Yesterday, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Aafia Siddiqui was convicted for attempted murder and armed assault after she opened fire on American troops in Afghanistan without killing anyone -- a crime for which she now faces up to 60 years in prison.* Michelle Malkin strains to show how this vindicates her claim that civilian courts can't handle terrorism cases, because Siddiqui said some pretty mean things while she was being tried, and she wasn't convicted of "terrorism":
Today, she was convicted of attempting to murder a U.S. serviceman in Pakistan. Proof that civilian trials for terrorists work? Hardly. Note that while KSM named her as a principal in U.S.-based plots to bomb gas stations and counterterrorism investigators traced her bank account to Saudi terror funders, she was not convicted of terrorism.
Right. Infamous gangster Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion -- not bootlegging, racketeering, or murder. It's been decades since his conviction; is it finally time to institute mandatory military commissions for everyone accused of a criminal offense as a part of our new "war on crime"?
There's just a general hostility from some people on the right to the basic notion of due process that I fight hard to fathom. It basically comes down to a lynch-mob mentality, where trials are a mere bureaucracy that gets in the way of a good hangin'.
-- A. Serwer
*Charged by military commission, Siddiqui's sentence would likely have been lighter than it will be now.
