Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano must be relieved.
Over the last few weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder has passed and lapped her in the race to be the most flagrantly incompetent Obama administration official in the War on Terror.
Last year, Holder had a brainstorm: He’d remove Khalid Sheik Mohammed from Gitmo to try him in lower Manhattan, in the former shadow of the World Trade Center. Holder was thrilled by the “symbolism” of trying KSM so close to the scene of the crime.
But, eventually, New York officials and members of Congress were bound to notice the barking-mad senselessness of the entire scheme. Now that they have, plans for Holder’s trial of the century have collapsed in an unsightly heap in a matter of 24 hours.
After Mayor Bloomberg reversed himself and came out against the trial last week, the administration said it was considering other sites but still wanted a civilian trial.
Yesterday came word that it also is considering keeping KSM in Gitmo for a military commission after all, in what would be a crushing admission that its rush to shutter Gitmo was disastrously misconceived.
KSM is an enemy combatant captured on the battlefield who deserves none of the protections of the civilian court system.
The Bush administration set up a military commission system, endorsed by Congress and blessed by the Supreme Court, tailored precisely for these cases. It gave unprecedented due-process protections to detainees while protecting national security information from disclosure.
The trials would be safely held at Gitmo, a state-of-the-art facility designed for the purpose and a place where millions of innocent bystanders don’t work and live.
KSM told a military judge he was ready to confess and move on to the execution phase. Most people would consider that a neat conclusion to the matter, but not Eric Holder.
He intervened to short-circuit that process and bring KSM and four other terrorists here for trials that would cost as much as $1 billion to secure and paint an even brighter target on the city.
The Obama administration has an ideological reflex toward giving terrorists the legal rights of domestic criminal suspects and a political reflex toward rejecting all of George W. Bush’s works.
It couldn’t bring itself to admit that Gitmo and the military commissions — for all their flaws — represent a reasonable response to the hellish problem of dealing with an unreasonable enemy.
Instead, it marched straight into Holder’s Folly and now is beating a pell-mell retreat.