There was something pathetic about watching Attorney General Eric Holder announce this afternoon that the Obama administration will bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 plotters to trial in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay on the same day that President Obama announced the start of his presidential re-election campaign.
Although explaining, as he did back in November 2009, that federal courts are really the best place to try these five men, who've been imprisoned without trial for eight years now at Gitmo, Holder proceeded to blame Congress for the administration's complete turnaround on the issue.
Citing the transfer restrictions that temporarily prevent the administration from bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States for trial, Holder lamented that Congress "has taken one of the most effective counterterrorism tools out of our hands" with "serious ramifications" for national security.
So this is a really bad decision, Holder said, but we're going to go ahead and make it anyway.
As if to underscore just how wrong this decision was, the Department of Justice today released the long-sealed indictment in the 9/11 case. The 81-page indictment underscores, as Jane Mayer writes, that "Holder and some of the smartest prosecutors in the country had prepared what they believed was the strongest case possible against K.S.M.," and had spent years -- in some cases, entire careers -- compiling the evidence.
But if this was a big loss for the Attorney General, it was a triumph for Obama's critics -- who managed to simultaneously praise the decision and still beat up on the president.
"It's unfortunate that it took the Obama administration more than two years to figure out what the majority of Americans already know: that 9-11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a common criminal, he's a war criminal," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a release.
Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's outlet, which just last week circulated a petition urging President Obama to try KSM and his co-conspirators in military commissions, scorned Holder's delivery of the news.
"Holder: I know better than Members of Congress and the American people," they blasted on Twitter.
The decision seems clearly a political one. But it's hard to imagine that it's really going to help President Obama in his upcoming campaign. While it's alienating his supporters, who see it as backpedaling on his longstanding promise to close Guantanamo Bay, it only makes him look weak to his critics, who can now claim it was the right decision but a sign of his failure that it took him so long to come to it.
As Mayer writes, it's a "defining moment" for the administration: "defining it, unfortunately, as incapable of standing up to the political passions still stirred by the threat of terrorism."
Holder presented today's decision as one of fairness to the 9/11 victims, who should have to wait no longer for their day in court.
True respect for the 9/11 victims would have meant bringing the men suspected of the most heinous attack on U.S. soil in American history to trial in a public U.S. federal courthouse, for the victims and all the world to see. It would have meant securing solid verdicts that wouldn't later be vulnerable to reversal by the Supreme Court, as would their convictions in a military commission. It would have meant presenting the voluminous evidence that prosecutors had amassed over the past decade detailing the crimes that each man had allegedly plotted and carried out. And it would have meant showcasing that the United States not only preaches about the importance of the rule of law around the world, but actually believes in and follows it here at home.
Holder justified his decision today by saying that "justice is long overdue."
But the administration had more than two years during which it could have transferred these men to federal courts and begun their prosecutions, and it didn't. If the administration had moved these cases forward when it had ample opportunity, the convictions and sentences would likely have already been pronounced. Military commissions trials, meanwhile, will take at least twice that time to resolve, with the very possible result that either conviction or sentences will be overturned, given the commissions' shaky legal grounding.
Given how long it's waited already, the administration could have taken a few more months to press Congress to lift its purely political and nonsensical funding restrictions, and to explain to the American public why hiding prosecutions of terror suspects in inexperienced, far-away military commissions is a bad idea. In that way, President Obama could have used this difficult moment as an opportunity for real leadership -- and ensured that true justice for the 9/11 victims would finally be done.
Follow Daphne Eviatar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/deviatar
Someone has to be the adult. President Obama is the adult and the mature person can say maybe the other person has a better idea. It's not done out of fear it is done out of reality. I don't care how they are prosecuted, just prosecute them, and move on.
I watched the coverage of the nasty protests against bringing the detainees on American soil. No one has found a way to try these detainees on any American soil without stirring up massive unrest. The nation has rejected bringing these detainees to America for trial. There is no benefit in trying to force that issue. The trials needed to move forward in some way. This is not a cave in. There really is no other way to do it.
The risks associated with trying the detainees in American courts have now been nullified. This will not be a miracle President Obama can pull off. Those who want to indulge the mad with Obama bandwagon can now really blare with indignation. Makes little sense, but blare away they will.
These issues should not be the source for polarization. Enemies have been captured and are now being brought to justice. Of course, they have been subjected to torture and who knows what in the interim, and they will never know freedom again, but they will have some form of due process. In the meantime, they continue as pawns in the blame game, and continue to be a reason for some to be mad with Obama.
News would be if Obama had a spine.
There is more than one way to skin a cat, they used to say. Obama uses a different way, and he gets the goal accomplished. His way may not meet with your liking or approval. The job continues to be done.
President Obama didn't cave - he did what he had to do to move the process forward! Please take Govt. 101 and learn about how the parts of our government is supposed to work!
Bush and the GOP rounded up these people (some I am sure were in the wrong place at the wrong time) and sent them to a foreign nation without trial for almost a decade - where were you then?
fool me once ....
The hard-core Bush followers and hard-core Obama followers are exactly the same.
Yes, Daphne, however, President Obama has never yet, since being elected, showed real leadership. ...He didn't even lead his flagship legislation through congress - medical insurance reform - and he gave away the store before even beginning the debate...
We can't expect real leadership from someone who demonstrably doesn't have it in them.
What he doesn't have is follow-through or the iron will he appeared to have.
That is my great disappointment in Mr. Obama.
He mouths one moral line but does not follow it.
I was afraid we were in some deep doo-doo when he first made the appointments of Geithner and Summers. Obama has used his election as an entre into the world of Wall Street and high falutin muckity mucks and finance. His is a moral failure rather than one of leadership.
Well, I can agree that perhaps one led to the other - to me, it's clear he has failed morally, as you have pointed out, but also in leadership. ...What you suggest is that he has the leadership in him but doesn't want to lead where he had previously indicated we were to go.