They Still Want Civilian Trials For Terrorists

Barack Obama and Eric Holder may be two of the most incompetent people in America.  With 279 of 280 charges receiving a not guilty verdict in a civilian court this week Obama sees it as a victory.  The question though is who the victor is.  By most accounts the terrorists have won.

The 36-year-old Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani was convicted Wednesday of one count of conspiracy in federal court in New York. In addition, Ghailani could well serve life in prison for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa by al-Qaeda.   Would he have been found not guilty in a military tribunal?

The political reality is that the prospect of a tough sentence for conspiracy to destroy U.S. property by fire or explosives was largely swallowed up by a stunning verdict in which Ghailani was acquitted of 284 counts, including all 224 murder counts.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Ghailani the first former detainee to be tried in federal court will receive a lengthy prison sentence for his conviction on one count of conspiracy.

"In the case of Mr. Ghailani, there was a guilty verdict, a minimum sentence of 20 years that incapacitated somebody that has committed a terrorist act and because of that incapacitation is not going to threaten American lives," Gibbs told reporters.

Neither President Obama nor Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. commented publicly on the verdict, which other officials said they interpreted as a sign of quiet defeat. The political climate for civilian trials will grow only worse in January once Republicans - who are widely opposed to using federal courts to prosecute Guantanamo detainees - take over the House, officials said.

On the Senate floor Thursday, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said the president should offer assurances that "terrorists will be tried from now on in the military commission system that was established for this very purpose at the secure facility at Guantanamo Bay, or detained indefinitely, if they cannot be tried without jeopardizing national security."

Senior administration officials expressed frustration with the Republican response to the Ghailani case, saying the verdict changed nothing about the legal viability of civilian courts to handle terrorist cases. "Ghailani is an unfortunate addition to a long-running saga of politicization and outright distortion of this issue," one official said.

Some leading Democrats and human rights advocates said the administration should still press the case for more federal trials of Guantanamo inmates, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his four co-conspirators, whose case is in semi-permanent abeyance.

Had the jury found Ghailani not guilty on all counts, as at least seems possible now, it could have resulted in the extraordinary spectacle of the Obama administration ignoring the judgment of a jury of ordinary Americans and returning Ghailani to military custody and possibly his old cell at Guantanamo Bay's Camp 7 detention center. That is a scenario also likely to temper judgments about proceeding with other civilian trials.

It’s time Obama and Holder acknowledge there are terrorists that hate America and want to kill us.  Obama refuses to admit that Islamic terrorists need to be dealt with harshly.  These Islamic terrorists should be tried by military tribunals and not treated as civilians.

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