The White House seems intent on trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other terrorist detainees in the US, though they seem less clear on why. They even hold out hope that they’ll get the venue they want in New York despite growing opposition to the move.
Obviously aware that this agenda at least appears to work at cross purposes with security concerns, the White House messaging on the topic is all tough talk while studiously avoiding the reasons one might choose this approach because they’re deeply unpopular. This leaves them dancing around the point because they’re afraid to actually make an argument in support of the decisions they’re defending.
In other words, the only reason you’d move detainees from military tribunals to civilian courts is to give them additional rights. But there isn’t really a burning need to confer these additional rights while there is in fact a threat posed by doing so and people know it. That leaves them making promises about outcomes instead of demonstrating some need for this new process.
Robert Gibbs gets all fire-and-brimstone about how KSM is going to meet his maker (though only probably due to execution) but gives no justification for the assertion that a US civilian courtroom is the best place to bring him to justice except to say that it was the judgment of the Attorney General.
Gibbs seems so insistent that the process will be produce that outcome that it almost seems like an admission that there’s a greater risk of failing to do so (no one has to defend a military commisions’ ability to convict on Sunday shows in spite of a mixed record).
Putting aside the fact that declaring the verdict in advance makes the exercise look like a show trial, most opponents aren’t even arguing that KSM will be acquitted. If the White House is worried about that turf, then things are pretty bad because they’re not even disputing the conclusions that the trials will provide platforms for jihadist propaganda and they’ll be costly and impractical.
Now of course there’s a leftist cabal that believes (blindly) that civilian trials are needed to better serve the ideal of due process, but since the administration is running up against reality in so many ways on this one, don’t they owe it to themselves if not the rest of us to step back for a second and ask, “why are we doing this?” Paging Eric Holder.
