Rachel Maddow loves to gush of her admiration for Americans who serve in uniform. She also complains how it's borderline criminal that New York City has not held a ticker-tape parade for soldiers who served in Iraq.
It's all posturing, nothing more. Maddow considers the military contemptible, as true-blue leftists always do. (video clip after page break)
On her cringe-a-minute MSNBC show May 4, Maddow questioned how it is be possible that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 conspirators will be tried by military tribunal and not in a "real" criminal court --
This weekend there will be arraignments -- again -- for five men accused of masterminding and conspiring to pull off the 9/11 attacks. The most famous of the five defendants is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who we used to think of as looking like this (photo shown of bleery-eyed, grim-faced Mohammed shortly after his capture) but who now after years of US custody looks more like this (photo shown of Mohammed decidedly furrier and bright-eyed).
This trial was initially going to be held in real criminal court. In November 2009 the US attorney general announced that a federal court in Manhattan would be the venue. But after a political uproar about how awful it would be to try terrorism defendants in real US courts, the administration reversed course. And tomorrow's arraignment will be held instead at Guantanamo. It will not be a real court trial, it will be a military tribunal.
The few terrorism cases that have been pushed through this relatively untested, ad hoc military tribunal system have actually produced results that are more lenient on average than terrorism cases tried in real American courts. But the fear of trying an important terrorism case in a real court in New York is such that tomorrow's proceedings will be held offshore. They'll be held in Cuba. (Where that guy adorning Maddow's favorite T-shirt used to hang out).
This week, by the way, there was a conviction in what law enforcement says was the most serious terrorist plot on US soil since 9/11, a real plot by real al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists (as opposed to that alleged plot on 9/11 involving pseudo-terrorists) to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009.
The conviction was on Tuesday.
In federal district court in Brooklyn.
In New York.
I feel the need to tell you it was on Tuesday because when it happened, nobody really noticed. Life went on in Brooklyn and in New York City and in New York state and in America, totally uninterrupted. Nobody much noticed but justice was served, in a real court.
... Unlike that kangaroo court down at Gitmo to be staged by our stooges in the military. 
Military tribunals cannot be "real" trials, Maddow insists. They can be unreal, surreal, venereal, you name it -- just not, like, real, man. (Snap fingers to bongo accompaniment).
Maddow felt the need to tell you this, as do I in telling you what she wouldn't share with her credulous viewers anxiously awaiting their talking-points spoon feeding. The suspect convicted for his role in the NYC subway bombing plot was a naturalized citizen, arrested and charged in the US, and entitled to constitutional protections such as the presumption of innocence and trial by jury.
KSM and his woefully misunderstood cohorts, on the other hand -- all foreign nationals captured abroad, after the United States became engaged in a war started by them, as they proclaim whenever the opportunity arises. They are no more entitled to constitutional protections than was Yamamoto, architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt had him blown from the sky in 1943.
The only reason these pathetic Islamists are even facing trial is because the Bush administration decided that capturing al Qaeda plotters might be preferable to dispatching them outright, what with the limited intelligence to be gleaned from a corpse. Obama prefers to shoot first and elaborate later, thus avoiding that whole alleged moral quagmire over where to conduct trials for enemy combatants.
What is most amusing about Maddow's earnest anger is how ultimately it wouldn't matter to her where the trials were conducted. Since they'll be held at Gitmo, she bashes the military as incompetent. If the trials were held in the US, she'd bash the prosecution as incompetent. Whatever it takes for MSNBC to remain must-see TV for al Qaeda.
