BULLETIN:  COURTROOM DISASTER – AT 7:15 P.M. ET:  Conservatives warned and warned and warned, but The One, and his attorney general, The Other One, wouldn't listen.  Now we have, late this afternoon, a courtroom disaster.  From The New York Times:

The first former Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court was acquitted on Wednesday of all but one of more than 280 charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Unbelievable.  Acquitted of all but one charge.  What an embarrassment to this country.

The case has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of trying detainees in federal court whenever feasible, and the result may again fuel debate over whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying terrorists.

Yeah.  I'd imagine so.

The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 36, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He was acquitted of six counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill Americans and use weapons of mass destruction...

...The unexpected verdict by the six-man, six-woman jury came in the fifth day of deliberations and followed a four-week trial in which prosecutors built a circumstantial case to establish that Mr. Ghailani had played a key logistical role in the preparations for the Tanzania attack.

I'd love to know who was on that New York jury.  We can almost see their bleeding hearts.

He helped to buy the Nissan Atlas truck that was used to carry the bomb, and gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to intensify the blast, the evidence showed. He also stored an explosive detonator in an armoire he used, and his cellphone became the “operational phone” for the plotters in the weeks leading up to the attacks, prosecutors said.

Minor things, minor things.  Don't we all do that?

The fact is that the civilian trial rules in place prevented some of the best evidence against this bird from being used. 

Just last month, for example, on the eve of trial, prosecutors suffered a major setback when the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, barred them from using an important witness against Mr. Ghailani because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

The witness, Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he had sold Mr. Ghailani the large quantities of TNT used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam, prosecutors told the judge, calling him “a giant witness for the government.”

This defendant was a soldier at war against the United States, but he was tried like a shoplifter.  Our enemies, both foreign and domestic, will have a field day with this verdict.  They will use it to cast doubt on the guilt of every Gitmo detainee.  (Imagine holding civilian trials of Nazi prisoners in the middle of World War II.) 

We need a new attorney general, and we need to try these perps in military tribunals, where the rules of evidence are more suited to the occasion.

November 17, 2010