The decision by the administration to try the 9/11 perpetrators in a criminal court in New York has outraged most conservatives – and most likely a lot of democrats – and remarked the point that these terrorists have committed crimes per se, not war crimes. If they had committed war crimes, they would be tried in military courts since wars are conducted by the military.
The conflict accruing to 9/11 has always been classified as a WAR against terrorism, and the U.S. combatants have been members of the military, not police departments. So...the president and Attorney General Holder have adopted the same stance as the Clinton administration in the 1993 WTC bombing, i.e., that the 9/11 “gang of five” is on the same level as members of the Cripps, one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in the United States, having wasted innocent citizens and/or rival gang-bangers for years and for whatever reason.
On the basis of what’s been seen in similar events in other countries, the proceeding(s) will become “show-trials.” Think of the trials of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague in 2006. In many ways, these were circuses served up on TV, foreshadowing a virtual repeat in this country, replete with cable-news networks avidly searching for and disclosing “raw meat” on a 24/7 basis.
The potential for Khalid to harangue the judge, the lawyers and the press is palpable, all documented by the mighty cameras. In the 1980s, Khalid attended Chowan College (ironically a Baptist-affiliated school) in North Carolina and earned a mechanical engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Well educated and in good command of English, he can make Islamic fulminations interesting, though he has already admitted his guilt and even requested to be put to death; however, with an opportunity to force into the record and present to the world any propaganda he chooses, not to mention exposing damaging information about U.S. clandestine activities, he is likely not to plead guilty officially in New York.
Khalid’s presence, of course, nullifies one of the administration’s primary purposes in the trial – the condemning of the Bush administration for using water-boarding as torture. Water-boarding neither injures nor kills and is therefore not torture. A well-fed Khalid bearing no ill-effects of anything is testimony to this fact since a reported 183 water-boardings (whether fact or not) has left him quite well and publicly wishing only to exercise with the virgins in Paradise, though he’s probably too intelligent to actually believe that stuff.
In the Fort Hood slaughter, Major Nasan, an American citizen, killed both military members and a civilian on American soil but is to be tried in a military court. In the 9/11 proceeding, the perpetrators, non-citizens, effected the deaths of both civilians and members of the military (Pentagon) on American soil but are to be tried in criminal court, with the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of crimes already admitted. The major has been classified as a terrorist (committing acts of war), so where does that leave the “gang of five?” Are they just hoodlums who’ve committed crimes like armed robbery, since they’re being tried in criminal court?
There seems to be something wrong here. Nasan, the killer of 13 people, will be tried in a very restricted arena, a military court with the trial probably not on TV (at least most of it), while the folks responsible along with the hijackers for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11 will be allowed to strut and swagger all over TV for the whole world to see...sort of like O.J. back in 1994. These hijackers – like Simpson – with some slick lawyering could, if not go free, at least string out this mess for months or years and almost certainly escape the hangman’s noose.
Political correctness militates against saying anything by way of criticism of the president vis-a-vis his Islamic background, but the fact remains that Barack Hussein Obama was born into Islam and spent the first ten years of his life in Islamic households, the first headed by his biological Muslim father, the second by his Muslim stepfather. Later, he sat through 20 years of acerbic sermons by the white-hating Rev Dr. Jeremiah Wright, friend of Muslim Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan, whom he accompanied in the 1980s on a trip to visit Muslim/Libyan butcher Muammar Qaddafi. Is he trying to make a point by moving this business into the domestic court system rather than in that of the military?
This show-trial is made to order for the militant Islamic world, absolutely the best scenario for which it could hope. Given the built-in vagaries of the U.S. Justice system, the gang-of-five will come out of it smelling like a rose in the Muslim world no matter what happens. This shouldn’t happen, particularly at the expense of actually all the intelligence agencies of the civilized world. Obama and Holder need to be turned around on this one but, unfortunately, that can happen only of their own volition – not likely. In the meantime, it stinks!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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