Trialing indicators

American Thinker publishes a lot of warmed-over mush, but now and then something better. A posting by J.R. Dunn summarizes well the madness of putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 conspirators in a civil court in downtown Manhattan.

What can the administration's purpose be here? … The simplest answer is that it makes things easy. It's a much simpler matter to transfer so many generic "criminals" from Gitmo to Yourtown, USA as opposed to a detachment of theologically-crazed mass murderers. Similarly, when some of their number are acquitted, as will inevitably occur, it will cause much less uproar when they have to be released. Mirandizing the Jihadis is a first step in gearing down the War on Terror so that Obama can afford to ignore it and instead concentrate his attention on more interesting tasks such as wrecking the economy and turning the US into an international laughingstock.

By "Mirandizing the Jihadis" Dunn means turning them into ordinary criminal "suspects," like convenience store robbers, who were entitled to procedures such as having their Miranda rights read to them when they were "arrested."

But of course they were not arrested. They were captured in a theater of war. It is past absurd for captives to be treated as unlawful enemy combatants and interrogated as such for eight years and then, ex post facto, be given the protections that we rightly insist on for people accused of domestic crimes. Obviously those protections were not observed at the time and in the circumstances when they were captured. So if they want to, all the defendants can skate on procedural grounds.

It's easy to see how the pattern will work itself out. As in most criminal cases over the past thirty years -- OJ or Phil Spector can serve as illustrations -- the heart of the case will be buried under paper and legalisms. Much will be made of the discomfort Khalid suffered during his "torture" sessions -- the Couric-Moore-Olbermann axis will carry the ball here. Proceedings will drag on interminably, featuring numbing detail and endless repetition, contradictions, open fraud, and bogus controversy. By the end, a bewildered America will have tuned out, unwilling to hear any more. … The verdict, whatever it may be, will come obscured by a fog of trivia, and the entire exercise will climax in a whimper.

That's possible, but it could pan out in other ways. The Obama Gang may have badly miscalculated on this one. September 11 was starting to fade into history, something to be mourned like Pearl Harbor but not a live issue for most people. There are kids in middle school who were too young at the time for them to remember it now. The Bowing President and his Mus-symp brigade want the whole country to forget 9/11 as an act of war.

But a show trial will reopen the wounds. Khalid and company can spew out anti–Great Satan rhetoric at the trial, but thousands of bloggers and media outlets will push back with descriptions, videos, and photos of the 9/11 carnage. Outrage will be rekindled. Except among far-left head cases, nothing the defendants say or do is likely to win friends and influence people — other than influencing the American public to call for their execution and burial in a tub of pig fat.

As Dunn says:

… Whatever they may think, the chain of events is not under the control of Obama and his people. As I have pointed out previously, their activities have served to open a door, a door that reveals only darkness. Out of that darkness will come something that will blow away all the daydreams, all the games, all the bogus little ideals and rituals. We are being made to look weak, childish, and silly in the eyes of the barbarians. There is price for that, and that price will be paid … . History possesses its own dynamic, and it will not be denied.