After eight long years, some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks of 911 will face a trial in a civilian courtroom. From the AP (via MSNBC):
Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.
I don’t understand why it took this long. Granted, I didn’t expect Bush to do something like this, but we elected Obama over a year ago, and he was sworn into office in January.
This should have been done his first week in office.
I’ve long believed that we will never defeat terrorism militarily. Terrorism is a technique, not a nation or a group of people. How do you wage war against a technique? The goal should be to hunt down and bring to justice those that engage in this awful, disgusting technique.
Ideally it should be done a lot sooner then eight years after the fact.
For the past eight years, we have fought terrorism by spending billions of dollars in invading and occupying two Muslim countries. We’ve lost well over 5,000 service members and thousands more have been injured in this futile military pursuit. It’s hard to say exactly if these costly military excursions and occupations have contributed to the fact that the United States has not suffered a terrorist attack since September 11, 2001, but what is quite clear is that there are more Islamic terrorists in the world today then there was on September 12.
I believe the military occupation of two Muslim countries has greatly contributed to this problem. I believe that if you want to create more Islamic terrorists, occupy a Muslim country.
I don’t know if we will ever defeat terrorism. It’s hard to defeat someone who engages in a technique that often results in their own death. I do know this: terrorism will never be defeated in an epic tank battle.
Responding to terrorism with our massive military makes about as much sense as responding to North Korea invading South Korea by sending the FBI to the Korean Peninsula. If terrorism will ever be defeated, it will be in the courtroom, not the battlefield. It will be defeated with our laws and our judicial system, not our smart bombs and our main battle tanks.
Jesse Jace
/ November 15, 2009I can think of a lot of things that should have been done on Obama’s first day in office. In retrospect, there’s no way we would have been able to do them all. But I wish he would have at least tried.
Steve
/ November 15, 2009Right on, Rick. If you or I were charged with the identical crimes as those Khalid Sheik Mohammed is charged with, we would have been tried in an American civilian court long before now, and no one would have questioned it. That’s what we do with criminals in the United States. We try them in our courts.
It’s what we did with the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings (who were arrested abroad and are now serving multiple life sentences in federal prisons), and it’s what we should do to every terrorist currently in U.S. custody as a result of the war on terrorism. It’s not “crazy” as so many conservative pundits are saying it is. It’s justice. It’s what we do.
I’m prouder of Obama and his justice department for finally doing this than I have been of anything else in this first year of his administration. I only wish, as you said, Rick, that it had been done sooner.
Lee B.
/ November 15, 2009It is time to put an end to these bizarre indefinite legal limbos that came out of the Bush years- they are making the country look as bad as Myanmar in this regard.
I do understand the worry around having the trials in NY- but they gotta be held somewhere.