Facts am Hard

Today's column by Leonard Pitts isn't the dumbest thing I've ever read, but I can't think of what is.

Lots of people are outraged by the Obama Administration decision to remove Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, et al from the military tribunal system and try the admitted terrorists before a federal civilian court but columnist Leonard Pitts is all for the decision and he chastises those who are against the decision as having an ulterior motive for the criticism:

Indeed, if critics of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try him and his terrorist confederates in a New York City courtroom would be honest with themselves, they'd admit that this is what drives their condemnation, not questions of security, fears of acquittal or other obfuscatory concerns they've raised.

No, the baseline here is the understandable belief that these thugs, these gangsters of Islam, have no right to a trial, that the American legal system, with all its protections for the accused, all its rights and procedures and niceties, is more than they deserve.

Is Mr. Pitts familiar with how our legal system works? Has he heard of the terms ‘jurisdiction,’ ‘custody,’ ‘evidence?’ Is he familiar with Miranda?   Does he know anything about war and battlefields?  Does he know anything about intelligence? 

Okay, forget I asked that last question.  And you will forget in a few seconds. 

In order to bolster his position that KSM and friends should be removed from the military tribunal system and tried by a civilian system, Pitts says this:

It's worth remembering that even the architects of the greatest barbarism in history had their day in court. After burning away 11 million lives, the leaders of the Nazi regime found themselves facing not summary execution, but a trial before a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany.

So let me see if I can follow Pitts’chain of “logic.”  We don’t want the terrorist moved from military justice system to a civilian one because what we really want is to have them executed without a trial.  But we should stop criticizing the move from a military justice system to a civilian one because even the perpetrators of the Holocaust were subject to military justice.

Too long?  Let me try again.

"Don’t give them Military Justice because I know that you really don’t want have a trial and the Nazis got Military Justice but that was okay."

Better?

No, my head does not hurt--at least not today.

(Thanks to Hot Air)