Hold the champagne on military tribunals...It's a head fake

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama will reverse Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in federal court:

President Obama's advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.

The president's advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States.

If Obama accepts the likely recommendation of his advisers, the White House may be able to secure from Congress the funding and legal authority it needs to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and replace it with a facility within the United States. The administration has failed to meet a self-imposed one-year deadline to close Guantanamo.

Andy McCarthy warns us not to celebrate the move, calling it a head fake:

The Washington Post article that Dan posted about last night is a head fake. President Obama is not caving on military commissions. He has already caved on them: He failed (thankfully) to abolish them, Congress enacted legislation endorsing them again in 2009, and the administration has already directed a commission trial for the Cole bombers.

The real agenda here is to close Gitmo. That’s the ball to keep your eye on. The Post is trying to soften the opposition to shuttering the detention camp by portraying beleaguered, reasonable Obama as making a great compromise that will exasperate the Left. The idea is to strengthen Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hand in seeking reciprocal compromise from our side.

This, however, is a matter of national security, not horse-trading over a highway bill. You don’t agree to do a stupid thing that endangers the country just because your opposition has magnanimously come off its insistence that you do two stupid things that endanger the country.

If a deal to grant military commissions in exchange for closing Gitmo happens, it is a major win for the Obama Left and an enormous loss for public safety.

McCarthy's insights are spot on.  Read the whole thing.

Never forget

A stunning set of photographs taken by New York Police helicopters on September 11, 2001 has been released pursuant to an ABC Freedom of Information Act request last year.

A trove of aerial photographs of the collapsing World Trade Center was widely released this week, offering a rare and chilling view from the heavens of the burning twin towers and the apocalyptic shroud of smoke and dust that settled over the city.

The images were taken from a police helicopter -- the only photographers allowed in the airspace near the skyscrapers on Sept. 11, 2001. They were obtained by ABC after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that investigated the collapse.

The chief curator of the planned Sept. 11 museum pronounced the pictures "a phenomenal body of work."

The photos are "absolutely core to understanding the visual phenomena of what was happening," said Jan Ramirez of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. They are "some of the most exceptional images in the world, I think, of this event."

You can view the photographs here and here.

Two Gitmo detainees released to Somaliland?

The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration was planning to release six Gitmo detainees to their home country of Yemen.  It turns out that they actually released twelve prisoners from Guantanamo on Saturday.

The United States freed a dozen men from Guantanamo this week -- including one of the last captives sent there by the Bush administration -- in a mission that dropped detainees off in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.



The dozen included six Yemenis, four Afghans and two Somali citizens. Their departure left the prison camp census at 198 on Saturday -- the first time the detention center dropped below 200 captives since February 2002.

Adam Brickley at the Weekly Standard Blog questions the rationale of releasing these prisoners:

That we are sending these people back to largely-lawless Afghanistan and terrorist-hotbed Yemen is bad, bad news. However, it's the third country mentioned that's really bothersome.



Technically speaking, Somaliland does not exist.


Don't get me wrong -- the Republic of Somaliland is a very real entity. It has a government that has been functioning relatively smoothly since declaring independence from Somalia in 1991. The problem, however, is that every nation on Earth (including the U.S.) recognizes the area as a non-independent part of Somalia. There are no diplomatic ties between Somaliland and...well...anyone, and the government is universally viewed as illegitimate.


And we are going to trust these people with two jihadist detainees from Guantanamo Bay?


The only conclusion that one can draw from this story is that President Obama and Attorney General Holder are so desperate to clear out Gitmo that they are willing to do absolutely anything to accomplish their goal -- including the handing dangerous prisoners to a "country" that they themselves will not recognize.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air agrees:

We captured Arale in Somalia three years ago. Since we don’t have any military presence in that country, or at least none we acknowledge, Arale had to have been captured either by covert intelligence forces or a secret military mission. That must have meant that the Pentagon and/or the CIA thought him to be a significant target. We don’t know, because the paperwork released on Arale has been heavily redacted — which also indicates the presumed value of having him in our custody.



