Gitmo Detainees' Upcoming Trial Puts Supermax Back In News

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by: Colorado Pols

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terror suspects on trial in a federal court in Manhattan, as was announced this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, is a bad idea, tantamount to ” ideology run wild.

“We’re going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11. We’re now going to rip that wound wide open, and it’s going to stay open for, what – two, three, four years, as we go through the circus of a trial in New York City?” Hoekstra said today on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

He said the defendants and their lawyers will “bring every motion forward that they can” to drag the trial out so they can be at center stage, and that their objective is to make the trial a propaganda show. “Obviously our Attorney General, our legal system, will try to keep it dignified and civil and bring some respect to it,” Hoekstra said. “That’s not what KSM is going to try to do. They’ll do everything they can to disrupt it to make it a circus and allow them to use it as a platform to push their ideology.”

…Hoesktra said giving the “extraordinary” protections of our legal system to those who, he says, “mocked the American system, who want to do everything that they can do to destroy it,” is a bad decision. He also protested the Obama administration’s decision to transfer detainees from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay to prisons on American soil.

“I’m all about problem-solving,” said Hoekstra (left). “What problem is the president going to solve by moving these trials to New York or by moving Gitmo prisoners to Michigan, to Illinois, to Colorado? He hasn’t outlined what problem he’s solving. I don’t see the problem of moving them from Gitmo. It’s been a great place…”

The latest reports suggest a prison in Illinois may be used to house Guantanamo Bay detainees awaiting trial, but Colorado’s ADX Florence (“Supermax”) federal prison remains on a short list of potential long-term incarceration sites for terrorists convicted in civilian courts. Which, as the workers there will tell you, they are entirely capable of handling, just like they handle some of the world’s most notorious convicted terrorists right now.

As far as Pete Hoekstra’s objections to trying them in the United States to begin with…does anyone else find these to be remarkably shallow? We’re going to continue thumbing our noses at all objective standards of international law, handicapping our moral authority around the world–so we don’t have a ‘circus’ in an American courtroom? Seriously, if we didn’t have at least three of those a month, CourtTV would go belly-up.

7 thoughts on “Gitmo Detainees’ Upcoming Trial Puts Supermax Back In News”

DavidThi808 says:

November 16, 2009 at 12:42 am

That our country is moving forward with these cases as a criminal court. It is a wonderful statement about our belief in the rule of law.

And yes lets see this trial fill the front pages throughout the muslim world for 4 years. Can you think of a better way to get out message out about how America lives by it’s laws.

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Sir Robin says:

November 16, 2009 at 1:55 am

The Repubs are once again, against anything and everything. They’re a party of no can do.

Regarding Hoekstra, not the brightest buld in the rom. What would you call someone who tipped off the “radical cleric” that Major Hasan was communicating with; who told that person that U.S. intelligence was watching them, and specifically, that their E-mail was compromised, that intelligence agents were reading every word of their E-mails?

What would you call the person who completely blew that intelligence effort? Blew that surveillance target? Blew that lead that U.S. intelligence was following to fight terrorism?

In this case, you’d call that person Congressman Pete Hoekstra, the highest-ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee.

It was 2006 when Congressman Hoekstra championed the idea of putting up online, a huge archive of uncensored Iraqi government documents that had not been gone through at all to see if there was anything sensitive in them.

But Pete Hoekstra, as then chair of the Intelligence Committee, sided with conservatives who argued that our intelligence agencies couldn’t really be counted on to go through all these documents. They’d rather just post them all online, all of them, and even the charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy detailed narrative instructions about how to build nuclear weapons. Even the schematic showing how to build nuclear firing circuits and how to structure the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

Even the instructions in Arabic, of course, for how to make the lethal nerve agents tabun and sarin. You can thank the Congressman Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on Intelligence, for pushing to put all of that online, until even the Bush administration realize what a disaster Hoekstra has caused and pulled it all down.

(h/t Rachel Maddow)

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1. Sir Robin says:
  
  November 16, 2009 at 1:55 am
  
  bulb in the room:-)
  
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SSG_Dan says:

November 16, 2009 at 4:00 am

I’m not scared of these thugs coming to trial in NYC. I can’t wait to see them in orange jumpsuits, in shackles, in an American Court.

This trial can go on for 4 months or 4 Years…it doesn’t matter to me.

What EVERYONE should remember is the words of Judge William Young when he sentenced Richard Reid to his current long stay in the US Prison system:

“We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect.

“Here in this court , where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice, you are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist.

“And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.

“So war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow. But you are not that big. You’re no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.”

Found here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/…

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Einstein's dreams says:

November 16, 2009 at 5:00 am

because it would have been awesome to have those misogynist mofos told what to do by a Wise Latina. I can only hope they all get assigned female lawyers.

And they should be in criminal court – they’re criminals, and don’t deserve the dignity of a military trial. They’re not soldiers from a legitimate government, they’re thugs and murderers and deserve to be treated as such.

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dmindgo says:

November 16, 2009 at 8:15 pm

I’m glad to see the return of the rule of law. If that means that some of the detainees end up at SuperMax, so be it. It was built with federal dollars for that reason. I for one don’t understand keeping prisoners, assumed very hostile to the USA, on the soil of an island whose government we don’t even have minimal relations with. That sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.

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1. Phoenix Rising says:
  
  November 18, 2009 at 10:35 am
  
  Cuba doesn’t want them, either. But, yes, if someone really wanted to tweak us, it would probably be far easier to arrange the escape of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (and subsequent infiltration into the U.S.) than it will be once these folks have taken up residence in a SuperMax facility here in the States.
  
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