Ed Morrissey writes that it’s time for Eric Holder to go:
Let’s face it. Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose. Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.
The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along. It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face no more than 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.
Glenn Reynolds adds:
And making an even bigger mockery of the whole thing is the Administration’s claim of “post-acquittal detention power.” So the whole thing was just a show trial anyway. Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change? Apparently, it was the fierce moral urgency of show trials. But that doesn’t get Holder off the hook. He botched a show trial, after all . . .
How do you botch a show trial, when the user manual is so easy to follow?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member