By reversing itself and deciding to prosecute the Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind before a military tribunal, US President Barack Obama’s administration risks alienating its left-wing base and irking conservatives.
A stern Attorney General Eric Holder, who had spent a year-and-a-half seeking to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in federal civilian court, announced on Monday that the administration was giving up on the controversial bid.
Obama’s team had to “face a simple truth” that the congressional restrictions against trials in the US were “unlikely to be repealed in the immediate future,” he said. “And we simply cannot allow a trial to be delayed any longer for the victims of the 9/11 attacks or for their family members who have waited for nearly a decade for justice.”
However, the bid to lay the blame at Congress’s feet on the very day Obama officially declared his candidacy for a second term, raised some analysts’ eyebrows.
“This is a problem of Obama’s making, even though ... Holder tried to blame Congress,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “The Obama administration is almost hypocritical in complaining about this case when the president, Obama, -preserved the military tribunals.”
The president vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year in one of his first initiatives after taking office in January 2009, but he failed to fulfill that goal as he struggled to tear down the counterterrorism framework left over from former US president George W. Bush’s administration.
David Rivkin, a conservative attorney who favors the military trial venue, complained about the “unfortunate” delay for Obama to come to his latest decision.
“We are now exactly where we were at the time this administration takes office in January 2009. Things were moving forward. Military commissions obviously have suffered considerable losses in personnel and funding,” Rivkin added. David Glazier, a Loyola Law School professor in Los Angeles, said Obama’s move may signal he is trying to reach out to conservatives as he launches his re-election bid.
Republican lawmakers largely welcomed Obama’s move and said the issue was now closed.
However, pulling it all off as intended will still be a challenge.
A death penalty is not guaranteed because there is nothing under the law used in the Guantanamo tribunals to stop the suspects from pleading guilty. In December 2008, the defendants said they were inclined to do so without a full trial, but if one of the suspects pleads guilty, nothing says the defendants can be put to death.
“If the administration puts them in the military commission, and then does so in a way that they can’t get a death sentence, presumably it ends up antagonizing the very people it is trying to placate,” Glazier said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the