The KSM Trial, part II -- PTS

Geraldo Rivera of the Fox News program, and the editorialist at the San Francisco chronicle, both recently articulated the liberal position on the Attorney General's decision to move the trial of KSM, et al, from the scheduled military tribunal at Guantanamo to NYC and the civil authorities.  This position seems to be that it is right and just to try these criminals where they committed their crimes, that the citizens of NYC deserve this opportunity to "host" this trial, and that by trying them in civil courts with the full panoply of rights accorded the accused in our system of justice, we would demonstrate to the world our fairness and the strength of our judicial system.  Thomas Sowell offered some thoughts on this reasoning:

The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way— the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation’s adherence to the rule of law.”

This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.

How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda— nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.

Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called “world opinion.” Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States?

Internationally, the law of the jungle ultimately prevails, despite pious talk about “the international community” and “world opinion,” or the pompous and corrupt farce of the United Nations. Yet this is the gallery to which Barack Obama has been playing, both before and after becoming President of the United States.

Sowell's column in its entirety is here.  It seems clear that what Obama and his crowd are doing is pandering to the extreme left (where they also reside) who want to put the Bush administration on trial for its conduct of the WOT.  At the very least this decision is extremely ill-timed  in view of the massacre at Ft. Hood and the fact the perpetrator was a radical extremist Muslim.  As much as the libs deny it, obviously the WOT is far from over.  In addition one of the inconvenient little facts bedeviling these libs is the absence of any attacks in America after 9/11 during the evil Bush administration's conduct of the war.  Revealing more state secrets through the discovery process in an open trial of these terrorists hardly seems wise.