This is in response to Matthew Christ’s Monday column, “US should give terrorists civilian trials.”
In a supposed victory for American justice, President Obama has chosen to give public criminal trials to a select group of foreign terrorists.
Let’s look for a moment at what these trials really mean for America.
To start, these foreign terrorists will enjoy the forum these trials will provide them. Ultimately, it may be them on trial, but it is their wretched beliefs that will get all the press. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be there for planning the Sept. 11 attacks and for beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl. In return for his crimes, he will get a forum that most terrorists could only dream of. His messages of hate will reach far and wide thanks to the millions of dollars spent on these unfair trials.
But they won’t be unfair to these foreign terrorists. President Obama will ensure that millions of American dollars go to ensure that these trials are legally sound. These murderers will be given their choice of star representation all in a vain attempt to show our nation’s moral superiority by singling out a few people for special treatment.
This moral superiority comes at the cost of fair treatment for American citizens. More than 2 million Americans languish behind bars in our country’s fast-growing jails and prisons. Scores of Americans sit on death row after being represented by public defenders. All too frequently, they are poorly trained, poorly qualified and underpaid. Innocent Americans are given the death penalty or forced to waste away in prison because of the imperfections of a system chronically short of everything it needs to function properly.
And yet, as Americans are denied justice, these foreign terrorists are given everything they could possibly want or need. Imagine if all of the millions of dollars that will be spent on the security and the legal proceedings for these savages were instead spent on investigating the cases of Americans behind bars. How many lives might be saved? How many families reunited? How many people might experience real justice?
We’ll never know. These trials will take critical funding and attention away from our over-burdened justice system.
Chances are that all of the alleged terrorists will be convicted and probably given the death penalty. Anything less would be politically unacceptable.
Because ultimately, politics is what these trials are about. President Obama has chosen a few foreign terrorists for special criminal trials so that he can use our justice system to prove once again that he is not George W. Bush.
With unemployment rates rising even faster than his approval numbers are falling, the fact that our 44th president is different from our 43rd is really the only thing the man has left.
Of course, that doesn’t make these trials right. The truth is that these foreign terrorists have been nothing but a headache ever since their capture. Most have provided very little useful information and have been nothing but an expensive embarrassment and a rallying cause for America’s enemies.
Instead of being imprisoned, they should have been killed on the battlefields where they were captured. At least this would have been clear, legal and justified.
But instead we’ve locked them up for 10 years, and we’ll have them on trial and death row for at least another 10. And then we’re going to execute them anyway.
And all the while, we will have accomplished nothing, at the cost of many millions of dollars, along with any real justice for the American people.
The war on terror is not an international police action. It’s not a legal exercise. And it’s not a feel-good means for scoring political points. It’s a war. Let’s start treating it like one.
Warren Rhea is a UF student.
