Vanity Fair magazine contributor and former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald condemns the Republican response to the Boston Marathon bombing in a sharply worded critique posted April 26 on vanityfair.com. Read it here.
After slapping down a Glenn Beck-promoted conspiracy centered around erroneous reporting about Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national who, for a few hours after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, was mentioned as a possible suspect, Eichenwald focuses on how dishonesty and hypocrisy characterize Republican demands that the Obama administration declare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an enemy combatant and deny him his constitutional rights. Referring to numerous examples, from Zacarias Moussaoui, whom the media often mislabeled the 20th 9/11 hijacker, to shoebomber Richard Reid, would-be presidential assassin Ahmed Omar Abu Ali and Iyman Faris, a naturalized citizen (like Tsarnaev) who plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, Eichenwald points out how the Bush administration successfully tried hundreds of terrorism suspects as criminals in civilian courts and not as unlawful enemy combatants in military tribunals, and did so without a peep of criticism from Republicans.
“All of this unfolded without much criticism from the G.O.P. members of Congress,” Eichenwald writes. “But then something dramatic changed on January 20, 2009: a Democrat took the White House. And suddenly those same congressfolk decided that bringing terrorists to trial in civilian court placed the entirety of the United States in grave danger.”
In contrast to the record compiled by the civilian courts, the military tribunals Republicans favor over the Constitution and a history of success have been a miserable failure. “Even as hundreds of criminal cases against terrorists have gone to court,” Eichenwald writes, “only seven — yes, seven — military-commission trials have been held. Seven in 12 years.
“So, why do Republicans always demand (since January 2009) that suspected terrorists be declared enemy combatants and tried before nearly inoperable military commissions, particularly when Obama’s policies are almost identical to Bush’s? There is no other possible explanation: it is pure politics, designed to make Obama appear weak on terrorism.”
I made the same case for civilian courts over military tribunals in a column I wrote last week, though not with the same cutting passion as Eichenwald. What is clear is this: Starting with the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago that killed 11 people, just to pick an arbitrary start date, civilian courts both state and federal have sent a variety of terrorists to prison as well as to the gallows and the execution chamber.
Federal terrorism charges have been brought against Tsarnaev. The state of Massachusetts just as easily could have brought murder charges against him. Either way, he’s headed toward a civilian trial and that’s where he should go.