The Redhunter

Let's not have an naive talk, either, about how Ghailani is still probably going to jail for the rest of his life so the verdicts don't matter. This will be seen int the Islamic world as a terrible humiliation of the United States and a sign from Allah that he is on their side.

Too bad the judge in this case doesn't understand that we're in a War of Ideas with the radical Islamists:

"You deserve a lot of credit," U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told the jurors after the verdicts were announced. "You have demonstrated also that American justice can be delivered calmly, deliberately and fairly, by ordinary people - people who are not beholden to any government, including this one."

Can someone really be so stupid? Can anyone actually believe that Muslims around the world are applauding American justice? Put another way, can anyone actually believe they're not rolling on the ground laughing at what idiots we are and how we're ripe for the picking?

via Belmont Club, Jack Smith of the New York Times has the right solution:

The real lesson of the ruling, however, is that prosecution in either criminal court or a tribunal is the wrong approach. The administration should instead embrace what has been the main mechanism for terrorist incapacitation since 9/11: military detention without charge or trial.

Military detention was once legally controversial but now is not. District and appellate judges have repeatedly ruled -- most recently on Thursday -- that Congress, in its September 2001 authorization of force, empowered the president to detain members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces until the end of the military conflict.

Former assistant U.S. attorney Andy McCarthy has more along these lines.

So what is the administration to do? During the campaign and after, Obama trashed the military tribunals set up during the Bush Administration. His anti-war base will not let him go back on that. But he also cannot proceed with civilian trials. He can't risk having the next Ghailani being found not guilty on all charges. Given that no less a liberal than Senator Chuck Schumer opposes a New York trial for 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (not to mention almost all other New York politicians, Republican or Democrat), it's hard to see that happening too.

The bottom line is that the administration has painted itself into a corner. The political side of me will enjoy watching them squirm, but the patriot in me is saddened for our country.

Saturday Update

It has some to my attention that some on the left are saying that... it's all Bush's fault!

The prosecution was handicapped in the trial when Judge Lewis Kaplan refused to let it's star witness, Hussein Abebe, testify. Adebe is a Tanzanian who sold the dynamite to Ghailani that he used to blow up the U.S. embassy in that country in 1998. The issue is that the government found out about Abebe from Ghailani himself while the latter was undergoing "enhanced interrogation" techniques. All of which occurred during the administration of George W. Bush. These techniques violated Ghailani's constitutional rights, thus anything found out during these techniques was inadmissible in court.

The left is spinning these enhanced interrogation techniques as "torture," which is utter balderdash.

Andy McCarthy explains that no, coercion is not torture:

Commentators are saying that the witness was barred and the confessions were not introduced because Ghailani was "tortured."

This is not true. It is also a slanderous allegation, and I'm surprised to hear normally careful people throw it around so casually. Torture is a crime with a specific definition in law, involving the infliction of severe pain and suffering. We don't know exactly what was done to Ghailani, but we have heard he wasn't waterboarded. Waterboarding was the tactic closest to torture, and it was used on three detainees by the CIA. But under their fastidious guidelines, it clearly did not meet the legal test for torture. That's undoubtedly why the Obama Justice Department has never prosecuted anyone over it, despite ceremoniously reopening torture investigations against the CIA. In any event, while we can stipulate that Ghailani was made very uncomfortable, there is no colorable evidence that he was "tortured" in the legal sense of that term.

Sunday Update

Another point that I forgot to make in my original post: Attorney General Eric Holder said before the trail that we were not going to set Ghailani free even if he was acquitted on all of the charges. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on November 18, 2009 Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked Holder the relevant question:

"[Y]ou're not suggesting if, by some one-in-a-million fluke, one of these defendants were acquitted or given a short sentence, that they would be released anywhere, are you?" Graham asked.

"No," Holder responded. And the attorney general explained: "I certainly think that under the regime that we are contemplating, the potential for detaining people under the laws of war, we would retain that ability."

In other words, even if acquitted on all charges we weren't going to let him go anyway. So the entire trial was a sham. A "show trial."

You'd think the left would be outraged.