Yes, the worst thing possible has happened. A known Al Qaeda terrorist (the infamous underpants bomber) will be sentenced by a US Federal Judge for his crime after he was given his due process rights by our Federal Justice System. What’s worse is that US Military Commission established by Congress to try detainees alleged of terrorism at Guantanamo Bay has had absolutely no involvement! Oh the horror of allowing our federal justice system to try a terrorist on American soil, and for a Federal Judge to sentence him, no less!
A bomb hidden in the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now 25, caused a fire but failed to explode on a Delta Airlines flight carrying 289 people on December 25, 2009.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds will decide whether Abdulmutallab should be sentenced to life in prison as called for under existing sentencing guidelines.
You know what this means, don’t you? Once he’s sentenced he will serve his time in prison here in America just like any other convicted criminal, such as Charles Manson or the guys who carried out the first World Trade Center attack, for example. The danger of incarcerating him (or any other alleged terrorists, such as the ones currently held by the US Military at the Marine base at Guantanamo Bay, i.e., GITMO) in a US Federal Prison in the US of A cannot be understated. And it hasn’t, at least not by prominent Republicans, like John McCain, and many others. Here is what they had to say in opposition to closing down GITMO and allowing terrorists to be held in US correctional facilities in 2009 when President Obama first attempted to shut it down:
“Where are we going to send them?” Mr. McCain said in an interview on Fox News, just days after the inauguration. “That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.” Referring to the not-in-my-back-yard uproar over the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, he added: “You think Yucca Mountain is a Nimby problem? Wait until you see this one.” […]
… Ed Gillespie, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush, and Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster, distributed a survey in April indicating strong support for the idea of keeping “people who would kill Americans” at Guantánamo. Cable news and talk radio hosts seized on the relocation of the prisoners as an urgent threat. “These are the worst of the worst,” Mr. Hannity of Fox News warned. “We seem to be letting our guard down again.”
John C. Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer and an architect of the detainee policies, speaking on Fox News, said, “Nobody wants to have a detention center for terrorists in their backyard.” […]
“Not on my watch,” Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, declared in another online video depicting frightening images of Guantánamo inmates.
Indeed, Republicans made so much hay out of the President’s attempt to close down the prisons at GITMO, that it is still open today, and the “detainees” there are still awaiting the processing of the charges against them by the US Military. The backlog of cases has slowed to a crawl, unfortunately, possibly due to the lack of credible evidence against the men detained there:
Hundreds of classified assessments of detainees at Guantánamo were obtained by The New York Times. The unredacted assessments give the fullest public picture to date of the prisoners held there over the past nine years. They show that the United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future. The 704 assessment documents use the word “possibly” 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times.
And sadly, the military tribunals at GITMO have not gotten off to a very good start for a variety of reasons:
[T]his week [January 2012], behind thick bulletproof glass in a secure hangar-like courtroom at Guantanamo, I saw vast differences between the two systems. One notices first the physical – the few observers permitted to visit the isolated island base reach the courthouse through a maze of walkways secured by high dark-mesh fences, guards and double barbed wire on both sides. Instead of sitting in the courtroom, observers sit in an adjoining room, behind glass, and hear voices on 40-second delay to allow court security officers to cut off the audio should any classified information be uttered. In the dock this week was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent accused of planning and participating in the bombing of the destroyer, the USS Cole, on October 12, 2000. The attack killed 17 US servicemen and injured many more. With US service members killed a federal court clearly would have jurisdiction over the case, so the government must have some other reason for choosing a military commission.
Nashiri’s is the first death penalty case to move forward in the military commissions. The fact that it is just being heard now, nine years after he was apprehended, demonstrates one of the starkest differences between the military commissions and federal courts – the absence of any real right to a speedy trial. This type of delay would never occur in federal court and greatly prejudices both sides, as memories fade and witnesses disappear. […]
The defense has still not received roughly 70,000 pages of documents deemed relevant and material to the defense. Much of the evidence in the case is classified. After his capture, Nashiri was held in a secret CIA “black site” for four years, and waterboarded — a form of mock execution by inducing near suffocation long considered torture under US and international law. He was also threatened with a gun and, later, with a revving power drill near his head while he was hooded but otherwise naked. Details of his torture, while available in the public domain, are largely treated as classified.
Oh well, I’m sure they’ll get those issues fixed — eventually. Meanwhile, how did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, an admitted Al Qaeda operative, get a trial and a conviction in a US Federal Court in the first place? Well, he was arrested after the plane he failed to blow up (though he did set his pants and parts of the plane on fire) landed in Detroit on Christmas day 2009. Why wasn’t he immediately shipped to GITMO by President Obama? Why didn’t the Military or the CIA immediately take him into custody and whisk him off to GITMO or some other secret prison they operate overseas, such as the detention facilities in Afghanistan? What sinister reason has the administration concealed for allowing this monster to be tried in a Federal Court where he now faces a sentence of several consecutive terms of life in an American prison rather than in some hell hole god knows where?
More frightening yet, why did the senior Republican leadership fail to object to this trial proceeding, thus allowing our Federal Courts to once again besmirch the honor of our Armed forces by actually convicting a terrorist while still giving him all the protections afforded to alleged criminals under the Bill of Rights? Is this some grand scheme by the Republican party to insure President Obama’s re-election in order to further destroy our country? Or do they plan to use this trial as evidence (in attack ads) against Obama this Fall to show how he allowed our Democracy and our courts to function as they were intended to do by our Founders? In either case, they have put the lives of real Americans at risk for mere political gain. Then again, I suppose that’s what they do best.
In any event, it’s a crying shame when a foreign operative of Al Qaeda, who failed to blow up a plane with a bomb hidden in his underwear, is given a fair trial on our nation’s sovereign soil, without being tortured at a secret detention facility first and then provided a show trial governed by a Military Tribunal in a small military base in Cuba.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing about this travesty, and Obama’s failure to keep America safe, this Fall. On Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, of course, the only real source of news you can trust these days. Oh, and in political advertising by Super Pacs not controlled by whomever the Republican party chooses to nominate.
