Wanted: 12 Americans with Great Desire for Fame and Fortune

If one could pick out the worst decision the Obama administration has made to date (and there are plenty to choose from), the easy choice is Eric Holder's announced decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in a civilian court located in downtown New York. Obama administration officials have fanned out, taking up positions in all available media slots, to explain how we are going to "show the world" what a wonderful system of jurisprudence we have. If the world can't see already that our criminal justice system offers large advantages to the accused, then we are embarked on an expensive, wasted, and dangerous political exercise in bringing the 9-11 defendants to the metal, glass, and stone boxed canyons of Lower Manhattan. Except for those who excel at self-delusion and half-truths, the decision cannot be viewed as anything but a political one, aimed at "world opinion" and at the previous administration. Forget about justice-these trials are about celebrity.

Certainly, there will be a scramble of defense attorneys who offer their services gratis. A mere glimpse or mention of themselves in connection with the "greatest trial of the decade" (if they actually do manage to begin trial) will be remuneration beyond the wildest and most objectionable salary the Compensation Czar has tried to mitigate. Book and film rights contractors, reporters, biographers, and security personnel will be assigned to follow even minor players around, at great expense to the taxpayers. If Eric Holder really means to extract justice from the serendipity of the impending circus atmosphere, a first step should be to require all participants to return all profits back to taxpayers, or at least to the memorial funds of the victims, cops, military personnel, and firefighters whose lives are permanently scarred by the attacks.

Even the dullest lawyer know enough to make a great issue of the evidence obtained, drawing out the process as long as possible, so that being subjected to the drip-drip-drip of discovery testimony, by comparison, makes waterboarding seem to be a more desirable and benign activity. You might even have large segments of the American public demanding to be waterboarded instead of having to listening to months of testimony about how operative A handed a document to operative B who stored it in file C where it was read by operative C and is therefore inadmissible.

KSM has admitted to being the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks and boasted of his part in interviews with Al Jazeera. The Al Jazeera reporters weren't waterboarding him at the time, but the people who did waterboard him later will no doubt be blamed for the previous admissions. KSM also boasted that he had personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in that notorious filmed clip that appeared throughout the world of militant Islam and ended up eventually on YouTube. The ACLU can be expected to soften up the public with a barrage of statements as to why that, and other evidence, is "inflammatory and prejudicial" and must not be discussed or shown. Talking heads in the mainstream media will nod assent with studied gravitas. Yes, it's the Republicans again-using scare tactics.

Best of all will be jury selection. Can we find a person who has not heard of the attacks if we look in the darkest corners of the world? Perhaps, but jurors will have to be Americans, that is, until the Attorney General argues that these do not constitute a "jury of his peers." The process of selecting juries is termed "voir dire." What questions will be asked of prospective jurors? Can you put aside everything you may have heard about this and make a decision based on the limited evidence which I am dangling on a string in front of your face? If I were in the prospective jury pool, I know what I'd be thinking. Pick me! Pick me! Far better than hitting the Powerball lottery. I'd be right up there with JayZ-posh digs, security guards, more desirable to women than Leo DiCaprio, welcome everywhere!

Where the law firm of Obama and Holder appears most confused, however, is in the determination that some of the Guantanamo prisoners will be tried by military tribunals. The reasons given by the administration are the product of muddled thinking, and grant a terror premium to terrorists who attack Americans in our own country. The accused terrorists ordered by Attorney General Holder to be tried by military tribunal were the ones who attacked the U.S.S Cole in the Gulf of Aden. These foreign attacks do not gain the terrorist as many points as attacks on the American Homeland. Attacking Americans in America means that you will have constitutional rights of habeas corpus and other due process consideration. I'm surprised that Janet Napolitano has not described this latter category as a path to citizenship.

Nowhere in America is there a better stage for a show trial than downtown Manhattan. On its bustling streets, the meek and the powerful stride elbow to limousine in a city with a hole in its ground and in its heart. It is one of the great media, financial and juridical capitals of the world. Conducting civilian trials there, regarding what is one of the greatest atrocities committed against civilian populations in history, guarantees the widest imaginable world audience and an incentive to further terror attacks. Sure, I know that New York City has some of the finest cops, firemen, and security personnel, and that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is up for whatever task is put before him. But New York City has already paid for this once before and there is no need for New Yorkers and other 9-11 victims to be put through it again. Why should President Obama expect to do in New York City what his neighbors in his former posh Chicago neighborhood mostly likely would resist?