It is what everybody predicted would happen.  When Attorney General Stedman Graham er, Eric Holder announced that some of the Gitmo terrorist trials would be switched from military tribunals to civilian courts, people warned that key evidence would now be thrown out because it was obtained by enhanced interrogation techniques such as water boarding. That’s exactly what happened to day in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani whose trial was moved into the civilian system last year. The terrorist Ghailani  is charged with conspiring in the 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, that killed 224 people.

The witness who was banned from testifying, Hussein Abebe, says he sold TNT to Mr. Ghailani that was later used to blow up the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  The Judge agreed that the government learned of  Mr. Abebe through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation when he was being held in an overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Ghailani’s attorney,  the terrorist underwent coercive interrogation and torture while in C.I.A. custody, and that any statements or evidence derived from them is tainted and inadmissible. The  prosecution said Mr. Abebe’s decision to cooperate was voluntary and only remotely linked to Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation. “This is a giant witness for the government,” a prosecutor, Michael Farbiarz, told the judge last week, adding, “There’s nothing bigger than him.”  Mr. Farbiarz cited Mr. Abebe’s testimony that Mr. Ghailani made repeated trips to buy “black-market explosives” from him, adding, “That’s done for not many reasons in this life.”

Judge  Lewis Kaplan announced his decision today, blocking the government from calling  their “Giant Witness”

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Ex-White House counsel Greg Craig thought it was a good idea to transfer Elián Gonzalez from the arms of his loving family in Miami into the arms of Fidel Castro. Transfer Elián from Florida to Cuba. Bad idea. Attorney General Janet Reno thought she might have to prove her toughness by transferring dozens of women and children from a Waco cult headquarters to eternity. Really bad idea.

But Eric Holder’s plan to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from Guantánamo Bay to Manhattan for a civilian trial is perhaps liberals’ worst idea in years. KSM and his cohorts had agreed to plead guilty before a military tribunal, accept a sentence of death, and speedily rendezvous with their 72 ladies-in-waiting.

This offer of an efficient way out for the administration was not good enough for Attorney General Eric Holder. He insists on trying the terrorists before a civilian jury in federal court, just a few hundred yards from Ground Zero. Next to martyrdom and a free trip to paradise, this has to be the terrorists’ wildest dream.

No turbaned genie ever appeared out of Aladdin’s lamp to grant three greater wishes than these. KSM to Genie: One, I want to exploit my status as mass-murdering terrorist; Two, I want to inflict even greater pain and suffering on the families of those thousands whom I’ve murdered; Three, I want to make my trial a magnet for my brother jihadists throughout the world.

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Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter.

It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. One has to ask, why? The only real answer has to be that Obama is setting up some plausible deniability by firing or forcing the resignation of officials involved with GITMO policy. Once enough of these people are gone, Obama can look wide-eyed to the public and claim that he was badly served by his GITMO advisers and, therefore, it isn’t his fault.

Unfortunately for Obama the failure is not with the staff but with the chief himself, Obama.

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According to the American Historian Will Durant, “Animals claw each other to death, men consume each other by due process of law.”  And with that sentiment in mind, it is easy to see why the Obama Administration has made one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history.

Of course, I am talking about the decision to try terrorists for “crimes” in New York City in a criminal court using the laws of our land.  Let us count the ways this decision is beyond negligent; it is a gross dereliction of duty:

1.  An Unprecedented Act Providing A Terrible Precedent.  Throughout our history, we have treated enemy combatants as those committing an act of war.  That is so because (a) they are not US citizens, and (b) their acts were acts of war.  In other words, they were not criminal acts of a US citizen committed during peace time.  Now however, Obama has allowed at least one enemy combatant to be tried in a US criminal court subject to the constitutional laws of our country.

Here is what logically can flow from that legal precedent, keeping in mind that the first right granted is never the last:

a)      Other enemy combatants will claim that they are not being treated “separately but fairly,” that they too have a right to due process, and so they will claim that they have a right to tried in a US criminal court as well – effectively ending military tribunals; and

b)      Thereafter, enemy combatants will not only make use of our appeal process, they will also claim that they have a right to sue in our civil courts for any claimed “civil rights” injustices as a result of the process by which they were captured, detained and/or questioned – regardless of any existing laws to the contrary which they will claim are  – you guessed it  – unconstitutional;  and

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