The Gamble

The decision to try five members of al Qaeda in a New York federal court while sending five others before a military commission somewhere has me a bit puzzled. I suspect that it is another victory for wishful thinking over common sense for this administration. And maybe also the inevitable result of eight years of intellectual dishonesty and moral weakness about  distinguishing between civilians, soldiers, and illegal combatants, and the state of international law regarding parties in violent conflict.

President Obama, and make no mistake, this was his decision and he owns it, is gambling his Presidency that:

1. There will be no terrorist attacks in New York City during the trial. The possibility exists that al Qaeda would attack New York during a military commission trial in Guantanamo, but I don't think President Obama could be blamed for that. By staging the trial in New York though, he has actually provided an incentive for al Qaeda to strike while the world's attention is focused there. If the bastards want to ensure he is a one-term president they will strike in some fashion then, because a large percentage of Americans will blame Obama for setting up the likelihood of that particular disaster, including me.
2. Attorney General Holder appears confident that a case can be made against the five that will not compromise intelligence methods, nor put the judiciary in a position of having to choose between excluding evidence or setting precedents that diminish our own civil rights. I hope so. I don't have the legal background or the access to the information that Holder has to assess whether his confidence is misplaced. All I can say for sure is that a diluting of our rights under the guise of the necessity to prosecute foreign terrorists will be unacceptable to me and millions of Americans in no uncertain terms. That result would put the nation on very dangerous grounds.
3. The odds are that this trial is going to be a media circus. Any number of nations and groups will have all sorts of incentives to create incidents and issues that can quickly spin out of the control of the administration. Do they have any idea what kind of information ops arena they are setting up? Will they be ready for it? Maybe, but right now I'm skeptical. And once again is this another area where we may see compromise, this time by major American media outlets, that sets dangerous precedents regardless of which party is in charge?

The larger fail over the last eight years has been in how we view the various parties in a conflict. The world consensus that was built in the wake of WWII is not just broken now, it is shattered. The victims of this are primarily the innocent civilians in areas of conflict, but they are also the soldiers who strive to fight in ways that protect the rights of non-combatants in their area of operations. Our failure, our unwillingness, to discern the difference between the types of combatants in the world today is killing innocent civilians while allowing moral midgets, who at best appear to look good in suits on various talk shows, to drone on about how "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

That's just bullshit.

There's no escaping that we as a society, and western civilization as a whole, have made a complete muddle of that though. Mostly in the service of political ideology at the expense of integrity I think. More on that aspect later.