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Moussaoui's Mess
A terrorist's joy ride through the U.S. legal system. The Zacarias Moussaoui legal circus may finally soon leave town, though not without teaching everyone a few lessons about terrorists and civilian courts. In the more than four years since he was charged with six counts of conspiracy related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the "20th hijacker" has mocked the U.S. criminal justice system. He finally pleaded guilty last year, and this week at his sentencing trial the al Qaeda operative got some help from an unexpected quarter--the U.S. government. A lawyer working for the prosecution was found to have improperly coached several key government witnesses, leading Judge Leonie Brinkema to bar their testimony. As a result, Moussaoui may be spared the death penalty and instead spend the rest of his life in prison. The witness coaching was a prosecutorial blunder, which is a shame, but that is not the main issue here. A bigger mistake was President Bush's decision nearly four and a half years ago to assign Moussaoui to trial in a civilian criminal court. As we know from captured al Qaeda training manuals, recruits are instructed in how to exploit the West's legal system if they are caught. The lesson of the Moussaoui trial is that the regular criminal justice system isn't up to the job of trying most terrorists. Moussaoui would have been the ideal defendant to inaugurate the President's then newly announced--and subsequently much maligned--military commissions. Much of the evidence against him was unclassified and could have been produced in open court. If he had demanded access to classified information--as he did during his criminal trial--it would have been an easy matter to seal the courtroom and show it to his lawyers, all of whom would have had security clearances. The criminal prosecution was a missed opportunity to show the world how trial by military tribunal would work. Which brings us to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear later this month. The case challenges the constitutionality of the military commissions announced by Mr. Bush on November 13, 2001, to try suspected terrorists. It further argues that the tribunals are unlawful under the Geneva Convention. A lower court ruled in 2004 that military commissions violated international law, a decision overturned last year by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case was brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver and is being held at Guantanamo. There's a twist, though, that raises another legal point. Since the lower-court rulings in Hamdan, Congress passed and the President signed the Detainee Treatment Act--also known as the Graham Amendment. The law narrows the right of Gitmo detainees to bring suit in federal court; thus if the Supreme Court decides that Graham is constitutional, the High Court will lack jurisdiction to proceed in Hamdan. (Under Graham, detainees can still challenge either their designation as an enemy combatant or their conviction in a tribunal to a single court, the D.C. Court of Appeals.) And if that happens, the military commissions may at last proceed. Oral argument in Hamdan is set for March 28. Meanwhile, as the Administration decides whether to proceed with the death-penalty trial against Moussaoui, there's a certain moral irony in a confessed terrorist being saved by the very legal system that he spent three years railing against. Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-03-17 |
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