Justice Delayed

Holder’s friends in the al-Qaeda bar caused the trial delays he now criticizes.

Of all the infuriating aspects of the decision to transfer five 9/11 war criminals to civilian federal court, the one that grates most is the contention that the Obama administration is finally moving forward after “eight years of delay” — as Attorney General Eric Holder put it at his Friday press conference — during which the Bush administration managed to complete only three military-commission trials.

This is chutzpah writ large. The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people. (During 2007 alone, Covington contributed more than 3,000 hours of free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees.)

Almost from the moment President Bush authorized military commissions in 2001, this legion of litigators flooded the courts with habeas corpus petitions, contending that military detention and trials violated the Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Geneva Conventions. In 2004, the al-Qaeda bar induced the Supreme Court, in Rasul v. Bush, to grant enemies a statutory habeas corpus right to challenge their military detention in civilian court.

Congress tried to stop them by amending the habeas statute to divest the lower federal courts of jurisdiction in these lawsuits, but the al-Qaeda bar later persuaded the liberal bloc on the Court to ignore that amendment.

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