Justice for jihadists

Contrary to the wishes of the Obama Administration, New York politicians, including Democrats and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have managed to push the trial of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four codefendants out of Lower Manhattan. Furthermore, the fact that seemingly no state is willing to play host to the trials has reenergized advocates of trying Mohammed and the rest in a military tribunal.

This cowardly suggestion to pass the buck is an outright affront to the American legal system, denigrating the memory of those who died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the soldiers who have died fighting al-Qaida and the complicit Taliban in Afghanistan.

New York politicians cited cost and safety as reasons why the trial should be moved from Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center once stood. Bloomberg estimated security would cost $216 million for the first year of a trial.

The cost alone is a weak argument. Currently, President Obama is seeking $200 million in the budget to assist in the trials, so the overwhelming majority of the costs would be footed by the federal government if Congress were to sign off. Of course, this would still leave the costs of prosecution and security in the millions, but shouldn’t America be an example of laws and freedom in the face of terror and radicalism?

Founded to be John Winthrop’s proverbial “city upon a hill,” the United States is meant to lead the world by example. Giving the conspirators a civil trial would should show that this nation is above terrorism and won’t stoop to its level.

From a legal standpoint, foreign national murderers are tried in U.S. civilian courts. The trials of these terrorists should be no different. Military tribunals are meant for enemy combatants from foreign armies, but terrorists have no army.

Possessing only a radical ideology, terrorists are equal to cult followers who were brainwashed to murder. Of course, Charles Manson was never tried in a military tribunal.

The fact that the conspirators are terrorists also does not qualify them for a military tribunal. Timothy McVeigh, the homegrown terrorist who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, was also tried in a civilian court.

Incidentally, McVeigh spent his prison sentence in ADX Florence, where he stayed in the same cell block as Ramzi Yousef, one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

Yousef serves as a perfect example of the way the five Sept. 11 conspirators should be tried. Like Yousef, the five should be tried in a civilian court in New York, with New Yorkers on the jury.

If the United States doesn’t follow this precedent, the government will go down the slippery path of bending the laws to vacillating public opinion. This must never be the case, for the United States is first and foremost a nation of laws.



DISSENT Obama should admit the folly of trying terrorist masterminds as civilians.

Although the high cost of security and the increased risk of terrorist incidents are important aspects to consider in a civilian trial of the Sept. 11 plotters, the idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators as civilians would be foolhardy regardless.

This would be the case even if there were no need to spend valuable resources on security – and even if there were a way to ensure national security would not be compromised as a result of the need to present classified information as evidence.

Why? Because any civilian trial of men like Mohammed would have intractable problems of credibility that would make it quite obviously a show trial.

This is so for two reasons.

First, finding disinterested jurors would be infeasible anywhere in the United States, as the would-be defendants are accused of plotting the most well-publicized attack of the last decade.

Second, in the event that Mohammed is acquitted on account of the harsh interrogation he underwent (to which civilian defendants are never to be subjected), he would surely be tried in a military tribunal afterward so the administration could secure the conviction it has vowed to obtain.

Attorney General Eric Holder has acknowledged that trying these men in military tribunals is within the law. A concession on this issue would presumably be no more embarrassing for him and President Obama than were the admissions that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay could not be closed by this January and the decision to continue Bush-era policies, such as indefinite detention of unlawful enemy combatants.

Obama and Holder would do well to swallow their manifestly unearned pride and acknowledge once again that, when it comes to anti-terror policy, their instinct to be the anti-Bush is rarely a good one.

– Jarrod Lowery