The NY Times' Self Beclowning

Today the editors of the NY Times printed an editorial entitled "Guilty as Ordered" which chronicles what they see as the manifest unfairness of Salim Hamdan's war crimes trial at Gitmo (link to NRO, not the Times)

Now that was a real nail-biter. The court designed by the White House and its Congressional enablers to guarantee convictions of high-profile detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired — has held its first trial. It produced ... a guilty verdict.

The military commission of six senior officers (whose names have not been made public) found Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers until 2001, guilty of one count of providing material support for terrorism.

The rules of justice on Guantánamo are so stacked against defendants that the only surprise was that Mr. Hamdan was actually acquitted on the more serious count of conspiring (it was unclear with whom) to kill Americans during the invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001.

See the key phrase there is 'a guilty verdict' since Hamdan was actually acquitted of the more serious charge he was facing. The procedures weren't so stacked against this admitted member of al Qaeda that he was unable to procure an acquittal. That is a rather inconvenient truth from the stand point of the Times' narrative.

Instead of admitting that perhaps they were wrong and the President and Congress of The United States of America could actually devise a fair and just system of judging the guilt of this country's enemies and that professional military officers could render an impartial verdict as they were sworn to do, the Times simply continues its rantings in the face of all evidence.

It's almost as if they are more interested in bashing America's institutions and traditions of justice than you know, the truth.

How's circulation and revenue doing Pinch? (sorry about the HufPo link but it was all I could find and it's more enjoyable reading about liberal institutions dying from liberals anyway)

Headline [ace]: The editorial goes under the Headline "Guilty as Ordered."

The NYT apparently does not consider a prosecution fair unless it results in a full acquittal on all charges. We've seen this attitude before, in the bad old days of the seventies and early eighties, where all criminals were assumed to be innocent and the system was hopelessly corrupt for saying otherwise. There's nothing new here, except extending this license to kill from ordinary multiple murderers to terrorists.

posted by DrewM. at 12:29 PM

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