On Terrorists and Bedwetters

If George W. Bush had decided to pluck a few folks out of enhanced interrogation to prove America's strength and resolve by sending their asses to a federal courthouse in Manhattan for a fair trial and a fine hangin', we'd still be mopping up the resultant Toby Keith-gasm of the wingnuttery.

Instead, knees are knocking and teeth are chattering on the right side of the aisle in the wake of the Obama administration's courageous decision to demonstrate that we're a nation guided by the rule of law, not a bunch of chickenshits so stricken by fear that we justify pre-emptive attacks and indefinite incarceration while simultaneously boasting that we're the most powerful nation on earth.

It's not that we've never used civilian courts to adjudicate terrorism suspects before. Marie Cocco, writing at Truthdig, explains:

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the incessant refrain has been that some of those swept up and imprisoned during the so-called war on terror are so dangerous, their plots so potentially devastating, that they cannot be tried in civilian courts or in the U.S. military legal system. But this isn’t a legal statement; it’s a political one. It was concocted by the Bush administration to rationalize everything from its abandonment of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of wartime detainees to its use of torture and other abusive interrogation techniques.

The facts contradict this fiction.

In an exhaustive study of terrorism prosecutions conducted by two former federal prosecutors for Human Rights First, the outcome of cases brought against 257 individuals charged in U.S. courts with a wide range of terrorism offenses was clear: They were convicted and put away, many of them for life. Of the 160 defendants whose cases were finished between Sept.12, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2007, the overwhelming majority—90 percent—were found guilty. Only about 9 percent of the cases were dismissed or ended in acquittal.

Facts can be inconvenient little things when they get in the way of your hysteria.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, puts it more bluntly:

“New York is not afraid of terrorists. Any suggestion that our prosecutors and our law enforcement personnel are not up to the task of safely holding and successfully prosecuting terrorists on American soil is insulting and untrue."

Since 2001, the US government has allowed terrorist organizations to pull our strings in a macabre marionette opera. We've suspended civil liberties, bankrupted future generations, driven our volunteer military to the breaking point, and repeatedly failed to live up to the basic tenets of democracy we've been aggressively marketing around the world.

Enough. It's time to take back our country and demonstrate by our actions that insurgents cannot succeed in destroying our liberty.