Khalid Sheikh Mohammed On Trial

Victor Davis Hanson, writing on The Corner on National Review Online, asks,

Why the assumption that KSM and others will be found guilty?

This got me thinking about a recurring theme in articles written over past decade by George Jonas (a sample of which is here). Mr. Jonas was examining (in part) a central problem of high profile show trials, being that there never really is a presumption of innocence in cases involving the trials of men who commit (or aspire to commit) genocide; as a result, trials like this are actually inconsistent with modern Western traditions of criminal justice. In Jonas’ words, these are kangaroo courts.

There are numerous reasons why giving KSM a civilian trial is wrong. It treats the leadership of an organised, international, terrorist group, with legions of fanatics willing to die to achieve broad socio-political goals, as a mere criminal conspiracy. It exposes classified information and the techniques used to obtain it* to examination by a known terrorist and public review in an open court. It proposes that any number of activities committed on foreign soil, tantamount to acts of war, should ultimately be treated as domestic criminal matters within the American civilian court system.

What it does not do is further the cause of criminal justice. It is absolutely unthinkable, absolutely impossible, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will leave the courtroom in New York a free man. The Supreme Court finding that some of the techniques used in his interrogation constitute torture will surely come up, and in a normal case this would sink the prosecution. It will not have a bearing on the outcome of this case. There can be no other outcome but a finding of guilt and a sentence of death. As it was for Saddam Hussein, so too shall it be for KSM.

What President Obama and AG Holder have set in motion is not justice; it is a showy revenge plot, with the added “bonus” of exposing the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror to unlimited public scrutiny and criticism.

Heaven help us all if this pointless piece of Kabuki theatre goes sideways.

(*Let’s not forget that beyond waterboarding lie techniques such as infiltration that may still be ongoing and valuable; if such operations are at risk of being exposed by the trial they will have to be wound down before lives are put at risk; valuable information in the struggle to protect ourselves against those who would have us all dead might therefore be lost or compromised for the sake of defending the indefensible.)