New York Times

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Military Commissions, New York Times, September 11, World Trade Center

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed plus 4 al Qaeda killers at Gitmo admit they planned September 11

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Anyone remember 9/11?

Anyone remember the World Trade Center?

Anyone remember the Pentagon?

Anyone remember the innocent aboard those four planes?

Someone will have to explain to my family and me what President Barack Obama meant when he said those at Guantanamo will receive, “Swift and certain justice,” why five barbarians were not allowed to plead guilty last year, and why this latest admission of guilt is not reason enough to let them plead guilty immediately at a Military Commission.

The New York Times reports:

The five detainees at Guantánamo Bay charged with planning the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have filed a document with the military commission at the United States naval base there expressing pride at their accomplishment and accepting full responsibility for the killing of nearly 3,000 people.

The document, which may be released publicly on Tuesday, uses the Arabic term for a consultative assembly in describing the five men as the “9/11 Shura Council,” and it says their actions were an offering to God, according to excerpts of the document that were read to a reporter by a government official who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The document is titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” the military judge at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp said in a separate filing, obtained by The New York Times, that describes the detainees’ document.

The document was filed on behalf of the five men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Obama halted the military proceedings at Guantánamo in the first days after his inauguration, and the five men’s case is on hiatus until the government decides how it will proceed.

Several of the men have earlier said in military commission proceedings at Guantánamo that they planned the 2001 attacks and that they sought martyrdom. The strategic goal of the five men in making the new filing, which reached the military court on March 5, was not clear.

In their filing, the men describe the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks and the killing of Americans as a model of Islamic action, and say the American government’s accusations cause them no shame, according to the excerpts read by the government official.

“To us,” the official continued reading, “they are not accusations. To us they are a badge of honor, which we carry with honor.”

Remember the 2,975 that were killed and bring “swift and certain justice” now to their murderers.

9/11, al Qaeda, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, New York Times, September 11, World Trade Center

Why Close Gitmo? Its critics will never be satisfied: Andrew C. McCarthy

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The National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy was the lead Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Landmark Bombings plot and first World Trade Center attack prosecutions. He writes this morning:

A much-anticipated report laments that prisoners “live under conditions, rules, and policies designed” for “incorrigibly violent” detainees. The security controls were found to be “extraordinary,” employing “isolation and lack of in-cell as well as out-of-cell programs and activities.” Even allowing that these measures were in fact designed for some of the most savage of killers, the report nonetheless asserted that the strictures imposed were “pointlessly harsh and degrading.” They included “extreme” measures such as “lack of windows, denial of reading material, a maximum of three hours a week out-of-cell time, [and] lack of outdoor recreation.”

In sum, the report concluded, the detention conditions imposed by the United States government “can only be explained as reflecting an unwillingness to acknowledge the inmates’ basic humanity.”

In short, the federal penitentiary at Florence, Colo., is no Guantanamo Bay.

On the contrary, Gitmo — despite being repeatedly condemned as a blight on America’s reputation by the Obama campaign, congressional Democrats, alleged human-rights activists, European solons, and the legion of lawyers who’ve volunteered their services to al-Qaeda — is a model facility. According to a Pentagon investigation to be presented at the White House this week — a study ordered with great fanfare by Barack Obama in the first hours of his presidency — the detention camp, where about 245 alien enemy combatants are held, is in full compliance with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions.

The Human Rights Watch report cited above was a study of conditions in American civilian prisons, including those maintained by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Specifically, it addresses “supermax” prisons, such as the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado. In these prisons, the government houses convicted terrorists alongside some 20,000 of the most violent offenders in U.S. custody — many of whom are Americans, not foreign jihadists.

The HRW report was completed in February 2000, in the last days of pre-9/11 obliviousness. That fact should remind us of the danger we invite by allowing transnational progressives to define our national-security priorities — as the Left has been allowed to do with Gitmo.

It seems like ancient history but, since history is repeating itself, it’s worth revisiting: Before nearly 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on September 11, 2001, the great progressive crusade was against American incarceration practices. Putting criminals in jail and keeping them there for appropriate periods of time was the 1980s course-correction that led to dramatic declines in crime rates, which had skyrocketed after the criminal-rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

The success of these reforms led to predictable caterwauling on the Left about root causes and rehabilitation, and to the claim that imprisonment causes more crime (in much the same way that we’re today told that defending ourselves against terrorists causes terrorism). This campaign against our effective anti-crime policies often took the form of maddening stories in the New York Times, which frequently and hilariously puzzled over the supposed paradox that crime rates had plummeted “and yet” prison populations were still high. The anti-incarceration campaign also was conducted through studies such as the HRW report, which posited that supermax prisons violated U.S. treaty obligations, that prison authorities were failing to “respect the inherent dignity of each inmate,” and that they were subjecting “prisoners to treatment that constitutes torture or that is cruel, inhuman, or degrading” — that they were, in short, operating prisons “in ways that violate basic human rights.”

It sounds familiar because, following 9/11, this litany was repackaged as the case against Gitmo … READ THE REST

I differ with McCarthy a bit; the extreme left’s lawyers could be satisfied. Yet they would only be satisfied if President Obama made a truce with the Taliban, Congress formally declared the WOT over, the DOJ released all the detainees with pardons and restitution, the Treasury paid their lawyers handsomely, and A.N.S.W.E.R got to perp-walk (in hood, orange jumpsuit, and shackles) the entire national security related G.W. Bush team on to the planes with those last 245 for al Qaeda to take home and play with.

That what we’ve come to, this nation divided and having forgotten the real enemy still out there and coming.