric. “You can run but you can’t hide.” “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” “If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.” These were the words Bush used in some of his speeches.
What if, instead, we did as Bill Clinton did with the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and treated this as a crime rather than a war? Bin-Laden probably would have been lynched after a speedy trial. We could have used our newly formed alliance with nearly every country on earth to stamp out Islamic terrorism. We could have saved a trillion dollars that we’ve spent on the two wars, not to mention the nearly 5,000 lives of American soldiers and the 100s of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan civilian lives.
Of course, had we treated the 9/11 attack as a crime, right-wingers wouldn’t have gotten that warm and fuzzy feeling they get when they can hate and when they feel like they’re getting some kind of revenge. It goes back to the inferiority complex of a right-winger.
https://drudgeretort.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/the-inferiority-complex-of-a-right-winger/
DRUDGE RETORT 