As usual, I have no idea where these idiots (e.g. Palin, Boehner) are coming from.

KSM is going to be under constant guard by dozens of cops in NYC, yet some are acting like he’s going to tunnel out of his cell and jump a motorbike over the Hudson to freedom a la Steve McQueen.

And as for New York being a terrorist target, it’s been so since before the 1993 WTC bombings. And will continue to be a target until further notice.

Whether KSM is tried in NYC or Omaha, Nebraska, that’s not going to change.

In one of the links I provide above, Spencer Ackerman suggests that they fear more that KSM won’t do that.  And that he’ll be exposed not only as a human being instead of a superman, but that he will be exposed as the ranting loony he is.  And that will demonstrate that all these excessive tactics of spying, torturing, and indefinite detainment were pointless.  Which they were.

Part of it too, is that they’ve gotten so wound up in their own vision of good and evil, they’ve lost track of the fact that KSM is a human being.  And I don’t even mean this in the sense that he has certain unalienable rights (which he does), but in the sense that he can’t bend iron bars, absorb bullets, punchout two dozen FBI agents, and escape into the night on a hot-wired motorcycle before swimming back to Afghanistan.

Yeah, one of the most damaging myths I saw growing up immediately after the attacks was the idea that only a criminal mastermind would be able to realize that flying a giant plane into the WTC and the Pentagon would kill a ton of people, and perhaps cause the buildings to collapse (though I’m under the impression that conspirators didn’t really think that far ahead on that).  This struck me as a stupid thing to think, because it’s pretty obvious that the best way to kill a bunch of people is to fly a plane into a crowded area.  Moreover, this wasn’t even the first time Americans had dealt with this specific tactic—-remember kamikaze pilots? 

I don’t think at the time it occurred to me how valuable the “supermen as terrorists” myth would be for conservatives, though.  But I did find it weird how everyone immediately snapped into believing these guys were geniuses.

I’ll point out that the passengers of Flight 93 also grasped the parameters of the plot quickly enough to act, which again is evidence that it wasn’t some complex thing that was hard to figure out.

Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks was talking about this the other day, and he said that it is almost laughably absurd to think that these people are actually pissed because a guy who committed a horrible crime is going to be tried as a criminal, almost assuredly convicted, and there’s nearly zero doubt that he’s going to be sentenced to the death penalty.

What more do they want?

What do they think is going to happen?

Do they really believe he’s going to get found “Not Guilty” on some technicality?  Or that he’s not going to be given the death penalty in sentencing?

Hell, the only question I have is how in the hell it’s going to be possible to find an impartial jury for the fucker anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Amanda @ 2:

In one of the links I provide above, Spencer Ackerman suggests that they fear more that KSM won’t do that.  And that he’ll be exposed not only as a human being instead of a superman, but that he will be exposed as the ranting loony he is.

I agree that despite the carnage of 9-11, that the Bush Administration (and Cheney in particular) did their best to depict Bin Laden, KSM, et al., as global super-villains a la Hans Blofeld or Lex Luthor.

But when you strip away the mad rhetoric, you’re right, there’s very little underneath both men.

For the record, though, if KSM is found guilty (and that’s almost a slam-dunk) putting him or any high-ranking Al Qaeda leader to death would be (IMO) a mistake as it would give them exactly what they want in the eyes of their followers: martyrdom.

Better to let them rot in a Supermax prison cell for 23 hours a day, and bury them in unmarked graves when they expire.

For all the years of government excess and rights violations in the name of “security”, that the same people are now turning around and pretending that the government isn’t going to have the security of the trial locked down continues to amaze me.

And I’m utterly failing to see how this guy would just be allowed to walk free after a trial in NYC. Even if, buy some freak freak freak freak happening, he’s not convicted of the 9/11 attacks? I’m certain that he’s done something, anything, that wold justify keeping him in jail. I’m not worried about him getting out.

Given that KSM has been tortured, how is it even possible for him to be tried in a court of law?

I recognize that’s not quite the point you’re trying to make here.

Obviously, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves his day in court. But if he is brought to trial, the defense can show evidence that he was tortured, and the end result ought to be that he is then released. While that ought to be a strike against the Bush administration which tortured him, it would also require the kind of backbone which Obama has shown no sign of.

If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is convicted after the defense has been able to show he was tortured while a prisoner of the US, that will merely confirm once more that the US is now a nation to which no country should render prisoners. Obama’s failure to lead on stopping torture, investigating the crimes, and prosecuting the torturers and those who ordered and authorized torture, is bad enough - but to convict in court a prisoner who was tortured to give evidence against himself would be a new stain on US justice.

I don’t suppose that the bloviating wingnuts have considered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might have to be released and compensated for the years of extra-judicial imprisonment, if he’s brought to trial.

But I’m sure that smarter people - and quieter people - have considered that, were KSM to receive a fair trial, he would have to be declared not guilty and set free: he could not be found guilty if the evidence against him had been obtained by torture.

Therefore, one of two things is possible:

Obama intends KSM to receive a fair trial, the facts of his being tortured and extra-judicially imprisoned exposed in court, in order to force the DoJ to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the use of torture and extra-judicial imprisonment within the Bush administration, and the follow-on into the Obama administration. (I said possible, not probable.)

Obama intends KSM to receive an unfair trial and be convicted, which will be a whole lot of steps further down the path to perdition, as the use of evidence obtained by torture will have been accepted by the US justice system.

I was stuck in Agusta, GA, working on a project for the FAA.  Co-workers from my program and collegues from the government and other contracted companies we worked with were stuck at dozens of small regional airports across the country.  My company lost 4 employees.  In ‘07 through 09, I worked with a man who suddenly became very religious at least in part because his prayer that his wife was stuck in traffic between Elizabeth and the PA office so that she was not dead and dealing with the aftermath of those who were (many of his friends and long time collegues).  I’ve toured the hangar at JFK where many of the remains are housed with a LT from emergency services who spent months working the recovery.

Every time, EVERY TIME, these assholes try to use 9/11 to justify their shit, it pisses me off.

The problem really may be keeping some New Yorkers from just ripping him to pieces in the hallway or someone assassinating him a la Jack Ruby.  Either would be a mistake ; either would be wrong; either could easily happen if someone messed up security.

Part of it too, is that they’ve gotten so wound up in their own vision of good and evil, they’ve lost track of the fact that KSM is a human being.  And I don’t even mean this in the sense that he has certain unalienable rights (which he does), but in the sense that he can’t bend iron bars, absorb bullets, punchout two dozen FBI agents, and escape into the night on a hot-wired motorcycle before swimming back to Afghanistan.

Precisely.

This really is a Michael Bay movie to these lunatics.  It’s like we’re in a real-life version of X-Men, and KSM is Magneto, and unless we’re spending a zillion dollars a day holing him up in a super-duper ultra secret impenetrable fortress on an island just south of Florida, the man is gonna break free and rain fire down on the whole country from the power of his evil genius mind alone.

Nevermind the fact that the guy is probably going to be sent to someplace like Supermax in Colorado after sentencing, where he’ll remain incarcerated for a few years before the federal government executes him, and then that will be that.  It just doesn’t have the same cool million dollar CGI special effects as the movie they have in their minds, which totally screws up the imagined reality they’ve created about what exactly 9/11 was.

I swear to God, I really do believe that on some level, a conscious decision was made to not try harder to capture Osama bin Laden on Bush’s watch.  Keeping him alive, letting him stay hidden in some cave on the Af-Pak border, and periodically scaring the American public with a tape released by him is a far more effective way to keep the mythical narrative going than actually capturing him would have ever been.  And I’m not even 100% convinced that he’s even necessarily still alive.  The dude is a ghost, and he makes a great archnemesis when you treat your whole foreign policy approach like the movie Independence Day.  Only problem is, thousands upon thousands of real human beings have needlessly died because of this approach.

I think you could actually make a case that having the trial in NYC is NOT fair or just, but for a fair trial, KSM should have a change of venue.  New Yorkers were attacked that day.  The response was so incompetent that there’s still a big hole in the ground where the towers used to be.  Every day, NYers see a skyline that has changed irrevocably.  More than others in the nation, 9/11 matters as a reality and not a talking point to NYers.

Is there a NYer who is not biased and is capable of rendering a verdict based on the evidence, even a “not guilty” verdict?

Jesurigislac is right: torture should mean KSM is set free.  I don’t see us going that far back to being a country of freedom and laws.  But having a trial at all, even one that excuses torture is a small step back toward sanity.  The alternative was holding him forever just b/c we said so, or secret military tribunals.

An open trial is better than those two options.  Nothing will atone for the torturing, though.  That’s evil on our country’s soul that won’t come out.

I’m not a lawyer and know very little about this, but I’m actually wondering if this could end up backfiring. If KSM is convicted, is the fact that the trial was held in NYC going to open him up to appeals on the grounds of jury bias or something along those lines?

Jer, I don’t think Obama has the power to make the jury let KSM go because he was tortured.  I’m not really sure I see the Obama vs. Bush thing going on here.  It’s way more complicated than that.

Y’all are giving the rightwing nutjobs more credit than I am.  I think they object because the object to literally everything that Obama/the left/not them does.  And the reasons are all over the place, because there isn’t a real reason to object, just trumped up crap they throw at the wall to see what sticks.

They are full of crap, and given enough Rush and Beck and Hannity time, they can get the rest of their nutjob army to swallow one or more reasons which we will hear ad nauseum. 

No matter what happens, no matter what the outcome, even if it fulfills what would have been their wildest dream had Bush (or McCain) done it, it will be inferior and wrong.  It will be Obama’s fault, and Obama will have done it wrong. There is nothing he can do that will make them happy- and if he does what they want, they will deny they ever wanted that, and come up with some far out there looney thing they pretend is what any person with common sense would have done.  And, when their blowhards push it to the moronic masses (Sheeple, right? Dittoheads?), it will become “accepted fact”.

I was glad to hear that KSM is getting a court trial. I realized a few years ago that terrorism, being a crime and all, should be responded to with police agencies and prosecution, not military action. But as we all know, the Bush Administration managed to spin it well away from that quite successfully with their “War on Terror” rhetoric, and I’m glad to see Obama trying to nudge it back in a sensible direction.

I don’t think at the time it occurred to me how valuable the “supermen as terrorists” myth would be for conservatives, though.

I don’t think they want to believe that anything less than a superman could successfully take on Amurica.

There’s a third possibility, Jesurigislac.  They probably have enough evidence to convict without including statements obtained by torture.  The fact that he was tortured isn’t a get out of jail free card - it’s a put the torturers in jail card.  It doesn’t and can’t work that way - criminals would be lining up to have their rights violated if it meant they’d never be held accountable for their actions.

For the record, though, if KSM is found guilty (and that’s almost a slam-dunk) putting him or any high-ranking Al Qaeda leader to death would be (IMO) a mistake as it would give them exactly what they want in the eyes of their followers: martyrdom.

Better to let them rot in a Supermax prison cell for 23 hours a day, and bury them in unmarked graves when they expire.

I agree, but that’s not going to happen.  As an opponent of the death penalty, I oppose execution regardless of the situation.  And the fact that this will have the effect of making KSM a martyr is all the more reason not to execute him.

At the same time, there would probably be a pretty big political fallout for Eric Holder, and consequently the Obama Administration, if he is not given the death sentence.  The wingnuts would relentlesly use it to further the meme that Democrat and liberals are soft on terrorists, and unfortunately, I think a lot of the American public would buy into it.

Though such people do exist, it’s very difficult to find many average New Yorkers who were there on 9/11 who don’t want the perpetrators to fry.  Even a lot of people who are generally opposed to the death penalty are OK with an exception being made in this case.

He’s going to get convicted, and he’s going to be sentenced to death, and he’ll probably be executed within 5-6 years of sentencing (McVeigh was executed in June 2001 - 6 years after he blew up the Murrah Building, and 5 years after he was convicted for it).  Hopefully by the time it happens, we’ll have already left Iraq and Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed (or confirmed already dead).

So long as there is an American presence in the Muslim world sucking up their oil and trying to control their governments, the resentment towards America from there will persist, and certain theocratic lunatics will be able to use the power of their religion to rally that anger and use it to try to terrorize the people who they (understandably) don’t want in their part of the world meddling in their affairs and taking their resources.

This issue of trying KSM is in one way linked to the general fear that conservatives have had about captured Al-Qaeda and Taliban members since Day One of the Bush administration’s interesting experiment into capturing POWs and then ...pretending they were not POWs. Somehow this idea of letting them be anywhere in the actual United States is abhorrent to them…but keeping them locked up in Guantanamo is totally acceptable. There very literally is no difference between holding KSM at a military base stateside vs. Guantanamo except that one is in Cuba. ...I mean, unless the Bush administration was so wrapped up in double speak semantics that when they said “America doesn’t torture” they meant that to mean “America doesn’t torture on American soil”

Also interesting about this is that it exposes the American freedoms that Sarah Palin thinks should not extend to these POWs. Not only do they not get the rights of due process and trial by peers and etc etc, but they apparently also do not deserve the freedom of speech. She says to let them hang ... well, okay, Sarah, how about we actually have a trial for these people before we execute them? At least pretend that we’re still part of Western civilization?

But, yeah, I agree with the above sentiments about the likelihood of a momentary lapse in security leading to KSM or one of his fellow detainees being shot.  Start placing your bets now.

I agree with drachonfire that the wingers have a knee-jerk reaction to oppose anything that happens under Obama. They are right on one point though, that this could become a media circus and platform for KSM. I do hope that they allow only print media to have access to the courtroom.

Amanda: Jer, I don’t think Obama has the power to make the jury let KSM go because he was tortured.

It’s not up to the jury: it’s up to the judge - indeed, it’s going to come down to: is the US judiciary system so hopelessly corrupt that they will allow a jury to convict a man based on “evidence” taken under torture: or will Obama’s administration (or Bush’s heldover DoJ) be leaning on the system to ensure that KSM will not be released?

libdevil: They probably have enough evidence to convict without including statements obtained by torture.

But, again presuming that the judiciary system is not already corrupted - given that it’s public knowledge that the prisoner, and other prisoners in the same extra-judiciary “system”, have been tortured to force them to confess to whatever the US wanted them to confess to, any evidence which the prosecution may claim has not been obtained by torture, must be proven not to have been obtained by torture.  How likely is it, after eight years of torturing prisoners and failing to keep consistent records of what was done, to whom, when, that any evidence obtained during the time Khalid Shaik Mohammed was a prisoner must be disregarded.

It is not up to the jury to decide. It’s going to be up to the judiciary to decide if they can allow the judicial system to accept evidence that is, at best, tainted by torture, if not directly obtained by torture.

t doesn’t and can’t work that way

Actually, it does and it can. I can think offhand of two cases - one in the UK, one in Belgium - where a man accused of a crime had been tortured in order to make him confess, and in both cases, the judge declared the case closed and set the prisoner free - despite additional supporting evidence that the prisoner was guilty - because in civilised countries, torturing prisoners to make them confess destroys your case against them.

The politics of this is very interesting. I was in downtown NYC on 9/11/2001. Based on that shared experience with numerous other New Yorkers, I suspect that as New Yorkers begin to realize what wingnut scumbags like these two despicable morally degenerate pieces of shit really think about 9/11, they are going to be really fucking pissed off.

KSM and his co-conspirators fucked with New Yorkers, and New Yorkers who were fucked with are not going to take kindly to this garbage. New Yorkers want KSM tried here.

libdevils: criminals would be lining up to have their rights violated if it meant they’d never be held accountable for their actions.

No doubt, but in a country with a proper judicial system, the police and the courts take rigid care that no one accused of a crime ever has their rights violated, because they know that if the person is guilty and yet must be set free because they were tortured while imprisoned, they will get it in the neck.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that all this case will prove is that the US does not have a proper judicial system and no signatory to the US Convention Against Torture should render a prisoner into the custody of the US.

DTG @ 18:

Hopefully by the time it happens, we’ll have already left Iraq and Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden will have been captured or killed (or confirmed already dead).

Bin Laden hasn’t made a video statement in years, so I suspect he may be dead already (of natural causes), and that Al Qaeda is trying to keep his mystique alive for propaganda.

Yet even if Bin Laden were alive and the US killed him (today), were I Obama I’d be strongly tempted to cover it up for the reasons cited above. Yet by the same token, publicizing Bin Laden’s death would be a huge win for Obama’s administration PR-wise - one that his critics on the right could not take away nor minimize.

You have to ask: what evidence does the government have, which will be admissible in federal court, against Khalid Sheikh Muhammad?  I’m guessing that they didn’t read him his Miranda rights when he was captured, or provide him with an attorney, so none of his confessions or statement would be admissible.

The military aren’t policemen; they don’t go about looking for evidence and keeping a chain of custody which could be used in a criminal trial in these situations.  I’m hoping that the Justice Department has really worked this one through, and has sent this through all sorts of legal tests, because there’s a possibility he could be acquitted.

There’s a third possibility, Jesurigislac.  They probably have enough evidence to convict without including statements obtained by torture.  The fact that he was tortured isn’t a get out of jail free card[.]

This is definitively the correct possibility. Holder’s statements about the basis for the decision to try KSM in a civilian court make it absolutely clear. And in relation to torture as a “get out of jail free card”, regardless of one’s moral opinion, US law is very clear that the remedy for evidentiary problems is exclusion of the evidence, not blanket immunity from prosecution.

I’m hoping that the Justice Department has really worked this one through, and has sent this through all sorts of legal tests, because there’s a possibility he could be acquitted.

There is absolutely zero chance of his being acquited, which is the only reason that the administration has decided to all him to be tried in a civilian court (for better or worse; see Greewald’s post on this). What sane juror is going to vote to acquit this dude, and then have their name known to the nation? Not gonna happen.

Obviously, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves his day in court. But if he is brought to trial, the defense can show evidence that he was tortured, and the end result ought to be that he is then released. While that ought to be a strike against the Bush administration which tortured him, it would also require the kind of backbone which Obama has shown no sign of.

If what you want is for the Republicans to decimate the Democrats in the next two election cycles, completely take over Congress, and nominate a wingnut to destroy President Obama in the 2012 election, be my guest.

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with a repugnant turd like toe-sucking Dick Morris on anything, but he made the argument the other day that if somehow KSM is able to walk away from this trial a free man, it would be a complete disaster for the Democratic Party in the next two election cycles, and the Republicans would be able to steamroll them at the polls.  I think he’s probably exactly right.  The difference between me and him is that a) I think KSM absolutely WILL be convicted; b) I think Morris and his ilk probably want KSM to be exonerated, so that it can be used as a bludgeon by the wingnuts to regain political power.

Many Americans were absolutely disgusted by the manner in which the Bush Administration handled the so-called “War on Terror”, and were repulsed by their attempts to justify torture.  At the same time, the vast majority of Americans still want to see the people directly responsible for 9/11, including KSM, punished to the full extent of the law, and would be outraged if any of the perpetrators were permitted to walk away as free men.

