Obama’s unshared values: Ghailani’s show trial
The Obama administration has decided to make a federal case out of the Clinton era embassy bombings. The administration flew Ahmed Ghailani from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay today to be tried in lower Manhattan.
Jake Tapper did a great job trying to pin down Robert Glibbs today on what should be a simple question: what happens if Ghailani is acquitted. Glibbs, as is his wont to do with any question he doesn’t want to answer, called this a hypothetical, and refused to answer that question. (Of course, if you asked him how many jobs has the stimulus package “created or saved,” Mr. Gibbs would answer with more speed than a college dorm during finals week.)
The point here is that the Obama administration has decided to bring a terrorist onto U.S. soil so that he can be tried for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Fine. But with that decision comes risk, and that risk is that the criminal justice system, which is founded upon a presumption of innocence, renders a verdict of not guilty.
By bringing Ghailani into the United States, the Obama administration is conferring upon him certain rights, including habeus corpus, that he does not have outside of our borders. This is the premise upon which Gitmo was built: we can hold terrorists without trial, so long as they are outside the United States. Once again, the great Constitutional scholar president is found with his constitutional pants down. Failing to acknowledge that Ghailani could possibly be released or even acquitted makes his trial seem like nothing more than a North Korean show trial.
The reluctance of Mr. Gibbs to answer such a simple question belies the true reason for Obama’s decision to bring Ghailani to the U.S. Our naive president is once again grandstanding, just as he did when he promised to meet with Ahmenidnijad, and when he promised to close Gitmo. Mr. Gibbs probably knows that Ghailani’s trial will take a year or longer and, if convicted, will involve appeals that will outlive even the (heaven forfend) second Obama administration. Moreover, even if Mr. Ghailani is acquitted, he is not a legal resident, and would be held at an immigration detention facility or deported. That makes Gibbs’s refusal to answer even more cowardly.