Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Fallacies Of The ‘Blind Sheikh’ Case & How They Threaten To Unravel The KSM Trial

By: Spencer Ackerman Friday April 9, 2010

Several weeks ago, I interviewed Lindsey Graham’s staff to find out what specifically Graham’s objection was to trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civilian court. The answer: the inadvertent release of classified information. So I wrote a piece on that after I noticed that the rules for handling classified information in military commissions are substantively near-identical. But there was more, and today I have a sequel.

Graham himself cited a disturbing incident in the 1995 terrorism-conspiracy trial of the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman, as a dangerous prologue to a KSM trial. A list of unindicted co-conspirators leaked out and made its way back to Usama bin Laden. So I took a further look. And it turned out, as my piece today for the Washington Independent details, the prosecutors in that case didn’t make use of any of the tools for protecting classified and even non-classified information in the case. To turn around and use those disclosures as an example of the impotence of civilian courts in national-security cases is, to say the least, odd. But one of the prosecutors on that case has held out that case as a prime example of what can go wrong (even as he quite successfully convicted the Blind Sheikh): Andy McCarthy of National Review Online.

So I interviewed McCarthy — I have to say, I found him gracious, generous with his time, and intellectually vigorous — and you can check out what he told me about the incident in the piece. One hint: even he thinks the co-conspirator-list leak is overblown. And it’s that leak that’s at the center of Graham’s case for getting KSM out of the civilian courts.

The embedded links in this article, and they are excellent

‘Urban Myth’ Behind Graham’s Support for 9/11 Military Trials

Classified Information Is Handled the Same in Military and Civilian Venues [ http://washingtonindependent.com/78925/urban-myth-behind-grahams-support-for-911-military-trials ]

Todays follow up article that he wrote.

In Much-Cited Precedent for 9/11 Trial, Tools for Protecting Information Went Unused

Former Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy Concedes He Could Have Done More to Stop Crucial Leak [ http://washingtonindependent.com/81710/in-much-cited-precedent-for-911-trial-tools-for-protecting-information-went-unused ]

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/04/09/the-fallacies-of-the-blind-sheikh-case-how-they-threaten-to-unravel-the-ksm-trial/