Cannot Defend Terror Trial in NYC

thelastcrusade.com

“Startling!”

That’s how one legal expert describes a recent exchange between a Republican senator and the U.S. attorney general regarding the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and suspected terrorists in federal court.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) in a Judiciary Committee hearing last week asked Attorney General Eric Holder a question that befuddled the nation’s top cop could not answer.

Sen. Graham asked: “Can you give me a case in United States history where a[n] enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?”

The inquiry was followed by an extensive silence before Mr. Holder said: “I don’t know.  I’d have to look at that.  I think that, you know, the determination I’ve made. . .”

“We’re making history here, Mr. Attorney General,” Sen. Graham said.  “I’ll answer it for you.  The answer is ‘no.’”

Robert Alt, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, says that the Attorney General’s non-response raises a question about the political nature of the decision to try some Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian court.

“You would anticipate that any legal decision of this nature would have been highly researched and that the attorney general would have been briefed on the questions of any prior usage,” Mr. Alt said.  “The fact that he couldn’t even answer that question, I found startling.”

Mr. Alt pointed out that Al Qaeda was able to use the civilian trial of blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in New York as an information-gathering tool — a list of unindicted co-conspirators was later found in a cave in Torah Borah, Afghanistan.