Sorry, the benefits of letting someone like KSM walk away because he was tortured don’t even remotely make up for the massive wingnut-driven consequences Americans would face if such a thing happened.  In principle, your point has some validity, but I’m personally willing to allow KSM to be convicted despite being tortured, if it ensures that we don’t have a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe in the next decade, among the many horrors that an extremely revitalized Republican Party would be able to get away with if they get the gift of a freed mass murderer to use against the Democratic safety net we have now.  I personally don’t like the idea of President Huckabee, President Giuliani, or President Romney in 2012, nor do I like the idea of Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell.  And if KSM is allowed to walk, that’s precisely what will happen as a result.

Remember the public outrage when the four cops got exonerated of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1992?  Yeah, well multiply that by 1,000, and that’s what you’ll get if KSM walks out of a New York federal courtroom as a free man.  Michael Dukakis got destroyed by political ads with pictures of Willie Horton in 1988.  Barack Obama would get absolutely decimated by political ads with pictures of a freed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2012.  Which is precisely why there’s no chance in hell of it happening.

DTG in STL: If what you want is for the Republicans to decimate the Democrats in the next two election cycles, completely take over Congress, and nominate a wingnut to destroy President Obama in the 2012 election, be my guest.

I’ll be sad if that happens, not least because it will demonstrate Americans really can’t cope with the idea that their country should not torture prisoners and that evidence obtained under torture ensures a conviction for the torturer and not the prisoner.

Remember the public outrage when the four cops got exonerated of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1992?

What do you suppose would have happened in Los Angeles if Rodney King had been put on trial based on evidence beaten out of him by the four cops?

Yeah, well multiply that by 1,000,000, and that’s what you’ll get globally if a New York federal courtroom decides to convict KSM.

Actually, only Triplanetary is on the right track here: the problem is that the Obama Administration is converting the September 11th attack back from an act of war to a crime, away from responding to an act of war with military action, to responding to a crime by sending in the police.

President Bush made a huge mistake by not moving forward with some form of Nuremberg court—which was a novelty, an excuse by the winners to hang the losers—very early on.  By letting the problem fester, he allowed it to get out of control.  Even having declared them Prisoners of War (which would have meant Geneva Conventions protections, and no interrogations) wouldn’t have worked: as POWs, they’d have to be released as soon as the war was over.

Rather than novel “miitary tribunals,” standard (non-Article 32) courts-martial could have been used.

But there is an obvious lesson here: you should never take anyone prisoner if you are unprepared for the possibility that he will eventually have to be released.

Look for this headline in a couple months:

“John Boener says KSM conviction a vindication of Bush torture regime.”

The spin will be dizzying.

Dana greases over the crimes committed by the Bush administration, calling them a “huge mistake”.

But he is right - though, knowing Dana, he is right for the wrong reasons - when he says, in a muddled way, that when people are taken prisoner, their captors must be prepared for the possibility that they will eventually have to be released.

The Bush administration behaved throughout their time in power as if they were sure it would never end - that they would never be called to account for their crimes. From the comments on this opportunity to call them to account for their crimes, it appears they were right - they might eventually have to leave the administration, but under no circumstances would Americans tolerate their being investigated, tried, and convicted - apparently, not even die-hard lefties like Amanda Marcotte think that would be a solidly good achievement.

What do you suppose would have happened in Los Angeles if Rodney King had been put on trial based on evidence beaten out of him by the four cops?

Yeah, well multiply that by 1,000,000, and that’s what you’ll get globally if a New York federal courtroom decides to convict KSM.

What crime exactly would Rodney King have been tried for?  There was no crime committed that he could have been charged for that I’m aware of.  I’m missing your point there.  9/11 actually did take place, and the vast majority of earthlings believe that it was Al Qaeda operatives, including KSM, that were responsible for it.

Do you really believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a globally sympathetic figure, like Nelson Mandela?  To the extent that he was victim of torture, sure, but it’s not as if his torture erases the horrific crimes that he’s widely believed to have committed in most people’s minds.  Do you think that most people don’t actually believe that he committed the crimes that he’s been accused of, just because he was tortured?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like you are making the contention that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed DIDN’T actually do the things that he’s been accused of.  Are you actually suggesting that you think KSM didn’t have anything to do with 9/11?  I don’t know if that’s what you’re really saying, but if it is, you’re getting into Alex Jones territory there.

The Bushies responsible for their torture tactics absolutely should be forced to face justice for their crimes, and I think much of the global anger at America exists because they haven’t.  And that anger is completely justifiable.

Yet I somehow don’t see the possibility of the rest of the world saying, “Oh my God, the Americans convicted a mass murderer who was tortured, let’s riot!”

Yes, torture should never be used on anyone, and those who employ its use should be punished to the full extent of the law.  But I don’t think there’s going to be much sympathy for the cause of completely exonerating a guy who 99% of the planet thinks is guilty of what he’s been accused of, just because he was tortured.

I think much of the world wants the Bush regime torturers tried for their violations of the Geneva Conventions.  I don’t think very many people in the world want Khalid Sheihkh Mohammed to be freed just because he was tortured.  The dude is not widely perceived in the same vein as genuine political prisoners have been throughout history.  He’s pretty much regarded as a mass murderer, who unfortunately was tortured.  Most people rightly think his torture was wrong… they also think that what he did was many times more wrong.

One could reasonably argue that what the Italians did to Benito Mussolini in April 1945 was a pretty gross violation of his fundamental human rights as well, but I don’t think there has ever been a whole lot of Mussolini sympathizers out there who believe that his extra-judicial execution and the public mutilation of his body should exonerate him of historical culpability for the crimes he committed against his own people.

Well, die hard lefties like me think imprisoning the Bush regime would be a spectacularly good thing.  We need to demonstrate that the rule of law is back in effect.  War crimes need to be prosecuted.  Civil rights violations need to be prosecuted.  Corruption on a scale so massive as to defy description needs to be prosecuted.  None of that, however, means that I think murderous bastards like KSM should not also be tried, convicted, and imprisoned.  Bush being a criminal doesn’t somehow make bin Laden a non-criminal.

I thought KSM was basically a drooling, incompetent maniac after years of torture. How is the shell of a lunatic supposed to be scary?

How is the shell of a lunatic supposed to be scary?

You might be confusing Mohammed with Jose Padilla.  Regardless, that’s, as mentioned, probably one of the things that’s got conservatives spooked.  If they lose their Islamic boogeyman wielding his BFS of Impending Terror +5, they lose most of their remaining political clout.

DTG in STL: What crime exactly would Rodney King have been tried for?  There was no crime committed that he could have been charged for that I’m aware of.  I’m missing your point there. 

The police officers who beat Rodney King were committing exactly the same crime as the US military did when they tortured Khalid Sheik Mohammad. Your belief that KSM must be guilty of the crimes with which he is charged is identical to the belief that a person might have that Rodney King must be guilty because, while being tortured by the police, he confessed to whatever they wanted him to confess.

Let us suppose that after the beating, Rodney King had been kidnapped by the LA police, taken to an undisclosed location, and held there for 8 years. During that time, he confessed to whatever major unsolved crime(s) the LA police wanted him to confess to, and the confessions were publicised as a proven “success” of the treatement he received.

After eight years, Rodney King is brought back to LA to stand his trial. What’s your verdict, if you’re in the jury? Should he be convicted, or set free?

Do you think that most people don’t actually believe that he committed the crimes that he’s been accused of, just because he was tortured?

I have no idea if he committed the crimes he’s been accused of. I have never seen any clear proof that was certainly not based on torture.

libdevil: Well, die hard lefties like me think imprisoning the Bush regime would be a spectacularly good thing.  We need to demonstrate that the rule of law is back in effect.

Then why were you arguing against the rule of law in this thread?

I was talking to a co-worker about this just… today, technically (3rd shift.  Don’t ask how much that sucks.), and he was a) convinced that a “jury of KSM’s peers” would have to be all Muslim, ‘case his peers are Muslims, and OF COURSE Muslims all hate America and love Al Qaeda… and also b) trying KSM in a court of law at all is an insult to all victims of 9/11 and everyone who lost a loved one, because a fair trail would be “granting him the rights of an American citizen”, and furriners need to be just shot and buried an shallow grave, or something…

There is apparently enough evidence not obtained by torturing KSM with which to convict him in open court.

Hooray!

There is also a boatload of evidence obtained by torture most of which is not only inadmissible, but likely untrue. Read between the lines of the 9/11 Commission Report and you can literally see the inaccurate bits as they dribbled out of KSM’s water logged mouth. History by waterboard is a very uncertain thing.

The truth is, this was always a criminal matter. It would be better adjudicated at the ICC, but the US refuses to be a signatory, even in the age of Obama. Sad, that, but for the fact that many of our own high officials, past and present, would be eligible for arrest and prosecution on the world’s terms, and that will not do for an aging, rotting empire. Appearance, appearances!

The right wing hysteria over this is quite calculated. It is about fear and winning elections, and they have been trained to believe that engendering one leads directly to the other. Never mind that plenty of terrorist types have been tried in open court, convicted and imprisoned here on our mainland, the metaphysical truth remains that terrorists have super human powers to spread fear and destroy things with their minds, aided and enhanced by the conservamedia and their wealthy benefactors. Let us succumb to irrational fears and elect neo-fascist conservatives so we can pretend to sleep well at night.

KSM will be tried, found guilty, and executed exactly as he wishes. It will be the perfect closing act of a horrible and murderous play. Now if we could just get Dick and George before a jury of their peers…

And in relation to torture as a “get out of jail free card”, regardless of one’s moral opinion, US law is very clear that the remedy for evidentiary problems is exclusion of the evidence, not blanket immunity from prosecution.

Jesurgislac seems a little confused about the requirements of US law when it comes to evidence that was obtained by torture.  It’s true that those convictions are often thrown out here, but it’s generally because there is no other evidence (which is why the cops decided to torture the guy in the first place), not because being tortured means the case against you is automatically dismissed regardless of the other evidence.  Dirty Harry was not, in fact, an accurate depiction of what happens in that case.

And, really, Jesurgislac, there are going to be massive riots in the streets of London and Madrid if KSM is convicted?  Really?

I have no idea if he committed the crimes he’s been accused of. I have never seen any clear proof that was certainly not based on torture.

So the fact that you don’t know what evidence is available that was not obtained by torture means that he shouldn’t be put on trial at all but instead released immediately?

The police officers who beat Rodney King were committing exactly the same crime as the US military did when they tortured Khalid Sheik Mohammad. Your belief that KSM must be guilty of the crimes with which he is charged is identical to the belief that a person might have that Rodney King must be guilty because, while being tortured by the police, he confessed to whatever they wanted him to confess.

You do realize that Rodney King was never charged with anything at all in that incident, right?  He never even spent a night in jail for it—he was taken straight to the hospital and never charged.

Mnemosyne, would it have made the crimes committed by the police officers any better if Rodney King had been charged?

Would it be acceptable to you if the police had decided that the best way of avoiding any acknowledgment that a crime had been committed was to claim that Rodney King was in fact guilty as hell?

“But I’m sure that smarter people - and quieter people - have considered that, were KSM to receive a fair trial, he would have to be declared not guilty and set free: he could not be found guilty if the evidence against him had been obtained by torture.”
Comment #9: Jesurgislac on 11/15 at 12:15 PM

Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it, which is why trying this case in a civilian court is a spectacularly bad idea. There are a million things that can go wrong, starting with the fact that, as Dana opined, none of these guys were read their Miranda rights, had access to a lawyer, or any of the other niceties of our legal system. Ten to one, at least one of these guys walks, and possibly most or all of them do.

Others have stated that no NY jury will vote to acquit, which is almost certainly true, but that’s all the more reason for the defense to call for a change in venue, and short of moving the trial to Nome, Alaska, you’re not going to find an “Impartial” jury anywhere in this country. And, even if convicted, there’s a good chance one or more convictions would be overturned on appeal, for reasons already stated.

Bottom line: This was a monumentally dumb move for the Obama Admin, one that might just kill any chance of his getting a 2nd term. Hello Sarah Palin 2012!

So the fact that you don’t know what evidence is available that was not obtained by torture means that he shouldn’t be put on trial at all but instead released immediately?

Does anyone know if there is evidence proving he committed a crime for which he can be tried by the US - after the US kidnapped and tortured him?

Would it be acceptable to you if the police had decided that the best way of avoiding any acknowledgment that a crime had been committed was to claim that Rodney King was in fact guilty as hell?

So your argument is that KSM is completely innocent and is only being put on trial because the US government is embarrassed that we imprisoned and tortured an innocent man?

Oh, and Rodney King actually was guilty as hell—blood tests done at the hospital showed that he was, in fact, driving drunk that night.  However, the police response to a simple drunk-driving incident was so out of proportion to the actual offense that he was never charged.

Does anyone know if there is evidence proving he committed a crime for which he can be tried by the US - after the US kidnapped and tortured him?

You seem to believe the latter circumstances utterly negate the former. Because KSM was tortured, he committed no crimes?

Do you honestly think this administration is going to stake its reputation on trying in open court a defendant against whom there is no evidence at all, beyond what as gained from directly torturing him?

Do you believe they are that foolhardy?

Now you can argue all day long without knowing what other evidence the prosecution will introduce that all other evidence is manufactured or otherwise inadmissible, but that’s an argument that fails until we know what case the government intends to put on.

Again: Do you honestly think Holder and Obama are going to expose their administration to the consequences of losing this case, even if all evidence obtained by torture is ruled out?

I have no idea if he committed the crimes he’s been accused of. I have never seen any clear proof that was certainly not based on torture.

Well, the fact that you haven’t seen the proof doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  There’s lots of things that the FBI and the CIA and DOJ and other intelligence-related agencies are aware of that the average citizen is not, but the fact that we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I didn’t sit in the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, I didn’t have access to all of the police evidence involved in prosecuting those men, but just because I am not personally aware of what evidence was used to convict them doesn’t mean that such evidence didn’t exist, or that it was wrong for general public opinion to believe in those men’s guilt before they were actually tried.

I wasn’t at Fort Hood last week when the shootings went down.  And while I don’t have any personal firsthand information on the tragedy and little in the way of specific evidence, I feel pretty confident in saying that I believe that Nadal Malik Hasan most likely killed 13 people, even though he has yet to be formally convicted of those charges.  And I don’t feel bad or wrong for believing that either, even though the only evidence I have to go on is the reporting I’ve read and watched.

Let me ask you a question, because you seem to be implying that you think KSM might not be guilty of being the 9/11 mastermind… do you believe that Al Qaeda was or was not responsible for planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, yes or no?

If you don’t think AQ was responsible, well, there’s not much left I’m willing to discuss with you on the subject.  Sorry, I think the 9/11 Truthers are paranoid conspiracy theory kooks.

Does anyone know if there is evidence proving he committed a crime for which he can be tried by the US - after the US kidnapped and tortured him?

Now you’re trying to get metaphysical—you seem to think that if the US government says they have evidence, that’s proof that there is no evidence so therefore no evidence exists.

Does anyone know if there is evidence proving he committed a crime for which he can be tried by the US - after the US kidnapped and tortured him?

You are asking that question to a bunch of random people on a blog, and I am not aware of any of us being employed by any federal agency which would have access to that sort of highly classified evidence.

A better question is this: Do you know that there isn’t any non-torture produced evidence that can used to try him in the US?

I somehow have a feeling that this wasn’t a decision made on the fly by AG Eric Holder, and that he was quite fully aware of the inadmissability of torture-produced evidence in prosecuting KSM.

Which leads me to believe that if the U.S. DOJ did not have access to other evidence which can be used to convict KSM, then they wouldn’t be trying this case, and that KSM would still be sitting indefinitely in a cell on an island south of Florida.

The United States Department of Justice has something like a 98% conviction rate in criminal cases tried in federal courts.  They virtually never lose, once a case moves to trial.  I gotta feeling that they wouldn’t have moved forward with this case until they were sure that they could walk in with a 99.99999% certainty that they would get a conviction, given the massive negative political ramifications of an acquittal.

I fail to see how arguing that both mass murderers and torturers should be tried for their crimes is somehow a repudiation of the rule of law.  That’s almost completely nonsensical.

I think it’s simpler than that. They’ve forgotten that 9/11 happened in New York City.

It’s become an American tragedy that happened to all of America, and as we all know from wingnut rhetoric, some parts of America are more American than others. Those must be the parts most victimized by 9/11. It’s a Kansas tragedy, not a Manhattan one.

This is my guess as someone who lived in NYC then and moved away shortly after.

Jesurgislac, KSM had already admitted his responsibility for 9/11 in an interview to Al Jazeera, as well as in statements in open court that weren’t rendered from him by torture.

Please do some research on the subject before assuming that the only evidence against him is the statements he made under torture.

libdevil: I fail to see how arguing that both mass murderers and torturers should be tried for their crimes is somehow a repudiation of the rule of law.

If Khalid Sheik Mohammed is guilty of mass murder in the US, and the US wished to put him on trial and enforce the rule of law, the necessary procedure is:

1. Demostrate to the local law enforcement that there is sufficient evidence to allow for KSM being arrested;
2. Show sufficient proof to the local judiciary system that the US has evidence meriting bringing KSM to trial;
3. Establish that the US is a country to which it is lawful for a signatory to the UN Convention on Torture to render prisoners for trial;
4. Transfer KSM from judicial custody in the country in which he was arrested to judicial custody in the US;
5. Bring him to trial, allow him a full defence, show the evidence, and - if the evidence is sufficient to prove him guilty - have him convicted and sentenced appropriately, allowing that according to the rule of law, he is presumed innocent until proven guilty of the crime(s) with which he is charged.

Guess which of these steps did not happen with regard to KSM? Hint: the number was invented by Hindu mathematicians sometime around the 6th century.

DTG: The United States Department of Justice has something like a 98% conviction rate in criminal cases tried in federal courts.  They virtually never lose, once a case moves to trial.  I gotta feeling that they wouldn’t have moved forward with this case until they were sure that they could walk in with a 99.99999% certainty that they would get a conviction, given the massive negative political ramifications of an acquittal.

Yep, and that’s seriously disturbing, given that KSM was kidnapped and tortured: for the DoJ to be that sure that there’s no way his defense will be allowed to prove a mistrial means that the US judiciary is a broken system.

as well as in statements in open court that weren’t rendered from him by torture.

KSM made statements in open court after having been tortured. Nothing KSM said after the US had tortured him can be considered evidence against him.

As for the claim that KSM confessed to 9/11 in an interview with al-Jazeera, he claims he made no such confession.

Yep, and that’s seriously disturbing, given that KSM was kidnapped

Kidnapped?

KIDNAPPED?!?

Oh my fucking God.  I have no reasonable response to such an utterly unreasonable contention.

