At some point in the next week, President Obama is expected to announce whether he's decided to backtrack on his decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-admitted mastermind of the 9/11 atrocities, and four of his alleged co-conspirators in federal criminal court.
According to reports first published in the Washington Post, Obama is being urged by key advisors to return to the Bush administration's plan to try the alleged Al Qaeda terrorists before special military tribunals. If the president, who campaigned on a promise to restore the rule of law in the treatment of the jihadis, reverses course, it will be not only a lamentable triumph of politics over principle but an affront to common sense and some of our most valuable historical precedents.
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. put the matter squarely when he announced the administration's initial decision to shift the 9/11 trials to a federal criminal courtroom in Manhattan, as part of the plan to close the last remnant of the Bush/Cheney gulag at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. "We need not cower in the face of this enemy," Holder said at the time. "Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm and our people are ready."
That's not wishful idealism; it's a sentiment backed by hard experience. Other Al Qaeda-linked terrorists who have passed through the normal criminal justice process are the so-called blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman; Ramzi Yousef, who engineered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. All were tried and convicted, and all are serving life sentences in federal prison -- in the latter two cases without possibility of parole. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian accused of participating in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa, was transferred from Guantanamo to Manhattan last June, and proceedings against him there continue.
