(On Holder's Senate Judiciary hearing yesterday in which he struggled to defend his decision to trial KSM in New York)
Once you endorse the notion that the Government has the right to imprison people not captured on any battlefield without giving them trials -- as the Obama administration is doing explicitly and implicitly -- what convincing rationale can anyone offer to justify giving Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants a real trial in New York? If you're taking the position that military commissions and even indefinite detention are perfectly legitimate tools to imprison people -- as Holder has done -- then what is the answer to the Right's objections that Mohammed himself belongs in a military commission? If the administration believes Omar Khadr belongs in a military commission, and if they believe others can be held indefinitely without any charges, why isn't that true of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? By denying jury trials to a large number of detainees, Obama officials have completely gutted their own case for why they did the right thing in giving Mohammed a trial in New York.
Even worse, Holder was reduced to admitting -- even boasting -- that this concocted multi-tiered justice system (trials for some, commissions for others, indefinite detention for the rest) enables the Government to pick and choose what level of due process someone gets based on the Government's assessment as to where and how they're most likely to get a conviction ...
How will prominent, respected lawyers Barack Obama (constitutional law) and Attorney General Eric Holder feel about themselves in 10 years? How can they reconcile their pure thoughts about the law with their adoption of so much of Bush administration rhetoric and fear of using our own legal system to handle terrorists? Needless to say, they know what they're doing and it's keeping them up at nights. Whether this happened long ago or not, it doesn't matter, but these men have adopted the corrosive, toxic, insidious aspects of Washington (and American) culture. It doesn't matter who the king and his minions are, they will always be the most powerful. They got to the throne by pretending to care about the lesser among us. That was their ticket. Now they walk upright, and are no longer to be bothered by what's going on in the barn.
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