9/11 Trials at Last?

by: Hopeful

Sat Feb 09, 2008 at 12:47:44 AM EST

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and drew the United States into war, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six detainees held at the detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

...

"The thinking was 9/11 is the heart and soul of the whole thing. The thinking was: go for that," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.

I have always regarded this matter as a New Jersey issue because so many of the victims lived here. I been outraged at the failure to prosecute anyone involved in the attack. At least these military commissions will finally result in a trial, although the price paid by Senators Menendez and Lautenberg of legalizing  torture and gutting habeas corpus was too high.  I guess we should be grateful that someone decided to actually "go for" 9/11 convictions to "establish credibility."  

This is especially true because I do not need to be a government official, "Super-Delegate" or lawyer to know that murdering thousands of innocents was already illegal in New York.   So, why are these questional legal tactics necessary?  The answer is almost certainly to protect those in the Bush Administration who are guilty of torture:

Lawyers have said that two of those are men whose treatment in American hands would inevitably be a focus of defense lawyers in their cases.

One of them, Mr. Mohammed, known as KSM, was subject to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding while in secret C.I.A. custody, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed this week.

Like our senators, I find it unimaginable that we let these terrorist monsters get away  with their crimes, but our justice will be tainted as the Bush administration holds an election-year trial under rules it invented.