The danger of putting terrorists on trial in a civilian court

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be tried by a military tribunal, not a civilian court. The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby explains:

Mohammed and his Al Qaeda co-conspirators, led by bin Laden, made war against America while committing horrendous war crimes - above all, the deliberate, unprovoked murder of thousands of innocent civilians. The place to try such war criminals is before the military commissions Congress created for that purpose, commissions that even Obama acknowledged “have a long tradition in the United States’’ and “are appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war.’’ The administration’s decision to transfer Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters from Guantanamo to New York, and to put them on trial in a civilian court as if they were ordinary criminals, seems completely inconsistent with the president’s earlier assurances. It is also inconsistent with the announcement that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning the deadly attack in 2000 on the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.

But worse than inconsistent, the administration’s action is reckless.

As defendants in federal court, the Al Qaeda prisoners will be entitled to the full panoply of due-process rights, including the right to discovery of all of the government’s information about them, where that information came from, and the methods by which it was obtained.

“Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials,’’ writes former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy. “They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses - intelligence sources - must expose themselves and their secrets.’’

Technorati tags: current affairs KSM Khalid Sheikh Muhammed Obama politics Barack Obama Gitmo guantanamo War on Terror