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Manhattan TransferThe right's nonsensical arguments against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Monday, Nov. 16, 2009, at 7:12 PM ET

Khalid Sheikh MohammedOpposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firmly in the first camp, is hopping mad that we are poised to make all the suspect's dreams come true. As he said on ABC's This Week: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, when he was first arrested, asked to be brought to New York. I didn't think we were in the business of granting the requests of terrorists."

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Funny, that. I didn't think we were in the business of caring one way or another what the terrorists want from us. The criminal justice system is as uninterested in advancing the goals of the accused as it is in frustrating them. The most vocal critics seem to forget that our legal system exists not to grant requests or dash hopes but to bring people to justice.

Giuliani seems to object mainly to trying terrorists in his backyard. Presumably, he would be fine prosecuting KSM in criminal court in Virginia. Or at least he was back when Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted on terror charges. At the time, Guiliani had this to say: "I was in awe of our system ... that we can give people a fair trial, that we are exactly what we say we are. We are a nation of law." What Giuliani objects to, it seems, is the symbolic defeat of trying these defendants in the same place the crime occurred—hardly an exceptional undertaking in the criminal justice system. In his view, it's somehow rude to New York itself to try the terrorists there.

Of course, if you're really determined not to give the terrorists what they want, you can't really argue for Attorney General Eric Holder's plan to seek the death penalty either, since what they want most of all is to be martyred. That makes Sarah Palin's typically thoughtful Facebook post on the subject of the KSM trial so perplexing. In addition to her argument that witnessing the American justice system at work will lead U.S. allies to "become less likely to support our efforts in the future," Palin ends her post with an exhortation to "Hang 'em high." Here's betting there's nothing KSM wants more.

Both Palin and Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., are also obsessed with the prospect of allowing these terrorists to have an opportunity to mount a so-called "circus trial." They must be awfully afraid of the other side's message to believe that allowing the defendants to utter even a word in their own defense is to risk recruiting millions of new adherents worldwide. Yet there was Hoekstra claiming on CBS' Face the Nation that terrorists should be denied open criminal trials because they "are going to do everything they can to disrupt it and make it a circus and allow them to use it as a platform to push their ideology."

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Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

COMMENTS

We're not going to agree on this, Dahlia. You seem to see the attacks on the Cole, the US Embassies, the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon as simple crimes. I see them as politically symbolic acts intended to further a theocratic ideology, in other words, acts of war.

I'll grant you that if the writ of US criminal law had a worldwide reach your argument would be plausible, but that's not the case.

As I've maintained on these forums (fora?) previously, the US holds Kahlid and Kahdr and the rest of the detainees, in their thousands, under the provisions of the international laws of land warfare, a series of treaties to which the US signed over the years. We will never find common ground for agreement as long as I deny the applicability of US criminal law to these people and you deny the applicability of international law.

-- celhardt
(To reply, click here)

I really think this security concern argument is total BS.

New York City and its courthouses, have been, and continue to be targets. We were attacked in '93, on 9/11, and I don't think the terrorists decided that was enough. This trial does nothing to change that mix. It's not like NYC has reached any kind of truce with the terrorists that this trial is going to break.

Some might say that this trial will heighten the risk further. Really? How so? Because a terrorist might want to do something in NYC to draw attention to the trial? See above point- terrorists already want to attack NYC and have focused their best efforts there. A terrorist might want to attack the courthouse? NYC's federal courthouses are already under threat and have been since '93.

A terrorist might want to fly a plane into the courthouse to bust out and/or kill/martyr KSM? Well, they could fly a plane into Gitmo, or they could fly a plane into NYC anyway. Maybe not a plane, but a truck full of explosives? Well, sure. But that could happen anywhere, at any time. And it did, except it was at the world trade center, not a courthouse.

It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

Finally, horrible and animalistic as these guys are, they are not some sort of super-race of islamic-ninja's that can't be contained by U.S. Marshalls.

-- dbguy
(To reply, click here)

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