Thursday, November 19, 2009

Why Trying the 9/11 Terrorists in NYC is a BAD Idea

An excellent analysis of why trying Khalid Shiekh Mohammud in New York is a colossal mistake. The legal jargon is a little dense, sorry.

The writer is an attorney who lays out how the trial will inevitably play out. I think he's exactly right. We've seen this already in the trial of Zacharias Moussoui (however it's spelled), the alleged 20th hijacker. In short it will be a massive media circus, cost incredible amounts of money, give the confessed terrorists an international platform and publicity, and require that the U.S. disclose our secret intelligence gathering techniques. Not to mention setting the defense attorneys up for life financially, and ruining the reputation of the U.S. legal system.

He also speculates on the President's motivations for bringing the trials here, and concludes that it is part of a sinister left-wing plot. On that point I think he gives President Obama too much credit. A plot requires competence and planning. I'm not sure it's a plot, so much as just plain stupidity, naivete, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the world and of human nature coupled with a disdain for any policy or measure enacted by President Bush.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'd rather see them tried at the International Criminal Court. It's reputation has no where to go but up, and when the terrorists are all freed, it would help cement public opinion against international institutions, and strengthen faith in America. All the opposite outcomes of a trial in NYC.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Random Quote:

From a National Review Blog:

This Day in Liberal Judicial Activism—November 12 [Ed Whelan]

1908—In Nashville, Illinois, the human fetus to become known as Harry A. Blackmun emerges safe and sound from his mother’s womb. Some sixty-five years later, Justice Blackmun authors the Supreme Court opinion in Roe v. Wade. (See This Day for Jan. 22, 1973.) Somehow the same people who think it meaningful to criticize Justice Thomas for opposing affirmative-action programs from which he putatively benefited don’t criticize Blackmun for depriving millions of other unborn human beings the same opportunity that he was given.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Another Anniversary



Twenty years ago today, the East German government lifted all travel restrictions on its citizens. Later that night, Germans began tearing down the Berlin Wall.

The press seems to be taking much more notice of this one than they did of the Tiananmen Square anniversary.

I remember the events, but I didn't appreciate them as much at the time as I do now. This was a truly historic event, and was the highlight of the series of peaceful revolutions which dismantled the Communist bloc within only 2 years.

A miracle if there ever was one.

Too bad our President didn't think it necessary to attend the celebration. Peter Robinson says it best at National Review Online.

The Cold War was the defining struggle of the second half of the 20th century — a clash of beliefs about God, man, government, and economics so utterly basic, so primal, that it stands in comparison with the Persian Wars or the long conflict between Rome and Carthage. “My view of the Cold War is simple,” Reagan once famously explained. “We win, and they lose.” And with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago on Monday, that is just how it turned out. Liberty vanquished tyranny.

Barack Obama? He has no idea. No idea at all.

And from George Weigel:

It’s a very big deal, because the president’s absence bespeaks a woodenheadeness about the history of our times: a woodenheadness likely influenced by the classic left-liberal notion that the Cold War was just an action-reaction cycle between two “great powers” (“two scorpions in a bottle,” as a Jimmy Carter appointee notoriously put it), not a moral contest for the human future between imperfect democracies and pluperfect dictatorships.

There have been few moments in modern history when the good guys won, cleanly, and without mass violence; Americans had a large role in creating the conditions for the possibility of that. The fall of the Wall was the symbolic centerpiece of the Revolution of 1989 — it’s shameful and, frankly, embarrassing that an American president is not in Berlin to celebrate the implosion of the worst tyranny in human history. But it’s hardly surprising, given the president’s performance before Russian students earlier this year.

The politics of national self-deprecation — moral blindness wrapped in moral sanctimony — continues.