Jesus Christ… if U.S. troops should ever find and detain Osama bin Laden in a cave on the Af-Pak border, will they be kidnapping him, too?

I always hate the false characterization wingnuts make that those on the left are terrorist-coddlers, but for fuck’s sake, if everybody on the left spoke about people like KSM in terms like this, I couldn’t blame them.

1. Demostrate to the local law enforcement that there is sufficient evidence to allow for KSM being arrested;

And the local law enforcement authority in Afghanistan in 2001 was ...

2. Show sufficient proof to the local judiciary system that the US has evidence meriting bringing KSM to trial;

And the functioning judiciary system in Afghanistan in 2001 was ...

You’re acting as though Afghanistan had a functioning government, police, and judiciary system when KSM was captured.  Believe it or not, not every country has all three of those things.  The only country that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan was Pakistan—not a single other country in the world recognized them as the legitimate government.

If we arrest someone in Somalia, what police department do we report to?  What judiciary system will give us the clearance to extradite the person for trial?  Or are we just supposed to shrug our shoulders and let criminals go if they happen to be operating out of parts of the world that lack a functioning government and judiciary system?

I hope that historians use this thread as evidence that large segments of the American public completely lost their ability to separate fantasy and reality.  Here you have both right wingers and left wingers—-motivated by the same irrational hatred of liberals—-praying that a man who murdered thousands of innocent people in cold blood walks free, due to some legal mojo deus ex machina, so that Obama has egg on his face.  Not going to happen, for one, and WTF is wrong with people for another.

Well, if KSM did go free because he was tortured (not that I want that to happen, however mortified I am by the use of torture), it would of course be Bush’s fault for having him tortured, but as has been pointed out many times, the general public certainly wouldn’t see it that way. Obama would definitely take the blame.

That said, here’s hoping he’s convicted. I’m sure DTG is right that the DoJ wouldn’t go forward with this without a strong case. Meanwhile, we should also convict the people who tortured KSM. I can dream.

1. Demostrate to the local law enforcement that there is sufficient evidence to allow for KSM being arrested;
2. Show sufficient proof to the local judiciary system that the US has evidence meriting bringing KSM to trial;
3. Establish that the US is a country to which it is lawful for a signatory to the UN Convention on Torture to render prisoners for trial;
4. Transfer KSM from judicial custody in the country in which he was arrested to judicial custody in the US;

I believe KSM was seized and tortured by members of the ISI (Pakistan’s Intelligence Service) and the CIA - so it’s not like we grabbed him without local consent.

As for the claim that KSM confessed to 9/11 in an interview with al-Jazeera, he claims he made no such confession.

In 2002, Al Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda conducted an interview in Karachi, Pakistan with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh.[8] During the interview, Mohammed admitted his involvement, along with Ramzi Binalshibh, in the “Holy Tuesday operation”.[9] In the interview, Mohammed and Binalshibh explained how they “organised and executed the hijacks with Bin Laden’s approval.”[10] They also said that the U.S. Capitol was the intended target for United Airlines Flight 93, and not the White House.[10]

Link

It’s to know whether or not the actual principles of law ostensibly espoused by the American people trump the need for vigilante justice.

Putting someone on trial is now classed as vigilante justice?

Not only do I want a trial, I want it broadcasted on network TV. We should have done this from the beginning, the world needs to see the people who did 9/11 for what they are. Instead we tortured them, doing the near-impossible—making people feel sympathy for terrorists. Did Bush ever think of that before he did this crap?

And he will be convicted. He may be spared the death penalty because of torture, though, and that lays squarely at the feet of Bush/Cheney.

Amanda (5):

I’ll point out that the passengers of Flight 93 also grasped the parameters of the plot quickly enough to act, which again is evidence that it wasn’t some complex thing that was hard to figure out.

Are you calling the heroic heroes of our national nation stupid?</wingnut>

Dana (25):

I’m guessing that they didn’t read him his Miranda rights when he was captured, or provide him with an attorney, so none of his confessions or statement would be admissible.

Well, having exactly as much evidence as you do, I rather suspect when he came into the custody of civilian police forces, they did read him his rights, for precisely this reason.

Furthermore, I’ll bet you’re wearing a striped tie right now. Y’know, while we’re speculating about things we have absolutely no way of knowing.

Jes (37):

Let us suppose that after the beating, Rodney King had been kidnapped by the LA police, taken to an undisclosed location, and held there for 8 years. During that time, he confessed to whatever major unsolved crime(s) the LA police wanted him to confess to, and the confessions were publicised as a proven “success” of the treatement he received

Do you think KSM has some responsibility for 9/11? Because the analogy really only works as intended if you don’t. “I haven’t seen any evidence” is a cop-out; I’m not asking if you’d vote to convict if you were a juror, I’m asking where you think the probabilities lie. I invite you to say it was Donald Rumsfeld the whole time if you believe that to be the case.

Fallsroad (48):

Do you honestly think this administration is going to stake its reputation on trying in open court a defendant against whom there is no evidence at all, beyond what as gained from directly torturing him?
Do you believe they are that foolhardy?

I do, actually. But I take your point, and it doesn’t follow that this is, in fact, the case.

DTG (51):

Which leads me to believe that if the U.S. DOJ did not have access to other evidence which can be used to convict KSM, then they wouldn’t be trying this case, and that KSM would still be sitting indefinitely in a cell on an island south of Florida.

See, now, this hadn’t occurred to me. Realistically, the government’s choice wasn’t trying him vs letting him go; it was trying him vs holding him without trial. If they really thought every scrap of evidence would be thrown out because of torture, they could easily leave him there.

Come to think of it, I suspect the underlying ooginess wingnuts feel about this is in part that it signifies the beginning of the end of detention at Guantanamo Bay etc.

Jes (56):

As for the claim that KSM confessed to 9/11 in an interview with al-Jazeera, he claims he made no such confession

Well, then, that’s a question of fact that can be put before a jury. We don’t let someone go free just because they deny having committed a crime or having confessed to it.

I wonder if they fear that his loony ranting will sound strangely familiar ... like, almost like their own loony ranting!

Also, there’s evidence that he did these attacks that was not extracted by torture. He can be convicted of that.

But he is right - though, knowing Dana, he is right for the wrong reasons

Yeah - when he says “never take anyone prisoner unless you’re prepared to see them walk free” he means KSM should have been tortured, then shot in the head and dumped in a ditch somewhere. He’s just not being explicit about it here.

Re: #59 - Mnemosyne

To be fair, KSM was picked up and initially detained by ISI in Pakisatn, not by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Why does the good opinion of John Boner matter?

Umm… Because we don’t want him swept into power on a wave of outraged populism?

There’s more than a whiff of Truther nonsense to the whiff of wishful thinking.  KSM isn’t going to walk.  Please stop being a parody of liberals that right wingers love to believe in.

If Saudi Arabia—which is an backward authoritarian hellhole where women are treated like property, gays executed, and where democratic rights non-existent—captured Osama bin Laden, and put him on trial, I would be hoping that bin Laden is still found guilty even though the state putting him on trial is disgusting in it’s own right. I wouldn’t be gleefully predicting he would walk free just because I despise the Saudi Monarchy.

If KSM is acquitted due to stupid technicalities, this is potentially evidence that the system worked.

So, in other words, you will not accept any verdict other than dismissal or acquittal, no matter what evidence is actually presented at the trial, because any other verdict would be proof that the system didn’t work.

For the same reason, if the USSR had captured Hitler alive and put him on trial I’d want a conviction, even if the Soviet system of “justice” didn’t live up to the standards of Sweden.

You were right in the sentence you crossed out.  Right wingers are opposed to anything that happens under President Obama.  If the Justice department had decided to let Mohammed be tried by military tribunal they’d be opposing that.  If the Obama administration makes a statement against cancer they’ll be on Faux News defending tumors.

Alright, but then American liberals who feel that this is the case should also believe that the experiment is well and truly dead, and there is no further value in engaging with the electoral system.

I’m sure the people of Bali would be perfectly content to see KSM walk free, right?  After all, there’s only one crime that he’s accused of, so no one else in the world would be upset to see him go back to financing terrorist bombings.

Mnemosyne—

Or Casablanca, or Istanbul, or Iraqi Shias. Al Qaeda has probably killed more Muslims than it has killed Americans, actually.

So I am finding it a little odd to see American liberals surprised by the fact that the Bushist/Cheneyist attempt at circumventing these mechanisms (by inventing e.g. bogus legal categories) may have the ultimate effect of making legitimate prosecution of KSM very difficult.

As an American well aware of the DoJ’s track record, I can tell you assuredly that they do not prosecute cases until they believe they have a near ironclad conviction on their hands… hence the 95% federal conviction rate (my previous stat was slightly off).  If you get charged by the Feds for a crime and your case makes it to trial, the odds are pretty damn strong that you are going to be convicted.  The Feds rarely lose.  And in this particular case, I am positive Obama wouldn’t have given the go ahead to Holder to move forward with the case until the AG could give him a 99.9999% assurance that KSM would be convicted.

That people actually believe that there’s any realistic chance of an acquittal in this case is kind of shocking to me.  The Feds don’t lose, and in a case with this high of a profile and this serious of political ramifications for the prosecutor (Holder) and his boss (Obama), I can assure you… the odds are better that Carrie Prejean will become a same-sex advocate tomorrow than that the People of the United States will lose this case in federal court.

  What do you suppose would have happened in Los Angeles if Rodney King had been put on trial based on evidence beaten out of him by the four cops?

  Yeah, well multiply that by 1,000,000, and that’s what you’ll get globally if a New York federal courtroom decides to convict KSM.

not gonna happen. yeah, the world despises the US for its torture of terrorist suspects, but there will be no world-wide riot over an uncivilized-but-expected conviction, the same way there are no global riots when Russia or China do somehing uncivilized-but-expected. The world is pretty fucking jaded in that regard.

Mandos, if Dick Cheney was taken into custody by Iran, tortured for 8 years, and then put on trial for aggressive war, would you want him to walk free?

I’d like to point out, tho, what’s actually wrong with this trial.  As Glenn Greenwald described it the other day (and as he has been warning about for years now), what the Obama Administration has now codified is a stratified system by which alleged criminals who will surely be convicted will go to trial (KSM, et al.) while people who have less conclusive evidence against them will receive a secret military tribunal or just indefinite detention (i.e. just about everyone else in Guantanamo).  The point is that once you’re accused, you’re guilty, as far as the state is concerned.  It’s a horrible and frankly terrifying precedent that they’re setting.  My only real hope here is that actually sending some of them to trial will make the contradiction glaringly apparent and, ideally, unsustainable (i.e. leading to fair trials for all detainees).

Greenwald, of course, explains it better: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/13/guantanamo/index.html

I don’t think that either I or Jesurgislac are predicting that he would walk free.

You do seem to believe he should, though, or otherwise the USA=Saudi Arabia, or something.

You also seem to believe that, if he is convicted, it couldn’t possibly have been a fair trial. You’ve reached your conclusions before the trial has even started.

Yeah, and KSM publically confessed, too. So…

And it’s not like Al Jazera is some horribly biased pro-American source!

And if Italy wants to do something that would have an effect in the real world, they could put Berlusconi on trial, who aided and abetted Bush and Cheney in preemptive war every step of the way.

The Conservative Bed-wetters won’t be happy unless KSM and the co-conspirators are convicted via secret military tribunal and put to death on Pay-Per-View.

The Conservatives are really afraid of what the trial will reveal: 1) these guys are loony fundamentalists who should easily be convicted and will happily (for the most part) accept the death penalty as martyrs; and 2) the Bush Administration’s tactics (i.e. torture) would be deemed illegal in open court.

Jesurgislac is stradling that fence between “rational arguer” and “concern troll”.  All the arguments he’s making are the arguments the “rational” conservatives make for military tribunals for the al-Qaeda crew.  The Feds managed to convict Yousef and McVeigh.  I have confidence they’ll convict someone who proudly admits to his role in 9/11, torture or not.  We need to regularly remind the Right Wingers that the US is, in fact, “The Good Guys” in this.  We defeated the Nazis and the Soviets without having to resort to tossing the Constitution.  We can probably handle these religious zealots too.

If anyone REALLY thinks KSM and his crew will ever see freedom, you are just not being realistic.  IF they somehow escape conviction in NY, the Feds could just rearrest them and ship them to Virginia for trial in the Pentagon attack (and fixing any mistakes made in the NY trial in the process).  IF they failed conviction there, then the Feds could rearrest them and send them to Pennsylvania and try them for the Shanksville crash.  And, if they STILL fail to get a conviction, the Feds can always take them back into custody as POW’s.

There is no way, and I mean no way, that KSM ever sees freedom again.  None.  Guaranteed.

You also seem to believe that, if he is convicted, it couldn’t possibly have been a fair trial.

That’s not a totally unreasonable concern, especially given the publicity stunt of holding the trial in New York.  Granted, jury pools are probably poisoned everywhere in the country, but I imagine it’s the worst in NYC.

If KSM is acquitted due to stupid technicalities, this is potentially evidence that the system worked.

And it will also become the means by which the Republican Party gets handed the perfect bludgeon to decimate the Democratic Party and regain power in America with a massive vengeance, overtaking both houses of Congress and the White House.

I assure you, if you were offended by the vigilante torture tactics employed by the Bush Administration, you’ll be absolutely mortified by the evil shit that gets cooked up by the Giuliani, Huckabee, or Romney Administration that will assume power on January 20, 2013.

If letting KSM go will be a great way to prove the system works, it will also serve as an indirect mechanism which will allow even more sinister tyrants than Cheney to completely dismantle the system, and rain hell on earth.  The system that some people fought so hard to protect by pushing for KSM’s acquittal will become totally moot within 5 years.

Iran War, here we come.

Trust me… it’s in the world’s best long-term interest that KSM gets locked away for the rest of his life.

This is strict utilitarian and survivalist thinking on my part here… if the trade-off for allowing America to be a little more stained by the torture of KSM by the Bush Administration is that we don’t have to suffer from a future Administration that makes the Bushies seem like champions of progressivism, that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.

Quite literally, wishing that KSM gets released on legal technicalities is also wishing that Obama is a one-term president who will lose to a total wingnut in 2012, even if that second wish is unintentional.  It is a political reality that letting KSM walk will cost President Obama his job.  For those who think that Obama would be selling out America by allowing this prosecution to move forward instead of releasing KSM… you really don’t want what would necessarily come with the alternative.

And it will also become the means by which the Republican Party gets handed the perfect bludgeon to decimate the Democratic Party and regain power in America with a massive vengeance, overtaking both houses of Congress and the White House.

The leftists (zmag types to troofers) would love that, it’s called “heightening the contradictions”. I call it “masturbating with sand paper”.

Greenwald, of course, explains it better:

I’m sorry, but you just demonstrated why I can’t take Greenwald seriously.  In Update 2, as proof that the US is refusing to repatriate Omar Khadr to Canada and instead absolutely insists on making him go through a military tribunal, he links to this article:

US Not Ruling Out Khadr Repatriation

It’s a bit of cherry-picking on Greenwald’s part for him to claim that the US government is saying that there’s no way that Khadr will be repatriated when that’s not what the US government is saying, don’t you think?

Greenwald is the world’s most successful purity troll. If something or someone isn’t perfect, in his mind=BOTH SIDES EQUAL! BOTH SIDES BAD!

The “implications” of a successful conviction of KSM, even after a flawed trial, would be that we took the least worst option available thanks to the fuck ups of a previous administration.

(But this scenario is a strawman in that Dick Cheney has publicly and without torture or even apprehension admitted his illegal intentions, and so torture would not be required, same as the conviction-in-absentia of CIA operatives in Italy.)

As did KSM.  And yet you keep leaving that part out and insisting that the only statements that exist from him regarding his involvement in 9/11 were obtained under torture so therefore there’s no way he could get a fair trial.

If it turns out that KSM cannot, in fact, get a fair trial here and instead we extradite him to Bali to stand trial for his involvement in the terrorist attack there, would you be satisfied if he were convicted there under their justice system or would any trial at all for anything that he did prior to his arrest be tainted at this point as far as you’re concerned?

I fully realize that even if it were not so, a conviction of KSM is probably quite secure.  I merely point out the moral and political implications of this fact.

But do you recognize the political implications of an acquittal on technical grounds?

Whatever good that could be served by acquitting KSM because he was tortured would be massively overwhelmed by the bad that would result from the political fallout to Obama and the Democrats, and the massive empowerment of the neocon Right that would result.

To some, the neocons never really lost power… I get that perspective to a degree.  But the neocon power of the Bush Era will seem downright pacific compared to the new neocon power that will emerge from the populist outrage if KSM walks.

“Bottom line: This was a monumentally dumb move for the Obama Admin, one that might just kill any chance of his getting a 2nd term. Hello Sarah Palin 2012! “

This actually made me laugh out loud.

KSM will be convicted and will play no role in the election of 2012.

If Obama goes down as a one-termer it will be because he and his pet asshole, Rahm, didn’t cough up a staggeringly large jobs program.  They don’t have much time left with which to do that.

Jobs.

Jobs.

Jobs.

Remember where you heard it first okay?  I say you meaning the person who wrote that post.  Most people have already heard the news.  It’s about jobs.

In this unlikely instance, it would be the case that KSM would have to be set free when the war (against whom?) is over.

Then arrest him for Bojinka, or WTC 1993, or the Millenium Plot, or any one of a half dozen other terrorist plots he’s admitted to.  He was originally wanted for Bojinka well before they took him into custody.

People need to stop pretending that KSM will walk out a courtroom as a free man at any point ever.  It will NEVER happen.  Throwing up all of these “what-if the justice system fails” just makes you look like a delusional bedwetter who is afraid of the dark.

If the Nazis in Nuremeberg had been allowed to walk for not getting a fair trial (and they really DIDN’T get a fair trial, it was victors justice but this is better than no justice at all) there would have been outrage in France and Britain, I guess that shows French and British democracy were on its last legs in 1945.

Bottom line: This was a monumentally dumb move for the Obama Admin, one that might just kill any chance of his getting a 2nd term. Hello Sarah Palin 2012!

Eric, do you enjoy making a fool of yourself because you think it pisses off liberals, or do you really believe such stupid things? Really, I’m honestly asking: is this a kind of “arizona engineering fratboy” shtick you pull for laughs because this what you think is “cool,” or are you actually so stupid as to be a Palinista?

I don’t know to whom on this thread you are referring, because I am not pretending this.

You’re claiming that if KSM is convicted, it’s proof that the American justice system is hopelessly broken and the country will collapse.  Of course, you then admit that if he’s acquitted, the Republicans will take over again and the country will collapse.  Frankly, it sounds like you’ll be happy with any outcome since either one means the country will collapse.

Of course, you then admit that if he’s acquitted, the Republicans will take over again and the country will collapse.  Frankly, it sounds like you’ll be happy with any outcome since either one means the country will collapse.

