Eric Holder’s War

[Geee]

National Review:


The Obama administration wants us to believe that one out of 285 ain’t bad.

A jury in New York acquitted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani on 284 out of 285 charges for his part in the murder of 224 people in the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Attorney General Eric Holder thought the trial would be a glorious showcase for the civilian court system. We’d stun the terrorists with our courtroom procedure, win over the world with our mincing legalisms, and salve our consciences after the horrors of the Bush years.

This was Holder’s war on terror. He’s losing it in a rout.

The attorney general’s obsession with bringing terrorists captured overseas to the U.S. for trial in the civilian courts looks more willful and untenable by the day, as the edifice of his legal strategy collapses in a pathetic heap. It’s not inconceivable that, should he win a second term, Pres. Barack Obama will hand over an operational Guantanamo Bay prison facility to his successor in January 2017.

Ghailani offered a brazen defense at his trial. It was all an innocent misunderstanding when he helped buy the refrigeration truck and the oxygen and flammable acetylene tanks used to make the bomb in Tanzania, when he stored electric detonators in his house, and when the suicide bomber used his cell phone in the attack. These are the things liable to befall any young man on the streets of Dar es Salaam.