With the basketball tournament season upon us, it's worth noting that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is throwing up one of the political year's most embarrassing air balls. Mr. Graham says if the White House sends September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a military tribunal instead of a New York courtroom, he'll help rally Republicans to support closing the prison in Guantanamo. Why?The plan for KSM's tour of the civilian justice system is already a political dead horse. The White House has been backing away from its plan to try terrorists in civilian courts. What's left is Mr. Obama's unfortunate campaign promise to "close Guantanamo." So Senator Graham is working with chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to help them out of this bind.
It's hard to fathom. The Administration has struggled to get even Congressional Democrats to cough up the $80 million to close Guantanamo. Since November, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his plan try terrorists as common criminals, political opposition has made the issue another liberal albatross for the Administration.
Last month, a bipartisan group of Senators wrote a letter to the President opposing the plan to handle KSM in a civilian courtroom. New York's political establishment, including even Mayor Michael Bloomberg and hyperpartisan Senator Chuck Schumer, dropped their initial support.
Virginia Senator Jim Webb has sponsored legislation to move them back to military tribunals. Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said he'd rather see KSM "plead guilty before a military tribunal in Gitmo." Ditto Connecticut Attorney General and Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal, who says a military tribunal is the better place to try an "enemy combatant directed by foreign terrorists and a foreign government to attack this nation."
Mr. Holder has insisted "failure is not an option" in the civilian court system, but that depends on the meaning of failure. Any defense lawyer worth his pin stripes will try to suppress information allegedly gained from "torture," or from communications intercepts, while quizzing government officials on classified information to make them look evasive. Given the evidence rules for civilian trials, defendants could end up charged with the terrorist equivalent of mail fraud, requiring the Administration to revert to indefinite detention to keep them from walking the streets.