Mass murderers as victims--it takes a liberal
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.
The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.
KSM himself has made plain the extent and ambition of his world war. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z," he admitted during a hearing in March last year. He planned the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 2002 bombings of the Bali nightclubs and the Kenya hotel, among 31 actual attacks. KSM was an architect of the Bojinka plot in 1995; by his own confession he drew up plans for strikes in South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, Israel, Brussels and London, plus a "new wave" of post-9/11 attacks on L.A., Seattle, Chicago and New York.
These are not ordinary crimes. "For sure, I'm American enemies," said KSM in his broken English. "When we made any war against America we are jackals fighting in the nights. . . . the language of the war are killing." The proper venue to address his mass crimes against humanity is not some civilian jurisdiction. Terror cases committed as acts of war, by their very nature, require a separate judicial process.
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Yet now anti-antiterror activists are attempting to make the process a referendum on the Bush Presidency or "torture" or whatever. Purportedly the tribunals are illegitimate because they do not afford every last Miranda right or due-process safeguard of the civilian courts. The key and appropriate distinction is that foreign terrorists are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution. They also violated the laws of war -- for example, by deliberately targeting civilians. International law has always held that such people deserve fewer legal protections, much less those of civilian defendants.
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The most preposterous canard is that the tribunals are tainted because some terrorists were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques while in CIA custody. But a total of three -- KSM being the only one yet charged -- were waterboarded. It was conducted not to extract a confession but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when further attacks seemed likely and intelligence about al Qaeda's operations was limited. CIA Director Michael Hayden recently testified that these interrogations saved American lives.
Though allegedly coerced testimony might potentially be admitted under the Military Commissions Act, the Pentagon took the extra step of using "clean teams" to rebuild the cases. Not that it matters: Like KSM, most of the 9/11 conspirators happily boast of their atrocities.
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The ultimate purpose of the tribunals is to administer justice. It is a strange worldview that considers such tribunals and the death penalty inappropriate for the murders of 2,972 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and hundreds more world-wide. A society that would not tender justice to a human butcher like KSM is not serious about defending itself.
What this is really about is the liberals insistence on a lawfare approach to the war against us by the Islamic religious bigots. They have this goo-goo vision of some PR benefit in giving terrorist a criminal trial. They discount the damage done to the war effort by providing the enemy with the sources and methods of gathering evidence against them. It was the trials of the African embassy bombers that let Osama bin Laden know we were monitoring his satellite phone, which he naturally quit using in his 9-11 plot. What liberals want to do is make it easier for our enemies to engage in mass murder for some dubious PR with other liberals in Europe.
POSTED BY MERV
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