Eight Years To Find Our Faith In The Justice System

By Steve Hynd

The news that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other detainees accused of helping orchestrate the 9/11 attacks are headed to New York for federal trial  has all the wingnut pantswetters beside themselves in horror. You'd think KSM was Magneto from the way they carry on.

The perfect antidote to their hyperventilating is provided by M. LeBlanc, guest posting at Attackerman today:

Eight years, two months, and two days. That’s how long it took for the government to get its fucking shit together to do the thing that needs to be done. After all the pleas, complaints, arguments, legislation, counter-legislation, and Supreme Court decisions in the battle to determine whether we will demonstrate our belief in the criminal justice system by using it to address the most important crime that has happened on American soil in the last fifty years, or descend into a shadow world of justice inhabited by those we claim are our sworn enemies, we have decided on the path of doing things on the up-and-up.

...This is what we need—what we’ve always needed, to start the process of healing from what happened eight years ago. Not further blood spilled on the ground, not dark prisons in undisclosed locations, not secret trials existing under a fake framework which is against everything we’ve strived for over the last two hundred years.

Word.

Update: It seems obvious to me why Republicans, especailly senior lawmakers, are so upset. Simply, trials in a civilian federal court are going to put all of the wrongdoings of the Bush years back on top of the news cycle and back in the political limelight.

Defense lawyers are likely to demand release of documents and to bring up illegal rendition, torture, a lack of habeas corpus and other violations of legal due process - and it's all going to be big news just like everything else associated with the trials. The trials are going to last a while - almost certainly well into the 2010 election season. Which means Republicans up for re-election are going to find themselves re-defending their support for Bush's actions - some of which are clearly war crimes to my mind - in front of an electorate who will be freshly reminded daily of why they didn't re-elect Republicans in 2008.

Could the Obama administration be twisted enough that they planned this? Well, they're politicians. But if they didn't, they're sure to be accused of it soon enough by running-scared Republicans anyway.

Update 2: Glenn Greenwald correctly points out that the only detainees going to civilian court are those the administration are sure they can secure convictions on. KSM plans to plead guilty, for instance. Anyone being held for trial where the evidence is dodgier, involving hearsay and missing files, will still get shafted the same old military tribunal way. No matter how laudable that some are being tried where they should have been all along, that others aren't subtracts from that win.

Glenn writes:

A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you'll get just enough to be convicted isn't a justice system at all.  It's a rigged game of show trials.

Which just makes me think even more that these trials are actually aimed at the GOP and 2010.