Terrorist Criminal Trials and the Coming Jihad

By Abraham H. Miller

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After the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, the police found amid the belongings of one of the perpetrators the list of the unindicted co-conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.  The list had been submitted to the lawyers for the defendant, Sheik Abdel Rahman,  and signed by Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney.  Under the rules of discovery in a criminal trial, the defendant had every right to the list.  If you read through the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, one name will jump off the page and grab your attention.  It is Number 95:  Osama bin Ladin.

If ever you had to have a reason why terrorists had to be dealt with as foreign combatants, and not as criminals, it would have stared you in the face from the discovery process of Sheik Rahman’s trial.  But there was more.  Rahman’s activist attorney, Lynne Stewart, used her position to pass information from the cleric to his terrorist followers in Egypt.  Stewart was later disbarred and sentenced to twenty-eight months in prison.

Stewart, however, is not an anomaly.  Radical lawyers, bent on using the legal system for furthering a political agenda, will be falling all over themselves to represent the five alleged terrorists who will now stand trial in New York City.  These lawyers will put American foreign policy on trial for the events of September 11, 2001.  Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama — in putting September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators into the criminal justice system — have given the Jihadists an incomparable stage for their propaganda.

What then possessed the Obama administration to ignore the obvious and to try these defendants in civil and not military proceedings?  It most certainly is not to showcase the American justice system for the world.  Both the president and the attorney general, in a consummate act of legal stupidity, have announced to the world that the defendants are not only guilty, but they are also going to be sentenced to death. If ever a national jury pool was tainted, this one was.  In the Islamic world, no one remotely sympathetic to the defendants could ignore the hypocrisy of this conduct.

Obama is willing to compromise intelligence and provide the Jihadists with a propaganda platform because he needs to placate the extremist elements of his political base. By taking these terrorists out of the hands of the military and putting them in the criminal justice system, Obama is redefining terrorism as a criminal justice issue and not as irregular warfare. In this, Obama is beginning a process that will reshape the meaning of terrorism in consonance with the sympathetic and minimalist notions of leftist ideology.

Terrorist trials in the media capital of the world will be a magnet for the inspired publicity of Jihadism.  All terrorism finds its inspiration in violence as theater.  The theater in the courtroom will be overshadowed by the inevitable carnage in the streets.

Terrorists have always wanted a lot of people watching, a lot of people asking, “Why?”  From Abane Ramdane, who moved the Algerian insurrection against the French out of the anonymous Sahara and into the media-saturated streets of Algiers, to George Habash, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who blew up air planes, terrorist leaders have thrived on the oxygen of publicity.

It is inconceivable that the Jihadists will not find New York, during the terrorist criminal trials, a place for statements to be written in blood and punctuated by explosions.

Innocent blood will flow in the streets of New York because Obama chose to make a political statement rather than confront the reality of what terrorism is and how it works.

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