By: Gregory Burnep

January 25, 2010

In November, Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intention to try 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators in a civilian courtroom in New York City instead of using the military commissions system established by the Bush administration and ratified by Congress.

Holder’s decision, coupled with his inability to offer a coherent rationale for why these men ought to get civilian trials while those Islamic terrorists responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole are tried in a military setting, set off a firestorm of criticism.

Those who are opposed to the administration’s policy argue that the inevitable media circus surrounding the trial in NYC will give KSM just what he wants: a soapbox from which to air his grievances against America and rally others to his cause. Other objections include the security threat that a trial in Manhattan will pose to the general public, the fact that classified intelligence will be revealed during the course of the trial that could compromise American efforts to root out terrorists overseas, and the concern that the defendants could walk free on a technicality.

Administration officials, including the president himself, have made it clear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will never walk free, even if he is acquitted. Which raises the question: if we’re not going to let him go even if a jury finds him innocent, why even go through the motions of a full, fair trial in a civilian court? While the administration is correct to point out that the military commissions system has convicted just three terrorists in eight years, this hardly justifies the decision to move dangerous terrorists to American soil and award the panoply of legal rights normally reserved for American citizens to these barbarians.

The KSM decision, the impending closure of Gitmo and the corresponding transfer of detainees to US soil, and now, the Obama administration’s response to the attempted airplane bombing by an Islamic terrorist on Christmas Day, are all indicative of President Obama’s desire to distance himself from the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” mindset and phraseology.

In the aftermath of the failed Christmas attack, the administration elected to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a common criminal, reading him his Miranda rights and providing him with a lawyer. Predictably, Abdulmutallab clammed up immediately, depriving us of a perfect opportunity to learn valuable information that could have helped us hunt down and disrupt Al Qaeda overseas as well as prevent future attacks on the homeland.

Over and over again, the administration has reiterated the same tired argument for closing Gitmo: that it will make America safer by removing one of Al Qaeda’s foremost propaganda tools. But it seems the president is blind to the irony of this line of argument. After all, it’s hard to imagine a better “recruiting” opportunity or a nicer venue for issuing a worldwide “rallying cry” than a highly visible trial in downtown Manhattan.

President Obama gave a speech recently in which he declared that “we are at war,” but his actions make it clear that we are no longer firmly on a war footing, as we were in the Bush years, in our ongoing fight against Islamic extremism. Whether or not the new approach will make us safer remains to be seen, but it’s worth remembering this: we tried the civilian trials for terrorists approach in the 1990’s, and we wound up with 9/11. Then we shifted to the “War on Terror” approach, and the homeland was kept safe. Maybe our security successes after 9/11, like the failure of the Christmas attack, were just lucky. But maybe they weren’t. And that’s a very unsettling thought.

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Gregory Burnep is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he studied Political Science.   He most recently authored Checking the Commander in Chief: An Analysis of the Power of the Purse in American Foreign Policy, which  he will present at the annual Northeast Political Science Association Meetings in Philadelphia.   Greg lives in Manchester,  CT, listens to classic rock, and is a diehard Mets and Jets fan.