The 9/11 plotters: Why they’ll be tried in the U.S.

Has the Obama administration completely lost its mind? said National Review Online in an editorial. In one of “the worst national-security derelictions” imaginable, Attorney General Eric Holder last week announced that the Justice Department would bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters to New York City to face a civilian trial for the terrorist acts that killed 3,000 people. That’s right: The foreigner who boasts of being the mastermind of the bloodiest attack ever on U.S. soil will be afforded full due-process rights, as if he were an American citizen accused of a crime. Terrorism isn’t a crime; it’s an act of war, which is why the Bush administration treated terrorists as combatants to be tried in military courts. By bringing Mohammed to a courthouse just blocks from the World Trade Center site, the administration will create a media circus in which Mohammed and his co-conspirators will have “a soapbox to press their grievances against the U.S. and the West”—a terrorist’s recruitment dream. That’s not even the worst of it, said former Bush Justice Department lawyer John Yoo in The Wall Street Journal. The defendants will no doubt demand that the government produce “all the information it has on them, and how it got it.” As a result, the U.S. could end up being forced to hand al Qaida “an intelligence bonanza” that will help terrorists avoid detection in the future.

It’s amazing how little faith many “weak-kneed” conservatives have in the American justice system, said Steve Benen in Washingtonmonthly.com. Since 9/11, the Justice Department has brought terrorism cases against 289 defendants, achieving a 91.1 percent conviction rate without compromising national secrets. Mohammed has already admitted his guilt, and says he’s eager to be executed as a martyr, so convicting him won’t be a problem. Trying him and other 9/11 conspirators in an open court will send an important message to the world, said the San Francisco Chronicle. A public trial of these murderers can provide “overwhelming evidence of their culpability, their inhumanity, and the strength, integrity, and confidence of the nation they attacked.” Rather than give them a soapbox, the trial will undermine their narrative of martyrdom at the hands of the Great Satan. “The last thing any martyr needs is a fair, open trial.”

What dangerous naïveté, said Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. This “political” decision by the Obama administration has but one goal—to embarrass the Bush administration. Obama and Holder have scorned Bush’s “war on terror” and its approach to enemy combatants. In the upcoming trial, defense lawyers won’t be able to deny their clients’ guilt, since it’s so obvious, so they will put Bush on trial by soliciting testimony and evidence about secret CIA interrogation sites abroad, waterboarding and other interrogation tactics, and intelligence intercepts of phone and e-mail conversations. Americans will be less safe as a result, but “this will give the hard Left its promised feast.”

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This administration is hardly a bunch of principled liberals, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. Holder is now conceding that while he will put the 9/11 suspects on trial, they’re the exceptions; other Guantánamo detainees, including the main suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, will be tried before military tribunals and have far fewer rights. Others will have no trial at all, and will be held indefinitely. What kind of strange, “multi-tiered justice system” is this? Despite all the fine talk about “the rule of law,” said the Chicago Tribune, the administration would never let Mohammed walk free, if he were somehow acquitted. “The honest approach would be to announce that dangerous defendants such as these will be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, under the rules established by international law.”

But then we would be deprived of what promises to be the trial of the century, said Barton Gellman in The Washington Post. With the world watching, the U.S. and its militant Islamist foes will have a chance “to define Sept. 11 as a parable of right and wrong.” Federal prosecutors, who must make their case without using any evidence obtained through coercion, “will tell a story of innocence and evil, of indiscriminate murder.” Mohammed will try to spin 9/11 as “a victory over a mighty infidel power”—one that waterboarded him 183 times. It remains to be seen who will “control the narrative,” though both sides envision the same conclusion: Death for the man who, in one horrible day eight years ago, helped turn lower Manhattan and the Pentagon into smoldering tombs.