It does seem like s/he is rooting for injuries, so to speak. Again, the “HEIGHTEN THE CONTRADICTIONS!” ‘school’ of far-leftist thought. It’s like throwing the Social Democrats under the bus for the Communists, which of course only ends up electing Fascists and both groups ending up in the same mass grave.

What does surprise me is the widespread acceptance by liberals of the hypothesis that a technicality that might set KSM free would be itself unacceptable, even if it were true.

Intellectual masturbatory exercises are neat, but we’re talking real world consequences here.

Outcome A = trying and convicting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, even though it may be on shaky legal ground.

Outcome B = releasing KSM on technical grounds because he was tortured.

Consequence C = the possibility that America will be stained by having convicted a man who was tortured.

Consequence D = the resurgence of neocon power to a level never before seen, with the GOP winning landslide elections on populist outrage giving them huge Congressional majorities and a wingnut president, free to completely trample the Constitution (well beyond any trampling involved in a spurious conviction of KSM), and take the “War on Terror” to new heights and into new countries (Iran).

It is very possible that A will then lead to C.  It’s virtually guaranteed that B would lead to D.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, the tradeoff involved for A makes it a FAR better outcome than B.

Not only Americans, but most world citizens would be quickly regretting the release of KSM on technical grounds when they see what shitty dominoes get tipped over as a result.

There’s a big difference between a system being “undermined” and it being utterly destroyed. I don’t think Bush and Cheney destroyed the American legal system anymore than the interning of the Japanese-Americans did. It damaged it, it did not destroy it.

Whoever said that this is like masturbating with sandpaper, really hit it.  I like that.  I am pretty far left.  It’d be hard to come up with an actual policy or social program, or economic program that I’d look at and say, oh noo, that’s too far left for me. 

But I have some problems with leftists and they are very pronounced on this thread.  The only place I have seen them this pronounced is on my facebook page before I “hid” the posts of some anti-war friends of mine who were driving me batshit crazy and who I was fighting with all of the time.  One of them is the living embodiment of every negative stereotype the right has painted the left with.  A Ph.D philosophy professor with a gold plated health insurance policy, a million dollar home on LI’s north shore, two cars, etc, who writes the most absurd purist shit, as if, policy didn’t affect actual people.  He’s also a raging sexist, and when another Pandagon poster said that Keith olbermann is no feminist he’s just another 60’s liberal and as feminist as Stokey Charmichael, I laughed out loud and thought of this guy.  My biggest fights with him have been over his pompous assholeness about feminism. 

There seem to be a lot of Mac’s on this thread.  And they really make me understand why some people hate the left.  If the left was only comprised of people like this, I’d hate us too

All this aside I’d really, really like to see some Muslims on the jury. It will destroy at once the far right fantasy that all Muslims love Al Qaeda and hate the United States, and the far-left fantasy that all Muslims hate the United States enough to wholeheartedly endorse Al Qaeda. I doubt a Muslim-American living in New York would vote any differently from his atheist, Jewish, or Christian counterpart on the jury.

That someone’s acquittal is impossible is not a reason to celebrate.  Even if it were possible that he could legitimately be found guilty.

It was impossible for John Wayne Gacy to be acquitted once they found 29 bodies buried in his crawlspace.  Does that mean that our justice system has always been fatally flawed?

I don’t know to whom on this thread you are referring, because I am not pretending this.

It is not something I am assigning to you specifically, Mandos.  It is something that has been thrown out there above and in other threads on the subject across the Blogosphere.  The “What if he walks? - YOU CAN’T HAVE A CIVILIAN TRIAL!!!111” is also the prevailing talking point that FOX is throwing out there (I had to put up with both Huckabee and Geraldo pushing this horseshit at the gym yesterday).

“That someone’s acquittal is impossible is not a reason to celebrate.  “

When that someone is responsible for people holding hands to jump 100 floors to their deaths after spending an hour praying to be rescued and finally realizing they weren’t going to be; they were either going to burn to death and were already feeling the terrible heat of the flames, or they were going to jump from an unimaginable height and die…it is something to celebrate.

Get off of your high horse.  There’s a song for people like you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lai0ytdCwvo

I’ve known enough of you guys in my life.  You all think you’re better than everybody.  What you really are people so full of themselves, so pompous, so uncompromising, so addicted to your righeousness,  that you can never and could never and will never, govern any body.

Yes, Mandos, I am in fact for doing the least amount of harm if any harm must be done at all (and I’m not convinced that harm must be done). The scenarios, from best to worst:

1) KSM is convicted in a fair trial

2) KSM is convicted in a flawed trial

4) KSM continues to be held in limbo at Gitmo the rest of his life

5) KSM walks free after a fair trial due to torture

How long should I hold my breath for the eventual official admission that the USA done wrong?

Forty years at the most. That’s how long it took for an admission with the Japanese internment situation.

What you really are people so full of themselves, so pompous, so uncompromising, so addicted to your righeousness, that you can never and could never and will never, govern any body.

I wouldn’t say that they can never govern any body.  It’s more that when they do manage to get into power, it doesn’t end well since the people always turn out to be in need of major improvement.

And before someone thinks this is a uniquely American phenomenon—

How long did it take for France to admit that wrong was done in Algeria? How long did it take for the British to admit wrong was done in India? How long did it take for Holland to apologize for raping Indonesia for 300 years? All three are (and at the time of those atrocities, unlike Germany, WERE) western democracies, just like us, who have engaged in horrible behavior that contradicts their ideals.

Ben D.: Your hierarchy may be perfectly correct if you are willing to admit that it is also a list of profound failure.

All the options except 1 really suck. We can “thank” Bush for that, and use this as a reason never, ever, EVER to do anything like what happened at Gitmo again. Not ONLY was it immoral,  it has bad consequences that far outweigh any “ticking time bomb” bullshit.

It would have been possible if there were certain categories of violations of Gacy’s rights which could be attested in court.  Was this the case?

Gacy was originally arrested on marijuana charges to give the cops more time to get a second warrant to search the house.  This is, as you know, technically a violation, especially since he was never prosecuted for the marijuana charges.  So, by your lights, Gacy’s case should have been thrown out by the court despite his confession (which he made in custody, also making it potentially questionable), the map that he drew for the police of where the bodies were buried, and the 29 bodies and other assorted evidence found in the house by the police.  Instead, he was convicted and executed for murder, which was clearly a grave injustice in your book given the technical violations surrounding his arrest and the search of his house.

Of this, I have no doubt.  But then, consider the ramifications of this for the long-term political future of the USA.  It means that the door to a more just society is fully shut, and that all political action in the matter of justice is merely treading water.

Hello, Drama!

One could argue that when America was founded, the door to a more just society was already fully shut, because uh… we legally fucking enslaved people!

And while we eventually knocked that shit off (after briefly splitting into two countries), you can’t really shake that stain off of America’s history.  And yet, most would argue that we have walked through many doors to becoming a more just society in the two centuries since our founding.

I get it.  You’re saying that if America lets Mohammed get convicted in light of the fact that he was tortured, we will have likely done a VERY. BAD. THING.

And you may be 100% right!

But it won’t be the first time that America has ever done a VERY. BAD. THING., nor is it likely to be the last.

The notion that this will be the final defining moment for the American system of justice is beyond ridiculous.  The U.S. Justice system is not now perfect, has never been perfect, and will never be perfect.  That you think that locking up a mass murderer because we tortured him is going to inscribe some sort of indelible stain on America from which we could never possibly recover is ridiculously naive.

This country is already stained, and many of those stains are quite a bit worse than this potential one could ever be.

While I’m sure you don’t actually believe this, you speak about America as if it is this great shining city on a hill whose good name must not be soiled by allowing this great atrocity to happen, or it will just ruin us forever.

It won’t.  Because America is not that great shining city on the hill, never has been, never will be, and this singular event is not going to permanently tarnish us.

But you know that already.

And given the consequences of allowing the alternative, I’m totally cool with this stain, if it is even a stain at all.  I’m also cool with people like Glenn Greenwald having a neurotic meltdown over it, if the only way to possibly placate him is to indirectly hand the wingnuts the full reins of government again.

Sometimes I think that there are some people SO FAR to the left that they secretly hope the wingnuts take over in America, so that the wingnuts have the opportunity to completely drive the country over a cliff.  It’s like they thrive on chaos.

But it won’t be the first time that America has ever done a VERY. BAD. THING., nor is it likely to be the last.

And we are not the only country, or even western democracy that professes to believe in human equality and freedom, that has done a VERY BAD THING, either. Now, I don’t buy the wingnut bullshit that America is some unique font of moral good and justice that enlightens the rest of the world, that’s such horseshit. But I also don’t think America is some unique font of evil and hypocricy when compared to other democratic Great Powers, who profess the same ideals we do, either. Just ask an Irishman or Algerian.

This is because it is very, very difficult to live up to these ideals. In fact it is impossible to live up to them 100% of the time, 100% perfectly. They’re a goal and an ideal to live up to. A MORE PERFECT union, not a perfect union.

Now there are some countries that seem to live up to these ideals, at least in their foreign policies (they still no doubt have racism and inequality domestically of some kind or another), all of the time. But that’s only because they’re literally too small to make trouble. This is why I wish I was born in Switzerland sometimes.

Sometimes I think that there are some people SO FAR to the left that they secretly hope the wingnuts take over in America, so that the wingnuts have the opportunity to completely drive the country over a cliff.  It’s like they thrive on chaos.

I’m reading Nixonland right now.  They’ve been with us for a while.  In fact, if you look at the aftermath of the 1960s, you see quite a few people (like David Horowitz) switch sides from left to right because the left just wasn’t revolutionary enough for them anymore.

The question for me is, do people accept the possibility of acquittal of an accused mass-murderer due to a technicality as potentially just?

The vast majority of Americans would not, in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

If yes, than does this trial contain such a (remote) possibility, and if it doesn’t, how is it not a rigged court?

There is virtually no feasible possibility of an acquittal in reality.  Just as there is absolutely no realistic possibility of KSM being able to get a 100% impartial jury anywhere in the United States.

Just as poor people rarely get the same criminal justice system in America as rich people do.

We ain’t perfect.  Nor is our criminal justice system perfect.  Nobody’s is.

And that’s all there is to say about it.

Now there are some countries that seem to live up to these ideals, at least in their foreign policies (they still no doubt have racism and inequality domestically of some kind or another), all of the time. But that’s only because they’re literally too small to make trouble. This is why I wish I was born in Switzerland sometimes.

Switzerland didn’t allow women to vote until 1971, so they’re not exactly a utopia of equality, either.

It was not an injustice to him (neither necessarily would KSM’s conviction be an injustice to KSM himself), and no systems are perfect.  But we shouldn’t celebrate the impossibility of technical acquittal.

So you mourned the day that Gacy was executed because it was impossible for him to have gotten a technical acquittal, right?  After all, if we don’t denounce KSM’s trial as a total farce and insist that he be freed as you do, that means that we’re celebrating the impossibility of his technical acquittal.  Because, of course, we can’t just be recognizing that impossibility—no, we must be celebrating it if we recognize it!

All this aside I’d really, really like to see some Muslims on the jury. It will destroy at once the far right fantasy that all Muslims love Al Qaeda and hate the United States, and the far-left fantasy that all Muslims hate the United States enough to wholeheartedly endorse Al Qaeda. I doubt a Muslim-American living in New York would vote any differently from his atheist, Jewish, or Christian counterpart on the jury.

Well, wingnuts would go “They’re just doing it to pretend they’re good Americans,” but I still agree.

Amanda: Here you have both right wingers and left wingers—-motivated by the same irrational hatred of liberals—-praying that a man who murdered thousands of innocent people in cold blood walks free, due to some legal mojo deus ex machina, so that Obama has egg on his face.

This may surprise you, Amanda, but I’m motivated by the same hatred of torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial imprisonment that conservatives called irrational during the Bush administration and now, it appears, liberals call irrational when it’s the Obama administration.

None of my views have changed just because the US has a different President. Torture is still wrong, and using evidence obtained by torture to convict a prisoner is still wrong, and calling this “the rule of law” is still wrong. It doesn’t become the correct thing to do just because it’s no longer Bush & Co doing it.

This wingnut has not forgotten 911 when I lost many friends. This wingnut sees nothing wrong with patriotism or wrapping ones self in the American Flag.  This wingnut does not believe maggots like Khalid Sheik Mohammed should be allowed to piss on America and its legal system.During WW2 we held over 100,000 Nazi POWs inside America.  Imagine if we granted civil trials to them?  No Amanda. We did not forget.  you did.

Believe it or not, both thoughts can be true at the same time: that Boehner is a monster, and Obama has not wiped the slate clean.  But people are reacting to this as though it were about the idiocy of John Boehner.

No, people are reacting to the idiocy of John Boehner insisting that KSM is a magical supervillain who can’t possibly be put on trial in open court because he’ll break through the walls and fly back to Afghanistan to continue building his ultimate weapon of mass destruction unless we give him one million dollars!  Instead, we think that KSM should stand trial for his crimes using all of the non-tainted evidence available—and, yes, there is some.  The entire case is not based on what KSM told us under torture, particularly since 90 percent of that seems to have been total crap anyway.  Unlike what Jesurgislac seems to believe, we didn’t obtain bank records via torture.

Again, you seem to think that the only way for Obama to “wipe the slate clean” is to free KSM and give him free passage home.  Sorry, that ain’t going to happen.  KSM has injured and killed too many people worldwide for that to be a viable plan.  So we’re going to have to give him as fair a trial as possible given the fuckups by the Bush administration and make sure he doesn’t get out to injure and kill more innocent people.

During WW2 we held over 100,000 Nazi POWs inside America.  Imagine if we granted civil trials to them?

That’s right, they didn’t get individual trials—instead, we sent them all home at the end of the war.  Are you proposing that we give KSM a handshake and a plane ticket home like we did with those Nazi POWs?

New York? Where feminist terrorist lawyer Lynn Stewart was nabbed trying to pass Al Qaida messages for the Blind Sheik?  How was Lynn treated by leftist wackos in NYC?

  Hofstra Law School’s new guest lecturer on legal ethics: disbarred felon Lynne Stewart..

  Khalid Shiek Mohammed will end up with some leftist wacko lawyer.  Perhaps Ron Kuby.  Anything for a Buck.

Jobs.

Jobs.

Jobs.

Remember where you heard it first okay?

Who is Joe Biden?

That was actually the main talking point he was given in the final months of the campaign last fall.  Here’s a classic:

“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S,” the Democratic veep nominee said at a morning rally in Athens.

God, I love me some Joe Biden, especially considering who his predecessor was for the last eight years.  I’m still not sure exactly what his role is, but if nothing else, he’s great for some much needed levity in this White House, even if it’s usually at his own expense.  He seems like a genuinely good guy, even though he’s the supreme gaffemeister.  And his wife kicks ass.

Anyway.

Leaders of the Nazi Party were eventually given trials at Nuremberg. After the war ended.  I can live with that. When the war on terrorism ends lets give em all trials.  Until then screw em.

But what liberal supporters of the present situation are admitting is that the Republic is on its last legs.

Oh, good God.

Could you possibly clutch the pearls a little tighter?

Joe Biden is basically what the wingnuts tried to make us believe George W. Bush was in their propaganda (but wasn’t)—a gaffe-prone everyman who you would like to have a beer with. That’s why it’s always so funny when wingnuts attack Biden for being just that. How soon they forget!

KSM escaping is not a concern.  A major terrorist action to bring attention to the trial is a concern. A pefect circus atmosphere for Al Qaida. God you people are fuckin stupid.

Dencal (I’m going to be nice and assume you’re not a troll) there is no “Terrorland” and “Terror” can’t surrender. Al Qaeda is not a state, it is an organization.

Joe Biden has out gaffed even Bush

Shorter Dencal: Let’s let Al Qaeda dictate how we should run our legal system.

When the war on terrorism ends lets give em all trials.  Until then screw em.

So, tell me, where exactly is Terrorism located?  Who is the president?  What uniform does their army wear?  When Terrorism surrenders, who is going to sign the treaty on their behalf?  Are the Real IRA and the ETA part of the nation of Terrorism, and if so, do we have to keep all former al-Qaeda operatives locked up until those parts of Terrorism surrender, too?  Will we have a Marshall Plan to rebuild Terrorism the way we rebuilt Germany?

We’re running a War on Drugs, too.  Should we keep everyone convicted of drug charges locked up as POWs until Drugs agrees to surrender?

Ben

Al Qaida is dictating how we run our legal system.  They have spent years in Gitmo hiring every left wing lawyer to oppose Bush and Cheney.  You hated Bush more than you hate Al Qaida. . There is NO reason to close Gitmo. None.  Red Cross has declared it a good facility.  Dem Congressman by the DOZENS have been there and said prisoners were treated well.  Its a model facility.  But to GET BUSH we must commit suicide as a nation.

Al Qaida is dictating how we run our legal system.  They have spent years in Gitmo hiring every left wing lawyer to oppose Bush and Cheney.  You hated Bush more than you hate Al Qaida. . There is NO reason to close Gitmo. None.  Red Cross has declared it a good facility.  Dem Congressman by the DOZENS have been there and said prisoners were treated well.  Its a model facility.  But to GET BUSH we must commit suicide as a nation.

Cool story, bro!

War on terrorism of course applies to Islamic Fundementalist Jihad currently being waged against this planet. It has no borders and has no country.  Yes we understand this.  So because it lacks solid borders and definitions means it doesn’t exist?

Leftist:

But what liberal supporters of the present situation are admitting is that the Republic is on its last legs.

Wingnut:

But to GET BUSH we must commit suicide as a nation.

Mandos, meet dencal26. Dencal26, mandos.

Actually I think Bush was a total asshole arresting these people and bringing them to clean places like Gitmo where they were offered Medical treatment. Religious visits from Imams and military tribunals. I much prefer the Obama predator attacks where we can kill them without trial and kill all those in the vicinity who may have befriended these maggots. Somalian Pirates shot between the eyes . No trial. End of subject.  I actually prefer how Obama has handled them.

KSM escaping is not a concern.  A major terrorist action to bring attention to the trial is a concern. A pefect circus atmosphere for Al Qaida. God you people are fuckin stupid.

I guess we should have locked the cops in the Rodney King case up forever rather than give them a fair trial since it ended up triggering a major riot.  And we probably shouldn’t have even put Timothy McVeigh on trial at all since someone phoned in a bomb threat the day of his execution.

Which other criminal cases do you think should never be put on trial in case they end up triggering violence?

Rodney King was an America Citizen protected by the US Constitution.  Mnemosnye.  DUH

If we don’t try KSM then we don’t have a democracy worth saving.  Because we are so far off of original intent of the founders of this country that the terrorists have won.

The U.S. Constitution speaks of PERSONS not “citizens”.

