Jesse-Justin Cuevas, Columnist
Ideology: Liberal Independent | Writing from: Brooklyn, New York

“Values matter in this fight. We need to give those who might follow these mad men a good sense of what America is, and what America can be. We are militarily strong, but we are morally stronger.” – U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder

There was a time in my life when I was not proud to be an American but I believed in justice. Now the inverse is true, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in our justice system.

Growing up, I was fortunate enough to travel internationally at a young age, and I developed an early appreciation for other countries’ cultures and political societies. In the natural habit of comparison, I often found myself critical of our government even when I was too young to really understand the system. Like most young liberals, I obtained the bulk of my knowledge about our body politic under the Bush dynasty, which instilled in me an anger that prohibited any personal sense of patriotism. I couldn’t separate the United States from its government, and so I disliked this country rather than the decisions coming from its White House.

That raw frustration pushed me towards a university activist scene. In my first two years of college, I took many classes about social justice and I worked for a slew of marginalized campaigns—for Haitians’ rights, for sidewalk vendors’ rights, for reproductive rights, for sex workers’ rights. I really believed that justice was attainable and that it would be achieved non-hierarchically.

Now, however, after many years and events that have shaped my politics and my relationship with my government, the opposite is true. I love my country, but I don’t believe that true fairness exists. I think that we must work within our system to make real change even though there isn’t any way to serve justice totally. Although I disagree with many of the policies our government puts in place, and although I fundamentally disbelieve in many of the conditions upon which this country was built, I believe in our system and its potential.

This maturely developed faith in our system and my simultaneous skepticism of the ability to make things right is why I am saddened by the politics surrounding the debacle over Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and company’s trial. While I respect the point of view of the citizens—many of them 9/11 victims’ family members or New Yorkers to whom 9/11 maybe hits closer to home emotionally—who felt backhanded by the Attorney General’s November decision to try KSM in downtown Manhattan, I can’t help but see the newest developments as a public disbelief in our justice system on behalf of Capitol Hill. In an interview with the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center on Law and Security, declared that, “the Justice Department was emasculated under Bush.” Personally I believe it is being further emasculated right now.

On November 13th of last year, our current Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced that the 9/11 conspirators would be tried in a criminal court in Manhattan’s Foley Square. But on January 27th, after two and a half months of harsh criticism from the right, New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who originally publicly supported Holder’s decision, declared that that a trial in New York would be too expensive. That was the final deathblow.

Recently, the Washington Post reports, Obama declared that he will help decide where KSM will be tried. Originally, he asked that Holder make the decisions regarding the 9/11 conspirators and their trial. Such a decision was both a deeply political and symbolic move to help maintain an independent Justice Department. Holder’s decision reinforced this desire to depoliticize the nature of one of the most polarizing and political issues facing the Administration: how to protect the United States from terrorism. Holder’s decision reflected an attempt to “reassert [the Justice Department’s] lead role in handling the prosecution of terrorism,” as Greenberg said.

“His vision as Attorney General is to be seen as a lawyer, and to get away from what was a partisan-infected Justice Department…He doesn’t want the Justice Department to be seen as another political agency…after years of politicization, [the people at D.O.J.] are now going to do the right things, regardless of politics,” said David Vladeck, the current director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Conor Rogers, also of the Politicizer, wrote an article in opposition to Holder’s desires for a local and criminal trial. In it, he writes that, “to treat the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and their perpetrators, as criminals, rather than an act of war committed by fundamentalist terrorists demeans the importance of what happened, and perhaps more dangerously, reflects the very attitudes that our country ‘woke up’ form on that September morning.”

I wholly disagree. I think that to try KSM in a criminal court, we would be sending a message of pride and certainty, a distinguished belief in our system and our country’s dependence on and commitment to due process. Certainly 9/11 was an act of war rather than a “mere” felony, but that does not legitimize the subversion of one of the pillars supporting this government. Instead of subverting due process, we should sublimate it. Give the masterminds the “larger megaphone than any Al Qaeda spokesman has he ever had.” Lend them lawyers and a defense. And let us dominate them, legally. Rather than viewing Holder’s trial as a “miscarriage of our own justice system,” I see the disavowal of his decision as an abortion of our faith in this country’s justice system.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, in Washington, projects a similar conclusion. “We can’t have a situation where political pressure forces the federal government to forgo criminal prosecution. That would mean the system is fundamentally broken,” she said.
There is no doubt that I was one of the least personally affected people in this country during the attacks on September 11, 2001. But just as those in my mother’s generation recall exactly where they were, what they were doing and how they were doing it during the announcement of JFK’s assassination, I remember vividly the events that unfolded early that Tuesday morning. I remember where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking. And although I was a 15-year-old Tennessean without family members working or living near the World Trade Center, the events of that day have shaped every single day of my life since.

I cannot claim a home turf advantage to my opinion, though I have lived and worked in New York for the past going-on-five years, but maybe that lends my opinion some sort of clarity advantage. I have not always loved this country, and I certainly still am a skeptic in most veins of my life, from the political to the romantic, but there are principles that through time have won me over. To see KSM tried in Guantánamo would be the three steps back to every one step forward in my faith in this country. I think the world is more likely to admire an America that has regained its courage to live up to its principles more than one that “didn’t wake up” that September morning.