Americans to Rally Against Holder 9/11 Trials Decision

By Aryeh Spero
12/02/2009

“Holding this trial in a civilian court in NYC is giving Khalid Shaikh Mohamed a platform greater than he ever dreamed possible. In effect, the trial allows him and the terrorists to hold the Mother of all Press Conferences in front of the entire world. We are handing him a microphone to the world, and with it he will recruit future jihadists.” These are the words of Debra Burlingame, founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America and one of the organizers of the 9/11 Never Forget Rally to take place at noon this Saturday, Dec. 5, at Foley Square in lower Manhattan where the presiding Federal Court is located.

Attorney General Eric Holder made the unprecedented decision to hold the trial in a civilian court as opposed to a military court where enemy combatants are normally tried.

Burlingame revealed that Mohamed’s original plan called for ten planes to suicide crash into targets while the plane he commandeered was to land safely at which point he would hold a press conference justifying jihadi attacks on America. “Holder is giving him what he wants, indeed, giving Mohamed more than he ever dreamed possible — for Mohamed’s tirade will now go on for weeks, protected. We have given him his propaganda victory. Holder has made him a success.”

The upcoming and sure-to-be lengthy court room spectacle is even more nauseating in light of how prior to Holder’s decision Mohamed announced that he wanted to plead guilty and die rather than to remain under the thumb of America. With the Obama administration’s decision, it is now America that will be under Mohamed’s thumb while his liberal lawyers put America on trial and paint the terrorists as the latest victims of American imperialism and interrogation methods.

Aside from the outrage and anger, the rally organizers, like so many in America, feel betrayed by Team Obama. Tim Brown, head of The Bravest, a sponsor group representing many of the fire-fighters, the first responders, who sacrificed their lives that horrific morning, said: “This is a real war. To bring these barbarians into our civil court system makes me sick to my stomach. The barbaric terrorists will be painted as victims deprived of ‘their Constitutional rights’ while America and Americans will be portrayed as the lawless. They will use our Gitmo policy, which is after the fact, to free these guys for the murders they did before Gitmo. And we will have to sit by and watch all this.”

This spectacle did not have to happen. Worse, as Burlingame points out, “Holder referred to this as ‘the trial of the century’, which means that Holder knows it will be made into a circus, sensational and prurient, where leftwing lawyers will do whatever it takes to bolster their careers. How cavalier and indifferent to the pain of the families this spectacle will be. It is cruel. Holder knows this, yet he doesn’t care.“ For many organizers this is just another indication of how the Obama administration prioritizes the “feelings and sensitivities” of the Islamists and others in the world over America and Americans.

New York Congressman Peter King, a member of the Homeland Security Commission whose district is close to NYC and who knew many of the fire fighters killed in the Twin Towers, said this at a press conference announcing the upcoming rally: “This is perhaps the most dangerous decision any President and any Attorney General has ever made. By this decision, the President is unilaterally ending the war on terror and returning it to merely a law enforcement matter.” No doubt, the world-wide media event will “inspire” many radical Muslims to engage in terrorism and jihad seeing that such acts do not bring immediate punishment but stardom on a world stage where a swan song for Allah and the Islamist cause can be belted out. For them, martyrdom has now taken on a new and delicious calling. A civilian trial, as opposed to a quicker and quieter military one, is a gift, a reward – from us. As Burlingame states: “Pushing for civilian trials as a showcase for Islam is part of the hope and plan of Islamization.”

Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Sheikh Abdul Rahman, also spoke at the press conference and added strength to Congressman King’s warning of the danger inherent in Eric Holder’s decision: “A civil case may very well give Mohamed , and in extension Al Queda, the ‘right’ for a year or more to sift through our national defense secrets.” He added, “This is the judicializing of the war fighting”. We are, strangely, volunteering to fight the war not so much on the battlefield but in the courts. This is not only strategically baffling and foolish but morally repugnant in that the administration is, essentially, now treating both sides as non-descript equal parties to a court case and elevating the terrorists, with their incessant ‘treatment’ complaints, to plaintiff status.

The November 24th press conference coincided with the very day Rowan Scarborough of HUMAN EVENTS reported on the underlying but rarely mentioned villain in the captured terrorist saga: “Some of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful law firms have donated hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal service to terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.” Scarborough reports that “left wing activist groups have helped free many, and some have gone back to terrorism and the job of trying to kill Americans.”

Khalid Shaik Mohamed, the mastermind behind 9/11 and the executioner of American reporter Daniel Pearl, would long ago have been tried and convicted, and executed, by military court had it not been for left wing lawyers throwing legal monkey- wrenches into the process so as to jettison the military and acquit them in civilian court.

Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy said it best when he posed the question: “Whose Side Are They On?” Bottom line — they are helping radical Islam. The left has always romanticized and made noble those arrayed against America. As Andrew McCarthy says: “These leftwing lawyers volunteering for the Islamist cause are wrapping themselves in the Constitution to make an otherwise odious exercise [anti-Americanism and collaboration with the enemy] look patriotic.”

Nor is Dr. William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights fooled. “These guys are not motivated by patriotism.” The decision regarding this trial, the court martial of the navy seals, the denial of terrorism/jihad behind the Fort Hood massacre bespeaks an administration whose priorities appear to be skewed. “It’s time for Americans to take to the streets in protest,” Donohue adds.

Holder and other liberals are posturing that this case will prove that we are a country under “rule of law”. Perhaps those perpetually ambivalent about America’s integrity need to continually “prove” and justify America to the world. Those tentative about America seem to have this unquenchable desire to show the Islamists that we hold in regard, and are susceptible, to every complaint the Islamists lodge against us — but we will “prove” our goodness. Burlingame sees through this canard: “What do we need to prove? People have been flocking to this country for centuries and already know we are a lawful country.”

What is taking place is not the rule of law but a perversion of the law. By law and precedent, the case should be tried in a military court – that is its rightful place. By holding the trial in a civil court, we are setting the wrong legal example. “Now we have a situation where one juror — for whatever reason — one juror can acquit these murderers.”

Leading the charge to block our efforts to punish the terrorists and keep America safe is the Center for Constitutional Rights, run formerly by William Kunstler. Those who gravitate to the Center have as their life’s mission the politicizing and twisting of law so that the guilty are freed, any which way, as “payback” to America’s sin of being America. This case will not highlight the rule of law, but the “rule of lawyers” hell bent on deviously exploiting the law, in ways they would never do for an upstanding citizen, to bring America down.

One of the mottos of the Center for Constitutional Rights is “Disturb the Universe”. But as with everything the left does, it is our universe, America, which they wish to disturb, while their sanctimonious universe remains untouched and undisturbed.