Mnemosnye

I know I do not have to explain this to you but Rodney King or McVeigh were not part of a massive terrorist organization with Global Reach.

During the War of 1812 many of the original founders were still alive and many were still active. I cannot find where ONE of them objected to holding British POWs without trial.

War on terrorism of course applies to Islamic Fundementalist Jihad currently being waged against this planet.

There are people in England, Spain, India and Sri Lanka who would like to have a word with you.  I guess their friends and relatives aren’t really dead or weren’t really maimed since the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, and the ETA aren’t “real” terrorists.  I guess Oklahoma City never happened because Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols weren’t Muslims.  And it’s nice to know that the bombings in Atlanta never happened because Eric Rudolph doesn’t belong to al-Qaeda.

So because it lacks solid borders and definitions means it doesn’t exist?

Does the War on Drugs exist?  How about the War on Poverty?  I think we may have a War on Obesity on our hands right now, too.  Who should we arrest and lock up without trial until we solve the problems of poverty and drugs?  If we don’t lock people up without trial, does that mean that poverty and drugs don’t exist?

The model we should use for dealing with leaders of Al Qaeda (LEADERS, not foot soldier pawns) should be more along the model we would use for, say, a Soviet spy than a German POW.

The US Constitution is very clear on who it meant to protect

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

WE the PEOPLE of the United States     Secure blessings of Liberty FOR OURSELVES Not Muslim Jihadists.

Again, you seem to think that the only way for Obama to “wipe the slate clean” is to free KSM and give him free passage home.

Actually, I think the only way to wipe the slate clean is for the Department of Justice to declare that a kidnap victim who has been held in extra-judicial imprisonment for so many years, subjected to torture, cannot be tried for his crimes because the evidence is tainted by torture, and, thanks to Bush, Cheney, et al, they are going to have to let him go: and then to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the real villains.

I know I do not have to explain this to you but Rodney King or McVeigh were not part of a massive terrorist organization with Global Reach.

So why did we even bother arresting McVeigh and putting him on trial?  I mean, all he did was kill his fellow American citizens in the second-worst terrorist attack on American soil, so he was small potatoes to you, right?

Oh, and you seem to have forgotten that Rodney King was the victim, not the criminal.  Stacy Koons and his merry band of assholes were the criminals who you think should have been locked away without trial because the trial ended up sparking a massive riot.

Mandos, you are forgetting that KSM could be extradited, too.  He’s been internationally active, after all.

Actually, I think the only way to wipe the slate clean is for the Department of Justice to declare that a kidnap victim who has been held in extra-judicial imprisonment for so many years, subjected to torture, cannot be tried for his crimes because the evidence is tainted by torture, and, thanks to Bush, Cheney, et al, they are going to have to let him go: and then to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the real villains.

Still masturbating with sandpaper, I see.

That someone’s acquittal is impossible is not a reason to celebrate.  Even if it were possible that he could legitimately be found guilty.

In theory, there is no acquittal that is absolutely impossible to attain.

But in reality, where we actually live, yes, there are some cases that come along in which the likelihood of an acquittal is so ridiculously remote that it isn’t even discussed as a rational possibility.  These cases are typically referred to by DAs and their prosecutorial colleagues as “slam dunks”.  Guy shoots an infant in the head on live television, and it is witnessed by thousands, both at home and at the location where the shooting occurred.  That would be considered an example of a “slam dunk” case.  Yes, until the jury actually comes back with a decision, there reamins an infinitessemally small possibility of a complete acquittal, but 99.99% of the people following the case can’t conceivably imagine anything other than a conviction, or at a minimum, an acquittal by means of insanity, which still leads to incarceration.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Foot Hood shooter… most people will tell you that’s virtually a “slam dunk” case, and the only possible means of acquittal would be an insanity ruling.  The trial won’t likely begin for months, the vast majority of evidence hasn’t been seen by the public… and yet we all know that guy’s gonna spend the rest of his life behind bars, either in a prison or a government mental detention facility.

Such is the case with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The reason nobody is talking about the realistic possibility of him being acquitted is because essentially, there is NOP realistic possibility of an acquittal.  The mere notion is regarded as preposterous by most.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a beautiful legal principle, and while it would be ideal if we could find 12 people in America who have spent the last 8 years living totally off the grid and completely unaware of anything that has happened in the world since 2001, it ain’t happening.

Mnemsyne

IRA situation was brilliantly settled by George Mitchell.  I guess you missed that.  Tim McVeigh was executed thank God .  The major terrorist issue facing this planet CURRENTLY is Islamic.  If you do not want to admit that you are a fool.

Amanda wrote:

Here you have both right wingers and left wingers—-motivated by the same irrational hatred of liberals—-praying that a man who murdered thousands of innocent people in cold blood walks free, due to some legal mojo deus ex machina, so that Obama has egg on his face.

Other than Jesurgislac, do you really think anyone here has been “praying” that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad walks free?  I am concerned that he could be acquitted, but that’s not the same thing as praying or hoping or wishing that he is acquitted.

The US Constitution is very clear on who it meant to protect

Hey, look, Kyle Mortensen has come to visit!

Mortensen said his admiration for the loose assemblage of vague half-notions he calls the Constitution has only grown over time. He believes that each detail he has pulled from thin air—from prohibitions on sodomy and flag-burning, to mandatory crackdowns on immigrants, to the right of citizens not to have their hard-earned income confiscated in the form of taxes—has contributed to making it the best framework for governance “since the Ten Commandments.”

Dan
Explain your post   Are you disputing what the US Constitution says?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If it turns out that KSM cannot, in fact, get a fair trial here and instead we extradite him to Bali to stand trial for his involvement in the terrorist attack there, would you be satisfied if he were convicted there under their justice system or would any trial at all for anything that he did prior to his arrest be tainted at this point as far as you’re concerned?

Is there any evidence aside from a confession obtained under torture that KSM is responsible for the Bali terrorist attack?

The bill of rights talks about PERSONS, it does not say “Americans” or “citizens”. Hell it doesn’t even say “white men” which for the time it was written in is pretty impressive.

These include the provisions that prohibit torture and mandate a trial by jury.

I actually predict that KSM will plead guilty and that this whole discussion is moot.

Dana

I am sure many leftists pray KSM Goes free just as many cheered when a shoe was thrown at Bush and many leftist cheered the Al Qaida defeated America in Hamden vs Rumsfeld.  Liberals were thrilled.

IRA situation was brilliantly settled by George Mitchell.

Well, sort of, if “brilliantly settled” includes “Police Race to Stop Real IRA Bomb Plot.”  I guess you should hop over there and inform the IRA that Mitchell settled the problem so they can’t possibly be bombing people anymore.

The major terrorist issue facing this planet CURRENTLY is Islamic.  If you do not want to admit that you are a fool.

No one said it wasn’t.  But only one of us here is wetting his pants because OMG THE MOOSLIMS ARE COMING TO GET ME!!!  Only one of us thinks that we need to give up all of our civil liberties and lock people up forever without trial because they don’t think their Depends will hold up much longer.

Seriously, when did you right-wingers become such fucking pussies?  “Oh no, Muslim extremists hate us!  I can’t come out from under the bed until the government makes the scary people go away!  Mommy, save me!”  Jesus, grow a pair.

Ben
I doubt he pleads guilty. From reports leaked by interrogaters KSM loves to talk and preach and would embrace a podium with the entire world watching.

. From reports leaked by interrogaters KSM loves to talk and preach and would embrace a podium with the entire world watching.

Exactly. And pleading guilty is the easiest way for him to do this. He can brag about how he did it and would do it again because of [the Palestinians, the Iraq War, the Crusaders, insert red herring here] etc. In his twisted mind he will think it will bring him the admiration of the whole Muslim world and that he will become a martyr.

Mnemsyne

I worked at 59 Maiden Lane on 911. I lost 11 friends.  I ran from Broadway up to City Hall and could barely see.  So don’t pull that pussy shit on me.  You were probably hiding under your bed.

Ben
I understand your point. But even a lengthy speech at a Plea Proceeding will afford KSM with Hours not Weeks on a world stage.  I think he chooses Weeks or Months

I worked at 59 Maiden Lane on 911. I lost 11 friends.  I ran from Broadway up to City Hall and could barely see.  So don’t pull that pussy shit on me.  You were probably hiding under your bed.

I’m in California—why would I be hiding under my bed?  It’s not like al-Qaeda had magical technology to send bombs through the TV set.

Sorry, but I stand by my “pussy” statement.  You’re so terrified of a guy that we’ve had under lock and key for four years that you’re pissing yourself at the thought of him being put on trial.  I realize it’s common for trauma victims to not want to face the source of their fears, but you’d be better off seeking therapy than insisting that the rest of us alter our entire system of justice because you’re scared of the boogeyman.

Then we should be admitting that this is a no-win scenario.  On the one hand, we accept that the system is broken, politically and judicially.  On the other hand, America will run riot.

Can’t speak for everybody, but I accepted that the system was broken a long, long time ago.  It’s always been broken.  It was proven to be broken here in St. Louis 150 years ago when a federal court told Dred Scott that he was just a piece of property and had no rights as a U.S. citizen.  It was broken before then, it was broken after then, it’s still broken today, and it will remain so tomorrow.

Just as every state-run judicial system has always been broken.

Guess why?

Because all systems of justice, throughout the entire history of the world, have been arbitrated by human beings.  Completely fallible human beings who are incapable of adjudicating anything perfectly all the time, every time.

Given the choice of:

A) a result which could prove the imperfection of the American justice system (even though it has been proven to be imperfect countless times throughout our history); or

B) a result which will almost certainly lead to the re-empowerment of neconservative warlords in our government,

I choose option “A”.

It may be a no-win situation, but there is a least bad option, and a truly horrific option.  I choose the “least bad” option.

Mnemosyne

Its not the one who is locked up I fear. Its the thousands who are still loose because of Bush failures to get BinLaden. Perhaps you need to visit the NYC Metro area and learn how things are. We have mosques being erected all over . One such mosque in Brooklyn was home of Omar Rahman aka the Blind Sheik.  Arrests of Islamic radicals is almost a daily news item here now.  Stay under your bed son.

Ben D wrote:

All this aside I’d really, really like to see some Muslims on the jury. It will destroy at once the far right fantasy that all Muslims love Al Qaeda and hate the United States, and the far-left fantasy that all Muslims hate the United States enough to wholeheartedly endorse Al Qaeda. I doubt a Muslim-American living in New York would vote any differently from his atheist, Jewish, or Christian counterpart on the jury.

Assuming that KSM will be put on trial with the possibility of a capital sentence, the sury selection process will necessarily include questions concerning the willingness of the jurors to impose a death sentence if convicted.  You’re starting to get way down the road if you think it will be easy to find some non-biased Muslims in the jurisdiction who could also vote for death.  Capital punishment certainly is allowed under Islam, but a trial in which the defendant’s religious beliefs will certainly arise may be one in which it would be difficult to find the kind of jurors you seek.

Of course, I have my doubts that an unbiased jury can be found, period.

DG in St Louis thinks a return to power of Neo Cons is worse than letting KSM go free.  Political extremism run amock my friend. Time for some introspection.

Er, no, that’s a pretty straightforward opinion.  The neocons are far more effective at empowering Al Qaeda than KSM could ever be.

IF KSM jury selection will be a long tedious process. His defense team will reject most jurors including Jews and those working in the financial field.  His jury will eventually be comprised of Muslim Americans . Mark my Words.

Pundit

Maximus
Another extremist on display I see. A lover of KSM

IF KSM jury selection will be a long tedious process. His defense team will reject most jurors including Jews and those working in the financial field.  His jury will eventually be comprised of Muslim Americans .

Good, I’d like to see his face when they return a “guilty” verdict and his illusions that he speaks for anything more than the splinter of a splinter of the world’s Muslims will be shattered before his very eyes.

Friday prayers used to be held in the WTC, and a not insignifigant number of Muslim workers in the WTC attended.

Dencal wrote:

Leaders of the Nazi Party were eventually given trials at Nuremberg. After the war ended.  I can live with that. When the war on terrorism ends lets give em all trials.  Until then screw em.

That’s essentially what President Bush was trying to do with the idea of military tribunals.  The war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Japan were unprecedented, “law-making” out of whole cloth, applied ex post facto.  The trials were nothing more than the excuse of the winners to hang the losers.  General Curtis LeMay, who ran the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, noted that had the United States lost, he’d have been the one on trial for war crimes.

The military tribunals idea wasn’t a good one, but the Supreme Court had already allowed some direction, legally tested: the detainees could have been tried in courts martial.

One slight difference between post-WW@ war crimes trials and the proposed military tribunals: in WW2, the German and Japanese leaders actually put on trial (other than Rudolf Hess) weren’t captured early in the war, but at the tail end, as their countries were defeated.  Having held KSM for six years now might make some legal difference.

The neocons are far more effective at empowering Al Qaeda than KSM could ever be.

Yes, and just as the neocons give Al Qaeda power, Al Qaeda gives the neocons power. As soon as normal Muslims get a taste of what living under Al Qaeda is like (parts of Iraq in 2006) they quickly realize that they’re horrible people and throw them out on their ear. We’re talking about people who, when they ruled Iraqi towns, would cut off peoples fingers for selling falafel because falafel didn’t exist in Muhammad’s time, and would ban cucumbers because they looked like the shape of a woman’s body! That’s what REALLY brought the violence down in Iraq and turned the Sunnis against Al Qaeda, not DAH SUUUUUURGE!!!11!1

If America left the Middle East tomorrow Al Qaeda would burn out through it’s own heat. They’re too extreme, even for such a conservative part of the world, and cannot thrive unless they have a bogeyman.

For example, I presently support the idea of passing the current broken form of the public option, when the real answer is Single Payer.  What I don’t pretend is that it is in any way a solution.

If it is in no way a solution, then why on earth would you support it?

Could it possibly be that what you really think is that it is a solution, albeit not a terribly good one, and certainly not the best one, but still a definite improvement over the status quo?

The good is not the enemy of the perfect.

Convicting a mass murderer in which judicial mistakes were made is still a better option than letting a mass murderer walk away scot-free, and empowering those who would use it as a political bludgeon against liberals.

And you know, as much as the wingnut minimizations of the effects of waterboarding offend me, I’d feel like a gigantic asshole telling the next of kin of a 9/11 victim that KSM’s suffering in detention was in any way comparable to the psychological and physical suffering of their dead spouse who had to choose between leaping 100 stories to their own death or being burned alive by thousand degree flames that surrounded them.

I should add however that it was our fault that we created the power vacuum for a group like Al Qaeda in Iraq to gain power over parts of the country in the first place.

Dana
Actually many Germans were held much longer. Of course Nuremberg were the most high level of Nazis but over 1600 others were given military tribunals at the time.

Is there any evidence aside from a confession obtained under torture that KSM is responsible for the Bali terrorist attack?

We actually had the evidence before we captured him.  See, this is where I actually think you’re insufficiently cynical.  You seem to think that we tortured KSM because we didn’t have enough evidence to convict him.  I think we had plenty of evidence to convict him, but Dick Cheney wasn’t interested in getting a conviction, because that was what Clinton had done with the 1993 terrorists, and Cheney had to do the exact opposite of everything Clinton did.  Plus Cheney was embarrassed that Clinton and Richard Clarke were right that al-Qaeda was a threat and he was pissed off that al-Qaeda made him look stupid in front of the whole world.

We didn’t torture KSM because we needed to get the evidence to convict him.  We tortured him because we could.  Because it made Cheney and Bush feel like they got some revenge on al-Qaeda for making them look like idiots.  To put him on trial would be to admit they had made a mistake, and God knows the Bush administration could never, ever admit to even the smallest mistake.  So KSM had to pay even though we could easily have put him on trial and gotten a conviction with the evidence we had obtained perfectly legally.  He had to suffer for bruising Dick Cheney’s ego.

Ms Kate wrote:

If we don’t try KSM then we don’t have a democracy worth saving.  Because we are so far off of original intent of the founders of this country that the terrorists have won.

Really?  Had the Framers faced such a situation, would KSM even be still alive today?  They treated captured officers as gentlemen, but KSM is certainly no gentleman as the Framers understood the term.  Odds are they’d have hung him from the nearest oak tree and have been done with it.

Dana, the concept of treating POWs humanely didn’t exist until the 20th Century. Before that, up to and including the Civil War, the idea was to keep them alive but very very weak and malnourished. The thinking was you should make them weak enough that when they were released they couldn’t fight again.

The Civil War prison camps were HORRIBLE, on both sides. There’s one down the street from me where 1000s of prisoners died from hunger and exposure. I wouldn’t want to go back to that line of thinking, though.

DG in St

How would KSM go scot free? And why are you more concerned with attacks on liberals than what actually happens to KSM?

DTG wrote:

Such is the case with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The reason nobody is talking about the realistic possibility of him being acquitted is because essentially, there is NOP realistic possibility of an acquittal.  The mere notion is regarded as preposterous by most.

Like O J Simpson’s trial?

Ms Kate

Show me where the founders intended to grant Constitutional Protections to our enemies? Any evidence of British Soldiers in the War of 1812 getting trials?  Anything ?

During the War of 1812 many of the original founders were still alive and many were still active. I cannot find where ONE of them objected to holding British POWs without trial.
Comment #185: dencal26  on  11/15  at  09:31 PM

Okay, I’m pretty sure that this is in violation of the stick rule. Here’s a hint, dencal: the significant term here is POW, which the Bush administration insisted that detainees were <i>not.<i>

Perhaps you need to visit the NYC Metro area and learn how things are. We have mosques being erected all over . One such mosque in Brooklyn was home of Omar Rahman aka the Blind Sheik.  Arrests of Islamic radicals is almost a daily news item here now.

Yes, I’m sure that not a single one of those mosque members is an FBI agent or an NYPD officer.  I’m sure that not a single one of the imams is a paid informer.  Yep, they’re all just sitting there plotting against us and the government is not doing a single thing to monitor them, which is why people keep getting arrested.

Dude, seriously, try to think logically for at least half a second.  Do you think they caught that guy who was buying his bomb-making materials at beauty supply stores in Colorado by accident?

Dencal wrote:

I am sure many leftists pray KSM Goes free just as many cheered when a shoe was thrown at Bush and many leftist cheered the Al Qaida defeated America in Hamden vs Rumsfeld.  Liberals were thrilled.

I don’t really think so.  Yeah, there are a couple of people in this thread who see acquittal as the only just response because they don’t like the way the prisoners were captured, interred and interrogated, but really only a couple.  Jesurgislac is really the only one here really hoping for that, and she lives across the pond.

Our friends on the left are actually in a quandary here: they want to see KSM convicted, and pay for his crimes, but they are unsure how to go about it in a way which will satisfy their objections to Guantanamo and interrogation.  No one here, right or left, would like to see what would happen if KSM were acquitted.

Like O J Simpson’s trial?

