05 May Breaking: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Won’t Participate in His Military Commission
05.05.12
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So reports the media. I, for one, am shocked: it’s almost as if KSM has concluded, having been waterboarded (read: tortured) 183 times in one month, that the U.S. might not actually be committed to the highest standards of fairness and justice now.
Come on, KSM. Can’t bygones be bygones? Heed Obama’s injunction: now is the time to look forward, not backward.
At the Legal Ethics Forum I just posted the following in response to a link to “Lawfare’s coverage of the KSM proceedings:” While he appears to have used numerous aliases, why can’t we use his full name: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Is the use of initials in this way a common practice in referring to individuals in criminal trials (irrespective of how ‘different’ this trial is)? After his full name is introduced, then perhaps we can simply use his surname. Among other possible complaints, “KSM” sounds like the name of a fast-food sushi chain or some corporate entity, and so forth. Whatever we might think of him and/or the acts he may be criminally liable for, he is still a person, with a name, and the use of his initials seems in some strange if not inexplicable way, to diminish the basic recognition that this trial involves a human being, a person, with a name.
Of course the proceedings involve more than just Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
He is at least guilty for staying illegally on Guantanamo.
Lawfareblog is a bit snarky but that is par for the course in this space. I wrote to the Toledo Blade today about the coverage of the trial (Defendant’s disruptive; 9/11 victims frustrated being the memes I have seen on the crawls etc). I hope there will be a higher caliber of reporting over the course of these cases. Here is the letter I wrote to the local paper here the Toledo Blade on this. Dear Editor, Reading about the KSM military commission and the 9/11 families experiences in watching it prompt this letter. While I lost a friend from high-school who just happened to be giving a speech in the Twin Towers that day, I know that I can not imagine the depths of the pain of those 9/11 families over their tremendous loss. I share with them their frustration with the length of time it has taken to bring the alleged perpetrators of that horrible day to justice. Let us be clear as to who caused a significant part of that delay: the Executive and the Legislature in both the Bush and Obama Administrations. Five days after 9/11 President Bush made the fatal mistake of ordering the creation of… Read more »
Breaking, this is a giant echo chamber.