http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/schumer-terror-trial-could-cost-nyc-hundreds-of-millions-1.1683187
I usually lean far to the left when it comes to politics, but can someone explain to me again why these guys are being tried by means of Military Tribunal?
Terrible idea - Obama and the AG are totally wrong on this.
But hey, looks like most of my Obama predictions from the thread when he was president-elect are coming true. That is why I hated the fact that an unproven politician was being turned into a T-shirt pop culture icon just because of his race.
a military tribunal does not work the same as a normal court. you are not protected under the constitution the same way, so they are probably doing it on purpose to assure they get a specific kind of outcome from the case.
a military tribunal does not work the same as a normal court. you are not protected under the constitution the same way, so they are probably doing it on purpose to assure they get a specific kind of outcome from the case.
I understand that a military tribunal does not afford the same type of case, but do these guys really deserve a regular trial? If the US was able to capture some of the Kamikazee pilots that attacked Pearl Harbor do you think that they\'d be afforded this type of a trial?
Kamikazee pilots did not attack Perl Harbour.
While there was some moral justification to the Nurenburg trials - the defendants, based off the society they were from - should have known what they were doing was wrong.
The corrisponding Japanse War Crimes trials were a bit of a black mark, with a few dozen generals being hung for following orders, in a society where they would have killed themselves had they not followed orders.
Neither of those points are relivant to trying alleged terrorists. It is also note worthy that will when US/Allied forces in Iraq are accused of killing civilians, that recieves major air-time in the region; however the court martials (and they are all court martialed) of those suspects in the US don\'t.
If the intent in trying the suspects is to win over popular favour in the middle east, I don\'t think that it will go very far. Supporting the revolutionaries in Iran, or doing more to support Palestine; particularly the blockade of Gaza, and illegal settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Would probably do alot more to remove the cause (hatred of America), and therefore the effects, of terrorism.
I mean if they really want to set up a caliphate somewhere as long as we can get a non-agretion/alliance with them, what is it to us? Who are we to dicate morals or theories of goverment to the rest of the world? The US may be pretty powerful, but we have a very checkerd past and have support some pretty burtal regimes and policies around the world.
if you really want to read the total BS these military tribunals are head over to salon.com and read any of the stuff greenwald has written on the subject
Basically Our Government is choosing to try defendants where they know they can get a conviction.
This is why some were given Federal court trials while others are being tried in military tribunals and others are just being held indefinitely without charge
these are sham show trials. Americans should be ashamed of this total disrespect for due process.
Basically is boils down to the fact that we as a nation tortured and did all other sorts of illegal things in order to get some of these people. They do not want to have to justify that in Federal court because those guys will walk on that alone. So they cook up the military tribunals so hearsay and coerced testimony are admissible.
This doesn\'t ven broach the topic of all the other folks who have been imprisoned in Cuba without charges. We even held a reporter from Al Jezzera for over 7 years without a charge. He was recently released. The topic of his torture and abuse ? Not Al queda but Al Jeezera. How the tv station works etc etc.
It is the death of the rule of law in this country and it is truly sad. the terrorists have won. Our president argues that he can hold people without charges indefinitely, citizens and non-citizens alike. we are currently hold over 70 yemeni men in cuba how have been cleared of any wrong doing. They were never charged and were cleared for release by the bush admin and still they are held. it is disgraceful.
Americans love to point to North Korea or Iran and say we are better because we don\'t imprison people without trial, we don\'t lock up journalists etc etc. Well it is all total BS because we do, and what makes it even worse is that we try to claim the moral high ground on these things.
Americans love to point to North Korea or Iran and say we are better because we don\'t imprison people without trial, we don\'t lock up journalists etc etc. Well it is all total BS because we do, and what makes it even worse is that we try to claim the moral high ground on these things.
I see what you\'re getting at here, but this isn\'t exactly an apples to apples comparison.
A government like North Korea or Iran will imprison people with out trial as standard procedure. Go out and commit a crime in this country and you WILL in fact be afforded to due process. Hell, with most arrests you go home that same night.
In our response to this terrorist attack, we\'re charting new territory. Is this a civilian crime or an act of war? What really applies here?
Wall Street Journal editorial on the subject:
The Ramzi Yousef Standard
The Administration has ways of making terrorists not talk.