Only people who didn’t live in LA and weren’t here for the 1992 riots were shocked that Simpson was acquitted.  Especially given the LA district attorney’s office’s record of completely blowing high-profile cases.  It took them two tries to get the Menendez brothers convicted, fer chrissakes.  They couldn’t get John Landis convicted of anything after his negligence killed three people on his movie set.  Hell, they couldn’t get the cops who beat Rodney King convicted and it was all on videotape.  That had more to do with the problems in the DA’s office than anything else.  If you have people like Marcia Clark prosecuting KSM, then he probably will walk.

Put Patrick Fitzgerald on as the prosecutor in the KSM case.  You won’t get a quick conviction, but it’ll stick.

But we shouldn’t celebrate the impossibility of technical acquittal.

Who said it’s impossible?  Anything that hasn’t yet happened is always theoretically possible.

Somebody could set off a nuclear war tomorrow that completely wipes out 99% of the entire human population.  That, in fact, is something which is “possible”.

And yet, such an event is so ridiculously unlikely that if someone were to say that “it’s impossible”, what they more likely mean is that it would be an utter waste of time to even discuss it as a possibility, given that the odds against it happening are 9999999999:1 against, or some similarly ridiculous number.

It’s possible that KSM could be acquitted.  I’d say there’s probably about a 0.000001% chance of that happening.

Are you saying that it’s unfortunate that his odds of acquittal aren’t any better?

I wouldn’t accept the opinions of the founders on the laws of war anymore than I would their opinions on proper medical treatments.

But I really, really would like to know what Dana and Dancal think about the fact that Jefferson and Madison both said standing armies and prepetual war were “dangerous to liberty”. The wingnuts seem to always forget THAT “original intent”.

Ben
Jefferson said many things including

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Thomas Jefferson
3rd president of US (1743 - 1826)

During the War of 1812 many of the original founders were still alive and many were still active. I cannot find where ONE of them objected to holding British POWs without trial.

Perhaps because during the wars of the early nineteenth century, it was essentially a guarantee that prisoners would be freed at the end of the war if not sooner?

very citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

Which means “no professional standing army”. So you agree we should NOT have a large standing professional army.

Rebecca

Show me evidence where it was promised in the early 19th century that POWs would be released as you claim?

Next up: let’s adopt the opinions of the founders on space travel, medical treatments, and physics.

Ben

Jefferson was President during a time when states power was preferred over Federalism and his support of the state militia system was opposed to a national standing army.  Of course America has long moved on from that model and now we have a stronger federal government than intended.

Actually I think Bush was a total asshole arresting these people and bringing them to clean places like Gitmo where they were offered Medical treatment. Religious visits from Imams and military tribunals. I much prefer the Obama predator attacks where we can kill them without trial and kill all those in the vicinity who may have befriended these maggots. Somalian Pirates shot between the eyes . No trial. End of subject.  I actually prefer how Obama has handled them.

Cool.

Maybe we could also build some neat facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan where we round up all Muslims, make them wear Crescents on their chests to identify them, and after a while, make them strip nude and go into a brick chamber, telling them it’s time for a “shower”.  Except instead of water, we’ll douse them with Zyklon B.

We could even call one of these camps “Auschwitz on Anbar”.

Nobody’s ever thought of something like that before.  It can be the “final solution” for our little Muslim cockroach problem.

Sound good?

dencal26—I would be obliged to have an opportunity for you to say that to my face.  PM me and we can work something out.

Rodney King was an America Citizen protected by the US Constitution.  Mnemosnye.  DUH

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

I know I do not have to explain this to you but Rodney King or McVeigh were not part of a massive terrorist organization with Global Reach.

So how big and how terrorist-y does the organization have to be? How active a participant does the accused have to be to no longer have human rights?

Its not the one who is locked up I fear. Its the thousands who are still loose because of Bush failures to get BinLaden. Perhaps you need to visit the NYC Metro area and learn how things are. We have mosques being erected all over . One such mosque in Brooklyn was home of Omar Rahman aka the Blind Sheik.  Arrests of Islamic radicals is almost a daily news item here now.  Stay under your bed son.

Oh no, houses of worship. It’s not like the Constitution guarantees free exercise or like the country was settled for freedom of religion or anything.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

Ja wohl. It’s called a militia; look it up.

Ben
The founders did not address medical treatment or space travel . What they did address is still very relevant today with the exception of electronic eavesdropping perhaps.

Show me evidence where it was promised in the early 19th century that POWs would be released as you claim?

Promised? That’s just how it worked. Any historical account will tell you that. For starters, you can google “war of 1812 prisoner exchange.”

Rebecca

  Islamic Terrorism is ” Free practice of religion” protected by the US Constitution? Is this your position?  Yikes

Actually, I think the only way to wipe the slate clean is for the Department of Justice to declare that a kidnap victim who has been held in extra-judicial imprisonment for so many years, subjected to torture, cannot be tried for his crimes because the evidence is tainted by torture, and, thanks to Bush, Cheney, et al, they are going to have to let him go: and then to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the real villains.

Wow.  Anybody ever told you that you’re kind of a crazy person?

Rebecca

Keep trying to protect your hero boys of Al Qaida.

Islamic Terrorism is “ Free practice of religion” protected by the US Constitution? Is this your position?  Yikes

Nope, but mosque construction sure is, and you’d do well to stop flipping your lid about it.

The founders did not address medical treatment

You bet they did!

Keep trying to protect your hero boys of Al Qaida.

You disgust me. You do more to advance the cause of Islamic terrorism by your proposal to abandon the fundamental principles of the United States than any of us do by suggesting that a criminal be afforded the protections guaranteed to criminals in our nation’s founding document.

DG in St Louis thinks a return to power of Neo Cons is worse than letting KSM go free.  Political extremism run amock my friend. Time for some introspection.

No you twit, if you bothered reading even a fraction of my posts, you would see that my argument is that if KSM goes free, an unintended consequence of that would likely be the return to power of neocons in Congress and the White House.

I honestly believe that at least part of the reason why Osama bin Laden was never captured on Bush’s watch is because he served as a far more powerful tool to neocons as an ominous boogeyman hiding in the caves than he could ever serve as a captured terrorist sitting in a jail cell.

I don’t believe that neocons want OBL to be caught, especially right now, because his capture would mean: a) that Obama succeeded where Bush did not; and b) that assholes like Frank Gaffney could no longer use his mystique as a scare tactic to keep bedwetters like you riled up.

The founders did remark on medial treatment, and it involved a lot of leeches and whiskey.

IOW, stop treating them like religious prophets. They were politicians.

Clicked too soon…

Politicians who had many human weaknesses, more often than not had the standard prejudices of the time, and who included a method of changing the Constitution in the Constitution. And who often disagreed with each other virulently over what the Constitution meant.

Oh, and look:

Here’s a treaty written by the Adams Administration and unaimously approved by the U.S. Senate in 1797:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Oh, and if we’re going to go with the words of the Founding Fathers:

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

DTG wrote:

Such is the case with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The reason nobody is talking about the realistic possibility of him being acquitted is because essentially, there is NOP realistic possibility of an acquittal.  The mere notion is regarded as preposterous by most.

Like O J Simpson’s trial?

Apples and oranges.

A whole different set of dynamics surrounded the OJ Simpson trial, not the least of which was the still stinging remembrance of the injustice and resulting riots of the Rodney King police acquittal in the exact same jurisdiction three years prior.

This is a federal trial, that will be prosecuted by a team of highly skilled U.S. attorneys hand-picked by the highest law enforcement officer in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder.

The OJ Simpson trial was prosecuted by an apparantly incompetent Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, whose efforts were further hampered by the idiocy of racist LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, facing a team of the most experienced and most expensive private defense attorneys in the country, including F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Robert Shapiro, and Johnny Cochran.  OJ Simpson bought and paid for the best verdict money could buy.

While It’s likely that KSM will find a highly sympathetic high profile attorney like Ramsey Clark to defend him, he’s still gonna be facing the full resources of the United States Government, not just the LA County District Attorney’s office.

U.S. Attorneys get 95% of the cases they bring turned into convictions.  I am sure in this particular case, steps have been taken by Eric Holder and assurances have been made to President Obama that the chance of conviction for KSM is well above 99.9%.  If they weren’t walking in with a near ironclad conviction on their hands, KSM would still be sitting in a cell in Gitmo.

Ah jeez, how did this get so long?  Is this something that I need to bring under control?

This may surprise you, Amanda, but I’m motivated by the same hatred of torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial imprisonment

That’s great, but doesn’t change the fact that you’re engaged in pure fantasy at this point.

Ah jeez, how did this get so long?  Is this something that I need to bring under control?

You might enjoy our new troll dencal26’s opining on what a bunch of terrorist-coddling liberal wusses we all are.

Amanda—I’d appreciate an “edit” function, if that’s possible, in the comments. That would help control thread length I think.

Mandos (117):

People need to stop pretending that KSM will walk out a courtroom as a free man at any point ever.  It will NEVER happen.  Throwing up all of these “what-if the justice system fails” just makes you look like a delusional bedwetter who is afraid of the dark.

I don’t know to whom on this thread you are referring, because I am not pretending this.

Well, no, not technically, you just said he ought to. Totally different.

Mnem (129):

It was impossible for John Wayne Gacy to be acquitted once they found 29 bodies buried in his crawlspace.  Does that mean that our justice system has always been fatally flawed?

Depends. Was Gacy tortured?

Gacy’s responsiblity was probably slightly less questionable than KSM’s is. So it’s indeed a question of evidence and guilt rather than whether he actually did it, as with Gacy. If he is acquitted, then, I’m not clear that’s a sign of the system working

Mandos (131):

How long should I hold my breath for the eventual official admission that the USA done wrong?  There is a monument to Japanese interns on Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC

Well then, looks like 50 years, give or take.

Oh my god, these two knee-jerk sarcastic responses were other people’s presumably measured serious responses.

dencal (164):

Khalid Shiek Mohammed will end up with some leftist wacko lawyer.  Perhaps Ron Kuby.  Anything for a Buck

Um, you know who defended the British troops after the Boston Massacre, right?

Jes (189):

cannot be tried for his crimes because the evidence is tainted by torture,

How is evidence gathered before his capture “tainted by torture”? How is evidence gathered independent of his treatment in custody “tainted by torture”? Or is it your position that there is no such evidence—not that it hasn’t ben examined properly (e.g., by a jury), but that it desn’t exist and never has? And if so, how did you reach that conclusion?

Ben D (200):

The bill of rights talks about PERSONS, it does not say “Americans” or “citizens”. Hell it doesn’t even say “white men” which for the time it was written in is pretty impressive.

Er. Everyone knew that’s what they meant, though (except in New Jersey where it briefly meant “white people”).

dencal (206):

I worked at 59 Maiden Lane on 911. I lost 11 friends.  I ran from Broadway up to City Hall and could barely see.

You ran from that far away? Wimp. I walked from Church and Vesey. My father proceded in an orderly fashion right out of 1 WTC. You were all that way away and you ran?

(You want to wave yours I’ll wave mine right back.)

Our friends on the left are actually in a quandary here: they want to see KSM convicted, and pay for his crimes, but they are unsure how to go about it in a way which will satisfy their objections to Guantanamo and interrogation.

Anyone else just love how torture and interrogation have become synonymous in the right-wing mind?

I merely point out y’all are arguing that trying KSM will not result in outcomes feared by conservatives because conservative-approved outcomes will certainly be achieved using conservative-approved methods.

No, a conservative-approved outcome for KSM would mean endless detention at an offshore facility in which the general public is never allowed to be fully aware of what the treatment protocol of prisoners is.  A conservative-approved method of dealing with KSM would be endless physical and psychological torture, forever shrouded in secrecy and denial.

Should KSM be convicted, he will: a) be remanded to a U.S.-based correctional facility; and b) in the custody of federal corrections officials, whose protocols are much more closely scrutinized, observed, and regulated by the public than the highly classified and constantly changing protocols in offshore prisons which have been governed by military officials.

As much as wingnuts whine about their fake concerns that trying KSM in U.S. federal court could result in his acquittal or another terrorist attack in NYC, what really scares the shit out of them is a smooth trial resulting in a criminal conviction and a criminal detention for KSM, because it will have proven that their way of handling people like him was not only pointless, but immoral and unnecessary.

Hershele: How is evidence gathered before his capture “tainted by torture”? How is evidence gathered independent of his treatment in custody “tainted by torture”?

You do know that KSM was far - very far - from the only person being tortured by the US during the past eight years?

Look: if evidence exists that the prosecution can show for sure was not gained by torture, which definitely convicts KSM of the crimes of which he is accused. Well, too bad.

But: Given Obama’s lack of enthusiasm for cleaning out the DoJ of the Bush administration’s poisonous influence; given Obama’s lack of enthusiasm for investigating or prosecuting the torturers; given Obama’s lack of committment to ending extra-judicial imprisonment or torture; I am prepared to bet that no effort is going to be made to ensure that only clean evidence is used.

Look: if evidence exists that the prosecution can show for sure was not gained by torture, which definitely convicts KSM of the crimes of which he is accused. Well, too bad.

...god, that came out wrong.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured sometime between September 2002 and October 2003. He has been held in extra-judicial detention for at least six years. His children were tortured. He has been tortured. 

He was indicted before the routine practice of extra-judicial imprisonment and torture, in 1996, for his involvement in Operation Bojinka. It is possible that sufficient evidence exists to convict him for the crime of conspiring to commit a terrorist attack, and murder. (I had remembered he was supposed to have been widely involved in terrorism prior to 2001, but had forgotten that there was an actual, specific crime for which the US had sufficient evidence against him to bring an indictment, as far back as 1996.) So he can be tried on that crime with evidence untainted by torture - I hope.

But, yes: not because I want to see KSM walk free (he won’t, if he can be convicted of that 1990s terrorist charge) but because I want to see the US clean itself of involvement with torture, extra-judicial imprisonment, kidnapping, and murder: I had rather see KSM declared not guilty due to criminal actions taken against him by the US, and blame firmly and clearly laid against the Bush administration for making it impossible to convict him, than any other outcome.

Not because I want to see Obama with egg on his face. But because the US as rogue nation is terrifying. I want to see the rule of law restored, and the crimes committed over the past eight years investigated and punished, much more than I want to see any individual terrorist convicted.

Naturally, the Serious “Liberals” and the right wing are opposed to this

Huh?  The bad guy liberals are the ones who want to put him on trial.  The 9/11 Truthers and PUMAs are hoping that KSM walks free, so they can be vindicated about the grand conspiracy, Obama, liberals, their own whatever.  It’s a fantasy that won’t happen.  The problem is putting it in the realm of possible outcomes.

Guess which of these steps did not happen with regard to KSM? Hint: the number was invented by Hindu mathematicians sometime around the 6th century.

Jesurgislac,
Don’t know much about math do you?  The Mayans had zero, as a concept and a symbol,  long before that.

Amanda Marcotte: The 9/11 Truthers and PUMAs are hoping that KSM walks free

... you forgot “And those who care about cleaning torture and torture-obtained evidence out of the US judiciary”, who say that KSM may have to walk on the crimes for which US use of torture has irretrievably muddled the trail of evidence. (If there is any. It’s known that, under torture, KSM confessed to crimes he could not have committed.)

helen w. h - yes, that’s obviously the most important part of my comment.

My uncle worked for a long time in lower Manhattan before moving to Boston.  He and his family was visiting with a colleague and his family in NC and my wife and I got together with all of them.  His colleague and his colleague’s wife talked about how 9/11 was so impactful on their lives, such an important thing to them.  They spoke in the generic type way a tragedy affects everyone.  My uncle spoke about how he knew people that died and I think (memory bad, event was 4 or so years ago) a few were friends.  The conversation pretty quickly moved on to another topic.

9/11 affected many people directly.  People lost family members, friends, and co-workers (do firefighters and cops refer to each as co-workers or is there some more familial term?).  I will never be able to understand what 9/11 means to them, as I was merely scheduled to fly to Albany, NY and was recently married, so it sort of told me to value my time with my wife and not take tomorrow for granted.  Some people who only watched on TV seem to elevate its impact on their lives and do not show the appropriate respect to those who were directly impacted.

This thread is about an important problem, but allow me to take a moment to thank you for calling the wingnuttery out on thinking the Metro is like the monorail at Disney World. I have that thought DAILY as I interact with these frightened souls who have never seen so many black people in their lives when the realization hits that there are real people living in DC who use the Metro to get to and from work.

By Serious “Liberals”, I meant the people who had capitulated to neocon thinking and proceeded thereafter to scold everyone else for being unserious about terrorism.  Or have we forgotten that too?

Since this is the very first time in a 275+ comment thread that you’ve drawn a distinction between those of us who want to put KSM on trial in public court with whatever untainted evidence is available and the neocon “liberals” who cheered on his secret torture, I don’t think we’re the ones who’ve forgotten.

Those who want to put KSM on trial in public court with “whatever untainted evidence is available” appear to be a vanishingly small number of people, because such an occurrence surely risks KSM’s acquittal, which we have ruled out as politically acceptable.

So, in other words, all of us arguing with you on this thread, including Amanda, are Serious “Liberals” who must have been cheering on the torture regime all of this time because we realize that KSM’s acquittal is about as likely as John Wayne Gacy’s acquittal.  In fact, it looks like you must be the only person in the whole world who actually objected to the torture regime since all the rest of us are so tainted.

Tell me, what’s it like to be too pure for this world?  Does it bother you to have to interact with those of us who’ve been stained by contact with reality?

By conservatives, I don’t mean the screamy people.  I mean the neocons.  I mean Dick Cheney.  And a neocon outcome is definitely the legitimization limbo legal status in WoT.  That is what you are arguing for.

No it isn’t, and where the fuck you get that from I have no idea.

As has been said countless times, this is a both/and blog.

I think virtually all of us here (conservative trolls aside) agree that Bush Administration officials should be held to account for the torture crimes that occurred on their watch.

Wanting KSM to be held to account for his crimes does not equate to wanting to exonorate the Bushies for the crimes that they committed.

In a truly just world, KSM would be locked away for eternity for masterminding the worst terrorist attack in American history and murdering 3,000 people, AND Bush/Cheney et al would be locked away for condoning the use of extrajudicial tactics in dealing with people like KSM.

I realize that what you want to see happen is for assholes like KSM to be able to use their torture as a “get out of jail” free card, but you are decidedly in the minority among human beings.

And the fact that Jesurgislac actually made the argument that not only should KSM be freed, but that we should literally PAY him compensatory damages leads me to believe that she/he is a monumentally insensitive asshole.  I assure you that if someone were to say to the face of a NYC firefighter who lost friends that day that we should both free KSM and pay him for his troubles, they would probably respond by knocking the person out.  And I couldn’t blame them if they did.

