Stuart Taylor, Jr. Pulls No Punches About Terrorists and Panties, in That Order

In one of his blunter moments on Imus in the Morning, legal expert Stuart Taylor, Jr. said that the recent “hoo-ha” over an accused terrorist being exonerated in a civilian court of 284 of the 285 counts against him is “probably overblown.”
 
Critics have been quick to presume the outcome would have been different had Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee in question, been tried in a military commission, but Taylor doesn’t ascribe to this theory.
 
“The main problem with this prosecution was that the judge…excluded some evidence that was very incriminating about him,” Taylor said about Ghailani, who was convicted on one count of conspiracy to bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. “But a military judge might well have done the same.”
 
The rules of the two court systems don’t differ much, Taylor pointed out, and Ghailani will still be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. “It’s not as if he’s walking free,” said Taylor, a contributor at National Journal and Newsweek.
 
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder were hoping to use this case as an example that the civilian court system is capable of trying terror suspects, but this verdict has been a political setback for them. “It enables Republican critics to say, ‘See the civilian courts don’t work,’” Taylor said, but he called this sort of criticism “oversimplified” and “wrong-headed,” because all Ghailani’s trial proved was that “in one case, you couldn’t get convictions beyond 20 years to life.”
 
In fact, Taylor continued, “There’s some case to be made that this guy might have gotten acquitted on all counts in a military commission, because the one count of which he was convicted, which is conspiracy, may not be available in a military commission at all.”
 
Going forward, he believes the fallout from this trial will result in the U.S. government not putting alleged terrorists on trial at all, and continuing to hold them indefinitely as military detainees. “As long as we’re at war with Al-Qaeda, and they’re associated with Al-Qaeda, we can hold them indefinitely under traditional military and international law without putting them on trial, period,” Taylor said, and agreed with Imus’s assertion that the United States’ war with Al-Qaeda could conceivably go on forever.
 
On other matters, Taylor told Imus that invasive airport security pat-downs are legal “as a general matter,” as long as a guard doesn’t get carried away and start uncomfortably groping people. The full-body scanners are also legal, in his view, but eventually the courts may require proof from the government “that you’re going to prevent some airline bombings by using them that wouldn’t otherwise be prevented.”
 
In matters of airport and airline security, Taylor noted the tendency of those in charge to employ a “last war psychology.” For instance, he said, “The last time something happened the guy had a bomb sewed in his underwear, so we better check everybody’s underwear.”
 
Don’t worry about our panties, Stuart.
 
-Julie Kanfer