The KSM trial: Are we led by incompetents or by the ill-intentioned?

Charles Krauthammer leads the analysis:

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."

Finally, there's the moral logic. It's not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.

What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime -- an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war which the U.S. itself has engaged in countless times?

...

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

The Anchoress 'speaks' to the possibilities of an alternative conclusion:

I am rendered very nervous when I hear our Attorney General and our President talk about trials with pre-determined outcomes. Aside from the showtrial that is meant to once-and-for-all defeat Bush and Cheney (and that will backfire on Obama and Holder) or the propaganda and security measures, this mindset -if it is allowed to proceed- will create a very unhealthy precedent in the minds of many who will be “just glad to see KSM” dealt with, and unconcerned about methods. No one should be “glad” about a president and AG -an entire DOJ- willing to tell you what is going to happen in the case of a now presumed innocent defendant, regardless of verdict.

It’s so very, very…statist of them. And I suppose, it’s part of “remaking” America.

Sadly, neither scenario speaks well of America's future.

Comments

[Locutisprime]

This is neither a trial of KSM or a display of our system of justice to the world. Not by a long stretch.

If anything, this trial is a display of just how easily our system of justice can and will be manipulated and corrupted, given the opportunity by those in power.

This is a trial of the Bush administration plain and simple. They will have their pound of flesh, whether it costs the lives of one or a hundred or another ten thousand.

Their blood lust for their brand of public ridicule of the Bush administration means everything to them abd they will not be denied.

And they don't care how many people will die as a result of their political blood lust.