Now he’s gone back to an area known to be a haven for terrorists — and under the control of a government with which the US doesn’t do business. How exactly did that happen? Somaliland is a breakaway piece of Somalia that no one recognizes. Does the US usually extradite prisoners to jurisdictions that we do not recognize and in the absence of an extradition treaty?


The only thing more foolish than releasing terrorists is to release them in the middle of failed states.

Perhaps the Obama administration released these two terrorists to Somaliland as a test.  Maybe the State Department held out the carrot of diplomatic relations with the U.S. in return for quietly taking these two potentially high value prisoners.  One might reasonably wonder what other Gitmo prisoner deals are in the works.

Rain or shine rally Saturday to protest KSM New York trial

The 9/11 Never Forget Coalition, a diverse group of 9/11 victims, family members, first responders, active and reserve members of the military, veterans, and concerned Americans, is holding December 5th rally protesting the plan to bring the 9/11 terrorist conspirators to trial in New York City.  Here are the details:

NEW YORKERS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER:

“WE WILL FIGHT YOU ALL THE WAY!”
What: December 5th rally protesting the NYC based trial of 9/11 conspirators
Where: FOLEY SQUARE, MANHATTAN
When: Saturday, December 5th, 2009 12:00 noon


Featured speakers include Debra Burlingame, Andrew McCarthy and David Beamer.  More info here.

If you haven't read and signed the Coalition's letter to President Obama, you can do both here.

Tell Holder and Obama we will never forget

From Keep America Safe:

Recently, Congress voted down a bi-partisan bill that would have ensured that the terrorists who brought death and destruction to our homeland on September 11, 2001 would be tried as war criminals in military courts, not as common criminals tried in civilian courts with full Constitutional protections on American soil. The Obama administration has not been truthful with the public about the risks associated with bringing these cases in federal court, where critical evidence will be excluded, classified intelligence will be made available to our enemies, foreign counterterrorism partners will be exposed and the "mastermind of 9/11" will be allowed to mock his victims just blocks from where they died.

theBravest.com has partnered with 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong and America and Keep America Safe to bring attention to this travesty. We are recruiting the families & friends of the FDNY to combat this ill-conceived policy of the current administration.

This week letters were sent to President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates questioning the wisdom of bringing these terrorists onto US soil to try them in civilian courts for their grievous crimes against this great country, including the murder of 343 New York City firefighters.

93 of them were my friends.

They were all my brothers.

I cannot stand by and let this happen without a fight.

Please read the letter below and CLICK HERE if you would like to add your signature.

Thank-you,

Tim Brown

FDNY-Retired, 9/11 Survivor

neverforget@theBravest.com

The letter is here.  Sign the petition here.

9/11 mastermind will be tried in New York criminal court

Today, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four of his co-conspirators, will be tried in Federal court in New York.  Candidate Obama made it clear during the presidential campaign that he believed the terrorists should be tried in the criminal court system, but hearing it with my own ears this morning was surreal. Understandably, many family members of the victims of these attacks are outraged.

“Families are furious about this,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother Chic Burlingame was the American Airlines pilot of one of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11. She said more than 300 family members have implored the administration not to move the trial to New York. “They know we don’t support this. We support military commissions but they are going to see a wave of fury, and I don’t think they’re prepared for it,” she said Friday after the decision became public. [snip]

Burlingame complained that the legal proceedings in New York will shift the focus to the treatment the defendants received, rather than the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

“This is all going to be about waterboarding and talking about how they were ‘tortured.’ Their lawyers are going turn these people into victims,” she said.

In his blog on the Corner of National Review online, Andy McCarthy agrees (From Rush Limbaugh):

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.

Let's take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs' execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.

Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can't help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda's case against America. Since that will be their "defense," the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

McCarthy knows of what he speaks. 

For eighteen years, Mr. McCarthy was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. From 1993 through 1995, he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. For five years, he was the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney of the Southern District’s satellite office in White Plains, and, following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s Command Post near Ground Zero in New York City.

John Hinderaker at Powerline poses the same query that I have:

Ask yourself this question: suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?