{"id":1003,"date":"2011-10-18T07:03:05","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T11:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=1003"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:26:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:26:23","slug":"terrorist-suspect-tried-in-civilian-court-head-for-the-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/10\/18\/terrorist-suspect-tried-in-civilian-court-head-for-the-hills\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrorist Suspect Tried in Civilian Court; Head for the Hills!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span>Mark Wilson\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Last week, the \u201cunderwear bomber,\u201d also known not nearly so well by the name\u00a0Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,\u00a0pleaded guilty to eight charges<\/a>\u00a0in a Detroit courtroom. Then, without warning, terrorists burst into the courtroom and blew up the entire building. Congress banded together, speaking in one voice, and passed a bill that required terrorism suspects to be tried in\u00a0off-shore\u00a0military tribunals.<\/p>\n

Okay, so it\u2019s pretty clear by now that I made that story up. Obviously Congress would never band together for anything.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true, though, that\u00a0Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty. And it\u2019s true that he was in a civilian courtroom. And that\u2019s the point. For ten years, we\u2019ve been told that trying terrorism suspects in a public, civilian court replete with due process would result in terrorist attacks, assassinations, explosions, and general mayhem. And every time the civilian trials have actually happened, nothing awful has happened. Courthouses were not fire-bombed, jurists were not assassinated. Attorneys addressed jurors, there were hearsay objections, and life went on.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed by a group of terrorists led by\u00a0Omar Abdel-Rahman. He and three other accomplices were indicted by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible (not secret) laws, tried in open court inside the United States, under the guidelines of the Constitution and the rules of U.S. criminal procedure, and punished with sentences in U.S. civilian prisons. After 1993, the nation was not less safe because Abdel-Rahman and his accomplices were being imprisoned inside the United States. Abdel-Rahman is housed at\u00a0the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols \u2013 members of a racist Christian fundamentalist terrorist group \u2013 blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Nichols and McVeigh were indicted, again by civilian prosecutors, accused of breaking publicly-accessible (that is, not secret) laws, tried in open court, and sentenced to U.S. civilian prisons. McVeigh was given the death penalty. The nation is not less safe because Terry Nichols is housed inside the same Supermax prison as Abdel-Raman.<\/p>\n

I think you get the point. Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber;\u00a0Wadih el-Hage, accused of involvement in the 1998 al-Qaeda U.S. embassy bombings; Richard Reid, the \u201cshoe bomber\u201d; Jose Padilla, the \u201cdirty bomber.\u201d All of these people were tried in a civilian court and now serve hefty sentences in ridiculously secure prisons.<\/p>\n

After stripping out all the hyperbole,\u00a0terrorism<\/em>\u00a0is a crime just like any other crime. It\u2019s usually committed by civilians. It\u2019s perpetrated upon civilians. Al-Qaeda has more in common with the\u00a0Chicago South Side Gang of 1929<\/a>\u00a0than it does anything else.<\/p>\n

Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to setting his pants on fire in order to kill civilians. Tried (sort of; he pleaded guilty after a few days of trial), and convicted. No problem. And he\u2019s one of many. There is no need to use\u00a0extrajudicial tactics<\/a>\u00a0in the \u201cwar\u201d on terror.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Mark Wilson\u00a0 Last week, the \u201cunderwear bomber,\u201d also known not nearly so well by the name\u00a0Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,\u00a0pleaded guilty to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-gb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}