In his show last night, David Gregory of MSNBC--a pretty good proxy for the MSM--seemed to be puzzled and quite dismissive of Obama's approach to fighting terrorism legally. The notion of putting a terrorist on trial seemed like a total extravagance & waste of time to him:
It is a very difficult proposition to try any of these terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, let alone Osama Bin Laden, does it reflect some lack of experience, some naivete on the part of Obama and his team to suggest that they would waste all of that energy and expend all of that effort in such an enterprise.
While I appreciate Rachel Maddow's reply to Gregory (acting legally is not the same as limiting ourselves solely to a criminal law response of police, civilian courts, etc.) I think she, the other panelists, and the MSM in general are missing a very important point, one that Obama made at the beginning of the segment in his remarks about putting Bin Laden on trial:
What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he has engaged in and to not make him a martyr... One of the high water marks of US foreign policy was the Nuremberg Trials. Because the world had not seen before victors behave in ways that advanced a set of universal principles.
Barack has it just right. If Nuremberg--where defendents had a right to a lawyer, could see and challenge the evidence against them, and more (see the rules)--was the appropriate way to handle the Nazi leaders, fiends whose genocidal crimes dwarf anything Bin Laden ever even contemplated, then Bin Laden and especially the lesser folks in Guantanamo Bay deserve no less.
And the reason why they deserve it has nothing to do with them. It has to do with us. What the United States is about and stands for. It has to do with justice instead of vengeance and reason triumphing over power. As Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor for the U.S. at Nuremberg so eloquently put it in his opening remarks:
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the
peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility ... That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung
with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive
enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes
that Power has ever paid to Reason ... The former high station of these defendants,
the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke
retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and
measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from
the anguish of war. It is our task, so far as humanly possible, to, draw the
line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge
these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as
well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task
that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's
aspirations to do justice... They do have a fair opportunity
to defend themselves-a favor which these men, when in power, rarely extended
to their fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that public opinion already condemns
their acts, we agree that here they must be given a presumption of innocence,
and we accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the responsibility of
these defendants for their commission.
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