After an eight-week trial in federal court, a jury acquitted Ahmed Abu Khatallah on fourteen counts for his role in the 2012 attack on the American embassy in the Libyan city of Benghazi, but found him guilty of four additional and mostly peripheral charges. This odd outcome, argues Andrew McCarthy, is a product of a flawed system for trying terrorists like Abu Khatalla, where the only alternative to an inadequate civilian court system are the equally inadequate military courts:
Progressives fantasize that all national-security challenges can be resolved by lawsuits and diplomatic gambits—fallaciously reasoning that, because a conflict may not have a military solution, the solution should not have a military component. They insist that the civilian justice system “works” for terrorism because the comparatively few terrorists who are tried get convicted of at least something. . . . But apologists for civilian due process ignore that most terrorists cannot even be apprehended, much less tried in our judicial system. Most terrorist planning and attacks occur in dangerous territories where our investigative agencies do not operate and the writ of our courts does not run. . . .
[T]he main challenge [is that] it is impossible to try terrorists under civilian due-process protocols without providing them generous discovery from the government’s intelligence files. This means we are telling the enemy what we know about the enemy while the enemy is still plotting to attack Americans and American interests. That’s nuts.
The patent downsides of treating international terrorism as a law-enforcement issue are why critics, myself included, were hopeful that a shift to military prosecution of enemy combatants would improve matters—more protection of intelligence, and due process limited by the laws and customs of war.
[But] we were wrong. The experiment has been a dismal failure. To catalogue all the delays, false starts, and misadventures of the military-commission system would take another essay. Suffice it to say that it was unfair and unrealistic to task our armed forces with designing a legal system on the fly even as they fought a complex war in which, unlike prior American wars, swaths of the American legal profession backed the enemy—volunteering to represent jihadist belligerents in challenges to military detention and prosecution.
As an alternative, McCarthy proposes the creation of a “national-security” court to handle such cases independently.
Read more on National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454162/ahmed-abu-khatallah-trial-benghazi-attacks-terrorism