Trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court in NYC: Obama's worst idea yet?

He never seems to have any good ideas.

NY Times: 9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles for Both Sides

Althouse: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the alleged 9/11 mastermind — and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — the alleged planner of the USS Cole bombing — will go to trial in federal court in NYC

Neo-neocon: The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: a 9/10 approach to 9/11 justice

Drew at Ace of Spades has video of Rudy Giuliani commenting on this: Rudy Goes Off Over Decision To Try KSM In Civilian Court In NYC. "It comes right from the top."

Allahpundit has video of Charles Krauthammer: "Mr. Holder has honored mass murder by treating it like any other crime."

Shannon Love: "How Obama is Bringing Martial Law to America."

Jerry Pournelle, passim: "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."

Freedom of speech in Ireland ...

… is in the same kind of danger that it faces in Canada. Remember the hearings held by the Human Rights Tribunals against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant last year, briefly mentioned here at the time, now recounted in Levant's book Shakedown.

Now Mark Steyn draws our attention to a similar case in Ireland, in a Corner post titled Cockles and Muzzles.

Kevin Myers, my old comrade from my Irish Times and Sunday Telegraph days, is undergoing an experience that sounds very familiar to yours truly.

Last year he wrote a column about Africa dissenting from the approved line that there's nothing wrong with the place that can't be solved by tossing a few more gazillion dollars into the dictators' Swiss bank accounts. It was a strong column and he might reasonably have expected an avalanche of outraged letters to the editor. Instead:

The National Migrant Council reported me to An Garda Siochana [that's Oirish for "the coppers"], demanding a criminal prosecution for incitement to hatred, with a no-jury court, and four years imprisonment the possible outcome. Hans Zomer of Dochas reported me to the National Press Council, on numerous grounds.

It is a sad day indeed when to speak your mind is to risk the wrath of the law, aided by the State-backed auxiliary bodies of intellectual conformism...

Tell me about it. What's at issue here is a sustained attempt to criminalize opinion — or, at any rate, opinion which dissents from liberal dinner-party orthodoxy.

RTWT.

Second Holy Land Foundation trial ...

… drawing near its close.

My first post on the first HLF trial was Islamic fifth column, back in September 2007. The "lawfare" label brings up all of them. Keep current here.

Update Nov 24: Guilty on all counts.

Sharia in Britain

It's highly likely that there will be an island off the shore of France for a good long time to come, but it's looking less likely all the time that there will always be an England. Some excerpts from a much longer article:

Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.…

The disclosure that Muslim courts have legal powers in Britain comes seven months after Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was pilloried for suggesting that the establishment of sharia in the future “seems unavoidable” in Britain.

In July, the head of the judiciary, the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, further stoked controversy when he said that sharia could be used to settle marital and financial disputes.

In fact, Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours.

Can this possibly work? Two different legal systems in the same country are bound to come into conflict eventually. Given the prevailing social climate, which one will take precedence? I suspect it will be the one whose supporters are more willing to use violence to support its rulings. Since in a civil society violence is the monopoly of the state, this amounts to setting up a parallel government. Having two governments in one country is an unstable condition. One is bound to prevail over the other. It will be interesting, in the "may you live in interesting times" kind of way, to see how this plays out. Will John Bull stand up, or roll over?

Mark Steyn on trial

A note to remind myself that Andrew Coyne is live-blogging, starting with this post. Ezra Levant is blogging the hearing, starting with this post. More from Jay Currie, starting with this post.

At Coyne's second post, commenter Douglas quotes former Canadian PM John Diefenbaker:

I am a Canadian,
free to speak without fear,
free to worship in my own way,
free to stand for what I think right,
free to oppose what I believe wrong,
or free to choose those
who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom
I pledge to uphold
for myself and all mankind.

Canada has slid a fair way down the slippery slope since Diefenbaker came up with that, the Canadian Pledge, in the debates leading to initial passage of Canada's Bill of Rights.

Americans should be paying more attention to this hearing. This could happen here.

Not the Holy Land Foundation, but similar

Care International, another such organization in Boston. Coverage of the trial has been so pervasive that I had completely missed it. Now it's over, and the verdicts are coming out. But Miss Kelly has been blogging the trial and such coverage of it as exists, for some time. Thanks to Solomonia.

More Holy Land Foundation jurors are talking

There has been some blog reaction to an article at the Investigative Project on Terrorism by Michael Fechter. The piece is mainly an interview with juror Kristina Williams. It includes video.

