Say Anything Blog

As I’ve pointed out before, putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in a United States civil court, in New York, is a stupid idea. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, the trial will polish America’s tarnished image abroad. But Holder himself has all but guaranteed that KSM will be convicted of mass murder. If the end result of a trial has to be guilt, and no other option exists, then is it really even a trial. And, Holder reassured the senate, if KSM is found not guilty, he will continue to be held indefinitely. So how exactly does a trial where the defendant has virtually no chance of being found not guilty, and where he won’t go free if by some lope hole he is found not guilty, how does that polish America’s tarnished image?

It doesn’t.

Add to that the expenses related to the trial. I have no idea what the U. S. government intends to spend on this trial. What I do know is that Charlie Schumer asked that an extra $75,000,000 be tossed NYC’s way to proactively reimburse the additional security measures they have to put in place.

Additionally, the trial itself will be an intelligence bonanza for al-Qaida, giving America’s enemies information not just on the specific operations, but deep details on America’s strategies and information gathering techniques. Some out there point to convictions in previous terror trials as examples of how America can succeed by criminally prosecuting terrorists. But each of those prosecutions came at a high price in terms of providing valuable intelligence information to al-Qaida. During the 1993 trial of the “blind sheik”, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the prosecution was forced to give the defense a list of 200 possible co-conspirators. Osama bin Ladin’s name was on the list. Bin-Ladin didn’t know that fact until the court mandated release. But it gets worse. By seeing which of his people were on the list, he was able to discern which of his terrorist cells were compromised and close them down. It also gave al-Qaida enough information to begin counter—counterterrorism operations. It’s not unreasonable to think that the production of the 200 name list may have set American anti-al-Qaida work back by years. And those years were used to implement a plan to take over airliners and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Attorney General Holder points to delays in the military tribunals as reason why the cases should be moved into the civil courts. But he neglects to mention that his own law firm, along with an army of radical leftist attorneys, are responsible for those delays.

Andrew McCartney, who prosecuted the 1993 terrorist bombers points this out:

Of all the infuriating aspects of the decision to transfer five 9/11 war criminals to civilian federal court, the one that grates most is the contention that the Obama administration is finally moving forward after “eight years of delay” — as Attorney General Eric Holder put it at his Friday press conference — during which the Bush administration managed to complete only three military-commission trials.

This is chutzpah writ large. The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people. (During 2007 alone, Covington contributed more than 3,000 hours of free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees.)

Almost from the moment President Bush authorized military commissions in 2001, this legion of litigators flooded the courts with habeas corpus petitions, contending that military detention and trials violated the Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Geneva Conventions. In 2004, the al-Qaeda bar induced the Supreme Court, in Rasul v. Bush, to grant enemies a statutory habeas corpus right to challenge their military detention in civilian court. Congress tried to stop them by amending the habeas statute to divest the lower federal courts of jurisdiction in these lawsuits, but the al-Qaeda bar later persuaded the liberal bloc on the Court to ignore that amendment.

 

It bares noting that Atttorney General Holder and the Obama Administration is packing the Justice Department with leftist lawyers, many of whom come from “progressive” law firms representing terrorists.

More than a dozen new Justice Department lawyers have come from private firms representing Guantanamo Bay detainees, creating potential conflicts of interest as the agency begins its review of roughly 245 men imprisoned at the military detention center.

[…]

And the department will have to tread carefully as more lawyers join the leadership ranks. Several of Obama’s nominees for top department posts have ties to Guantanamo through their firms’ work, including:

• Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr’s David Ogden, who is nominated for deputy attorney general. His firm represents three detainees in habeas proceedings in federal court.

Three former Wilmer lawyers are already planted in the DAG office: chief of staff Stuart Delery, senior counsel Eric Columbus, and counsel Chad Golder. Wilmer lawyers played the lead role in detainees’ landmark victory in Boumediene v. Bush, which recognized their constitutional right to challenge their confinement under habeas corpus.

• Associate Attorney General nominee Thomas Perrelli, managing partner of Jenner & Block’s Washington, D.C., office. His firm represents six detainees in habeas cases. Former Jenner associate Brian Hauck is serving as counsel in the office, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Donald Verrilli left the firm last month. Jenner was co-lead counsel to José Padilla in Rumsfeld v. Padilla and filed amicus briefs in Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

• Covington & Burling’s Lanny Breuer, the nominee to head the Criminal Division. He’s also conflicted out of matters related to the firm’s 16 Yemeni clients. Covington lawyers burned 3,022 hours on Guantánamo litigation in 2007, according to The American Lawyer’s annual pro bono survey, the latest figures publicly available. It was the firm’s largest pro bono project that year. Covington co-authored one of three petitioners’ briefs filed in Boumediene v. Bush, and was responsible for several detainee victories in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

• Morrison & Foerster’s Tony West, the nominee to head the Civil Division. His firm represents one detainee in a habeas case in U.S. district court.

So now we’ve got a Justice Department that is largely being run by lawyers with strong ties to what former terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCartney called the al-Qaida bar.

Now having said that, do I think that KSM is going to be convicted? Absolutely. Attorney General Holder and President Obama have all but guaranteed that those brought to civilian trial will be convicted. But how much valuable intelligence will al-Qaida be able to gather through observing these trials? It may be incalculable.

I rest upon my previous opinion that these trials are intended to distract the media and the American public from the economy and domestic politics.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202428688933&rss=newswire

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NjJjYTIxNGFlZjRiNzFmYzFiM2ZhMGI4NTRmMWNhMzg=