20100209

itscalledtheruleoflawpeople

The only problem with trying KSM and his allies in criminal courts (apart from the absurdity of using NYC itself, as Keith Knight pointed out, that leaves them no excuse for changing the venue of police brutality cases anymore) is that the practice of keeping them as military prisoners (under the bullshit term "enemy combatant" invented to evade Constitutional and treaty laws dealing with prisoners) has destroyed, corrupted, or never bothered to gather the lines of evidence that would make a criminal prosecution feasible. Said again THE POLICY OF TREATING TERRORISM AS A SINGULAR MILITARY FOE RATHER THAN A CRIMINAL ACT AND CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY IS THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM!

There is no Constitutional alternative to the criminal justice system. People calling for the military to simply take KSM, the Detroit bomber, and others and "try," convict, and punish them are calling for the end of the Constitution itself, the end of the Rule of Law, and the rise of martial law. Not that there's anything new in that. The Cheney administration spent most of the decade eagerly and openly dismantling as much of the Constitution as they could get their claws on, appealing to a mal-educated public's tough-guy-action-movie fantasies to expand central executive power. And a compliant complacent Congress and SCOTUS happily rolled over and let them do it. (Condoleezza Rice at one point actually invoked the popularity of "24" as proof the American people weren't interested in Constitutional restraints on the government anymore.)

Unfortunately, there's no easy unraveling of the prosecution problem now. What little evidence was gathered is dispersed among numerous uncoordinated government bodies, corrupted by entropic time, and tainted with questionable interrogation and imprisonment techniques. Even though KSM was caught not by a military operation, but by a joint international law enforcement operation, it's reached the point where the best hope for conviction by means that let America remain America rests on the likelihood that he wants persecution, martyrdom, and infamous credit for what he's done. Small favors. At least the Detroit bomber is a fresh case that's been handled through professional criminal investigation after the whole National Security angle failed to stop him.
 
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