Monday, November 16, 2009

The Coming Trial of the 9/11 Mastermind

I read with dismay a posting at Honest Partisan (see the link in my left-wing blogs section) that the author of that blog, who is a partisan Democrat and attorney from New York City, actually agrees with the Obama administration’s decision to move terrorist and 9/11 mastermind Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed from his cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the city of New York to be afforded U.S. Constitutional rights and a trial there.

The foolishness and downright dangerousness of this decision is staggering. I heard former New York City mayor Rudy Guliani say last Friday when this decision was announced that aside from myriads of other excellent reasons for not doing this, the moving of KSM to New York City for trial puts a further burden on NYC police and security personnel and places the city at an even graver risk for an attack than the heightened chances that already exist for such an episode on a daily basis.

Basically, President Obama has changed policy on terrorism from the Bush administration where they treated such attacks as acts of war and instead went back to the Clinton era policy of treating terrorism as criminal acts that should be handled by police. The decision to do so will only serve to embolden our enemies, weaken our prosecution on the war on terror, and have the potential to seriously undermine our national defense and intelligence gathering capabilities to counteract future terror plots.

Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed is NOT some leader of a gang of inner-city thugs that are a part of his posse. He is a leader of Al Qeada and an enemy combatant that refuses to accept the dictates of the Geneva Convention as he and his ilk intentionally target civilian and military targets with equal prejudice. His regard for life is non-existent and to treat his deeds as felonious actions is ludicrous in the extreme.

Further, by affording this piece of human debris constitutional rights to a trial in New York City, KSM will have access to all sorts of intelligence gathered by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense personnel in order to provide for his own defense at trial. By allowing him unfettered access to this type of information, many sources of our intelligence gathering could be compromised and attacked by Al Qeada. To continue, if the wrong judge were appointed to oversee KSM’s trial, say perhaps some ACLU-terrorist-rights-liberal judge, then it is conceivable that the judge could throw out much of the evidence against KSM, including his own confessions, by saying these things were inadmissible in court because KSM was tortured to get this information. Never, mind that once KSM was water-boarded he provided invaluable information that helped us catch other terrorists and foil their operations for future attacks that were in the planning stages. Now KSM will have the right to an attorney to challenge in public court the “illegally obtained” evidence against him and have those responsible brought in to testify against him in court, regardless of the secrecy of their identities.

Evidently President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, (A man who already is guilty of recommending the past Clinton pardons of the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists and white collar criminal Mark Rich in the waning hours of the Clinton administration) want to make the gathering of intelligence and protecting our nation even more difficult in order to provide U.S. Constitutional rights to a non-American terrorist bent on destroying the very fabric of our nation. Does this irony strike anyone else as completely absurd?

Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed should remain in Gitmo with his fellow terrorists. He should be provided a military lawyer and a military tribunal at Gitmo. He should be found guilty of the crimes he committed and confessed to having done and masterminded and he should be punished accordingly. Anything else will only show our enemy that we are no longer serious about the war on terror.

There is a reason that once President Bush changed this policy to an actual war instead of a matter for police that no other terrorist acts were successfully perpetrated on U.S. soil.
The police cannot prosecute a criminal until AFTER he has committed a crime. In the case of war, we can and have put these human scum on defense and taken the war to them.

Now Obama will take a step backward and allow the terrorists to resume being on offense. We will see future attacks on our country accordingly. It is just a matter of time. It greatly troubles and saddens me too, because it is so needless to have the future loss of property and life that will occur all for the hope that by allowing a public trial for a terrorist will show the world and the terrorists that the United States wants to be their friend.

President Obama should be impeached for this alone in my opinion. He took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the United States of America. He has done the absolute opposite on both of these accounts. I would think that this would be a step too far, even for those living in New York City where some of the worst of these acts of war occurred only eight short years ago.

No comments: