Monday, November 16, 2009

Is This Really the Reason?

Andy McCarthy was the prosecutor who got Sheik Abdul Rahman convicted in the first World Trade Tower bombing. He also is of the opinion that the decision to bring the 9/11 terrorists to New York is really a ploy to embarrass Bush and both destroy his legacy and the CIA. He writes:

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder - and his boss - had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department's obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the "reckoning" that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign.

It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring "torture" and "war crimes" indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama's base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.

Today's announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses - intelligence sources - must expose themselves and their secrets.

There's more at the link where McCarthy explains that the terrorists have already confessed, they have no defense, and that the only purpose of going through a highly public trial is to produce an ideological coup against the hated Bushies and the CIA. It's pretty depressing to reflect on the possibility that a man with such antipathies occupies the highest office in the land.

RLC