Liz Cheney Pushes Myth That Civilian Trials Leak Secrets

March 18, 2010  |  Posted by Danielle Belton

In their rush to push back against Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony to Congress, Liz Cheney's fearmongering, McCarthyite group Keep America Safe continued its attack on any attempt to end the failed national security policies of the Bush-Cheney era.

When it comes to justice, military commissions are slow, problematic and the rulings are regularly challenged for their legality. The families and victims of 9/11 have waited more than nine years for justice, yet Cheney and Keep America Safe want to push a system that has only managed to convict three people since 2001. They're stuck on what people should and shouldn't call terrorism suspects. Stuck on whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others are "warriors" or not, instead of focusing on what's the best way to finally see terrorists prosecuted and exact justice for their victims.

How much longer will New Yorkers and others have to wait? It's been almost a decade since the attacks yet the so-called "mastermind" of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, still remains without a trial. No one has been held responsible for the lives ruined by the attacks. Liz Cheney thinks military commissions can do it, but facts show, they can't. Slow and promblematic, they've bumbled along -- often stuck being challenged on their legality in court -- leaving both the victims and the suspects in limbo. There is not justice. There is no closure. There is no prosecution that would bring the truth out and finally deal with what happened that horrid, tragic day.

During his testimony, Holder compared KSM to mass murderer Charles Manson, calling them both murderers and stating that a civilian court could handle KSM just at it handled Manson. Keep America Safe pounced, again backing military commissions using misinformation.

From Politico:

“Comparing the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the trial of Charlie Manson is a perfect example of why the American people have lost confidence in the Holder justice system,” Debra Burlingame, a member of the Keep America Safe board of directors, said in an interview.

“Putting Charlie Manson in a civilian court didn’t endanger any intelligence secrets,” she said. “When he draws analogies like that, that’s when he loses people. It appears as if he doesn’t know we’re at war.”

Spokesperson Debra Burlingame claimed that Mohammed's trial "isn't anything like trying Charlie Manson." But just as Manson's victims deserved justice and got it from his prosecution, the stateside trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is just as necessary and in some ways more important than the Manson trial. While the story of Manson's victims is a tragedy, KSM is accused of being responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11. An action that has lead to two wars and even more lives lost. Yet he's not been held accountabile. He sits in limbo while his victims wait for justice.

And we have the best way to deliever justice -- our criminal courts.

The trial of KSM is important and many victims of 9/11 understand that. They know that his trial, on U.S. soil, is not only an affirmation of our beliefs as a society, but a repudiation of the flawed national security policies of the Bush-Cheney administration. It is a signal to the world that Americans are not afraid and are using the best tools at their disposal to fight for justice.

Recently September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows released a statement in support of a criminal trial for KSM.

We believe that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the four detainees who will be tried with him must be tried in civilian courts.  We believe that where in our country these trials are held is irrelevant, as long as they occur on our soil where the crimes were committed, where the people who deserve transparent government once again have it.

Our daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives who worked in or rushed in to save others in the World Trade Center and died there, and those in the Pentagon, and those on the planes: passengers and pilots and crew members, all loved our country.  In their names we ask that you honor and preserve our constitution and our rule of law.

Criminal trials work. They've prosecuted terrorists hundreds of times without incident. Many of Burlingame's and Keep America Safe's so-called "fears" about civilian trials are no more than "urban myths." They say they can't handle sensitive information, but The Washington Independent reports that "The military framework for handling classified information is almost exactly the civilian framework for handling it." Cheney, Burlingame and other right wingers blindly back military commissions, failing to mention that they have been slow in delivering justice (again three convictions in nine years) -- when and if they ever get around to doing it.

From The Washington Post:

Military prosecutors are likely to rely on statements the defendants made to an FBI team that arrived after more questionable interrogations had taken place as proof of the alleged plotters' criminal intent. Assistant U.S. attorneys working in the civilian courts have developed a larger body of sensitive evidence, which they might not be willing to use in a military proceeding because of concerns about the legal standards there.

One of the most fraught legacies of the Bush years is the issue of detainee mistreatment that could taint confessions and accounts from informers about other prisoners. Supporters of the military system say they have resolved problems with alleged torture by ensuring that fresh FBI interrogation teams got new, "clean" confessions from detainees.

But in January, senior U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan excluded nearly two dozen interrogation summaries in the case of an al-Qaeda-linked suspect who was challenging his detention. The suspect had been interrogated in Afghanistan and later questioned by a "clean team" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Hogan said the reports were "not reliable" and questioned whether enough time had passed between interviews for the man, Musa'ab Omar al-Madhwani, to have recovered from physical and psychological mistreatment.

Military commissions are not a practial as a solution. Not for justice for those victims of 9/11. Yet Burlingame, Cheney and others right wingers keep pushing the mythology. They don't care about a system that works. They care about creating political wedge issues to attack the President and divide Congress and the public.

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