Secret Plea Deals Reached With September 11 Defendants
Plus, terrible tweets by Ivy League professors; what Hamas means by a Gaza “ceasefire,” and more
The Department of Defense put out a three-paragraph, unsigned statement this evening headlined, “Plea Agreements Reached with 9/11 Defendants Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Bin 'Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi.”
It disclosed, “The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case. The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time.”
This is weird. The terrorist attacks on New York City, on the Pentagon, and on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, were a big deal, killing nearly 3,000 people. If there’s a deal that involves leniency for the perpetrators, the terms should be public, and it should be announced not in an after-hours unsigned press release, but by a live person who can answer questions.
The New York Times has an article reporting that the “deal” involves life imprisonment rather than the death penalty.
People have a range of views on the death penalty, but among the possible cases for which it is warranted, the September 11 attacks would seem to rank high among them. For Vice President Harris, who is running as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, it could be a politically troubling issue to get saddled with leniency for alleged September 11 perpetrators.
Youngkin dismantles anti-Blinken protest: It hasn’t gotten much national press attention, but anti-Israel protesters have been camped out for months in front of Secretary of State Blinken’s residence in Arlington, Virginia.
After Arlington County authorities refused to act, the state of Virginia, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, finally stepped in this week and shut the thing down, invoking a transportation safety issue.
“VDOT has determined that the present condition of the 400 block of Chain Bridge Road — which includes people, as well as concrete barriers, tents, flags, and other items occupying VDOT’s right-of-way — is unsafe for motorists, bikers, and pedestrians and blocks access to emergency vehicles and personnel,” the state agency told local news outlet ARLNow.
The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, praised the governor. “For months, @ADL has been disturbed by the lack of local action on this harassment of the highest ranking Jewish official in the Executive Branch. We have been working on this doggedly with local and state law enforcement. So glad that @GovernorVA has finally taken action against this ongoing harassment,” Greenblattt said in a social media post.
Recent work: “‘Medical Debt Forgiveness’ Is Next on the Democrats’ List” is the headline over my latest column for the New York Sun, reporting on an initiative by Vice President Harris. “We have forgiven over $650 million so far, and we plan to forgive another $7 billion — with a ‘B’ — for millions of Americans across the nation,” she said. Effectively, the forgiveness action transfers the debt from the individual patients and the hospitals to the overall American taxpayers. This week, the total public debt reached more than $35 trillion, a new high. The federal government has been adding to that debt with annual deficit spending since 2001, the last year there was a budget surplus. It is one debt that, unlike student debt or medical debt, is unlikely to be forgiven.
More recent work: “New York Times Blames Israel for West Bank Economic Misery, Omitting Crucial Context” is the headline over my latest column in the Algemeiner. Please check the full column out over at the Algemeiner. “Because the Times omitted the explanation for the withheld funds, the article made it sound like the Israelis were being cruel, vindictive, or, as the phrase ‘far-right’ suggested, extremist.” Please check out the full column over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that sort of thing.
Terrible tweets by Ivy League professors: Today we are kicking off a new regular feature, “terrible tweets by Ivy League professors.” The first example comes from someone I actually like, Juliette Kayyem, who is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She posts on x after the National Association of Black Journalists interview of President Trump: “They were like modern day Dorothys pulling the curtain back with their intellect and precision and exposing the ‘wizard’ as nothing more than a small, hateful man. It was skilled and illuminating and fearless.”
What’s the value-add for the Harvard professor to be out publicly on social media bashing Trump as “a small, hateful man”? It’s the equivalent of Trump referring to Senator Rubio as “Liddle Marco.” It reminds me of Nixon’s comment in leaving office: “always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” That is, the Trump-haters have become Trump-like in their nastiness.
Kayyem’s husband, David Barron, is the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Perhaps if a Trump-related case comes before him, the same crowd that wants Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse because of his wife’s text messages will ask Barron to do the same because of his wife’s tweet.
Harvard can talk about “institutional neutrality” all it wants, but when the famous professors are out there on social media during campaign season denouncing the Republican nominee as “a small, hateful man,” the public, and the students, manage to get the idea.
The “free speech” crowd will accuse me of wanting to restrict the free expression rights of faculty. Not so. It’s actually probably useful for the public to see these tweets as insight into the mindset of faculty at these institutions.
Ceasefire headline: The Wall Street Journal was sharply criticized on social media, and with some justification, for a headline about the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that read, “Strike in Iran Kills Hamas’s Leading Advocate for a Gaza Cease-Fire.” It was a lousy headline, and the article beneath it wasn’t much better: “They didn’t just kill Ismail Haniyeh,” a Hamas official said. “They are killing peace in the Middle East.” For this we need the Wall Street Journal?
More interesting than the press criticism angle on this one may be the “ceasefire” angle, because it’s being pushed so hard not only by the press but by the Biden-Harris administration. Serious Israelis are dismissive about the possibility. “Hamas is not interested in a deal at all. The only thing they are interested in is that Israel will surrender,” a former Israeli diplomat, Eli Yerushalmi, said today in a Zoom briefing of Israel’s Defense and Security Forum. He called reports of an imminent deal “fake news.”
The Israel’s Defense and Security Forum’s founder and chairman, Brigadier General (Reserve) Amir Avivi, said in another Zoom briefing this week that “Hamas is playing games.” Israeli military pressure might yield a temporary pause and the return of about 30 Israeli hostages, Avivi said, but fighting would then resume as it did after an earlier hostage-release pause.
What Hamas means by a “ceasefire” is a return to the October 6, 2023, status quo, with Hamas in control of Gaza and able to resume smuggling military material in by way of tunnels from Egypt. There is no conceivable scenario in which any elected Israeli government would accept that; it’d be suicidal for Israel. Anyway, what the Hamas guy means by a “ceasefire” is what looks to Israelis like an Israeli surrender. So the Journal headline, while ridiculous, is actually sort of illuminating in that it highlights how “ceasefire” doesn’t necessarily mean peace, but, depending on the terms, could mean Israel loses the war.
Haniyeh’s ceasefire advocacy will be buried along with him, but the Biden-Harris-Blinken ceasefire advocacy is a different story.
The return of any Israeli or American hostages from Gaza would be cause for celebration, for sure. But the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, knows that keeping a hold on some hostages is one of the few things preventing him from meeting the same fate as Haniyeh. The quickest way to a real ceasefire is a decisive Israeli military victory of the sort that has been advanced by Israel’s recent actions.
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