Former Gitmo detainee and now convicted terrorist Ahmed Ghailani, who was tried in connection with the 1997 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, was meant to be a test case for future terrorism trials in federal court. That framing is already strange -- there have been hundreds of terrorists convicted in federal courts, far more than in the alternative military commissions. Nevertheless, you still see newspapers printing paragraphs like this one:
The next morning, the judge gave the jury a new instruction, including key language sought by the defense. Late that afternoon, Mr. Ghailani was acquitted of more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy, while being convicted of just one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. The jury also found that his conduct had directly caused the death of a person, which meant that he could receive life imprisonment when he is sentenced next Tuesday.
The jury has not explained how it reached that decision, and with conjecture that the verdict reflected a compromise by a sharply divided panel, no one knows what the jurors had believed about Mr. Ghailani's guilt or innocence.
Still, the verdict was a surprising counterpoint to the overwhelming number of convictions in similar terrorism trials in the United States, and has deepened the debate over the use of civilian courts for terrorism detainees.
How exactly does another terrorism conviction in civilian court become a "counterpoint" to all the other hundreds of terrorism convictions in civilian courts? The artifice of journalistic objectivity becomes harder to preserve when the poles of political debate are premised on falsehoods. So what you end up with is a reporter trying to explain that despite the fact that the prosecution ended in a conviction, the dominant political narrative is that it was a failure because prosecutors didn't secure convictions on all counts. That narrative relies in part on another falsehood, that a military commission would have allowed evidence gleaned through torture that a federal court would not have.
Obviously some credit is due to the administration, which botched the politics of the trial, and has managed to lose an argument over the use of civilian trials for terrorist suspects even though the facts are on their side. The evidence that was not introduced at trial, such as Ghailani's admission that he was told the explosives would be used to attack an embassy, suggest he is guilty of more crimes than he was convicted of. But the blame for the failure to convict Ghailani of more than just the single count lies more with the policy-makers who approved his being tortured than it does with the Justice Department lawyers who had to do their jobs in a court of law rather than a black site.
