When I first heard that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 plotters were planning to plead guilty for their crimes, I thought it was a good thing. I figured that they’d end up getting a well deserved death penalty. It reminded me of David Bernstein’s comment about Sheikh Yassin after Israel killed him.
“The day in which I will die as a shahid [martyr] will be the happiest day of my life.” So I guess it’s win-win.
However Walid Phares warns of a danger.
First, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his comrades will use the so-called confessions deal to build a psychological environment for a martyrdom case: “istishaad.†They aren’t interested in saving their lives (at first, although they think they could) but in providing a maximum damage to their enemy through the tribunal proceedings. They will claim the court is not legitimate, the entire Guantanamo process as illegal and that they are ready to die as Jihadis in the path to Allah. Their first target is to grant themselves, in the eyes of millions of militants around the world the status of “Shuhada,†martyrs, even though they could survive it.
The “confessions†turned declaration of victory will be picked up by Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups and transformed into vital material for propaganda: videos, audio and texts. The “show†inside court will be used for indoctrination purpose around the world. A myth will be set in motion and emotional reactions to the “story†will be mutated into future revenge operations.
From there on, leave it to the architects of jihadi propaganda: statements made by the defendants will be used by operatives online, in the chat rooms but also on Al Jazeera (by callers and guests), and in other medium to widen the radicalization of youth in the Arab and Muslim world and within the West as well. An Al Qaeda “control room†will use the feed from the Guantanamo trials to produce a victory in their war of ideas against democracies. The fate of the 9/11 detainees isn’t the issue to Al Qaeda. By pledging loyalty to the “mission†through the so-called “confessions†or statements they have already sacrificed themselves ideologically. What KSM and his comrades are offering to their “brothers†around the world is an unbeatable series of images, footage and audio — pure gold for Al Qaeda propagandists and ideologues.
Phares does not offer any alternatives or saying (explicitly) that they ought not to be tried. However the Washington Post clearly will offer to help. In its editorial on the topic, the editors of the Post write:
The world is watching, which must please Mr. Mohammed. And he must know that the United States is as much on trial as he is.
The editorial is a laundry list of complaints against how the Bush administration conducted itself regarding Guantanamo.
However William McGurn, points out that the imperfections in the system that bother the editors of the Washington Post so much are the results of circumstances, not bad faith.
What the American people need today is a sensible policy that recognizes three facts: that terrorists present a unique challenge to our rules of war; that capturing and holding terrorists is different from capturing and holding criminals or prisoners of war; and that the men and women who set up Guantanamo did so not because they were out to shred the Constitution but because, faced with some very imperfect choices, this was thought to be the best way to protect the American people.
It’s true that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to close Guantanamo during his recent “60 Minutes” interview. But he also declined to set a date. No doubt he is now realizing a hard truth. While senators can say what they please and go to sleep untroubled, presidents cannot escape the consequences of their decisions.
Reuel Marc Gerecht goes even further. He points out that the problems with the system of handling terrorists apprehended abroad, aren’t the result of the Bush administration’s evil intent, but of bi-partisan consensus. Consider the much maligned rendition program, for example.
Which brings us back to rendition, which, properly understood, is what Americans do when they realize that active counterterrorism against jihadists prepared to use mass-casualty weapons is an ethical, juridical and operational tar pit. It isn’t an ideal solution — American intelligence officers have no control of the questioning, and Washington can become beholden to foreign security services — but it’s a satisfactory compromise. Just ask Samuel R. Berger, the national-security adviser for President Bill Clinton, who no doubt worked through all the pitfalls when he first approved extrajudicial rendition.
Earlier Gerecht points out:
And the internal-security services of our allies in Europe are, on the whole, vastly better today than they were in 2001. Thanks to intrusive surveillance methods (many of which are outlawed in the United States), they are much more efficient in pre-empting the plots of holy warriors traversing their borders.
The enlightened Europeans are more intrusive than us knuckle dragging Americans! Who knew?
I don’t know how to prevent KSM and his co-conspirators from using the legal proceedings against them as propaganda. It would be nice if our media and political class stopped using those proceedings to judge us and instead worried whether the procedures were keeping us safe.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Move them into the Federal Criminal Justice system. House them in Federal Prisons. In GenPop. With some Aryan Nation lifers.
(While there is the possibility that they would bond over their mutual Jew hatred, the prison authorities could also cut a deal, letting the gang leader know what killing them would mean to their priviliges. i.e., an improvement after a face-saving period in solitary.)
Condoning murder is worse than keeping them in Gitmo.
These guys are prisoners in a war they started that has no discernable end. POWs can legally be kept until the end of a war. We are legally able to keep the hard cases indefinitely, since they enlisted in a war with no end being waged against us. In any case we have released hundreds of others, some of whom have been caught or killed fighting us again. Furthermore all their operations, with very rare exceptions, are unlawful under the Geneva Conventions. I really don’t see the problem with trying them by court martial or military tribunal and applying any penalty the court finds reasonable and is lawful, including death. That was the way Otto Skorzeny’s commandos were treated in 1945 when they were caught out of uniform behind Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. They got no habeus corpus rights, nor was there any reason that they should. Neither is there any reason why the scum at Gitmo should. The main difference is that Skorzeny’s boyos were not trying as terrorists to carry out attacks on civilians, like these scum at Gitmo were.
All the protests against Gitmo have been use of law to hamper the US war effort by people who hate and despise America and want to see our defeat, and many more of us killed by terrorists, and by partisan opponents of the Bush Administration who used the issue for their selfish partisan politics while being unconcerned with the good of the country. There are a few more, like John McCain, who seem to me simply confused because this is a war unlike any other we have fought before, so that the catagories of previous wars do not fit very well the circumstances of this one. But confusion is no excuse for advocacy of wrongheaded policies.