Yes, people like KSM deserve basic human rights, and when those rights have been criminally violated, the criminals who did so should be dealt with.  We all agree with you on this.  Try Bush and Cheney, we’re all for it.  Where we disagree is with the notion that because KSM was mistreated, that he should essentially be forgiven by our justice system for his crimes.  As if having been waterboarded should somehow absolve him of the responsibility of brutally murdering 3,000 innocent human beings.

What the fuck is wrong with you?  What part of “evil murdering pile of shit” do you not get?  And while I agree completely that state-sanctioned torture is a monstrosity that should not be tolerated or excused, I’m not going to go along with your implication that what happened to KSM was in any way, shape, or form even remotely equivalent in its cruelty or evil as what he did to the innocents that he SLAUGHTERED.

I hate George Bush.  I really hate Dick Cheney.  And as much as I hate them, as much as I think they are evil warlords, as much as I want them to be tried for their war crimes, I will never, ever suggest that what they did to people like KSM was as bad as what KSM did to the innocents that he brutally murdered.  Yes, what happened to him was way worse than just “splashing a little water on him”.  But I guarantee you that if any of the survivng family members could choose to have their loved ones brought back to life provided they consent to allowing them to be waterboarded, every last one of them would probably do it in a heartbeat.  No matter how much you try to argue it, there is absolutely no morally logical way to contend that the unjust harm brought upon KSM is worse than the unjust harm KSM brought upon those he hurt.  In this specific comparison, what KSM did to others is WORSE than what his torturers did to him.  There is absolutely no debating that.

As a whole, I think most liberals do not live up to the idiotic rightwing meme that we’re all terrorist-coddlers.  You, however, appear to be the epitome of that meme.  You literally sound like a terrorist-coddler.  And that’s fucked up.

Okay guys and trolls, riddle me this: Is KSM a criminal or a POW?

If a POW, then he shouldn’t have been tortured and should have been released back to his country of origin.

If a criminal, he gets the same as any other criminal - like, you know, constitutional rights to trial by jury?

Make up your minds people.  Make up your minds.  No more of this “he’s a terrorist and that means NO rights” when he hasn’t been tried!

Mandos and Jes are classic examples of liberals who think that ideological purity is so important that we should cut off our noses to spite our stupid faces.

Of course, the contention that by moving forward with a trial that may be tainted by torture, we are entering a new and unprecedented era of taint, abuse and a failed Republic, is laughably stupid. The United States cut its teeth on the abuses (including torture of prisoners) of global imperialism in the Spanish-American War, one hundred and eleven fucking years ago. And then there was the post-Second World War flexing of new-found global military, financial and ideological muscle as we discovered that WE were now the big kids on the block with the failure of the old European empires. So we brought United Fruit and the CIA to Latin America, and we fucked them up pretty good, didn’t we? And yet, since the Spanish-American War and since the 50’s and 60’s, we HAVE moved this nation forward, even if slightly, even though it was kicking and screaming the entire way, by the sweat, blood and lives of hundreds of thousands of people who gave a shit and weren’t cynical fucks like you, who seem to think that there’s no such thing as redemption and that the momentum of corruption and regression are infinite. If we’ve lost our way as a nation, by your standards, we lost it over a hundred fucking years ago (and that’s being generous to you, since we were founded as a slaveholding nation and were thus fucked to begin with), so what exactly is there to lose? Oh right, I’ll get to that.

The Bush years were a monumental fuck-up, but it’s not like Cheney was after something new and uniquely deranged. These assholes wanted to come back from what they saw (and still see) as a pussified America (that’s the way they think, not a word I like) that no longer took what it wanted and fucked anyone - especially brown anyones - who got in the way. They liked that America, and they did what they did because they saw that it was retreating. We have been moving this nation forward in the last century or so, even if it is with two steps forward and one back most of the time. Assholes like that react to progress, they don’t preempt it.

You are acting as though this is some kind of zero-sum game and that the only result that matters is the one right in the moment, that if we don’t preserve a purity that we never had and never will that it doesn’t matter what happens, because we’re not worth saving. Fuck that shit, that’s seriously fucked up. So yeah, fine, I’ll admit it - if we let this trial go forward (which we MUST do), and KSM gets convicted on tainted evidence, then that may well be, on some level, a victory for conservative ideology. But see, here’s where people like you and people who are capable of adding some nuance to their moral reasoning diverge: if we take this hit, we can still win. At least, we can start marching toward progress again that much sooner because we let them have this one. Because, if we don’t, we may well be supremely fucked. Or, to put it in terms that might be simple enough for you to understand, if we insist on your terms here, a hell of a lot more people are likely to be abused, tortured, imprisoned, killed. That’s a pretty fucking easy utilitarian judgment to make for, you know, sane people. Even with the possibility that the assholes that got us into this mess WON’T be swept back into power, that’s just not a risk worth taking. It’s way, way too big a danger. That’s the real world. The result is that we may be able to start moving forward again, oh, sometime in the next ten years instead of twenty, thirty, forty. That’s the reality of cleaning up after someone like BushCo makes a big disgusting mess.

Again, only an idiot would think that not compromising on our principles right now is the best decision. Those principles have never been pure, and intelligent moral reasoning means taking a longer view than our own noses. The “right” thing to do here is in fact very probably the WRONG thing to do because we will reap a far more bitter harvest if we actually do it.

The reality is that we will make the compromise and muddle along the best we can, two steps forward, one step back because it’s the only sane way to run a Republic with any hope of progress, and it’s the only way there ever will be.

But I guarantee you that if any of the survivng family members could choose to have their loved ones brought back to life provided they consent to allowing them to be waterboarded, every last one of them would probably do it in a heartbeat.

Yep.  Would waterboard for friends, too.

WWED (what would Eisenhower do)?

It’s a Kansas tragedy, not a Manhattan one.

Unless you happen to live in Manhattan, KS.

The 9/11 Truthers and PUMAs are hoping that KSM walks free

I can’t speak for the 911 Truthers, but the PUMAs I know are much more upset about the Stupak amendment than the KSM trial.

Reading these comments is something else to say the least, sure looks like the right is again trying to twist fact and mis inform. According to the many post read it seem the righties are calling the lib’s the cheer leaders of torture yet there isn’t one iota of proof and the facts are in fact checking the truth. Look you have the American TRAITORS daughter on espousing her (right winger what do you expect) fear.
I do believe the truth will come out and my conversations with members of the Muslim (notice how their distinction of being from any Country has disappeared) community will be calling for a close scrutiny. If it is not FEAR that is motivating the right why is Giuliani backing away from his comments on the last Trail held here in the states.
I’ve read some pretty moronic comments about the President secretly intervening now that is a true wack job looking for recognition, my concern is the Corporate and International interests that are getting involved directly or indirectly. Now how is that for a far fetched wacko thought did I beat out any righties.

This is a Country of Laws and after the devastation and destruction of OUR Name and Reputation compliments of the last Cowardly Administration I truly welcome this and additional trails, it is re asserting us back into the World of politics as a country of Leadership sorely lacking from the past 8 years. If there is no evidence as some claim it will speak very badly for the PAST Administration and this Country as a whole. So I see nothing gained by us attacking one another when we should be attacking the real criminals that setup this debacle, bush, cheney, rumsfeld, addington, libby, rove and the rest of the Criminals that put us in this position.

As a retired Military Vet (combat oh boy that is os important to the righties who DO NOT serve) I fear nothing and as a American I fear nothing, and I truly believe that it is those that have made the commitment that feel the same. This Cowardly theatrics Talking Head round Table discussion by the Right for the Right sickens me, let the cards fall were they may and we will play the hand we are dealt and the sad thing is we will WIN.

Remember this WHOLE Gitmo thing is NOT about the prisoners it is about ACCOUNTABILITY which the Right fears more than Terrorism, you are talking about COWARDS who were and still are trying to circumvent the US Constitution to serve the Elitist and Corporate as well as the Theocratic Interest laid out by the right wing Think Tanks.

So if you are a fraid I would ask yourself what are you afraid of and who is instilling the fear and WHY? As a American you should stand Tall, Proud and Unflinching in something so minor as a trail.

One last note on the serious side I am more afraid of the righties, tea baggers, wacko’s and Crack pots on the right who will go out of their way and plant a bomb just to blame those they oppose, these people are more dangerous then KSM he did tell us the right will not, remember you have the Failures of their last eight years as Proof they are Cowards and can not be trusted.

Further proof is the Twisting of the Truth and the Hate and Fear Mongering where is the next example going to come from to prove their point.

If it were merely being argued that this were a tactical sacrifice of principle out of current pragmatic necessity, then you’ll see that I have already agreed with you.  Unfortunately, people are arguing for a deeper capitulation to a particular form of tunnel vision in American politics: that there are no real-world consequences to allowing a tilted judicial pinball machine, that this is *merely* about purity, and that I and Jesurgislac are Truthers or some ridiculous smear like that.

You’re not Truthers, you’re just idiots. Idiots who happen to be full of shit:

Mandos:
Of this, I have no doubt.  But then, consider the ramifications of this for the long-term political future of the USA.  It means that the door to a more just society is fully shut, and that all political action in the matter of justice is merely treading water.

But what liberal supporters of the present situation are admitting is that the Republic is on its last legs.

Jesurgislac:
But, yes: not because I want to see KSM walk free (he won’t, if he can be convicted of that 1990s terrorist charge) but because I want to see the US clean itself of involvement with torture, extra-judicial imprisonment, kidnapping, and murder: I had rather see KSM declared not guilty due to criminal actions taken against him by the US, and blame firmly and clearly laid against the Bush administration for making it impossible to convict him, than any other outcome.

Not because I want to see Obama with egg on his face. But because the US as rogue nation is terrifying. I want to see the rule of law restored, and the crimes committed over the past eight years investigated and punished, much more than I want to see any individual terrorist convicted.

You said it yourself. It’s not about arguing for pragmatic necessity. You having literally argued that The End of the Republic is Nigh, and Jesurglisac has made it clear that they consider the momentary moral satisfaction of letting a mass-murderer go because the guy was tortured (fucked-up in its own way, that) more important than the long-term moral consequences. No one is arguing for “a deeper capitulation, blah blah blah,” we’re arguing that you’re both morons, you for for ideologue pearl-clutching and Jesurglisac for what Ben D. so pithily called “masturbating with sandpaper.”

Are the Right that afraid that the world’s best “Leftist Lawyer” will show up, get KSM off on a technicality, and then we’ll have to sit and watch him give an interview on the steps of a federal courthouse while Bush & Cheney are marched past him in handcuffs?!  Because that’s what the bed-wetters sound like.

KSM will never, ever, ever see freedom again.  I said it up-thread.  If he somehow escapes conviction for the NY attacks, they’ll re-arrest him and send him to VA.  And if that fails they’ll re-arrest him and send him to PA.  And if that fails they’ll re-arrest him for Bojinka.  And if that fails there are a half-dozen other terror plots he can be held on.  He will die in prison of old age or in the death chamber.

The best any lawyer is going to realistically be able to do is have him avoid the one-way ticket to Terre Haute while exposing the Bush Administration for the torturous asses they were.  If you don’t think there is some secret wiretap with someone reliable saying KSM masterminded the operational end of all of these terror plots, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.

@Ben D (116)If the Nazis in Nuremeberg had been allowed to walk for not getting a fair trial (and they really DIDN’T get a fair trial, it was victors justice but this is better than no justice at all) there would have been outrage in France and Britain, I guess that shows French and British democracy were on its last legs in 1945.

Well, as it happened, 3 of the defendants (Schact, von Papen, and Fritzsche) at the main Nuremberg trial were acquitted, over the strenuous objections of the Soviet judge, because the US, British, and French judges determined that the evidence against them was insufficient to prove the specific offenses charged.  Some of us take that as evidence that the trial was, in fact, reasonably fair, at least as fair as possible under the circumstances.  These three were, in fact, allowed to walk briefly, before they were rearrested, tried, and convicted by German courts for offenses under German law.  There doesn’t seem to have been a great deal of outrage in France and Britain at their acquittal.

Once KSM has been tried, now imagine attempting to try Bush and Cheney.

Boy, are you delusional. Imagining Bush and Cheney being tried before KSM being tried was good for a laugh. There’s not any doubt at all that they deserve to be tried and sentenced for their crimes, any more than there’s not any doubt that they’ll live out the rest of their lives in freedom and comfort, and would have under any circumstances. We’ll have to settle for them being convicted by history. It’s disappointing, but that’s how it’ll go. In any case, there’s no reason to think that KSM being tried somehow makes a hypothetical case against Bush and Cheney less likely to succeed. The whole point of such a trial is not whether or not their methods worked (and the good evidence against KSM probably doesn’t come from whatever babbling he came up with while under torture), it’s whether or not they violated the limits of their offices, the rule of law and human rights of both US citizens and citizens of foreign nations. That they caught some bad guys is really beside the point.

It’s a monumental tunnel-vision that we’d never have countenanced before but I guess was predictable the moment any Democrat came to power.

You are still living in bizarro-world, I see. This is nothing new, we have countenanced it before and we will again. And last I checked, KSM’s status as a prisoner is not the fault of any Democrats. This is BY FAR the best solution to the shitty situation that the last assholes put us in. If you really want to make this better, go back in time and make sure Al Gore wins the 2000 election. Short of that, this is the best we’re going to do.

You can’t ALWAYS have both/and as a strict rule.  It’s a liberal fantasy.  The practical effect of trying KSM while excluding the conditions of his capture and treatment is the exoneration—-in spirit at least, but probably also in body—-of Bush/Cheney.

And if it is an exoneration of Bush/Cheney in spirit, it is an exoneration that the vast majority of humanity will not object to when we make it.

There will not be rioting in the streets of London, Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong when KSM is convicted for being the mastermind of 9/11, despite having been the victim of torture.  It will not result in global outrage and the collapse of the United States of America.  The vast majority of humanity either won’t really care one way or another, or will feel that justice was ultimately served, even though the process by which it was arrived at involved unjust actions.

You know what else is a liberal fantasy?  Believing in the absolute nature of any legal system or procedure.  That is must either be absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

There are only two certainties in life, and taxes isn’t one of them.  Every human being shares in these certainties.  The first certainty is that we have all been born.  All 10,000,000,000+ people who have ever taken a breath outside of their mother’s womb have been born.  The second certainty is that we will all die.  Each and every last human being that has ever lived has had to face the inevitable certainty that they will eventually die.

Those are the only two black and white certainties in our human existence.  Every single other thing is some shade of gray, some more so than others.

And so it is with the justice systems that we create.  They are not infallible, nor will they ever be infallible.  Just as mistakes have been made, and continue to be made… they will always be made for the rest of our existence on this blue marble we call earth.  There is no perfect system of justice that can fulfill everyone’s perception of what constitutes justice being served 100% of the time.

The reality of the detention and trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is this - regardless of what the ultimate outcome is, conviction or acquittal, it will absolutely involve some miscarriage of justice.

If the trial of KSM leads to a conviction, despite KSM having been illegally subject to torture during detention, a miscarriage of justice will have occurred, because we will have allowed a person to be convicted of a crime despite having been subject to cruel and unusual treatment while he was being detained for that crime.

If the trial of KSM leads to an acquittal based on the fact that he was illegally subject to torture during his detention, a miscarriage of justice will have occurred, because a mass murderer will have been allowed to walk free on a legal technicality despite having been responsible for the deaths of 3,000 innocent human beings.

While I know that my personal belief that KSM is absolutely guilty of the crimes that he has been accused should preclude me from sitting in his jury, I am still free to hold that belief, because I will not be sitting in his jury.  I know that KSM coordinated the plan to murder 3,000 people, just as I know that OJ Simpson brutally slaughtered his wife and her companion, just as I know Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller, just as I know Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 innocent people at Fort Hood, just as I know that the sun is made of helium even though I’ve never touched it, just as I know that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon even though I wasn’t there, and wasn’t even yet born.

Our criminal justice system does not render verdicts of “Innocent”.  If the prosecution fails to make a case which can convince a jury that the accused is guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, the person is found to be “Not Guilty”.  They are not found to be “Innocent”.  OJ might have been found to be “Not Guilty” in a court of law, but that doesn’t mean the justice system has definitively declared him as innocent.  That doesn’t mean that the justice system has taken the stance that he did not do the things which he was accused of doing.

(cont’d.)

(cont’d.)

Let me ask a question… on what moral grounds do you suppose it is that we have criminalized the use torture as an interrogation technique?  What is the moral reasoning?

Here’s what I believe - there are two reasons why using torture as an interrogation method is illegal. 

First, it violates a person’s constitutional right to not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment while being forcibly held in the custody of the state.  A completely reasonable case could be made that what happened to KSM was a violation of this fundamental moral principle.

Second, it presents the state with the opportunity to obtain false evidence that could be used to unjustly convict a truly innocent person.  This moral principal hinges on the notion that the state should never have the power to be able to convict someone who did not commit the crime they have been accused of.  The principle exists solely to protect truly innocent people from unjust convictions.  A reasonable case cannot be made that this moral principle will have been violated in the case of KSM, unless one truly believes that he did not actually conspire to murder 3,000 innocent people on 9/11.  And if you actually believe that KSM didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, that he is actually an innocent man and not just “not guilty” because of legal technicalities, well then you are a Truther, and you need to get a fucking shrink, because you clearly have mental problems.  Being a 9/11 Truther who doesn’t believe 9/11 was planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the direction of Osama Bin Laden makes one a crackpot, period.

Assuming you live in the reality-based world and accept that KSM was responsible for the planning of 9/11, this gets down to the question, “what injustice will have occurred if KSM is convicted under these circumstances?”  We will have convicted a man who was subject to cruel and unusual punishment.  What will not happen is that we will not have convicted a man who was truly innocent of the crimes for which he has been accused.

This then leads to the next question, “what injustice will have occurred if KSM is acquitted solely on the grounds that his torture has legally nullified any ability to convict him?  We will have allowed a mass murderer to get away with his crimes, by twisting the letter of the law to his defense in such a way that he has made it impossible to effectively prosecute him.  We will have forced 3,000 families to accept the fact that the man who was responsible for planning the murder of their loved ones was able to evade justice and skate free by utilizing the precise letter of the law to, quite literally, get away with murder.  Or more precisely, to get away with 2,974 murders.

Which is a greater injustice?  The injustice which harms one mass murderer, or the injustice that harms thousands of innocent families whose loved ones had to spend their final moments of life in excruciating physical and/or psychological agony, as they had to choose between being burned alive or leaping to their own deaths?  The agonizing realization that they would never get to say goodbye to their husband, or their wife, or their child, or their sibling before they died, because all the phone lines were down, and it was impossible to get a cell phone call out in the midst of that chaos.  The agonizing regret over the last fight they had that morning over whose turn it was to go grocery shopping that week.

Who deserves justice more?  The thousands of people whose world was forever damaged by the loss of the loved one that they can never get back, or the man who perpetrated that horror who was subject to cruel treatment during his detention?