The failed terrorist attack aboard Northwest Flight 253 is proving to be highly educational, not least about the Obama Administration and its pre-September 11 antiterror worldview. Yesterday, the White House reversed itself on repatriating Guantanamo detainees to chaotic Yemen, a step in the right direction. Now if it would only revisit its Ramzi Yousef standard for interrogating captured terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Ramzi Yousef, you may recall, was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who is now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison in Colorado. The Obama Administration likes to cite his arrest, conviction and imprisonment as a model for its faith that the criminal justice system is the best way to handle terrorist detainees.
"Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists. The record makes that clear," said President Obama last May 21 at the National Archives. "Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. He was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons."
On June 9, 2009, the Justice Department repeated the claim in a fact sheet arguing for handling terrorists in criminal courts:
"1993 World Trade Center Bombing: After two trials, in 1993 and 1997, six defendants were convicted and sentenced principally to life in prison for detonating a truck bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. One of the defendants convicted at the second trial was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the attack."
The World Trade Center trials were successful in winning convictions, and they were understandable because at the time we didn\'t understand the war we were in. But more than a decade later, the real news in these Administration statements is what they don\'t claim: Whether Ramzi Yousef told U.S. interrogators anything of actionable value about al Qaeda and its future terror plans.
We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef\'s uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef\'s co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.
Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM\'s plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn\'t surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don\'t recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.
All of this is directly relevant to the Administration\'s rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.
John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism official, tried to defend the criminal indictment on the Sunday talk shows but mainly revealed the Administration\'s confusion about the law and the uses of interrogation. Asked by David Gregory on NBC\'s "Meet the Press" why Abdulmutallab wasn\'t named an enemy combatant, Mr. Brennan said, "Well, because, first of all, we\'re a country of laws, and what we\'re going to do is to make sure that we treat each individual case appropriately."
But there is nothing illegal about holding an enemy combatant indefinitely, as the Supreme Court has upheld and as the Obama Administration has argued in court.
When Mr. Gregory pressed about "additional intelligence that could be gleaned" by interrogation, Mr. Brennan replied:
"Well, first of all, we have different ways of obtaining information from individuals according to that criminal process. A lot of people, as they understand what they\'re facing and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, we\'re going to pursue that. So?and we are continuing to look at ways that we can extract that information from him."
A plea agreement? Mr. Brennan seems to be saying that now that he has a public defender, Abdulmutallab has clammed up. But the Administration might be able to coax him to talk if it offers him a lower sentence or some kind of other legal concession, even though he tried to kill nearly 300 people aboard an American airliner.
In other words, because the Obama Administration is loath to interrogate terrorists outside the criminal justice system, our only lever to get them to talk is offering a legal reprieve. This is bizarre to say the least, and self-destructive if it turns out that Abdulmutallab has information that could help prevent future attacks.
Mr. Brennan\'s other defense on Sunday was that the Bush Administration also prosecuted terrorists as criminals on occasion, in particular shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui. But Reid was captured only months after 9/11 when the system of military commissions wasn\'t in place, and Moussaoui\'s trial was a legal fiasco that took years to prosecute. In neither case did they provide intelligence that revealed anything close to what KSM did about al Qaeda.
The lesson of these cases, like that of Ramzi Yousef, is not that the criminal justice system can sometimes convict terrorists. It is that criminal prosecution is far less vital to U.S. security than is conducting the interrogations that can yield information that saves innocent lives.
KIMDM:
Yes, these are show trails, as evidenced by the fact that the adminstration has admited that even if the suspects (not really the correct term) are aquitted by the courts, they will not be released. Which means guilty -> "legal" life-imprisionment, not guilty-> illegal life-imprisonment.
As for the arresting/designating enemy combatant:
I have always been appaled at the idea of the enemy combatant in a war like this. I understand the historical perceptive in a war between nations - the length of the imprisionment is the length of war, see Geneva Convetions. However in an asymetrical war between nations and non-nation groups, the term is synonomous with "indefinate impriosment"
Therefore, I think that as a matter of national policy, when the suspect is captured in an area where US law is applicable, they should be afforded the same rights and garuntees as a murder, theif, or arsionist would if captured in Hartford. The only difference is the crime which they stand accused of.
...If they are captured on a "battlefield" outside of the scope of US law, then, fine, threat them as enemy combatants, but do so in a humane and dignified manor such that impriosiment does not further radicalized them...like Gitmo obivously does.
Spelling is for wussies.