Law Professor Gets an “F”

The paranoid and hysterical will have nothing to worry about, said a Harvard-educated professor of laws yesterday, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammed ‘[is] convicted, and when the death penalty is applied to him’.

The professor quickly realized that he had gone too far and backpedaled: ‘I’m not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury’. Referring to the job that he just told them how to do.

Too bad that the professor is also the president of the United States and directly controls their future employment prospects. It’s pretty hard to imagine any judge or prosecutor not doing the ‘job’ that their boss just laid out for them.

Attorney General Eric Holder chimed in with the reminder that ‘Failure is not an option’. Good thing we can arrange the verdicts before starting jury selection!

It’s not surprising that the fix is in for the trial of one of the most notorious perpetrators in our criminal justice history. No one doubts that the evidence is there to convict KSM despite the danger to its admissibility generated by years of systematic torture.

But it is disappointing to see how those whom we elected to restore some semblance of the rule of law are more attuned to the hue and cry of those who did their best to dismantle it. How little backbone Obama and Holder have for defending due process for its own sake in the spirit of Jefferson and Madison in their eagerness to reassure the reactionaries who don’t give a shit about all that.

They also are sorely lacking in killer political instincts. One of their principal critics, former A-G Mukasey, just gave the Obama Administration a huge opening by making a tasteless joke about the Ft Hood shooter, a joke which came pretty close to winking at assassination.

What a great moment to flip the terrorist debate and saddle the crazies and their increasingly reactionary leaders with the implications of their own words. But that would take leaders ready to kick ass like their enemies do.

P.S. The loathesome Mukasey became Attorney General through the machinations of our liberal Democratic U.S. Senator, Charles Schumer, a crime for which he should be pursued by Furies until the end of his days.