What the 9/11 attacks exposed is that we’re a nation of cowards who don’t have the guts to live up to our convictions. That’s why Senator Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg complained about having trials for the 9/11 perpetrators in the State of New York, and also why Congress barred the military from spending any money to transport people at Guantanamo Bay prison to anywhere in the United States.
The wound inflicted on New York City from Mr. Mohammed’s plot nearly a decade ago will not heal for many lifetimes, yet the city, while still grieving, has thrived. How fitting it would have been to put the plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law.
That is such a basic idea that it doesn’t require any elaboration. A country worth its salt would be eager to respond to terror and destruction with the rule of law and swift justice. We’re not worth our salt. We’re not worth a damn. I’m embarrassed to be an American right now because we are collectively too scared to put the people who attacked us on trial in our regular legal system or on our soil. The ridiculous alternative military commissions are a travesty and one more demonstration that we were more damaged by how we reacted to 9/11 than by the attacks themselves.
And, no, I don’t blame the administration for this. Everyone wants to apportion at least partial blame on them. Find me anyone who had their back. You won’t. They tried to do the right thing but were confronted with nineteen different kinds of cowardice and cynicism. The president isn’t a dictator. Congress won’t stand up to him when he wants to use military force, but when he wants to give people a fair trial all of a sudden they use the purse-strings to force him into committing an injustice.
It’s a fundamental idea. You can’t have a fair trial unless there is a possibility that the accused will be acquitted. And you can’t refuse to put people on trial because you are afraid it might provoke a terrorist attack. Finally, you can’t hold people in perpetuity without charging them with anything just because you’re too embarrassed to admit you detained them in error, or because you tainted the evidence against them by torturing them, or because they’ve become dangerous as a result of their treatment in prison, or because you’re too afraid to release them in your own country.
I do blame Obama for not taking a stronger stand on the principles involved here. But I’m far more upset with everyone else who has made it impossible for him to even to the bare minimum to clean up Bush’s mess and restore the rule of law.
