Amy Davidson of The New Yorker asks, where is the great Al-Qaeda courtroom drama?
This is a country that likes trials of the century—a couple of them a year, if possible. We’ve also, as politicians remind us, been convulsed as a nation by the September 11th attacks, which are supposed to have changed our expectations of everything from Presidents to airplane rides and privacy. The one thing that the memory of 9/11 hasn’t had the power to do, strangely, is get us engrossed in the actual judicial proceedings involving members of Al Qaeda. When it comes to bringing terrorists to justice in a courtroom, we seem to get bored.
The military commission trying Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being behind Al Qaeda’s attack, in 2000, on the U.S.S. Cole, convened for hearings this week in Guantánamo Bay; only one reporter, Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, made it down there. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, goes on trial next week, for alleged involvement in post-2001 plots, with his lawyers coming closer to eliciting testimony from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed 9/11 mastermind. K.S.M. himself may not go to trial until next year; there have been repeated delays. But who would even know if there weren’t? Although they were followed closely in certain quarters, the eyes of the nation have not exactly turned to his pre-trial hearings, which have staggered along at Guantánamo, like an out-of-town show that no one has any intention of seeing. The week after next, K.S.M. will have been our prisoner for eleven years, and we haven’t managed to convict him of anything. What happened to the desire for a big trial to show the world what our legal system can accomplish?
Following World War II, we arrested most of the high-ranking Nazi officials. We gave them the best lawyers they could possibly get. We gave them a fair trial that was open to the public. And most of them were found guilty and executed or sentenced to long prison terms.
Now, almost 70 years later, our response is completely different. We have thrown a culture of secrecy on the detainees that we are currently holding. The military commissions that we are doing are being done in secret. There is a massive news blackout, contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment.
The fact that all this is still being done in secret, long after any of these people have any intelligence value to the US or the rest of the world, does not pass the smell test and reflects on the Obama administration. What do they have to hide?
Public trials of all the detainees would have shed public light on the moral turpitude of Al-Qaeda like the Nuremburg trials did to the Nazis following World War II. The lesson learned back then was that we cannot blindly follow orders. The lesson we could have taught the world this time was about the dangers of religious fanaticism and its complete divorce from reality.
The fact that many of these people have still not been brought to trial even after the government has had years to assemble evidence against them means that the government had no evidence to begin with. That, Mr. President, is not change we can believe in.
Last time we checked, the Declaration of Independence reads that all men are created equal. Therefore, it is never acceptable for the government to leave even one person in a status of legal limbo where they have no rights or recourse.
Many people have lamented what they see as a loss of our Christian heritage as a nation. I have one suggestion. Maybe we should recall the scripture which says, "Vengeance is mine!" If we go by that principle, then that means that it is better to let a few guilty men go free than it is to let one innocent person to be imprisoned.