Terrorists in court: What did the Ghailani verdict prove?

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.”

“This is war,” said the New York Daily News, and even here in America “war is not waged in court.” Terrorists like Ghailani are apprehended by soldiers or CIA operatives, not by cops on the beat. They are necessarily “squeezed for intelligence” that could disrupt other plots and save thousands of lives. Trying to force these “square pegs” into “the round holes of the civilian justice system” is a terrible mistake. Ghailani got a “sham trial” anyway, said Thomas Joscelyn in The Weekly Standard. The Obama administration made it clear from the outset that it “was never going to set Ghailani free—even if he was acquitted on all the charges.”

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“Savor that irony,” said The Wall Street Journal. In order to appease the Left and “showcase American justice,’’ Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama have insisted terrorists be tried in civilian courts. But even this administration is not so foolish as to release a committed enemy of the U.S. after an acquittal. So why engage in this pantomime of due process? A pantomime it is, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. After the near disaster of the Ghailani case, the U.S. may simply wind up imprisoning most of the detainees “for the rest of their lives,” because torture, black-box prisons, and other illegal practices clearly make it impossible to try al Qaida operatives in any court of law—even military tribunals. That’s one more grim legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “incoherent, shortsighted, and barbaric choices in the first years of the war.”