Jane Mayer on Terror Trials

I very strongly recommend Jane Mayer’s new piece in the New Yorker, which profiles Attorney General Eric Holder and the partisan circus that has come to dominate the terror trial debate. (Really Jane is all you need to read on this, but I wrote a bit about the issue here and here.) I’m going to quote at length, but again, just go read the piece.

On the supposed superiority of military commissions in handling the toughest cases:

The makeshift military-commission system set up by Bush to handle terrorism cases has never tried a murder case, let alone one as complex, or notorious, as that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who will face the death penalty for the murder of nearly three thousand people….

…There is no evidence suggesting that military commissions would be tougher on suspected terrorists than criminal courts would. Of the three cases adjudicated at Guantánamo, one defendant received a life sentence after boycotting his own trial; another served only six months, in addition to the time he had already served at the detention camp; the third struck a plea bargain and received just nine months. The latter two defendants—Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as Osama bin Laden’s driver, and David Hicks, an Australian who attended an Al Qaeda training camp—are now at liberty in their home countries, having been released while Bush was still in office.

And this is a good point on an oft-overlooked benefit of civilian trials:

But the conventional court system has proved surprisingly effective at extracting intelligence. Dozens of suspected terrorists in the criminal system have coöperated with the government, usually in exchange for leniency in sentencing….And, last week, the Justice Department confirmed that Abdulmutallab was now coöperating with the F.B.I. A department official noted, “He has an incentive to talk in the criminal-justice system, which the other system doesn’t offer.” The key to gaining Abdulmutallab’s coöperation was the F.B.I.’s ability to enlist his family in getting him to talk. Holder asked me, “Would that father have gone to American authorities if he knew his son might be whisked away to a black site”—a secret prison set up in a foreign country—“and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques?

So literally, in Abdulmutallab’s case the choices were: do you want information from him, or do you want to torture him at Gitmo? Can’t have both. I really think that many people on the military commission side of the debate are deep down more interested in extracting punitive violent revenge from our adversaries than extracting useful intelligence.