Um, excuse me, but can I please ask why it’s taken almost 12 years for these individuals to come to trial? Ironically, the military judge in this case denied an appeal based on habeas corpus, the right of the accused to come before a judge or jury. Many such appeals have been filed. All of them have been denied.
These men have been detained on American soil for over 12 years and we still assume they aren’t eligible for constitutional rights available to all American citizens?
An illegal immigrant crosses the border in Brownsville or El Paso or San Diego, and thirty seconds later they’re in a sanctuary city where it’s unlawful for anybody to ask for their citizenship papers. They’re American citizens, in every sense of the word (if not more so).
Every illegal immigrant who crosses our border and manages to stay here has tried and failed 10 times. They’ve been processed and charged and fingerprinted and shipped back across the border, all at taxpayer’s expense. TEN TIMES! By the time they are able to stay here permanently they have a rap sheet a mile long.
Then they find refuge in a “sanctuary city,” and their criminal record is wiped clean, expunged; hell, sponged clean with a perfume handkerchief and dry cleaned with a sharp crease along the seams.
Oh, I forgot. Guantanamo Bay isn’t technically American soil.
I suppose our consulate in Benghazi where a U.S. ambassador and three Americans died (including two ex-Navy SEALS) was a case of “domestic violence” or maybe “workplace violence” like the Fort Hood massacre has been classified.
This farce has gone on so long we’ve made those accused terrorists into cultural heroes back home.
They’ve proven everything that the original terrorist attackers accused America of – having a double standard, denying basic civil rights to “enemies of the state” and falling victim to a military justice system that gives gays accused of sexual assault on heterosexual service members far more rights than any civilian has.
We now know that the Twin Towers were at the center of the financial meltdown that cratered financial markets worldwide five years later. We know all about the five Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks on Wall Street that own $600 trillion in derivatives, ten times the total annual output of the whole world.
We have witnessed Washington pass the “Wall Street Reform Act” that built an impenetrable wall around these TBTF banks, so much so that if one of them ever stumbles it won’t just bring down Wall Street but the entire financial infrastructure of the whole nation.
The regional banking centers in Atlanta and Dallas survived the 2009 financial crisis unscathed. They were far more conservative in their loans and their banking practices. The Wall Street Reform Act spreads the risk to these banks, too. If one TBTF bank fails, they all do; everywhere, nationwide.
With all due respect to the victims of 9/11, I wonder sometimes if we all of us aren’t victims, the way banks have ruined our whole financial infrastructure.
It’s certainly a valid line of defense, and if they ever get beyond “pretrial hearings” I hope it’s part of the deliberations.
Justice, indeed.
