Former Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, who was convicted for his involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, was sentenced to life in prison today by Judge Lewis Kaplan. When the verdict was first announced, conservatives howled that Ghailani's acquittal on more than 280 other charges of murder and conspiracy proved that civilian courts were unable to handle terrorism prosecutions and that he should have been tried by military commission.
In actuality, the Ghaliani trial proved the opposite. The Bush administration's decision to subject suspected terror detainees to torturous interrogations made evidence gleaned from those interrogations likely inadmissible in either venue. Conservatives hoped to legitimize the use of torture by arguing that the exclusion of such evidence would result in a terrorist being set free.
The great irony of the politics of the Ghailani trial, where the verdict was seen as a disaster for advocates of federal trials, is that none of the apocalyptic scenarios conservatives envisioned occurred. The trial did not serve as a platform for "terrorist propaganda." The trial was not interrupted by a terrorist attack. There were no leaks of classified information. The evidence excluded because of torture did not prevent Ghailani from being convicted, and he will spend the rest of his life in a cell. It is telling however, that conservatives argued that acquittal would be unacceptable -- when it comes to terrorism, there's no distinction between suspicion and outright conviction.
Ghailani is of course, only the latest person to be sentenced in relation to the embassy bombings. On Oct. 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 single charge as Ghailani, even though he was accused of "engineering" 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 handed out, essentially the same one Ghailani received, 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 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 creation of the failed 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. After all, it was their guy in the White House.
There's nothing new or dangerous about Ghailani's trial, conviction, and sentencing. His accomplices 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.
