THE DAILY BLADE: BAM To DOJ: KSM In NYC Is DOA
An enduring leftist meme is that Vice President Dick Cheney was President George Bush’s puppet master. If that’s the case, then Cheney has his counterpart in the Obama administration: Attorney General Eric Holder.
Holder apparently has the unilateral authority to determine that the Christmas Day bomber would be Mirandized and tried in criminal court – without consulting President Barack Hussein Obama (AKA the Commander-in-Chief) or any national security or intelligence agency heads – and that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be tried in a federal courthouse steps away from the site where the World Trade Center once stood – again, without consulting Obama, the city’s mayor, police commissioner or the state’s representatives in Congress.
Well, Holder may be able to control Obama, but not New Yorkers. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly exacted his revenge for Holder rolling over him by riling up activist residents and prominent business owners in the area with an "extremely powerful" speech at police charity event last month about how their lives would be a living hell and their businesses would shrivel and die because of the hard perimeters, soft perimeters and checkpoints that would wall off huge swaths of lower Manhattan.
And these folks promptly gave Mayor Michael Bloomberg an earful, after which the mayor let it be known that he would "prefer that they did it elsewhere" because “[t]here are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive for New York City," a federal law enforcement official told the New York Daily News, adding: "They're in a tizzy at Justice over Bloomberg. It's like a half-baked soufflé - the plan is collapsing."
But instead of forcefully telling Holder to forget a 9/11 criminal trial, Obama merely asked for a change of venue - which means that KSM could end up at a courthouse near you, reports The New York Times:
Federal venue rules provide for wide leeway in choosing a location, requiring only “a plausible connection” between the crime and the district, said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University.
For a murder charge, federal law requires a trial venue tied to “the place where the injury was inflicted, or the poison administered or other means employed which caused the death.” Mr. Vladeck said that might arguably extend beyond the sites where the hijacked d airliners crashed — New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia — to Massachusetts and New Jersey, where two of the jets took off.
For a terrorism conspiracy charge, the list of possible venues could grow still longer to include states where the hijackers lived and plotted, among them California, Maryland and Florida.
The Associated Press explains that “[t]here is no requirement that the trials of professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others be held in the places where the most victims died.” Thus, in addition to the locations Vladeck mentioned, trials could also be held in “Florida, where [the September 11 terrorists] trained to fly airplanes; Boston, where some boarded a jet; San Diego, where several of them lived; or the attack targets.”
But growing numbers of Dems in Congress are joining their Repub colleagues in opposing terror trials in their states - or anywhere in the U.S. - and Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jim Webb (D-VA) and John McCain (R-AZ) sent a letter to Holder last week expressing their concern over the undue burden of cost and increased risk of terrorist attacks created by “[h]olding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial in [New York], and trying other enemy combatants in venues such as Washington, DC and northern Virginia.”
Webb also told reporters: "I don't think it's appropriate for them to be held on American soil” so he also opposes the administration’s plan to buy the Thomson Correctional Center in IL to house Gitmo detainees, for which Obama has included $237 million in his 2011 budget.
The budget also includes $200 million to cover security costs for terror suspects’ trials, as part of $1.1 billion in grants to urban areas to for anti-terrorism programs. Note that taxpayer money will be spent to protect terrorists from Americans, instead of Americans from terrorists.
On “FOX News Sunday” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) pointed out that “$200 million is about four times the startup cost of Guantanamo in the first place.” For his part, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) wants terror trials to be held at a location "where can you try them quickly, where can you try them as inexpensively as possible, and where do you not jeopardize American security any more than absolutely necessary."
Gee, that sounds like … Gitmo. And if Obama can’t connect the dots, Congress will do it for him.
In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) predicted that Congress would deny funding to try KSM in a federal courthouse, and that it "will be done on a bipartisan basis." To that end, Rep. Pete King (R-NY) introduced a bill in the House that bars the use of Justice Department funds to try Gitmo detainees, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will take a second crack at a legislation that cuts off funding for September 11 trials in federal courts. When Graham first tried to get his bill passed in November, it got only 45 votes. But that was before the Christmas Day bomb plot blew up any patience voters had to indulge the Obama administration’s naïve progressive conceits.
Update: The DOJ’s proposed $29 billion budget for 2011 includes $73 million for the transfer, detention and prosecution of (alleged) terrorist mastermind KSM and his (alleged) September 11 co-conspirators.
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