Suspends Trial of Cole Terrorist

By: Arthur Herman

Americans are learning there's one minority group President Obama is never afraid to offend: families of victims of Islamist terror.

First, Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attack, in lower Manhattan -- which nearly everyone, even Mayor Bloomberg (eventually), realized would be a standing insult to the memory of KSM's victims.

Then came Obama's "I was for it before I was against it" stance on the Ground Zero mosque -- another slap at 9/11 victims' families.

Now, last Friday, we learned that "no charges are either pending or contemplated" against one of the deadliest and most dangerous al Qaeda operatives, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, mastermind of the October 12, 2000, bombing of USS Cole that killed 17 sailors and officers and wounded dozens more.

The hope of families that lost loved ones on that terrible day, that after a decade justice would finally be done, has faded to zero.

It's worth remembering how this outrage -- which I predicted in a column back in February 2009 -- came about.

In the wake of the Twin Towers attack and despite howls of protest from the civil liberties left, the Bush administration rounded up leading Islamist terrorists around the world and put them to CIA interrogation. One of them was al Nashiri, a Saudi national who set off the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 as the destroyer was moored peacefully in Aden harbor.

Under President George W. Bush's executive order establishing trials of terrorists by military commission, authorities painstakingly gathered evidence against al Nashiri -- even as groups like ACLU howled that such commissions would violate terrorists' rights and should be shut down.

The gathering of evidence dragged on for nearly six years, until in January 2009 Obama ordered Defense Secretary Gates to suspend all military commission proceedings, including against al Nashiri.

Cole's former skipper, Capt. Kirk Lippold, and the Cole victims' families fought hard to reopen the case against their sons' and daughters' killers -- who in the meantime had been found guilty of terrorism and sentenced to death in a court in Yemen. They even met with President Obama, who promised them he was only waiting for the "right judge" before reopening the case under new rules.

Now, on Friday, we learned the "right judge" meant no judge at all. A Defense Department spokesman insisted that the fact that no charges will be brought before a military commission doesn't mean the case is over. But it will be a long time before this mess is finally sorted out. Yet it's a mess of Obama's own making.

After 9/11 Bush and other Americans understood that we were in a war, not a "Law and Order" episode. They understood that such a war required more effective instruments than our civilian courts and the normal legal process. The time-tested, Supreme Court-approved system of military tribunals for trying enemy combatants was one such instrument.

Obama told his political allies on the left that as president he'd turn Bush's War on Terror upside down. The terrorists would now get constitutional protections; and those who fought against them would go to jail as "war criminals."

Now, Obama's popularity is in a tailspin. Late night comics joke about his being a one-term president. The civil liberties left is furious with him for failing to close Gitmo and to prosecute a single former Bush official -- not to mention for keeping US troops in Afghanistan. If he starts even one military trial of an alleged terrorist, even one who attacked a mili tary installation, he loses whatever shred of credibility he still has with his political base. (The two commissions under way both began under Bush.)

"It seems like nobody really cares," says Gloria Clodfelter, whose 21-year-old son died in the Cole bombing. Like the KSM trial and Obama's stance on the Ground Zero mosque, the decision to suspend the al Nashiri proceedings has nothing to do with justice and a lot to do with politics. The shame is that, once again, those who suffer are the families of those killed by terror, not the terrorists themselves.


NY Post