Terror Trial May Move from NYC: David Loftus

I wrote here on November 16 that New York City was the right place to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and on December 18 that it would be correct and proper to move the Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil. I see no reason to alter a word of either of those commentaries, or to change the opinions I expressed in them.

Letting fears of “what might happen” force our hand is as much as to admit the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t really know what it’s doing and cannot actually protect Americans from further attack. Many people apparently believed the department was effective under Bush but is not so under Obama. Others believe it’s been just fine all along. My personal opinion is that DHS was not 100 percent effective under Bush (mostly just lucky) and it probably isn’t now, but I think it’s important for the U.S. to carry on before the world as if it were. The cost of providing security for the trial is a separate issue. (I see Mayor Bloomberg is demanding roughly $200 million a year, which is either a ploy to extort federal money or to make the cost so prohibitive that the Obama administration moves the trial elsewhere.)

Every time we falter in upholding the free, open, and democratic principles we claim to stand for -- when we say we don’t torture prisoners but we have been doing so, when we say we have evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction but he didn’t, when we look the other way as private U.S. contractors kill Iraqi civilians without having to answer to anyone for it -- we lose the war for the hearts and minds of potential allies and Muslims who might otherwise support us. Under the U.S. administration of justice, a trial is moved when it appears the defendant cannot receive a fair hearing, or his or her life may be in danger … not when there’s a nebulous fear of what might happen to others outside the courtroom who are not directly involved in the case. (And to be honest, this particular defendant sounds to me like a delusional bumbler, a minor player who got picked up so we’d have somebody to focus our frustrated energy on. Osama bin Laden is probably laughing his head off at how seriously we’re taking Khalid and he’d be a fool to order a terrorist attack now.)

To respond to nebulous, unnamed fears by changing venue is un-American (but unfortunately not atypical of the Obama administration’s history of waffling and backing down on its principles), and belies the supposed ardency of our civic beliefs.