David Rivkin and Rich Lowry, today, in the New York Post:
UNDOUBTEDLY, the media’s ideological bias prompts it to be dubious about KSM’s confession – for his statements powerfully rebut a favored media narrative, the notion that the Guantanamo-based detainee population is mostly comprised of “innocent shepards” wrongly swept up by the United States and its allies.
This notion is pivotal to the critics’ efforts to delegitimize the military-justice system that features CSRTs, military commissions and the detention in Guantanamo of captured enemy fighters for the duration of this war and their interrogation – all of which have been in play in the case of Sheik Mohammed.
The news of the confession, perversely, has even become an opportunity to renew calls for the closing of Guantanamo and the use of the criminal-justice system as the exclusive venue for dealing with KSM and his al Qaeda colleagues. This is foolishness.
Take the argument that, even if Sheik Mohammed is telling the truth, he is nothing more than an ordinary criminal and should be treated as such. This ignores the revolution over the last several decades in the rights of criminal defendants, resulting in a great emphasis on a variety of technical evidentiary and other rules. Given this emphasis, convicting individuals captured overseas, when all of the physical evidence also is derived abroad, is exceedingly difficult. Thus, trying al Qaeda personnel through the U.S. criminal-justice system would likely result in most of them going free.