No Trial for Architect of USS Cole Attack that Killed 17 and Injured 39

The 17 sailors killed during the USS Cole attack.

Named after a U.S. Marine who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his "conspicuous gallantry" at the Battle of Iwo Jima, the destroyer USS Cole was moored to a refueling platform in the Port of Aden in Yemen when suicide bombers used an explosive-filled boat to blow a 35-foot hole in the destroyer's hull. On that day, October 12, 2000, seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-nine were injured.

The alleged coordinator of that attack, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was captured in 2002 in the United Arab Emirates, has been awaiting trial at Guantanamo Bay.

But al-Nashiri is not going to trial, courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Even though al-Nahiri was scheduled to be arraigned way back in February of 2009, the charges against him have been withdrawn.

Moreover, as reported in the Washington Post, "no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future." 

At first, I wondered if al-Nahiri's file at the Justice Department got mixed up with the file of that New Black Panther guy who was intimidating non-Obama voters at a Philadelphia polling place. Or maybe the Justice Department got an "unwitting" delivery of "no charges pending" stamps that they felt had to be put to use.

No. What happened was that 20 months ago, right after Obama's inauguration, Obama's Defense Secretary, Robert M. Gates, ordered the military to stop referring cases from Gitmo for trial.

That's okay by al-Nashiri and his lawyer. Al-Nashiri maintains that he was an unwitting dupe who purchased the suicide boat for "a fishing project."

I think that if you asked him, al-Nashiri would tell you that his "freedom of fishing" should not be interfered with just because he is a senior al-Qaeda operative with Osama bin Ladin's number in his rolodex.

No doubt a chorus of American Leftists would agree. They should be happy. Under Obama, says the Post, it is unlikely that American Leftists--or any other Americans, including terrorism survivors and the families of those murdered by terrorists--will see Gitmo detainees in military courts or 9/11 plotters in federal court.

Come to think of it, trials of terrorists are messy things that do not exactly smooth the way for projects like the planned 9/11 Victory Mosque at Ground Zero, which has been endorsed with rubber stamps from City Hall right up to the White House.

And the Mainstream Media can't figure out why 20% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim.

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