Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going on trial on Monday for his role in the attacks. The military tribunal starts Monday.

And a big chunk of the American body politic and landed punditry is pretty sure that Mohammed is the one being wronged, here:

On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.

The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.

Let’s make this perfectly clear: KSM is a foreign national, whom evidence points to having planned the 9/11 attacks, captured overseas, in action against Americans, America, and the West. The Constitution doesn’t apply to him, any more than it did to Masaharu Homma or Yomiuki Yamashita or Herman Goering. There are generally-accepted procedures, to be sure – and a society that cares about due process needs to ensure that they’re followed – but they have little to do with the Constitution.

He was not in uniform, not a member of a military group, and not a member of a partisan group fighting for its own nation against an occupier, so the Geneva Convention really doesn’t apply.

The military tribunal system is both legal and appropriate. Torture, I’m less sanguine about – but that’s really not the issue here.

The real issue, here, is that a good chunk of American opinion would rather indict the US than Mohammed:

Whether they intend it or not, KSM’s victimologists are dupes in his campaign to undermine the antiterror enterprise. They also risk tearing down the firewall between national security and the civilian courts, where Constitutional principles could easily bend after some future attack to the gravity of national self-defense.

The proceedings are likely to be transparent, with only a limited portion closed to observers. It is true that this could become a forum for claims of childhood trauma, or a platform for grievances against the U.S., as with Zacarias Moussaoui; they also could degenerate into a media carnival. But that has more or less already happened. One virtue of public proceedings is to show that the U.S. is not conducting the Star Chambers of liberal caricature. Another is to reveal the ideology that irrigates al Qaeda’s violence.

The ultimate purpose of the tribunals is to administer justice. It is a strange worldview that considers such tribunals and the death penalty inappropriate for the murders of 2,972 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and hundreds more world-wide. A society that would not tender justice to a human butcher like KSM is not serious about defending itself.

A guy could be forgiven for having his doubts about that last bit.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under War On Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.