Most of the blog reactions are just quotations and comments.
Captain Ed: The Idiot Who Torpedoed The Holy Land Foundation Trial.
Hot Air: Steve Emerson’s IPT uncovers jury bullying in Holy Land Foundation trial?
LGF: IPT Investigation Uncovers HLF Jury Room Bullying. Over 600 comments!
Jihad Watch: Investigative Project uncovers Holy Land Foundation jury bullying
Patterico: Inside the Jury Room at the Holy Land Foundation Trial

I expect there will be more.

Holy Land Foundation mistrial

The verdict, awaited over the weekend, turns out to be no verdict at all.

Justice Department prosecutors can get juries to convict businesspersons such as Martha Stewart and Conrad Black, and high government officials such as Lewis Libby, on the flimsiest evidence, of non-crimes. Prison sentences result. But given networks and documents and years of real evidence of subversion, they cannot get a conviction. At least they got a mistrial and will have another chance, hopefully with another prosecutor and another strategy. It's enough to make you wonder if the DOJ are really trying. Gee, Sandy Berger has not taken that lie detector test, and DOJ is not pressing him on it. Maybe they're not really trying. There are probably people at DOJ and CIA who started working there when Jimmy Carter was president. The entrenched bureaucracy has its own agenda. Compare to this book, and this one.

Dallas Morning News: Judge declares mistrial in Holy Land Foundation case.
Rod Dreher: Holy Land Foundation snafu.
LGF: Breaking: Mistrial Declared in HLF Hamas Trial - Update: Official Verdict Document Added, quickly followed by CAIR Gloating Over Mistrial.
NY Times: U.S. Prosecution of Muslim Group Ends in Mistrial

Update, Tuesday Oct 23: More from the talkative juror, William Neal, a 33-year-old art director in Dallas: Holy Land defendants' long wait ends as U.S. vows to retry case.
From the American Thinker: Bad News for Holy Land Defendants.
And from the Investigative Project on Terrorism: Second HLF Trial Could Bring Changes. This includes a link to a video interview with juror William Neal. It seems odd that he can't remember his own age: "I'd never been on a jury before, never, this is my first time in 30, what, 20 years since I'm 18, or whatever …" He makes good points about the way the case was presented. Too much evidence that was too technical for the jury to deal with; too many charges. 197 charges! An hour a charge is not too much time for debate and voting, but 197 hours is five 40-hour work weeks, or 25 days. Assuming no time is spent on deciding what's for lunch—and Neal says that some days were mostly spent discussing lunch—then the 19 days of deliberation were still inadequate for the case as presented.

Another update, Oct 29: Steven Emerson in the NY Post:

Prosecutors in the Northern District of Texas deserve praise for bringing this case in the first place. The trial record conclusively demonstrated that Holy Land and several of its unindicted co-conspirators - including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - grew out of Hamas. Moreover, it showed that they spent the better part of 15 years deceiving government agencies and the media, hiding their true goals under a mask of work for charity and civil rights.

To be sure, the mistrial was portrayed as another in a series of setbacks for the government's anti-terror prosecution strategy. Notably, several jurors seemed to discount the testimony of an Israeli security expert, testifying under an assumed name, apparently on the belief that Israelis cannot be trusted on Palestinian matters.

Some jurors may even have bought the defense argument that anti-Israel terror isn't truly terrorism, but merely "resisting the occupation." One juror told the Dallas Morning News of his difficulty in describing Hamas as a terrorist group, stating, "Part of it does terrorist acts, but it's a political movement. It's an uprising."

This juror was of course William Neal, the only juror who has spoken to the press.

Here previously: Islamic fifth column.

Islamic fifth column

Rod Dreher writes about the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas:

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie – but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood – whose Palestinian division is Hamas – operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society – are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

[…]

This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we're still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us – and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It's there in black and white, for those with eyes to see.

Dreher's article does not link to the actual document, but a minute's work with Google finds it at the Nine Eleven Finding Answers Foundation site. It's a PDF that starts out in Arabic, but is translated after the Arabic pages are done.

From the explanatory memorandum:

4- Understanding the role of the Muslim Brother in North America:
The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

That bit about "destroying the Western civilization" is really all I need to hear. I'm kinda fond of Western civilization. It was relatively simple for Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski: they faced armies, and could fight them on the battlefield.

Dispatches from this trial should be on the front page of every newspaper in America. I don't see it in my town; do you, in yours?

Update: Rod Dreher has a blog called Crunchy Con at Beliefnet. There is some discussion in comments there (one post, another) but it's getting sidetracked away from the topic of conspiracy to overthrow the government (and the civilization!) by commenters who see, or prefer to talk about, religious discrimination.

Update: More on the trial at the Dallas Morning News: Muslim Brotherhood's papers detail plan to seize U.S.

Update: Holy Land Foundation mistrial.