Obama’s tribunal reversal

last updated 8 January 2015

The Obama administration reversed itself this week and said it would try confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The move—forced by bipartisan congressional opposition to holding terrorist trials in the U.S.—marks an abandonment of President Obama’s campaign pledge to close Guantánamo and conduct civilian trials for the suspected terrorists held there, including Mohammed. Attorney General Eric Holder first announced plans to try Mohammed in New York City in 2009, provoking heated protests by congressional Republicans, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, and New York City political leaders. Congress last year withheld funds to close Guantánamo and transfer the detainees to the U.S.

Republicans are gleefully claiming victory, said Paul Campos in TheDailyBeast.com, but KSM and al Qaida are the real winners. Too weak to genuinely threaten the U.S., they nevertheless understood that they “could win a great victory by creating a climate of irrational fear and rampant hysteria.” A small terrorist organization has now forced America to betray one of its most basic values, the right to a fair trial, “in the illusory pursuit of a world in which we are ‘safe’ from the terrorists.” What a sellout by the administration, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. The U.S. has successfully tried dozens of terrorists in civilian courts, and jailed them here in the U.S. Despite its professed commitment to constitutional principles, the Obama administration crumbled under the “bullying, fearmongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law.”

Our justice system was never designed for trials of foreigners accused of acts of terrorism, said the New York Post in an editorial. Civilian trials “could have been a disaster, given their strict rules of evidence.” KSM and his bloodthirsty buddies are war criminals, and “they don’t deserve the rights and privileges of American citizens,” said Rich Lowry in NationalReview.com. Perhaps Obama is beginning to appreciate “the hellish dilemmas” faced by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and why he created Guantánamo in the first place. “It’s called growing up—the hard way.”