Fri May 18, 2012
Aaron Harison
Caving Into 9/11 Terrorists
By Aaron Harison, Washington (D.C.) – December 2009
September 11, 2001 is THE historical marker that EVERY member of our generation will never forget. As citizens, it is our duty to our future that we ensure justice will be served for those attacks. It is also our responsibility as Americans to do everything in our power to prevent another such attack.
But the Obama administration’s ill-considered plan to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility coupled with Attorney General Eric Holder’s unilateral decision to try the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed along with four other 9/11 co-conspirators in a civilian court in New York City makes our responsibility to ensure justice is served very difficult, if not impossible. A slap in the face to those soldiers who risked their lives in the war on terror, these decisions have in fact played right into the hands of the detainees and given them exactly what they want.
Trying enemy combatants in a civilian court – just blocks from Ground Zero – provides them with a worldwide stage to spew their hateful jihadist rhetoric and mock the victims of 9/11. Such a platform does not exist at Guantanamo.
Further, in another ill-conceived move, the Obama Administration along with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Senator Dick Durbin announced that the federal government plans to purchase the Illinois state prison in Thomson, Illinois to house transferred detainees from Guantanamo Bay. This decision does not bring these terrorists any closer to justice.
The Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility is a safe, secure and humane facility that currently houses the most dangerous terrorists captured to date in the war on terror. These individuals were captured on the battlefields and are detained at Guantanamo as enemy combatants. They are deemed too dangerous for release based on known intelligence of their prior activity and their known connections to organized terror groups.
The decision to transfer them to US soil rewards these war criminals with rights reserved for civilian criminals, which as anyone who remembers the OJ Simpson trial knows, are much more expansive than those designated for enemy combatants.
Members of the United States Armed Forces and our intelligence officers risked their lives to capture these war criminals. Once captured, they were detained and interrogated under parameters ultimately designed for trial in military tribunals (tribunals, which by the way exceed all requirements laid out by the Geneva Convention).
The circumstances encountered by the soldiers and officers who caught the terrorists are much different than what those tasked with enforcing domestic street crime face. Everything from the gathering of evidence to witness testimony to methods of inquiry will now be brought into review in a system whose rules were never applicable in the conduct of war. Bringing the detainees to US soil removes the authority over their prosecution from the system that captured them and places it at the feet of federal circuit judges and their individual legal interpretations.
Prior to the administration’s recent announcements, while the detainees were still on track for trial in military tribunals, they planned to plead guilty. But this week’s announcement, in the words of one of the detainee’s lawyers, is a “game changer” in regards to their legal strategy. Guilty pleas in federal court are now unlikely and considered “presumptuous”. These lawyers and their newly empowered clients will exploit every legal loophole in the book to earn their clients’ acquittal and release.
Many of the first responders on 9/11, many families of 9/11’s victims and thousands of concerned Americans are fighting these moves with public rallies, petitions and appeals to their elected officials with the hope that their actions will correct the Obama administration’s misguided course. I, for one, am proud to stand with them.
Aaron Harison is the Executive Director of Keep America Safe. www.keepamericasafe.com
Leave a Reply
world headlines
U.S. headlines
editorial headlines
