The first administration attempt to try a Gitmo detainee in civilian court isn’t going well.
[Update a few minutes later]
More here:
Ghailani’s trial was supposed to start Monday. It has been postponed until today to allow the court to resolve the witness issue. If Abebe’s testimony is disallowed, the government will almost certainly appeal, potentially delaying the trial for weeks, if not longer.
Playing with fire like this is no way to prove a point. Maybe the Justice Department will convince the courts to permit the testimony of their crucial witness. Maybe the very talented prosecutors in Manhattan will even figure out a way to convict Ghailani without Abebe’s testimony. But we are intentionally tying our hands behind our backs and running an unnecessarily high risk of acquittal in a case involving a war criminal.
Is there room under the bus for Eric Holder? It’s long past time.
Gotta love this from the trial judge:
But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction.
Take that, Justice Jackson!
Of course, this sort of noble purist
self-serving bullshitsentiment from the members of the Federal bench would be a lot easier to swallow if they applied it equally to, say, the Commerce Clause and its supposed ability to lend Congress the authority to regulate every most private aspect of the citizen’s life, or to the Supremacy Clause and whether the state of Arizona can technically duplicate Federal immigration enforcement when as it happens the Federal effort is entirely theoretical, or whether a right to gay marriage lurked undetected in the Bill of Rights for lo these 230 years undetected…I wonder how long it’ll take for the motivations behind this trial to come to light? Given that it’s on track to be a major fail, I’d guess that in a couple of years, probably well within time for the 2012 presidential election, we’ll see some prosecutors and other involved parties putting out their memoirs and complaints.
Of course, now it’s impossible to do what should have been done in the first place; give the terrorist a bad case of lead poisoning and throw his worthless carcass on the nearest garbage dump.
It’s hard to get answers from a dead man, Fletcher. “Killing them all” (which seems Obama’s policy) avoids the unpleasantness of a trial (when you insist on treating unlawful combatants as criminals, which is also Obama’s policy) but it greatly reduces the amount of intelligence you can obtain. That intelligence can save a lot of lives.
Lawyers will be the death of America.
The “fruit of the poisoned tree” philosophy is a bit backwards in other criminal cases, too. Some authority commits a crime, but by doing so leads to the discovery of evidence of a different crime – shouldn’t our reaction in such cases be to punish two criminals, rather than zero?
larry j: So then get the info and THEN apply the Geneva Convention – which of course does allow for the summary execution of spies and enemy belligerents out of uniform. If he’s an American citizen – well, doesn’t enlisting in the armed forces of an enemy power invalidate citizenship even if you are born in the USA?
The “fruit of the poisoned tree” philosophy is a bit backwards in other criminal cases, too. Some authority commits a crime, but by doing so leads to the discovery of evidence of a different crime – shouldn’t our reaction in such cases be to punish two criminals, rather than zero?
The idea is to put in place a massive disincentive for criminal behavior by law enforcement.
The problem here isn’t the judge’s ruling per say. It’s the sanctimonious morons who wanted to prove they were on a higher moral plane than Bush. They were the ones who decided that a civilian trial would show just how wonderfully moral they are.
I wonder though, what the rest of the world is supposed to think if the case does dissolve and this toad is found not guilty but has to remain in custody anyway? How does that prove our moral superiority to anyone, let alone jihadists who hate our guts? It doesn’t sound like this thing was thought out much beyond the “patting oneself on the back” stage.
It doesn’t sound like this thing was thought out much
Once a leftard takes a position, they only think about how to defend that position rather than if the position itself needs rethinking. ‘to defend’ meaning any useful lie or spin of truth.