IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Terrorist On Trial

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Terrorist On Trial


War On Terror: In sight of where the World Trade Center stood, Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard goes on trial. Once again, terror is treated as a law enforcement matter. The administration has learned nothing.



It's still a mystery to us why an enemy combatant and mass murderer captured on a foreign battlefield and facing 286 charges for his terrorist activities is entitled to his day in an American civilian court.

The appearance of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in federal court on Monday is the inevitable result of Obama's decision to close Guantanamo, plan or no plan, and his firm belief that the war on terror, now just an "overseas contingency operation," is also just a law enforcement matter. This is a view that was shared by President Clinton with tragic results.

During an interview with ABC News last year, candidate Obama indicated that like Clinton in 1993 after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, he would treat the war on terror as a law enforcement matter. He has kept this campaign promise.

Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was indicted in 1998 for bombings that killed 12 Americans.

Prosecutors say he helped build one of the bombs. He began his career delivering bomb parts on a bicycle and rose through the terrorist ranks to become bin Laden's bodyguard.

Placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list in 2001, Ghailani was identified by Attorney General John Ashcroft in May 2004 as one of seven plotting another terrorist attack on America. Two months later Ghailani was captured after an eight-hour battle with Pakistani police in the town of Gujrat. In 2006 he was brought to Gitmo.

"With his appearance in federal court today, Ahmed Ghailani is being held accountable for his alleged role in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the murder of 224 people," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press release.

We'd like to see this monster get his just reward, but don't believe a civilian court is the proper forum. Ghailani will benefit from a law enforcement standard in civil court, where rules of evidence do not account for the circumstances of war.

Treating these acts of war like convenience-store robberies is just the kind of action that has encouraged terrorism in the past. It was the treatment of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 that gave bin Laden encouragement to pursue 9/11. He saw us as weak and hopelessly naive.

In that ABC interview, Obama opined that "in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first terrorist attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons incarcerated."

Is that what Obama has in mind for Ghailani? Life without parole? We'd prefer battlefield justice from a Predator drone, or at least final justice from a military tribunal.

The Clinton administration's decision to treat the February 1993 attack not as a declaration of war on the U.S. but as a law enforcement matter was the first step down the road to a 9/11 horror that saw Americans killed by terrorists on three continents without a decisive military response. Obama would take us down that path again.

There's a possibility that Ahmed Ghailani will be found innocent. What kind of signal would that send to terrorists worldwide? What kind of risk is that to take just to satisfy domestic political considerations?

We agree with Kirk Lippold, former commander of the destroyer Cole, a target of a 2000 terrorist attack that killed American sailors in a Yemeni harbor.

"By bringing Ghailani's case into the federal court system without a policy or plan on how to deal with the larger Gitmo issue," he said, "the Obama administration is again taking a piecemeal approach to a major national policy issue."