What does Andy McCarthy really want done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Here’s the National Review’s Andy McCarthy taking issue with the decision of the Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Justice Department to hold a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other major al-Qaida figures alleged to have planned 9/11 and other terrorist attacks:
Let’s take stock of where we are at this point. KSM and his confederates wanted to plead guilty and have their martyrs’ execution last December, when they were being handled by military commission. As I said at the time, we could and should have accommodated them. The Obama administration could still accommodate them. After all, the president has not pulled the plug on all military commissions: Holder is going to announce at least one commission trial (for Nashiri, the Cole bomber) today.
Moreover, KSM has no defense. He was under American indictment for terrorism for years before there ever was a 9/11, and he can’t help himself but brag about the atrocities he and his fellow barbarians have carried out.
So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America.
via Holder’s Hidden Agenda, cont’d … – Andy McCarthy – The Corner on National Review Online.
McCarthy has so much disdain for law and so much love for brute force that he says there is no point in trying Gunatanamo Bay’s worst of the worst. We should just go straight to the lethal injection, he seems to be saying. Or to be more precise, in his earlier article, “We should take his guilty plea, then move swiftly to the capital phase and the inevitable death sentence.”
Why stop there? If accused terrorists really don’t deserve a proper prosecution in our legal system, why even give them a formal prosecution? Why not put KSM on a plane, fly him out over the Atlantic Ocean, and push him out from a high altitude like the Argentines used to do? Why not simply send a soldier into his jail cell with a pistol and tell him to point the gun between KSM’s eyes and pull the trigger? If its martyrdom and grandstanding that McCarthy is worried about, then we just want KSM to disappear, don’t we? That’s where McCarthy’s logic leads – a journey to the world of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial executions. A world that President Bush and Vice President Cheney tried to take us to in their construction of a national security state.
A civilian prosecution is a valuable reminder to the entire world that we are a nation of laws. What McCarthy dismisses as ‘theater’ is how our nation avoids becoming an authoritarian dictatorship. By prosecuting KSM in a civilian court, we say to the world that we are not a nation of groupthinking workshops assembled by one administration’s attorneys to find a way to move our treatment of terrorists entirely outside the legal system. That’s what the Bush administration tried to do, and because we are a nation of checks and balances, they failed. With a new government that respects the legal system, it’s time that we manifest that respect.
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[...] screamed that we should effectively take these guys out behind the Guantanamo Bay guardhouse and shoot them. But just because they face the prospect of execution after a jury trial doesn’t mean that a [...]
Sorry, but I didn’t know how to contact you off-line, Michael.
Contributor Bill Dupray has posted an article that references the President in the following way, (the president is the “he” in the following passage):
start quote—
But if he (Obama) hasn’t crashed by then, you can rest assured that as the polls close and the votes roll in, he will hear one message loud and clear “pull back on the mother-f*%king stick you piece of sh#t little son of a whore.”
That is what all the over-confident young punks hear just before they grudgingly admit to themselves, “I don’t got it.”
end quote—-
Could you please take appropriate action, Michael. Thank you.
Bob, the tips e-mail on the right side of every T/S contributor’s blog page is the way to reach any of them backchannel, including all of your faithful editors as well as Bill.
I’m afraid I don’t follow what you mean by ‘appropriate action.’ I read, and commented on what I thought was an insightful, if colorful blog post from Bill.
I don’t think Bill is calling the President a ’son of a whore.’ Instead he’s offering an amusing contrast between the mood of the nation and the reaction of an experienced Air Force pilot to poor flying by a newbie. I think if Bill had meant to cal the president the son of a whore, he would have done so without any intervening similes or metaphors.
He’s certainly not afraid of speaking his mind, nor are most of True/Slant’s enterprising contributors, and that’s why they write here. T/S accommodates a variety of voices and opinions, including those of our users, and we’re happy to have you participating in our network as commenters.
In response to another comment. See in context »Yeah, “colorful,” that’s it, Michael.
In response to another comment. See in context »