Disgusted...

[Pearls]

Mukasey: 'very high' risk of attack over NYC 9/11 trial - Josh Gerstein - POLITICO.com

November 13, 2009
Categories:Terrorism.
Mukasey: 'very high' risk of attack over NYC 9/11 trial

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said today that it is highly likely that terrorists will attack New York City as a consequence of the Obama administration's decision to send five alleged Sept. 11 plotters there for trial in federal court.

During a question and answer period following a speech to a conservative legal group, Mukasey was asked about the possibility that there might be an escape by one or more prisoners.

"The [Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan] is a very secure place....Is it secure? Of course, it’s secure. They’re not going to escape," Mukasey told a conference of the Federalist Society. "The question is not whether they're going to escape. The question is whether, not only that particular facility, but the city [at] large, will then become the focus for mischief in the form of murder by adherents of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--whether this raises the odds that it will. I would suggest to you that it raises them very high."

Mukasey said the men now to be tried in New York should have been left before military commission proceedings at Guantanamo that were already in progress.

"The plan seems to be to abandon the view that we’re in a war," Mukasey said. "I can’t see anything good coming out of this. I certainly can’t see anything good coming out of it very quickly. And it think it would have been far preferable to try these case in the venue that Congress created for trying and where they were about to be tried."

Mukasey, a former federal judge who oversaw cases relating to the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, warned that a civilian court trial for the Sept. 11 plotters could produce " a cornucopia of information for those still at large and a circus for those still in custody."

However, despite his warnings about a terrorist attack on New York, Mukasey said he thought the legal system could carry out a fair and successful trial. He also said finding impartial jurors would not be much of a problem.

"Understand, I am a partisan of the Southern District of New York. I know of no jurisdiction where you could get people who are better prepared to deal with it, and that includes prosecutors, judges and jurors," he said. "But saying that, if you have to do it any place, that is a place to do it, is not the same as saying and should not be construed by anybody as saying that’s what I think should be done, because it isn’t."

Mukasey portrayed the idea of civilian trials as a reckless "social experiment" that the nation was likely to regret.

"If I thought that I or my family or my fellow citizens had three lives to live, I suppose I could be persuaded that we should live one of them as a social experiment to see whether the result here is one that we want to live with. But I don’t and they don’t and you don’t," he said. "It would take a whole lot more credulousness than I have available to be optimistic about the outcome of this latest experiment."

At a news conference this morning announcing the administration's decision, Attorney General Eric Holder disputed claims that having a 9/11-related trial in New York would endanger New Yorkers.

" New York has a long history of trying these kinds of cases," Holder said. "New York has a hardened system. We have talked to the Marshal Service there. An analysis was done about the capabilities that exist in New York, and I'm quite confident that we can safely hold people there, that we can protect the people who surround the courthouse area, and bring these cases successfully. So I don't think that that criticism is factually based."

Mukasey's remarks were viewed via a C-SPAN recording posted here.

[BC-tinatinva]

The Criminal Justice System Is Not The Proper Place To Determine Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Fate - jamesgalyean’s Diary - RedState

James Galyean is a former federal prosecutor and former counsel on the US Senate Judiciary Committee. He helped draft both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which dealt with the detention, interrogation, and trial of Guantanamo Bay terrorist detainees. He is currently running for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District of South Carolina. ———————–

The administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal criminal court in New York shows that President Obama is not serious about our national security. 


KSM conceived, planned, and launched the attacks that killed thousands of American citizens in a war that he and other terrorists declared. He is an avowed enemy of the United States. The criminal justice system is not the proper place to determine his fate. Our criminal courts provide protections to our citizens that should not be provided to a terrorist, and may actually damage national security.


Just think about the discovery requirements that could be placed on prosecutors. For instance, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, prosecutors were required to turn over to defense lawyers a large amount of intelligence information. Documents from that discovery production, which were never supposed to be provided to anyone outside the defense team, were later found in an al-Qaeda hideout. Let me say that again, confidential documents from a trial in New York were later found in the hands of al-Qaeda. 



Now consider that KSM was captured in a lightening raid in Pakistan. The intelligence that led to that capture has been the subject of a number of reports. However, al-Qaeda would love to know for sure where that information came from and how it was obtained. In addition to that, they may be able to learn a number of other things from discovery in this trial.

Consider for a moment the constitutional strictures regarding coerced confessions. Think a liberal judge might want to explore whether waterboarding is too coercive? Or being held in one of the CIA’s black prisons? 



Even if the prosecutors have developed their case without relying on any information derived from those waterboarding sessions, the defense lawyers will still have a field day with the issue. They will demand access to all of the intelligence gathering efforts used over the last several years, the black prisons, the waterboarding sessions, the renditions, and any information received from foreign intelligence sources. In short, everything. And they will probably get a lot of it. It will be a windfall for al-Qaeda like no other. Not to mention all the liberal legal groups that want to start headhunting for CIA interrogators, Special Forces personnel, and former Bush Department of Justice lawyers. And in the end, if a judge finds the case has been tainted by waterboarding and other intelligence efforts, the case may falter.

Which may, after all, be the point. The Obama Administration just approved new rules for military commissions. The President’s new rules make obtaining a conviction much more difficult, maybe impossible in some cases. The new rules require that a defendant be allowed access to any classified information used against him. This may prevent a number of trials from going forward if the military decides it cannot afford to “burn” the method or source of the information. And since the new rules are now the President’s rules, it would be his fault if the terrorist were not convicted, or perhaps not even tried.

