Fearmongers triumph over KSM Trial

A cost of 200 million dollars, hundreds of hours of police overtime, dozens of checkpoints and metal gates to fence off downtown Manhattan loomed at the prospect of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 9/11 mastermind.

New Yorkers would face disrupted traffic, closed subway stations and restricted access to the Foley Square area where Mohammed would have been tried in court. It would be unlike anything ever seen before.

But it now appears that all that security overkill will not be necessary. KSM will not be tried in federal court as previously announced by US Attorney General Eric Holder.

At first  backing the plan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly asked for 75 million to hold the trial, and then raised it to 216 million after fear-mongering politicians lined up to denounce the plan and weave doomsday scenarios for their constituents.

Rep. Peter King began hyperventilating, calling the trial “the most irresponsible decision ever made by a president.” King and others warned that using the US court system to try terrorists was an invitation to mayhem. Fox News had its usual field day.

Other Al-Qaida suspects have been tried in federal court and convicted over the past several years – Richard Reid, the Shoe-Bomber. Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, Ramzi Yousef, who helped to plan and carry out the first attack on the World Trade Center. And let’s not forget Timothy McVeigh, a terrorist who perpetrated the largest attack on US  soil until Sept.  11.2001.

None of these trials brought any further incidents of terrorism or caused disruption that brought daily life to halt.

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani a suspect in the bombings of the US Embassy in Tanzania and Kenya, has been going back and forth to his pre-trial hearings in Manhattan  federal court for the past year without fences or checkpoints and no one in New York seems to care.

But KSM is different, or so we’re told.  Over time, he’s morphed into a ten-foot terrorist whose very presence threatens us all, despite being locked up for the past three years and water-boarded 186 times. We’re still scared of him, or least some people want us to be.

Unlike the others, KSM has achieved mythic status. Never mind that all the rest of  these once dangerous terrorists are rotting in some supermax prison, KSM is so dangerous no prison can hold him.

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has done his part, issuing dark warnings about dangers he never really specifies.  That has enabled other fear-mongering politicians to fund-raise off the anxiety of their constituents. Business has been good.

Now Holder has been unable to find a place to hold the trial. It appears that New Yorkers – victims of the worst terrorist attack on US soil- will never have their chance to sit in judgement of  Khalid Sheik Mohammed.