Cafe de Mello

Senator Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) plans to introduce legislation that would block funding for the civilian trials of self-confessed 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and four co-conspirators, all of whom are currently held at Guantanamo Bay. This amounts to admitting that Al Qaida has defeated our belief in our legal institutions. For myself, I refuse to be such a coward.

All Americans should be aware that—whether we live in Washington D.C., New York City, Fort Hood, or Rat’s Nest California (like me)—without warning we could find ourselves on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism. And with that in mind, we should decide how we are going to respond now!

I say we respond with a roar of, “Screw you guys! You don’t scare us and we won’t budge an inch! We will not give up one clause in our bill of rights in order to be safer from you. You are not that frightening.”

Yes, Al Qaida and their ilk can kill us. They have in the past, and they will again, no matter what anyone does. In the endless game of “find the opening” (which sounds sexual somehow), eventually some terrorist will find some opening he/she can exploit and will blow up an airplane, a little league game, or a whole city. That is the reality we live with. If we let that reality back us away from the ideals embodied by the bill of rights, then we let them win. The choice is ours.

I choose to tell the terrorists that, no matter what physical damage they have done, they are small people, common criminals who we can drag into court and try for their crimes. They are not soldiers, or martyrs, or anything special. They are simply criminals and will be treated as such. Since we are a nation of laws, that gives them some rights, and we are big enough to give them those rights because they are nothing special. Lawyer up! We don’t care. That is the courageous stance.

Like many of you, I am too old and slow to be any good at shoot and scoot warfare (I was prepared to do that during my six years in the army), but I will gladly man any barricade you can drive or airlift me to. And I will fight at the intellectual barricades that maintain the freedoms that make this country great!

By the way, Graham’s reference to giving the terrorists more rights than the Nazis had is an appeal to public ignorance (See 1 and 2) . The Allies at Nuremburg did everything in their power to create a fair legal system. The Nuremburg defendants enjoyed the presumption of innocence (a right that Graham seems to have forgotten), rights to have the proceedings held in public, the right to give their explanation for their action, the right to counsel (with offices provided by the government and almost unlimited access to the accused), the right to all the evidence to be used against them, and the right to cross-examine witnesses. In short they had virtually the same rights the accused in our courts do.

Our civil courts are more than up to the job of convicting terrorists. According to the Constitution Project’s Laura Olson, more than 200 accused terrorists have been convicted in civilian courts since 9-11 as compared to three convicted by military commissions. Follow our Constitution; try terrorists as criminals in civilian courts. Treat them like the scum they are.

(Note: moving the trial out of New York to avoid the inconvenience and expense may make perfect sense. These guys aren’t worth spending an extra nickel on.)