There is much angst on the right about the U.S. Attorney General's choice to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others now detained at Guantanamo Bay in New York City in civil trials instead of in a military tribunal.
Mohammed has been detained since March 1, 2003. 2003!! That's six years that the Bush administration had to put this guy on trial and they failed to do so. It's just one more thing that they left for the Obama administration to clean up. Now the right wants to rip Obama and AG Holder for not trying them at Gitmo? Give me a break. It's just another one of Bush's failures they want to blame on the current administration.
I think those folks need to be reminded that one of the things Obama ran on was closing Guantanamo Bay, for which there was widespread support. How can people now say they didn't really expect him to do it, they just liked him talking about doing it?
Maybe the reason the Bush administration never put him on trial was because they waterboarded the guy over 180 times. Isn't the definition of insanity doing something over and over and expecting a different result? 180 times? And how did they expect anything given up under that to be admissible anyway?
Fortunately, I hear that he gave a detailed interview to al-Jazeera before he was captured that lays out exactly how he planned the 9/11 attacks. I don't doubt that will give us our conviction without having to use the information obtained under what has now been determined to be illegal torture.
It just goes to show what cowards Bush and Cheney were that they never put these guys on trial while they were in office. They didn't want to be held responsible for their treatment during their detainment any more than they wanted anybody to know that they purposely leaked the name of a CIA operative for political payback.
Now, hopefully, Mohammed and the other terrorists will be tried and finally, legally, face the death penalty they so richly deserve.
