A House Judiciary Subcommittee had prepared a full-court press today against the administration's plan to try the 9/11 defendants in civilian court, which may explain their decision to announce that they would be tried by military commission yesterday. Here's an excerpt from the testimony of David Beamer, whose son died on 9/11:
Instead of swift justice, President Obama worries that a military tribunal will offend the Muslim world. What about the effect of this needless delay on the morale of the American people. America has captured the mastermind who attacked and killed us in our homeland and here we and he sit. We have been through enough! We are tired of waiting for these admitted killers to get justice. We are tired of more pain added to the wounds of 9/11. When last month we heard that President Obama will reinstitute Military Commissions, we were encouraged momentarily, only to learn that this administration will not try the 9/11 cases. We are denied even the courtesy of an explanation … It hurts.
Beamer isn't just a random family member of someone who died on 9/11; he's been associated with conservative causes since 2006. Still, his testimony caused the sparsely populated hearing to erupt in applause -- at which point Chairman David Sensenbrenner had to remind the audience not to interrupt the hearing with expressions of approval or disapproval. If the administration hadn't had a bad news day yesterday, it might have had a worse one today.
Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that his decision to give up on civilian trials was out of a desire to see justice done on behalf of the surviving victims. The Republican response, from now on, will be that the administration needlessly delayed justice by announcing federal trials in the first place, because KSM and company initially wanted to plead guilty. But as of now, aside from the general weakness of the military commissions system, it's unclear that they can get the death penalty if they do so.
