18 November 2010
 
Oh Well

(Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani with his legal counsel. AP Artist depiction.)

The trees are bare of leaves now, and the blast of wind that swept through town carried that disturbing pink article of clothing up from the branch on which it had rested sixteen feet from my balcony and sent it to the ground far below.
 
That isn’t all that was swept away in the gale. So was the fiction that detained enemy combatants should be entitled to civilian jurisprudence and get what they deserve.
 
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was the test case. He was the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in New York. The poor battered Justice Department tried its best to throw the book at him. The prosecutors lodged almost three hundred charge against him, including one of conspiracy to commit murder for each of the 224 people who were killed in the bombings.
 
My pal Steve was in the basement of the embassy in Nairobi, getting a cup that fine Kenyan coffee when the truck bomb went off. He was trapped for a while, temporarily deafened and dazed by the magnitude of the blast.
 
He was unhurt, and lucky that he was early for his appointment to speak to the Ambassador, otherwise he might well have been slaughtered along with twelve other Americans and hundreds of Kenyans.
 
Ghailani arranged for the hiring of the truck and the logistics for the attack. He is a direct accomplice, in my mind, to mass murder.
 
Here is the problem. He pled “innocent,” and the information that he acquired explosives from a Tanzanian taxi driver was obtained by coercive means that are illegal in the American judicial system. The testimony of the taxi driver is inadmissible.
 
The American jury of his peers- a concept I find to be somewhat bizarre- was not told the whole story. Based on available evidence, the panel was only able find found him guilty only one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He could get twenty-years-to-life for that, and I will be curious to see what the judge does.
 
I would be comfortable with him rotting at GTMO until the conflict with the Islamic extremists is done, as prisoners of war are wont to do. Or just execute him.
 
Instead we gave him a lawyer.
 
Next on the docket is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. He was on the waterboard a lot, and hence that evidence will likewise be inadmissible. They can charge him with the murder of three thousand people, but trying him in a civilian court is going to provide him an excellent chance to beat the charges.
 
Is this a great country, or what?
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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