And One More Thing...

I just got wind of this set of polling data from ABC News/Washington Post and Quinnipiac. Taking the two polls together it suggests that somewhere between 52 and 61 percent of the American Public supports trying terror suspects like the Underpants Bomber Umar Faruk Abdulmutallab in military tribunals instead of civilians courts. In this case the ABC News poll was of "adults" by phone; a very amorphous group, and the Quinnipiac poll was of registered voters. I won't pretend to be a polling expert. If you're looking for that then head over to 538.com to get all you ever wanted to know and more about evaluating polls.

In any case, I feel that even if these numbers were 30-40% instead of the 50-60% that they are, they would be too high. The Bush Administration tried terror suspects in criminal courts including Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber. Especially in the Reid case, which almost exactly parallels the attempted underpants attack, it has been shown that criminal prosecutions of these sort are usually successful (especially with an airplane load of witnesses). In fact, I think the biggest issue with this sort of trial is finding an unbiased jury. That, I think is also the biggest problem in the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial. Where are you going to find 12 unbiased people within 100 miles of NYC? Or anywhere in the United States for that matter?

In any case, the arguements that have been made against civilian trials stem from the position that most of the "enemy combatants" that we're dealing with are not American citizens and so have no Miranda rights and so forth. I would argue that while this may be technically true, the rights afforded Americans under the Constitution and annunciated in the Declaration of Independence are there because they were viewed by the founders as basic human rights.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It is our duty as Americans to be better than those we oppose. Trying these men in civilian courts upholds the impartiality of our justice system as many on both sides of the aisle have noted. It also shows that we truly value that which is written into our basic founding documents. I don't see that we have any other choice unless we wish to return to the Bush era of being viewed as hypocrites by most of the free world.