terrorism – Hank Kalet

The wrong debate

The debate over yesterday’s verdict in the terrorism trial of Ahmed Ghailani, which resulted in the Guantanamo detainee being convicted on only one of nearly 300 charges, is ignoring a basic precept of American democracy. The conviction on a charge related to a 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Africa — a conviction that has Ghailani facing between 20 years and life in prison — has conservatives renewing their call for those facing terror charges to be tried by a military tribunal and not in civilian criminal courts.

The verdict has been discussed within a context of effectiveness, using the assumption that failure to convict is a conviction of the system itself, one that requires us to suspend the basic rule of law and to move to an extra-judiciary measure.

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

No one, however, is asking the question that needs to be asked. Were the acquittals due to the system itself, which is designed to defend the rights of the accused (a goal at which the system too often fails, but that is a topic for another post), an indictment of the system or did they occur because of a failure to collect the necessary evidence?

There is something more than a little disturbing about a mindset that demands we change the rules for a subset of people because we did not get the result we want, a mindset that endangers all of us because it chips away at the rights not only of Guantanamo detainees, but of everyone accused of a crime. It flips the basic premise of American justice — everyone is presumed not guilty until proven otherwise — and allows the presumption of guilt to become the standard.

This is far more of a threat to our country than anything threat we face from terrorism.

The logic of dictators

Follow the reasoning on this one:

Pakistan grabs a then-18-year-old during a sweep in 2002, less than a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The teen, as a judge eventually finds, was arrested and held without cause at our Guantanamo Bay prison facility. The judge — five months ago — orders the man, now 26, released.

The Obama administration balks. Even if the Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed,

was not dangerous in 2002, they said, Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States. If he returned to his troubled homeland of Yemen, the officials feared, he might fall in with the growing contingent of Al Qaeda there, one more Guantánamo survivor to star in their propaganda videotapes.

So American officials first sought to route him to a rehabilitation program for militants in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis would take him only if he wanted to go — and he did not.

To sum things up: He’s arrested and held without cause for eight years, which turns him into a potential terrorist, which creates the cause to hold him. When did we become the Latin America of Pinochet and Peron?
So it wanted to keep him in custody, which the judge overruled.

The

Quote of the day: on accountability

Juan Cole offers this (from yesterday’s post on his Informed Comment blog):

And I think there is good reason to ask whether McCain helped create al-Qaeda and the mess in Pakistan to begin with. It is time for someone to start holding the Cold Warriors who deployed a militant Muslim covert army against their leftist enemies accountable for the blow-back they created.

It has not been fashionable in the Post-9/11 era to raise this kind of question — to do so is to court criticism as an America-hater — but shouldn’t the people who created the conditions that led to the spread militant Islam be held to account?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Sabre-rattlers get you nowhere

Barack Obama did it. The Bush folks did it. Several members of Congress have done it.

They all have essentially threatened to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty to go after al Qaeda — regardless of whether the Pakistani government wants them to.

I know this is what you say during an election year, that you need to look tough — blah, blah, blah.

But if anyone wants to understand the folly of this approach, they only need to read this story from the L.A. Times on what Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has to say about all this sabre-rattling:

The president pointed out that certain recent U.S. statements were counterproductive to the close cooperation and coordination between the two countries in combating the threat of terrorism,” said a statement released by the Foreign Office.

The Pakistani leader, it said, “emphasized that only Pakistan’s security forces, which were fully capable of dealing with any situation, would take counter-terrorism action inside Pakistani territory.”

Musharraf also called new legislation tying U.S. aid to Pakistan to his government’s fight against militants an “irritant” to the two countries’ relations.

I am no fan of the Pakistani president, but it seems pretty arrogant of us to assume we can just waltz into a sovereign nation and take care of our own business without their being repercussions.

Oh, wait. I think I’ve seen that movie before.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.