Tag Archives: 9/11

I’ve read the arguments about why this Jihadi jerk shouldn’t be tried in federal court in New York, but I remain unimpressed. Surely, if GWB had any plans to have him tried by a tribunal and hung, it would have been done sometime in the seven plus years he was in Gitmo. Since that didn’t happen, it doesn’t bother me especially that he will now be tried in a civilian court. And if he gets off? Well, then it will just have to be arranged for him to be run over by a bus.

But it’s tempting to believe, as Power Line relates, that AG Holder’s motive is to see KSM’s lawyers run with his "treatment by the Bush administration, real and imagined, [as] the centerpiece of their defense, with the possible result that Bush, Cheney, and others may be indicted as war criminals by European countries or international courts, thereby satisfying the far left of the Democratic Party, which Obama represents."

It’s still not clear to me, however, why this couldn’t have happened just as easily in a military tribunal.

UPDATE: Two Bush-era lawyers have an argument for KSM’s NYC trial that’s much better than mine, including that such trials have already happened before:

"Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again."

Read. The. Rest.