It was “a very bad day for Ahmed Ghailani,” said Anne Kornblut in The Washington Post, but also “a pretty bad day for the Obama administration.” Ghailani, 36, an al Qaida operative, was convicted on one count of conspiracy last week in a New York court for his part in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa; he faces a minimum sentence of 20 years to life, and will likely never see freedom again. On 284 other charges, however, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online, Ghailani was acquitted, dealing a “body blow” to President Obama’s notion that “the civilian criminal-justice system is up to the task of trying terrorists.” Clearly, it isn’t. The trial judge ruled that prosecutors could not call a key witness, who had sold explosives to Ghailani, and refused to let the jury know that Ghailani had confessed during his interrogations. Despite overwhelming evidence, one juror even held out for complete acquittal. “If the civilian justice system couldn’t get this case right, how can we responsibly trust it” to prosecute even more dangerous terrorists, such as 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
The bottom line is that the system worked, said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. Yes, the guilty verdict may have been less resounding than prosecutors wanted. But Ghailani is now safely behind bars. In a real trial, as opposed to a “show trial,” the outcome’s supposed to be unpredictable. That’s what makes it fair. The president’s Republican critics say Ghailani should have been tried by a secret military tribunal at Guantánamo, said Morris Davis in The New York Times. But it’s not clear why this would be preferable. Ghailani’s minimum sentence of 20 years will be longer than many of those handed out by the Gitmo tribunals, and more important, it was achieved “while upholding the values that have defined America.”
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