Why hasn’t Eric Holder resigned already?
TweetPresident Barack Obama’s choice of Attorney General, Eric Holder, has been an utter disaster both practically and politically speaking. Today’s announcement, after over two years, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (believed to be the mastermind of the September 11th attacks) and five co-conspirators will be tried in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, rather than a civilian court in New York City or anywhere else, stands as an indictment of Holder’s judgment, competency and commonsense. He knows it. That’s exactly why he’s been putting this day off for so long.
As the George W. Bush administration drew to a close, pretrial work on the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had advanced to a very significant degree, with hearings having been held and lawyers on both sides having done substantial preparatory work. There had been scrupulous efforts to do everything to the highest legal standard in the context of a military court. The judge in the case was outraged when President Obama’s Justice Department, under Eric Holder, simply pulled the plug and flushed all of that down the drain, announcing that Mohammad and co. had been selected to be tried in a civilian court in New York City instead. (This was the wrong decision for so many reasons, but, as I wrote previously, I believe the most weighty was the potential effect of such incoherent prosecutorial policy on the rights of actual American citizens).
Then, facing tremendous albeit quite predictable political uproar over that decision, Eric Holder has simply left it out there, hanging and unresolved, all of this time; until today, that is, when he will be finally admitting with his actions (although, we can be certain, not with his words) that the Bush administration had it exactly right.
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The fact that justice has been deferred for so long for the relatives and loved ones of those killed on 9/11 is bad enough, but the reasons for its deferment under Eric Holder’s “leadership” are indefensible. It has been nothing but a craven exercise in vanity and stupidity. Why hasn’t President Barack Obama demanded Holder’s resignation? Why is Eric Holder still the Attorney General of the United States?
