One of the most dishonest characterizations of the verdict in the Ahmed Ghailani case is the idea that it was “an experiment.” Ghailani was only the latest person to be convicted for his involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings.
On October 21, 2001, Judge Leonard Sand handed down sentences of life imprisonment for Mohamed al-‘Owhali, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohamed Odeh and Wadih el Hage following emotional testimony from the victims about the enormity of their crimes. They were the first members of al-Qaeda ever convicted in a civilian court. Those convicted had larger roles than Ghailani in the plot–al-‘Owhali had been in the passenger seat of the car in Nairobi and Mohamed had constructed the bomb used in Dar-es-Salaam. El-Hage was convicted of the same charge as Ghailani, even though he was accused of assembling the Kenyan cell.
The New York Daily News had perhaps the most concise, poetic description of what had just happened: “The sentences were meted out with shotgun-toting marshals standing guard outside Manhattan Federal Court, located 10 blocks north of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, where more than 5,000 people lost their lives in a terrorist attack last month.”
No one called it a “miscarriage of justice.” No political leaders suggested that the sentences received, likely the same one Ghailani will get, were “disgusting” or “embarrassing” or “dangerous.” No one argued that their very presence on American soil was frightening, or that the system had somehow failed. It would have been ridiculous to suggest that because of this sentencing, that the Bush administration had somehow “forgotten” that the U.S. was at war with al-Qaeda, barely a month after the biggest foreign attack on U.S. soil since the war of 1812. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most of the people reading this don’t even remember this happening.
The lackluster military tribunals wouldn’t be announced for another few weeks, but even in the years following, only three military commissions would be seen to their conclusion, as hundreds of other convictions were secured in civilian courts. Republicans controlled Congress and could have passed legislation curtailing Bush’s ability to choose which forum to try suspected terrorists, but they didn’t. It wasn’t even suggested.
That of course, was when we had a Republican president. Since Obama took office, the GOP has approached national security politics the way it has handled everything else–making Obama’s defeat its main priority. The GOP has been willing to sacrifice their own accomplishments and ideas if it meant dealing a blow to the administration, even to the point of suggesting Obama’s disappointing continuity with Bush-era policies represent some radical departure from his predecessor. So undermining the American legal system by suggesting it’s too frail to do what it has done hundreds of times before seems like an afterthought.
But we shouldn’t pretend that there’s anything new or dangerous about what happened two days ago. The first members of al-Qaeda were sentenced in a civilian court while the dust still choked lower Manhattan, while New Yorkers could still feel the tickle of ashes in their nostrils as they walked down the street. It’s distressing to imagine that in some ways, that was a more sane time.
