Civilian or Military Trials for Terrorists?
Civilian or Military Trials for Terrorists?
By Drew Davis, Executive Director, 11-29-09
Available Online At: http://www.wiscnews.com/wde/opinion/467641
If you’ve been following the news, you know that on November 13 the White House announced it would be trying five high-profile terrorists in the civilian court system in New York City. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 operations, is one of those terrorists. The others include co-conspirators and those charged with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in October of 2000. Yemen is just south of Saudi Arabia and just east of Somalia—a real happy neighborhood.
Since the White House’s announcement, Congressmen, military and intelligence officials have been split on whether or not these terrorists—currently being housed in Guantanamo Bay—should be tried in the civilian court system or in military tribunals.
For me, the answer is simple, and when you read this column, you, too, will agree: Try them in military tribunals.
To be frank, neither the media nor the politicians are laying out the entire argument—only bits and pieces, most of which is framed in fiery political rhetoric or alarming fear mongering. As I see it, there are seven major reasons not to try these terrorists in a federal, civilian courtroom.
Most important is perception. Perception is reality. What type of message are we sending to Al Qaeda and other radical Islamo-fascists, with who we’re at war, if we begin to “arrest” our enemies, pay to transport them from the battlefield, and sit them before a U.S. judge with all guaranteed rights of the Constitution? As Senator Graham recently noted to Attorney General Holder, our nation has never made a habit of hauling its enemies from the battlefield into the court room—we’d be making history, “bad history.”
These people are not drug dealers, they’re terrorists. They’ve declared war on us,
literally, and we’ve reciprocated. They attacked both our financial and military headquarters on
9/11 and it would be very unwise to treat them as burglars and vandals. We approached terrorism from a law enforcement standpoint for twenty-years and it got us 9/11. It sends the wrong message to our future enemies and to the American people. It’s bad precedent.
While I have no doubt the Department of Justice would be able to achieve a successful conviction in a civilian venue, trying these five in Manhattan will result in enormous financial burdens for NY and U.S. taxpayers. The cost to provide enhanced security—the overtime pay for NYPD alone—for the length of the trial is an unnecessary cost when military tribunals, held within the secure confines of a military base, are an option. These civilian trials are going to be very long, and there may be five of them. The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in Virginia, a conspirator of the 9/11 attacks, lasted almost two years. Why is the government asking our taxpayers and local governments to assume such a financial burden in the midst of our nation’s worst recession in seventy years? It’s bad policy.
In addition, if the wrong judge or judges are assigned to these cases, we’re going to have a real problem with the disclosure of classified information. In the world of intelligence, the most important things to protect are sources and methods. But in a U.S. courtroom, defense has the right to discovery and to examine the integrity of the evidence being used by prosecutors. In such a high-profile case, even with the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), compromising the sources and methods of our intelligence community is inevitable. That’s unacceptable.
In 2006, Congress authorized the use of military trials and the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of those trials. The
question then becomes, why aren’t we going to use them for these five terrorists? Oddly enough, the other five Gitmo detainees Attorney General Holder cited in his announcement are being tried by military tribunals, though no location has been decided.
Why prosecute half of the group differently? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators attacked New York City, the crown jewel of our metropolitans; the Administration is affording New Yorkers the chance to effect justice. Are we to believe that a “jury of peers” in New York City could provide for a fair trial as the Constitution demands?
We all know that New York is not afraid of terrorists. We simply have smarter, more efficient, more cost effective ways of prosecuting terrorists. I rest my case.
