The Obama decision to provide criminal trials for terrorists is catastrophically misguided. To avoid catastrophic reality, those trials must be stopped.

Tweet

As presidential crises go, the opposition of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to a presidential decision would not normally rank high.  When that opposition is the Mayor’s abrupt about-face on trying confessed 9/11 terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York, it could be the political equivalent of a detonator setting off a series of chain-wired IEDs.

On January 27, answering a question at a press conference, Mayor Bloomberg said, “It’s going to cost an awful lot of money and disturb an awful lot of people.  My hope is that the attorney general and the president decide to change their mind.”

When the Obama administration announced last November, to the shock of much of the nation, that Mohammed and several other terrorists would be provided federal criminal trials, with all associated rights thereof, instead of military tribunals, Bloomberg was supportive, saying, “It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site, where so many New Yorkers were murdered.”

That was before a public explosion of opposition, to a criminal trial, to providing the rights of citizens to terrorists who plead guilty before they plead not guilty, to a venue as problematic in multiple ways as New York City, to a protracted security nightmare, to a staggering price tag, now estimated to exceed $1 billion in totality, and that’s just the cost to New York City.

If Bloomberg’s original support could be described as pride in New York’s ability to symbolically face down an enemy that had brought the city to its knees, then his opposition seems equally parochial, perhaps rightly so out of concern for the city.  It does not address the other fundamental issues that are deeply troubling to all who believe that existential issues of national security – including a growing list of bullheaded mistakes by the government charged with ensuring that security – must not be ignored just because this nation has other pressing problems.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama did not mention the trials.  He did not mention the jihadist massacre at Fort Hood.  He did not mention the Christmas Undie Bomber.  He knew better.    His closest veiled reference was to “values.”

We do not share the value of spending a staggering $1 billion for a gratuitous show trial at which lawyers scheme to exploit every nook and cranny of our civilian justice system and terrorists spew bile for a worldwide audience, a terrorists’ dream recruitment platform. 

We do not share the value of the intentional stonewall that has been erected around the Obama administration’s misguided and incompetent handling of the Undie Bomber.  Members of Congress, so practiced in the everyday expression of stage shock, are said to be truly shocked by the revelations that they are wrenching, bit by hard-fought bit from administration participants.

We cannot, under any circumstances, share the value of asking the American military to risk their lives to fight terrorism in multiple theaters if this is the way we are going to treat captured terrorists and enemy combatants who recognize only the value of American death in their evil cause.

President Obama would like to end the Just Say No Congressional opposition to his policies.  Of course he would.  But he allows no other course.  He does not listen to the American people, as expressed in poll after poll, policy after policy.  He twists the message of Scott Brown’s election to the U.S. Senate into a denial that forces his political posturing into the realm of psychological profiling.

The Obama decision to provide criminal trials for terrorists is catastrophically misguided.  To avoid catastrophic reality, those trials must be stopped.  Congressional efforts to do so are now serious, including Congressman Vern Buchanan’s proposal to require military tribunals for captured terrorists and Senator Lindsay Graham’s attempt to refuse funding for the criminal trials.

All efforts to return reason, sanity and responsibility to the treatment of captured terrorists should be supported, and vigorously, because against the unilateral intransigence of the Obama administration, “no” is the only response available.