TWO GROUND ZEROES: BRET STEPHENS
OPINION: GLOBAL VIEW
NOVEMBER 16, 2009, 10:35 P.M. ET
Two Ground Zeroes
A site of mourning became a symbol of defiance and then a metaphor for incompetence.
By BRET STEPHENS
I have long thought it would be a good idea to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices to lower Manhattan. In my concept, the men would be taken by helicopter to a height of about 1,000 feet over Ground Zero and pushed out the door, so that they, too, could experience what so many of their victims did in the awful final flickering seconds of their lives.
And since al Qaeda intended the attacks as a spectacle for the benefit of its would-be recruits, I’d give al Jazeera the exclusive TV rights.
This, however, is not Eric Holder’s concept. In announcing his decision last week to send KSM and four other defendants to stand trial for their crimes in a federal courthouse just a few blocks from Ground Zero, the attorney general said the trial would offer the bereaved of 9/11 “the opportunity to see the alleged plotters of those attacks held accountable in court,” adding that he was “confident” the legal system would “rise to that challenge.”
We’ll see about that.
There are a few ways to predict the course of the trials. One is to consult what al Qaeda itself advises its members to do in the event that they are brought before a judge. “At the beginning of the trial . . . the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge,” goes a line in what is known as the Manchester Document, a 180-page al Qaeda how-to obtained by British police in 2000.
This is, of course, a prescription for lying, though it shouldn’t be a tough sell with the jury given that KSM was in fact waterboarded by the CIA some 183 times. If anything, it provides a perfect opening for him to turn the tables on his accusers and put the U.S. government on trial, while embellishing any which way he pleases. No small number of potential New York City jurors would find KSM a more credible witness than any number of Bush administration officials—think Alberto Gonzales or Dick Cheney—who might be called to the stand.
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Associated Press
Ground Zero: the last thing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should see.
A second way to predict how the trials might go is to look back at the trial of al Qaeda’s Zacarias Moussaoui, often described as the “20th hijacker.” Moussaoui’s case has been cited by defenders of Mr. Holder’s decision as an example of how civilian courts have succeeded in dealing with some of the most hardened terrorists.
Really? Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001, and indicted that December. It would take until May 2006 before a jury would sentence him to life in prison, a single juror having spared him a death sentence. Assuming a similar time frame for the KSM trials, that means we can expect verdicts in 2015. That’s a long time to keep lower Manhattan in a perpetual state of red alert.
Yet the Moussaoui trial wasn’t merely interminable. It was also incompetent. Moussaoui did everything he could to turn it into a circus, at various times entering contradictory pleas on the view, as he put it, that “you’re allowed to lie for jihad.” Lawyers for the government were repeatedly accused of malfeasance, leading Judge Leonie Brinkema to observe at one point that “I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses.” The judge herself came close to dismissing the entire case, even as the Fourth Circuit had to step in to reverse one of her rulings.
And this was a comparatively clean case, unlike, say, those of El Sayyid Nosair, acquitted in 1991 of the murder of Jewish fanatic Meir Kahane; or of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh at whose trial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing critical intelligence information was disclosed that gave Osama bin Laden clues as to what the U.S. knew about his network.
The third way to consider the trials is to look at Ground Zero itself. After eight years of deliberation, planning, money and effort, what have we got? The picture nearby is the answer.
Let me be more precise. After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we’ve got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence—of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.
Barack Obama, energetic and smart, was elected largely to change all that. But the thrust of his presidency so far has been in the direction of bloated government, deficits and health-care bills; paralysis over Afghanistan and Iran; the convulsions over Gitmo and the CIA torture memos. And now this: An effort to demonstrate the purity of our methods and motives that is destined, as all these things have been, to wind up as the legal equivalent of Ground Zero. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for whom no real justice will ever be meted, understood his targets well.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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