ABOUT THE TRIAL OF KSM?…UM….ER….FORGET IT: JENNIFER RUBIN
Never Mind, Forget the KSM Trial
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/category/contentions
With the midterms in the rearview mirror the Obama administration can now admit the obvious: a public trial for KSM is impossible. The Washington Post reports:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111207508.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010111300434
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.
The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.
In other words, all of the attorney general’s assertions regarding the superiority of a public trial have proven faulty, and the administration now looks buffoonish. After excoriating critics and defending their scheme to put KSM on trial in civilian court, they now are forced to concede, “OK, it won’t work.” This was all perfectly apparent at the time to everyone but Eric Holder and the leftist lawyers who populate the Department of Justice (a number of whom represented Guantanamo detainees).
The administration is hard-pressed to explain the utter ineptitude that has characterized its detainee policy and the latest reversal. The best it can muster is this:
The Mohammed case is “a case that has to be addressed, and clearly it’s complicated in ways that weren’t originally foreseen, but as a symbol in some way of a thwarted policy, it is wholly misleading,” the senior official said.
Weren’t foreseen by whom? The hapless attorney general.
The administration has had to countermand Eric Holder twice now — first on the release of the detainee-abuse photos and now on the KSM trial and perhaps on the entire issue of military tribunals. For a constitutional scholar, as the president imagines himself, he certainly hired a second-rate lawyer to run the Justice Department. Holder and his appointees are consumed by ideology and lacking in common sense and legal smarts. If it weren’t for the State Department, DOJ would win hands down the “least effective” Obama department. The good news is that their advice has a short shelf-life.
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