Unfortunately, both sides don’t get to have full justice in this case.  And in my opinion, giving some sense of closure (even though those wounds can never be fully healed) to the people who lost loved ones that day matters a hell of a lot more than being able to jump up on an ideological high horse in which we must say, “Well, we had to let one of the most awful human beings on earth walk away as a free man after committing one the worst criminal acts in American history, but at least we’ve formally declared that torture is wrong and protected that absolute legal integrity that we never really had to begin with!”

Well, fuck that.  And thank God the latter won’t be happening.  You can cry and whine about it, and the rest of us will accept that an imperfect system had to be used to convict a monster.  Most of us are perfectly OK with living with the stain of having tortured KSM if the only alternative is to let him walk away a free man.

Like I said, it won’t be the first time America hasn’t carried out justice perfectly, and it won’t be the last time, either.  It is, in my opinion and the opinion of most others… “the lesser of two evils”.  And I’ll live with it.  Just as most of the world will, too.

These three were, in fact, allowed to walk briefly, before they were rearrested, tried, and convicted by German courts for offenses under German law.  There doesn’t seem to have been a great deal of outrage in France and Britain at their acquittal.

Probably because they didn’t have the Internet.

Yeah, that may sound laughable at first glance, but the societal response to this sort of thing in 1945 is not really comparable to the likely societal response to this sort of thing in the information overload society of 2009.

If you don’t think the acquittal of KSM would serve as the biggest bludgeon that has been handed to neocons in advancing their agenda since 9/11 itself, I’ve got beachfront property in Kansas to show you.

If we’re talking about a trial by history, no one in the USA who gladly agreed to accept the outcome of their actions will have the historical authority to criticize them for the means they chose.

Who said anything about anyone “gladly” accepting the way this will go down?

Is it possible that most of us are in fact grudgingly accepting that this is the “least worst” option available from a pragmatic perspective?

Are you saying that unless we all band together and storm the halls of Congress and threaten to shut down the entire government unless KSM is acquitted that we are joyfully acquiescing to the shitty reality that this is how it will all have to go down to prevent total chaos?

What if most of us think Dick Cheney is a war criminal?  Are we giving him tacit approval for his war crimes if we don’t band together and storm his Wyoming ranch to place him under citizens’ arrest?

I don’t know what exactly you think it is that we are supposed to do.  Most of us have looked at the situation, and have come to the realization that the ramifications of an acquittal will have far worse consequences than would a conviction, even if that conviction was obtained under legally compromised circumstances.

It’s basic utilitarianism.

Here’s one for you.  Dick Cheney will never, ever, ever serve even one minute in jail for his crimes, nor will he be forced to pay one red cent of restitution to the victims of his torture regime.  And I don’t have the money, time, energy, or political influence to personally do much of anything about it, so I’m not going to waste my time trying.

Now, does the fact that I have stated an obvious reality mean that I have “gladly” accepted it?  Or does it mean that I realize that it is what it is, and unjust as I or anyone else might believe it to be, all the righteous indignation in the world isn’t going to change it.  I’m not happy about it, but I don’t live my life dwelling on the fact that Dick Cheney is gonna get away with one of the worst abuses of power for any Vice-President in American history.  Why?  Because there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.  So why spend my life being pissed off about it.  I’ve got bills to pay, and far bigger personal things to deal with, things over which I actually DO have some degree of control.

And it isn’t “caving in”... it’s accepting what a monstrous wheel-spinning effort it would be to spend my life trying to get someone arrested who will never be arrested.

You seem to think this matters.  I don’t.  The US government is the US government.  Military detention is military detention.  So: we really have traded one set of imperialists for another.  Not that surprising.

All right, this has gotten old.

Fine, you win.  America is the most evil imperialist monster in history, there’s no difference between Barack Obama and George Bush, and we all suck and should be tried as war criminals for not stopping Dick Cheney.

So what the fuck are you gonna do about it?  Whine on the Internet?

Here’s a cookie for your efforts.

Hmm all very interesting. I don’t think that any evidence found through torture should be used. Here are the two reasons I think these people were sent to trial anyway:

1. there’s a lot of evidence outside of the information found through torture (once the torture leaked out 3-5 years ago, the FBI sent out people to make sure they also had clean information). It’s very very likely that they will be convicted.

2. there are a lot of other charges against them, so even if they are acquitted here (very very unlikely) they will not go free (they will be tried on other charges or extradited to other countries where they also face charges).

since these are people that themselves say they did these things, their trial will not show whether this is a fair process. That will happen as we work our way down to the lower level of detainees.

No, you missed the point.  Think outside America for a moment.  The legal and moral personality of a nation is not *only* the particular individuals who sit in its offices.  You can’t pretend that just because you got a president NOW who *might* behave better in the future that his office and his institutions can simply sweep away responsibility for the old situation or negate its consequences. 

That creates a huge moral hazard for the nation as a whole.

You’re right, from a moral perspective, sweeping the crimes of the Bush Administration under the rug won’t just make them disappear from history.  It will forever be a moral stain on the personality of America, a nation that is covered with moral stains, many of them far worse than this one.

As for creating “a huge moral hazard”... well, how much worse could it get for a country that used to legally enslave people, really?  Or a country that illegally held countless Japanese citizens in detention camps during WWII?

In regards to the torture crimes of BushCo - we fucked up, and people will forever be justified in saying that we fucked up.  And just as we moved forward after our many previous fuck-ups, eventually everybody will move on in this case as well.

What exactly do you think the end result of convicting KSM is going to be?  Imminent collapse of the United States of America?

I have no doubt that this nation will someday come to an end, mostly because nothing lasts forever.  However, I really don’t see America’s immediate actual demise being a direct consequence of KSM’s conviction.  Hell, we’re probably not gonna ever do shit to punish Bush or Cheney or their minions, and even that isn’t going to cause our collapse.  We didn’t do shit to most of the Nixon criminals for their Vietnam atrocities, either, and America survived that as well.

When you speak in ridiculous hyperbole about America forever losing its innocence and moral authority because we’ll be convicting a man we tortured and because we didn’t properly address the crimes of BushCo, I find myself asking… what innocence or moral authority was there ever to lose in the first place?

There wasn’t any.  We’ve been assholes since 1492, and this isn’t going to be the one thing that pushes us over some mythical morality line from which there is no return.  Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” was a bullshit myth when he first talked about it, and it’s always been a bullshit myth.  And you know that.

Do you want us to say that this is, in a basic moral sense, a step backwards?  Fine, it’s a step backwards, in a basic moral sense.

Bad shit happens.  Welcome to Planet Earth, a place where bad shit has been happening for many millennia.  America doesn’t have an exclusive patent on bad shit happening, either.  Bad shit happened long before we existed, and bad shit will continue to happen long after we are gone.  I’m fairly confident that earth will continue to revolve around the sun and that the United States will continue to exist the day after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is convicted in a U.S. federal courtroom, even though he was tortured.

Mandos I’m not quite sure what you’re arguing. Most of us here think people should be charged for committing torture. Most of us here think that the detainees should be put on trial or released. Many of us think Obama has not done enough. On the other hand, most of us do not think we should just let KSM go even though he was tortured.
Why? Because very very probably he is guilty of terrible crimes and very very probably there is a lot of evidence that wasn’t obtained through torture that proves this (do you really think that Obama would have sent this to trial otherwise? You must think he and everyone in his administration is stupid). I don’t worry about acquital (and I don’t think Obama does either), because he’s been charged with many crimes here and elsewhere. Letting someone go just because they were tortured is stupid—if he did what was alleged and it can be proven in a court of law then he should go to prison (hopefully he will not be killed). Period.

Everyone knew that the neocons quite publicly didn’t believe in any of it.  So no one was that shocked when Bush did it.  However, it’s a double blow when American liberals adopt a position of acquiescence.

Okay then, you’ve already been asked, but I’ll try one more time: what the fuck do you want us to do? You seem happy to play a game of holier-than-thou until the end of time without actually providing the solution that will preserve our imaginary moral purity. You’ve gotten called on your idiotic pearl-clutching multiple times, you deny it, but then you do it again:

Moving on is not possible.

Uh huh. Fuck you. Time passes. Shit happens. The wheel turns. Grow up.

You’ve also been told, repeatedly, that in any sensible moral calculus, the trial and conviction of KSM is the least shitty of a whole host of shitty possibilities. When you’ve bothered to reply to this, you’ve acted as though this were self-evident. Yet you go on and on about how Americans liberals have “adopted a position of acquiescence.” Which is weird, since not one of us has said that we’re happy about it, just that we’ve come to accept, as adults, that we live in a complicated and shitty world in which the just solution to many problems simply does not exist. Any other outcome would be far, far worse in terms of actual, material and tangible harm to people. Since you’ve admitted that this is obvious, I repeat the first question: what the fuck do you suggest?

I think it’s obvious that you don’t have any answers, but you refuse to admit it because you need to get off on knowing that you’re a better, nobler, more moral liberal (leftist?) than all those assholes who insist on the existence of the Real World. I can see you sitting there on your fantasy lectern of moral purity, masturbating like you want to catch fire. I leave you to it.

JohnL: Because very very probably he is guilty of terrible crimes and very very probably there is a lot of evidence that wasn’t obtained through torture that proves this (do you really think that Obama would have sent this to trial otherwise? You must think he and everyone in his administration is stupid).

I think that Obama is allowing KSM to go to trial because he is sure, regardless of what evidence there is that he was tortured, his children were tortured, and other prisoners were tortured, it won’t matter: a New York court will see him found guilty, convicted, and condemned. He is sure, in other words, that the US judiciary will simply accept that people accused of terrorism can be tortured and no American judge - as someone explicitly said to me upthread - no New York judge or jury - would dare fail to convict him, even if it becomes clear in open court that all of the evidence that can be brought against him for the crimes of which he is accused, is hopelessly tainted and muddled by confessions obtained by torture.

I don’t think Obama is stupid. I think that he has calculated that he has nothing to gain by trying to restore the rule of law and remove the rule of torture, and much to lose.

DTG in STL: And the fact that Jesurgislac actually made the argument that not only should KSM be freed, but that we should literally PAY him compensatory damages leads me to believe that she/he is a monumentally insensitive asshole.  I assure you that if someone were to say to the face of a NYC firefighter who lost friends that day that we should both free KSM and pay him for his troubles, they would probably respond by knocking the person out.  And I couldn’t blame them if they did.

Yes, because violence is, in the US, thought to be an appropriate response to suggesting that the victims of American injustice ought to be set free and compensated. Since 9/11 the US has started two wars which have killed well over a kidnapped hundreds of people, killed some of them, tortured many of them, and held them for years. That one of them is now getting a show trial to test the waters to prove that others can be put up on show trial and sent to one of America’s detention centers, and that Americans think this is justice and people who opposed the actions of the US under Bush are irrational to still oppose them under Obama - well, Americans are abso-blood-lutely fantastic at playing the victim card.

Mandos (278):

Those who want to put KSM on trial in public court with “whatever untainted evidence is available” appear to be a vanishingly small number of people, because such an occurrence surely risks KSM’s acquittal,

That’s what I want, though I don’t think the risk is unacceptably high (for a number of reasons, some I’m happier about than others).

DTG (282):

I guarantee you that if any of the survivng family members could choose to have their loved ones brought back to life provided they consent to allowing them to be waterboarded, every last one of them would probably do it in a heartbeat.  No matter how much you try to argue it, there is absolutely no morally logical way to contend that the unjust harm brought upon KSM is worse than the unjust harm KSM brought upon those he hurt.  In this specific comparison, what KSM did to others is WORSE than what his torturers did to him.  There is absolutely no debating that.

That’s not how rule of law works.

Torture doesn’t suddenly become ok when you do it to really bad people. Torturing KSM was wrong and evidence obtained solely from torture should probably be excluded. In addition, asking the victims or their families what we should do with the accused is not how the system works.

bouj (294):

The best any lawyer is going to realistically be able to do is have him avoid the one-way ticket to Terre Haute while exposing the Bush Administration for the torturous asses they were.

I could actually live with that, but I think the death penalty is barbaric in all circumstances, even when used against barbaric people who committed barbaric acts.

DTG (301):

Who said anything about anyone “gladly” accepting the way this will go down?
Is it possible that most of us are in fact grudgingly accepting that this is the “least worst” option available from a pragmatic perspective?

That requires more nuance than the likes of Mandos believe the average American to be capable of.

Mandos (306):

However, it’s a double blow when American liberals adopt a position of acquiescence.  It’s far more a sign of what has been undone than the extrajudicial detention itself.

So here at 300+ comments, you’re finally coming clean: you don’t like Barack Obama and never have. Because what you’re saying is that his being President of a country that hastortured is worse than Bush being President and ordering torture, or at least signing orders for torture people in his adminstration put on his desk.

Or you’re saying Obama should get his ass into Cronos One and stop KSM from being tortured in the first place.

Or that, having tortured and being incapable of moving on*, the federal government should be dissolved.

* True in the limited sense that we will never be a nation that hasn’t engaged in torture; we will never be a nation that hasn’t had slavery, and yet we now have the 13th Amendment.

Jes (311):

a New York court will see him found guilty, convicted, and condemned

Is this one of those situations where “New York” is code for “Jew”?

HO,
No it’s a reference to previous comments that indicates no one from NY is about to let anyone shown to be a mastermind of the WTC 9/11 destruction get off because they were tortured after the fact, and after they had publicly claimed to be responsible on non-US controlled media.

Jes is claiming all evidence against him should be thrown out because he was tortured at some point and he should therefore be released.  Hence, most of us have given up on that insane idiocy.  Even if we would do so, the other countries with cases against him are nowhere near as nice.  Just handing him over to them would probably be easier, and more wrong, IMO of course, then what we are left with.

Jesurgislac wrote:

You do know that KSM was far - very far - from the only person being tortured by the US during the past eight years?

Look: if evidence exists that the prosecution can show for sure was not gained by torture, which definitely convicts KSM of the crimes of which he is accused. Well, too bad.

Clarification, please.  Are you saying that if evidence was gathered because someone else was waterboarded, and tat wateboarding led to solid, untainted, corroborable evidence against KSM, it still couldn’t be used because the investigators wouldn’t have found it otherwise?

Helen, I wanna hear him say it.

Though, getting back to the original post, I think Amanda’s right that many wingnuts don’t believe New York is a real place. They’ve for so long made New York a stand-in for liberals, and homosexuals, and perverts, and black criminals (a pleonasm, to this mindset), and immigrants, and, yes, Jews on the one hand, and business, and money (and Jews), and urbanness, and bright lights on the other, that the actual people who get up in the morning and go to work and come home and live their (our) lives tend to be erased. And so in this view 9/11 didn’t happen to people and wasn’t a crime; it happened to a country and was an act of war.

And we had the war, tangential though it was, and another war which wasn’t even tangential but was sold that way, and they’re still going on, but now that we’re a bit calmer it’s long, long past time for the criminal act to be addressed.

I mean, you really can’t get an indictment with no usable evidence whatsoever. If there was nothing on KSM not obtained under torture, I don’t think Holder could go forward.

Ms Kate asked:

Okay guys and trolls, riddle me this: Is KSM a criminal or a POW?

He is an illegal combatant.

The Geneva Conventions allow for those who wage wat without wearing a uniform or some other distinguishing mark, to separate themselves from the civilian population, to be classified as spies and summarily executed.  President Bush could have declared the captured al Qaeda to be POWs regardless, which would have meant that they would receive POW protection, and could be held until the war was over; at that point, they’d have to be released, but he chose not to do that.

He wanted to have some form of military tribunals used.  If that sounds wholly novel, it isn’t: they’ve been used previously.  They could also have been tried by courts martial under the UCMJ, in non-Article III courts; that has been allowed by the Supreme Court.

President Obama has not made an official change to the designations specified by President Bush, but by bringing some of tem to the US for federal trials, he will have made a de facto change.  Right now, he could still change his mind, right up to the point where they are moved from Cuba to the US.

Mr Ostropoler:  Though it would be rare for me to come to Jesurgislac’s defense, I’m sure that she was not referring to a “Jew” court.

Dana: Clarification, please.  Are you saying that if evidence was gathered because someone else was waterboarded, and tat wateboarding led to solid, untainted, corroborable evidence against KSM, it still couldn’t be used because the investigators wouldn’t have found it otherwise?

Yes. Torturing people to get evidence against them is illegal, and evidence illegally obtained is not admissable.

He is an illegal combatant.

There is no such status in the Geneva Conventions. He is either a prisoner of war, and entitled to all the protections that the Geneva Conventions afford PoWs, or he is a civilian accused of specific crimes, in which case he is entitled to all the protections that the Geneva Conventions afford civilians.

President Bush could have declared the captured al Qaeda to be POWs regardless, which would have meant that they would receive POW protection, and could be held until the war was over; at that point, they’d have to be released, but he chose not to do that.

The US military was required by law to assume that anyone taken on the field of battle/in combat was a PoW until a tribunal had shown others. Bush and Cheney chose, entirely unlawfully, to create a new status of “illegal combatant”, and to treat people declared “illegal combatants” as not entitled to any protections under the Geneva Conventions. Shamefully, no one in the US with the power to do so acted to prevent this criminal action on the part of the administration, and - as shamefully - the Obama administration decided to continue to support the criminal actions of the previous administration.

Dana, you do know that a country doesn’t get to decide who is a POW right (and the term ‘enemy combatant’ is meaningless as far as the Geneva conventions)? The Geneva conventions describe who are POWs and if there is a question, an international group decides—not an individual country (I don’t know why we don’t trust, say, North Korea to decide who the Geneva conventions apply to). Ah, I see Jesurgislac got to this first.

Jes, I’m a little confused. First a judge will not convict these people, a jury will. They can decide if testimony is acceptable (and judges HAVE said that testimony found under torture is not acceptable, so I’m not sure why you say no judge would dare to). If a judge allows evidence obtained through torture, then you can be sure this will be appealed. The judge could (and I think should) disallow any of that evidence and the jury is not supposed to consider anything they have heard outside court. Of course some of them will anyway, but that’s true for any court case anywhere and is part of our imperfect judicial system.

and judges HAVE said that testimony found under torture is not acceptable, so I’m not sure why you say no judge would dare to

I will continue to hope, then, that the judge in this case will determine that as testimony obtained by torture is inadmissible, that means the jury must be directed to acquit - even though almost everyone else on this thread has been telling me that neither judge nor jury would dare do that.

This thread is starting to die out, but perhaps you’ll like this, from The Washington Post,  in paragraph 12:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

Translation: we know that they are way too dangerous to release, but we don’t know it in a way which could be proven in federal court, so we’re going to apply the same logic and wisdom as did President Bush, President Obama’s criticism of his predecessor on this issue during the campaign notwithstanding.

No, none of them are dangerous at this point, because they are in prison.  It’s whether they would become dangerous again if ever let out of prison that worries the President.