There is no greater expert on the inadequacy and perils of bringing criminal charges against enemy combatants in civilian courts than Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy is the chief government attorney who successfully prosecuted the blind shiekh behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. As McCarthy recounts in his book Willful Blindness, many collaborators of the blind shiekh were not prosecuted because certain evidence could not be used against them without disclosing national security investigative secrets to the public, including our enemies at large.
McCarthy now details how maliciously wrong and contemptible and dangerous for American security the Obama/Holder decision is to try Khalid Mohammed in a civilian court in New York.
It is dangerous because of the heightened terrorist risk New York City will be exposed to.
It is dangerous because of the risk of exposing national security secrets to the defendants and their terrorist collaborators still on the loose and free to kill Americans.
It is malicious because the only reason for staging this trial in civilian court where it is impossible to limit discovery of national security information is to provide the "transnational left" with material to seek war crime trials in Europe against officials of the Bush Administration who developed and carried out the counterterrorism strategy that kept America safe since 9/11.
The dismantling of the nation's defenses against Islamic terrorism under Obama is already evident in the re-opening of the investigation of the actions of CIA employees who had already been investigated and cleared. It is evident in the Obama Administration instructions forbidding reference to "Islamic terrorism" and "war on terror." It is evident in the President's message at Fort Hood, calling the terrorist murder a "tragedy" and "incomprehensible" when to any unbiased observer it was was the first successful Islamic massacre on American soil since 9/11.
Now the Obama/Holder plan is to go even further and provide our Islamic enemies with information that will, in the words of Andrew McCarthy, "make our enemies more efficient at killing us."
November 16, 2009, 0:00 a.m.Trial and Terror
The Left gets its reckoning.By Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review Online
The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other top al-Qaeda terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial is one of the most irresponsible ever made by a presidential administration. That it is motivated by politics could not be more obvious. That it spells unprecedented danger for our security will soon become obvious.
The five 9/11 plotters were originally charged in a military commission. Military commissions have been approved by Congress and the courts. Eleven months ago, the jihadists were prepared to end the military case by pleading guilty and proceeding to execution. Plus, the Obama administration is continuing the commission system for other enemy combatants accused of war crimes. If we are going to have military commissions for any war criminals, it is senseless not to have them for the worst war criminals. In sum, there is no good legal or policy rationale for transferring these barbarians to the civilian justice system. Doing so will prompt a hugely costly three-ring circus of a trial, provide a soapbox for al-Qaeda's anti-American bile, and create a public-safety nightmare for New York City.
There is, however, a patent political rationale behind Obama's decision.
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