Fire Eric Holder

IBDEditorials.com

War On Terror: The acquittal of a Gitmo detainee of the murder of 224 people shows the stupidity of civilian trials for those at war with us and the blind incompetence of an administration that believes in them.

Attorney General Eric Holder should be fired. Failing that, he should have the decency to submit his resignation, which should be promptly accepted. He is the architect of a policy that treats mass murder like a bank robbery and gives perpetrators the functional equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

Like Peter King, the soon-to-be House chairman on Homeland Security, we are "disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice" in which Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was convicted of one count of conspiracy to blow up government buildings, specifically our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, while being acquitted of helping murder the people inside.

Ghailani, a Tanzanian, was indicted in 1998 for those bombings, which killed 12 Americans. Prosecutors say he helped build one of the bombs. He began his career delivering bomb parts on a bicycle and rose through the terrorist ranks to become Osama bin Laden's bodyguard.

Placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list in 2001, Ghailani was identified by Attorney General John Ashcroft in May 2004 as one of seven plotting another terrorist attack on America. Two months later the terrorist was captured after an eight-hour battle with Pakistani police in the town of Gujrat.

In 2006 he was brought to Gitmo.

Ghailani bought the explosives used to blow up our embassy in Tanzania in 1998. He helped buy the truck that was used to carry the bomb, and gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to intensify the blast, the evidence showed. He also stored an explosive detonator in an armoire he used, and his cell phone became the "operational phone" for the plotters.

Ghailani was the administration's test case. This trial was supposed to prove that civilian trials of enemy combatants were right and effective. As we and others warned, the necessities of war do not mix well with the rules of civil justice, and the feds' case quickly collapsed when U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that a key witness' testimony was inadmissible.

The witness, a Tanzanian named Hussein Abebe, was prepared to tell the jury he sold Ghailani the explosives used to destroy the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania in 1998. But his identity was learned during the enhanced interrogation of Ghailani, which Ghailani's lawyer said was torture, so his testimony was not allowed.