American Thinker : November 30, 2009
Terrorist Criminal
Trials and the Coming Jihad
After the bombing of the American
embassy in Nairobi, the police found amid the belongings of one of the
perpetrators a list of the unindicted co-conspirators of the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing in New York. The list was submitted to
the lawyers for the defendant, Sheik
Abdel Rahman, and signed by Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney. Under
the rules of discovery in a criminal trial, the defendant had every right to
the list. If you read through the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, one
will jump off the page and grab your attention. It is Number 95: Osama bin
Laden.
If ever you needed a reason why terrorists must be dealt
with as foreign combatants and not as criminals, it would have stared you in
the face throughout the discovery process of Sheik Rahman's trial. But there's
more. Rahman's activist attorney, Lynne
Stewart, used her position to pass information from the cleric to his
terrorist followers in Egypt. She was later disbarred and sentenced to
twenty-eight months in prison.
Stewart is not an anomaly. Radical lawyers bent on using
the legal system to further a political agenda will be falling all over
themselves to represent the five alleged terrorists who will now stand trial in
New York City. These lawyers will put American foreign policy on trial for the
events of September 11, 2001. In putting September 11 mastermind Khalid
Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators into the criminal justice system,
Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama have given the
jihadists a once-in-a-lifetime stage for their propaganda.
What then possessed the Obama administration to ignore
the obvious and resolve to try these defendants in civil and not military
proceedings? It most certainly is not to showcase the American justice system
to the world. In a consummate act of legal stupidity, both the president and
the attorney general have announced to the world that not only are the
defendants guilty, but they will also be sentenced to death. If ever a national
jury pool was tainted, this one is. In the Islamic world, no one remotely
sympathetic to the defendants could ignore the hypocrisy of this conduct.
Obama is willing to compromise intelligence and provide
the jihadists with a propaganda platform because he needs to placate the
extremist elements of his political base. By taking these terrorists out of the
military's hands and putting them into the criminal justice system, Obama is
redefining terrorism as a criminal justice issue and not as irregular warfare.
In this, Obama is beginning a process that will reshape the meaning of
terrorism to conform with the sympathetic and minimalist notions of leftist
ideology.
Terrorist trials in the media capital of the world will
be a magnet for the inspired publicity of jihadism. All terrorism finds its
inspiration in violence as theater. The theater in the courtroom will be
overshadowed by the inevitable carnage in the streets.
Terrorists have always wanted a lot of people watching, a
lot of people asking, "Why?" From Abane
Ramdane, who moved the Algerian insurrection against the French out of the
anonymous Sahara and into the media-saturated streets of Algiers, to George
Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who blew up
airplanes, terrorist leaders have thrived on the oxygen of publicity.
It is inconceivable that the jihadists will not find New
York during the terrorist criminal trials the perfect place for statements to
be written in blood and punctuated by explosions.
Innocent blood will flow in the streets of New York
because Obama chose to make a political statement rather than confront the
reality of what terrorism is and how it works.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus
professor of political science and former chairman of the Intelligence Studies
Section of the International Studies Association
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