But, by moving these cases to federal court, if the case fails for some reason, the administration could once again beat the dead horse excuse that “it’s Bush’s fault” for torturing them and ruining the evidence against them. And with the terrorists in the United States now, a liberal judge might want to maintain jurisdiction over them. Any subsequent orders by the court would not be the President’s “fault,” even the ordered release of the terrorists to foreign countries.

So, to recap, the President gets to look tough on terrorists but yet respectful of their constitutional rights, releases a lot of classified information liberal groups are salivating for, and dodges responsibility for the ultimate outcome. The hat trick.

It’s true that elections have consequences. Americans should remember that in the coming months.

Bolding is mine...

So we risk giving out intelligence to al-Q AGAIN..and Obama get's to "vote present" on this by shifting any accountability to the Federal court system.. It's be brillliant.. if it wasn't so wrong..

[Pearls]

And this....from a law professor from Berkeley of all places.....

John Yoo: The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda - WSJ.com

NOVEMBER 15, 2009, 7:47 P.M. ET.
The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda

By JOHN YOO

'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.

No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.

Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.

Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.

KSM is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and a "terrorist entrepreneur," according to the 9/11 Commission report. He was the brains behind a succession of operations against the U.S., including the 1996 "Bojinka plot" to crash jetliners into American cities. Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan KSM eventually became bin Laden's operations chief. American and Pakistani intelligence forces captured him on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.

Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the "blind Sheikh"), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.
Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on the future conduct of intelligence officers and military personnel. Will they have to read al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights? Will they have to secure the "crime scene" under battlefield conditions? Will they have to take statements from nearby "witnesses"? Will they have to gather evidence and secure its chain of custody for transport all the way back to New York? All of this while intelligence officers and soldiers operate in a war zone, trying to stay alive, and working to complete their mission and get out without casualties.

The Obama administration has rejected the tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure.

The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.

Stranger yet, the Obama administration declared last week that it would use these military commissions to try five other al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay, including Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged planner of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It should make no difference that this second group attacked a military target overseas. If anything, the deliberate attack on purely civilian targets in New York City represents the greater war crime.

For a preview of the KSM trial, look at what happened in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested in the U.S. just before 9/11. His trial never made it to a jury. Moussaoui's lawyers tied the court up in knots.

All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him. The case became a four-year circus, giving Moussaoui a platform to air his anti-American tirades. The only reason the trial ended was because, at the last minute, Moussaoui decided to plead guilty. That plea relieved the government of the choice between allowing a fishing expedition into its intelligence files or dismissing the charges.

KSM's lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

[Pearls]

Originally Posted by BC-Maura

You got that right. The old "mental illness" card always comes out about this time.....

+++++++++++
Maura

Maura, if you can put the personal fussing aside, what do you think of the op's concerns with this case? What do you think of the article I just posted from John Yoo? If I'm remembering right, you're a lawyer or a retired one. Are you concerned with the information that may have to be given out publicly and AQ acquiring it?

[GirlMom]

Thank you for posting that article, Pearls. Wow... I continue to be amazed that our current leadership thinks this is a good idea. I know I disagree with so much that comes from this admininstration, but this is so far off of the charts for me... I can't believe it.

[Julester]

From what I can gather from all the "left" is the more information out there the better. Somehow in their infinite wisdom they feel that if you expose yourself, you will somehow conquer terrorists......and then stratch their heads in wonderment when that very information is used against us.

[robine]

This ought to wake even the most entranced among us awake.


we need a good military coup

[intheknow]

This is the direction that the left has always been going. Their ultimate destination is not prosperity and liberty, but for enslavement and subjugation. Wait, that's redundant, but their methods are too. Whether it is HCR, Gitmo detainees or Cap and Trade, the end result is the same. A weaker and more vulnerable America with the government having more power over YOU.

[BC-Maura]

Originally Posted by Pearls

Maura, if you can put the personal fussing aside, what do you think of the op's concerns with this case? What do you think of the article I just posted from John Yoo? If I'm remembering right, you're a lawyer or a retired one. Are you concerned with the information that may have to be given out publicly and AQ acquiring it?

"Personal fussing?" That's how you label our response to being called "mentally ill?" I wonder how you would label ITK's label?

What do I think about confidential information being given out? I think there are mechanisms in place for dealing with that. When you have a trade secret case (the formula for Coca Cola, for example) there are all sorts of ways from keeping the information from being disclosed. There are confidentiality orders. You can seal records, documents, testimony, the identity of witnesses -- you name it.

I think people who are against having the trial in NY are using scare tactics to influence public opinion. What a surprise.

++++++++++++++++
Maura

[BC-Maura]

Originally Posted by intheknow

This is the direction that the left has always been going. Their ultimate destination is not prosperity and liberty, but for enslavement and subjugation. Wait, that's redundant, but their methods are too. Whether it is HCR, Gitmo detainees or Cap and Trade, the end result is the same. A weaker and more vulnerable America with the government having more power over YOU.

An ultimate destination of enslavement and subjugation, huh? Just another facet of the mental illness, right?

++++++++++++++++
Maura