This from The Weekly Standard's Thomas Joscelyn:
And my question to add to Joscelyn's is why are these attorneys -- Holder, Obama, et al -- making such horrible decisions with regards to .... and I'll say it .... The War On Terror?!? This recent hairbrained decision paired with the one to try Khalid Sheik Muhammad in New York City is sheer insanity! Are these piss poor decisions being made on purpose?
Attorney General Eric Holder has sent a letter defending the decision to charge Abdulmutallab as a criminal and read him his Miranda rights. This paragraph stuck out immediately:“I made the decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab with federal crimes, and to seek his detention in connection with those charges, with the knowledge of, and with no objection from, all other relevant departments of the government. On the evening of December 25 and again on the morning of December 26, the FBI informed its partners in the Intelligence Community that Abdulmutallab would be charged criminally, and no agency objected to this course of action.”(1) While those other departments were informed, according to Holder, this evidently doesn't include the senior-most members of those departments -- per their congressional testimony. Senior officials including DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano have testified that they were not informed of the decision. If they were informed, which is unlikely, then they lied before Congress. If they weren't informed, which is likely, then this means those departments have serious communication problems because such an important decision was never communicated up the chain. In other words, assuming Holder is right, then why weren’t the senior-most officials in those departments informed?
(2) What took Holder so long to admit this?
I am hardly a law expert, but anyone with the slightest working knowledge of the law, let alone anyone who has ever watched a TV show or read the newspapers, can see that these ridiculous notions will result in mistrials, especially with regard to KSM. Any moron can see that all KSM's attorneys will have to do following a conviction is to appeal, based on KSM not being able to get a fair hearing in NYC -- an improper venue!
Here's another ruse KSM's defense attorneys will use to appeal any conviction: KSM can't get a fair hearing when The President asserts that KSM will be convicted. Michelle Malkin followed the trail on this, citing Jonah Goldberg:
Video: Obama prejudges KSM’s trial, denies that he’s prejudging it
In fairness to The One, I don’t understand why America’s prosecutor-in-chief can’t express confidence in convicting a guy whom his own DOJ is trying. When Nixon called Manson guilty 40 years ago, he was meddling in a state trial without having seen the evidence. Not so here, but oh well. This is indeed a gift to the defense, although aside from giving the court an extra procedural headache to dispose of, it won’t matter ultimately. No judge is going to free the mastermind of 9/11 on a technicality and no president is going to let the mastermind of 9/11 walk free even if one did. It’s a show trial, root, stem, and branch. Jonah Goldberg:
Every day it appears more and more that the White House wants it both ways. They want to claim that this is a fair trial but also an act of venegeance. The terrorists will be treated as if they might be innocent — key to a fair trial — but at the end of the day they’ll get their comeuppance. If KSM & Co. get off on a technicality, don’t worry, they’ll still be locked up, but when they’re convicted the White House will claim it was always a fair process. They’ll get a fair trial from an impartial jury in New York, but it’s “fitting” and “poetic justice” that the jury will be drawn from the community that was viciously attacked on 9/11. Fair but vengeul, honest but foreordained, instructive to the world but really just about the law: the rhetoric from the White House and the Democrats isn’t persuasive to those who listen closely and certainly won’t be persuasive to foreigners Obama is determined to impress.Just so. Goldberg followed this with another smart post about how bending over backwards to convict KSM will lead courts to set precedents that’ll actually undermine civil liberties, to which I’d simply add that it ain’t just courts who’ll be massaging their principles to arrive at the predetermined result. How else to explain noted death-penalty opponent Eric Holder saying today that he intends to seek death for KSM? That’s a political concession to vengeance and a reprisal for an act of war … to be carried out in a civilian courtroom.
Below the “prejudging” clip, you’ll find a guy known for blaming others for his every last political difficulty asserting, with all apparent seriousness, that the decision to try KSM in civilian court was made entirely by Holder based on a close consultation of the law. (More on that in the next post.) Really, champ? Knowing that the foreign-policy credibility of the Democratic Party for years to come rests on getting a conviction here, you rubberstamped a decision made by someone who thought it’d be super keen to pardon Marc Rich? What could go wrong? Click the image to watch.
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