Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has overridden a plea agreement reached earlier this week for the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death penalty cases.
Courts are separate from the executive branch for a VERY good reason
If people get in the habit of people from the White House calling up and saying hey no, I want you to treat those defendants more harshly than that, then it becomes commonplace. You need to be diligent about preventing the habit BEFORE it starts getting abused.
They are being tried in military tribunals so the Defense Secretary is in the position that the Attorney General would be in if it were in civilian courts. He didn’t, and can’t, override the court. He overrode the military prosecutors who initially agreed to the plea deal and withdrew the deal before it went to court.
Yeah. I mean I don’t agree with the whole concept of Guantanamo or the military tribunals or the torture or any of it. You have a point about how it’s supposed to work, in this construction… but this is why the courts are supposed to be civilian things.
There’s a reason why Ginny Thomas was talking about barges off Guantanamo for the Democrats, in the days leading up to January 6th. They haven’t forgotten how awesome it would be for it to work that way; we don’t gotta hand the infrastructure over to them all ready made.
The military part of it isn’t the point being made. The point is the chief prosecutor is stopping the offer made by his underlings. He isn’t overruling the court.
Yes. I understand that part of it. Let me rephrase my part that I already restated and expanded on a little.
People who work in the White House are absolutely not supposed to call a federal prosecutor and say, hey I don’t like this deal you made, take it back. Lloyd Austin isn’t a chief prosecutor.
The idea that someone who isn’t a US service member is going to be subject to a military tribunal, and in particular to a political appointee (which is what Lloyd Austin is, in addition to being the overling in this case so to speak) calling up and weighing in on their sentencing, has no place in a democracy at all, let alone one where there are people with credible plans to build that exact type of White-House-directed machinery and use it for horrifying ends. This is a time when every single person who works for the US government should be getting weekly briefings on the constitution and separation of powers, not having them bent (just a little) so we can settle some old and by now pretty much irrelevant scores.
I get that letting the 9/11 hijackers be subject to being paroled in 20 years by some theoretical future administration is unacceptable. I get that Lloyd Austin is the boss in this case and that military prosecutions don’t work like civilian law enforcement or have the same stringent safeguards built into it. That is, in fact, EXACTLY the reason I don’t like it.
I just don’t think this slight erosion of democratic norms of how law enforcement works is ever a good idea, let alone right now of all times.
WTF
Courts are separate from the executive branch for a VERY good reason
If people get in the habit of people from the White House calling up and saying hey no, I want you to treat those defendants more harshly than that, then it becomes commonplace. You need to be diligent about preventing the habit BEFORE it starts getting abused.
They are being tried in military tribunals so the Defense Secretary is in the position that the Attorney General would be in if it were in civilian courts. He didn’t, and can’t, override the court. He overrode the military prosecutors who initially agreed to the plea deal and withdrew the deal before it went to court.
Yeah. I mean I don’t agree with the whole concept of Guantanamo or the military tribunals or the torture or any of it. You have a point about how it’s supposed to work, in this construction… but this is why the courts are supposed to be civilian things.
There’s a reason why Ginny Thomas was talking about barges off Guantanamo for the Democrats, in the days leading up to January 6th. They haven’t forgotten how awesome it would be for it to work that way; we don’t gotta hand the infrastructure over to them all ready made.
The military part of it isn’t the point being made. The point is the chief prosecutor is stopping the offer made by his underlings. He isn’t overruling the court.
Yes. I understand that part of it. Let me rephrase my part that I already restated and expanded on a little.
People who work in the White House are absolutely not supposed to call a federal prosecutor and say, hey I don’t like this deal you made, take it back. Lloyd Austin isn’t a chief prosecutor.
The idea that someone who isn’t a US service member is going to be subject to a military tribunal, and in particular to a political appointee (which is what Lloyd Austin is, in addition to being the overling in this case so to speak) calling up and weighing in on their sentencing, has no place in a democracy at all, let alone one where there are people with credible plans to build that exact type of White-House-directed machinery and use it for horrifying ends. This is a time when every single person who works for the US government should be getting weekly briefings on the constitution and separation of powers, not having them bent (just a little) so we can settle some old and by now pretty much irrelevant scores.
I get that letting the 9/11 hijackers be subject to being paroled in 20 years by some theoretical future administration is unacceptable. I get that Lloyd Austin is the boss in this case and that military prosecutions don’t work like civilian law enforcement or have the same stringent safeguards built into it. That is, in fact, EXACTLY the reason I don’t like it.
I just don’t think this slight erosion of democratic norms of how law enforcement works is ever a good idea, let alone right now of all times.
That’s still not a 1:1. The President can’t actually call up the DOJ in the same way they can the DOD.