Try KSM, Not Bush
So now Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and five self-confessed 9/11 co-conspirators are to be tried not as war criminals in a military tribunal but rather in civilian court just blocks from Ground Zero.
A civilian format will allow challenges of evidence obtained under duress (ie. water-boarding), question the legality of KSM's 2003 capture, and even negate confessions extracted without the full protections of the Constitution being first explained to the detainees. And thus do I have a horrible feeling that these trials will degenerate into a case against the Bush Administration as much as the terrorists themselves.
As for demonstrating to the world our righteousness, I do not think that the subtleties of the American justice system will be adequately explained in Arab newspapers. Do you? What WILL be reported as this drags on interminably will be the many claims by the defense of so-called “torture” without any context or pretext of fact-checking. Call it a hunch.
A civilian trial could also provide an intelligence boon to our enemies. Precisely because so much other evidence may not be admissible, prosecutors may have to reveal genuine secrets to get a conviction. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
Osama bin Laden learned a lot from the 1995 prosecution in New York of the ‘blind cleric’ Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for the first World Trade Center attack. His main tip was that the U.S. considered bin Laden a terrorist co-conspirator, leading him to abandon his hideout in Sudan for Afghanistan.
Lost in all of this, of course, are the victims of these terrible war crimes and their families. (I know several.) They demand and deserve justice. A conviction that takes years, provides the murderers a megaphone to the world to spew radicalism, grants them the public martyrdom they so desire, and in the process reveals our vital secrets while turning the tables and putting this nation itself on trial, would be anything but.