I spoke too soon. What could wrong in Manhattan? Well, guess who’s stopping by Fun City for a trial: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:
U.S. prosecutors plan criminal trials for five men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and military tribunals for five others held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, self-described mastermind of the attacks, and four others will be tried in New York federal court. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday he expects to order prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the five cases.
Five other detainees held at the prison, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried in revamped military commissions, the Justice Department announced.
The prisoners won’t be transferred for weeks because of a law requiring at least 45 days notice to Congress before prisoner transfer from Guantanamo. Once brought to the U.S., the detainees will be held at the federal prison in New York.
Yet another reason why, as we begin to look back at the incredible clusterfarg that’s been 2009, the first year of the real life version of The West Wing has been even more improbable than its Hollywood counterpart, the Baseball Crank writes:
It’s impossible, really, to caricature this White House; even Josiah Bartlett didn’t run through this many liberal stereotypes in his first season. Obama needs new writers. Blow up the World Trade Center and kill 3,000 Americans? Jail! Don’t buy health insurance? Jail! Win the Nobel Prize for doing jack squat. Travel to Copenhagen to beg and grovel unsuccessfully for the Olympics, and pledge to go visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but blow off traveling to Berlin to commemorate the victory of freedom over Communism (then give a tepid speech on the subject that refuses to acknowledge Ronald Reagan). Commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland by unilaterally abandoning missile defense installations in Poland. Insult and disdain one faithful ally after another – Britain, India, Israel, Poland, Colombia, you name it – and cozy up to our enemies, with nothing to show for it – nothing to show for anything he’s done in foreign affairs. All but ignore democratic protests in Iran while supporting an illegal effort by Honduras’ president to stay on beyond the end of his term. Suddenly complain about corruption and electoral fraud in Afghanistan, while seeking the favor of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad and Vladimir Putin – heck, Obama endorsed half a dozen people in Chicago more corrupt than Hamid Karzai. On and on and on we go, with President Apology constantly straining to run down his country’s record and talk up the propagandized view of history of its enemies. He’s taken more time to “evaluate” General McChrystal’s recommendations about Afghan policy than it took George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and capture Kabul after September 11. It would be funny if it wasn’t tragically stupid and bound to get people killed. There is no mistake of our past that Obama is unwilling to remake.
If there’s an upside to all this, after months of watching KSM up close, even liberal New Yorkers may be ready to give Dick Cheney a medal.
Ed Morrissey rhetorically asks, “What do we get from having the 9/11 plotters tried in criminal court in New York City?”
Well, we get to have the city painted as a big, bright target for terrorist action during the entirety of the trial. Thanks to press coverage, which should be an order of magnitude more obsessive than the OJ Simpson trial in LA fourteen years ago, jihadists will come out of the woodwork to make a big international splash, or more likely a boom. We also give KSM and his cohorts a big, juicy media platform for their bile. That was one of their motivations for conducting the attack in the first place, and we finally get to deliver it to them.
Read the whole thing.
Update: “Ask yourself this question: suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?”
Loop the Obamöbius loop!
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