Prove It

by digby

Chris Matthews had former CIA operative and journalist Jack Rice and constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein on today in a failed attempt to educate himself on the basic tenets of the Bill of Rights. He simply doesn’t understand why, if we know that Khalid Sheik Mohammed is guilty, we should bother with a trial.

One of the two mentioned it in passing, but I think it’s worth noting more explicitly, that the government presumably always “knows” that someone is guilty before they indict him or her for a crime. At least it should. The point of the trial is to make them prove it. They have to put their evidence on the table and convince 12 people that it’s enough to take away someone’s freedom or, in this case, execute them. And because trials are public, this demonstration of proof creates trust in the justice system and the rule of law among the population at large.

Evidently Chris and many others see absolutely no value in proving to the American people, much less the rest of the world, that KSM actually did the crimes of which he’s accused. Apparently, the fact that everyone just *knows* that he’s a very bad man means that we needn’t go though the process or put the evidence in the record. Sure, there will be those who believe it’s all rigged, but at the very least, the country’s willingness to submit this man to a trial shows a degree of faith in our own system of law, which seems to me to be an important message to send to the rest of the world.

Chris is worried that there’s going to be some big Perry Mason moment in the trial where KSM stands up and makes a rousing pitch for jihad and inspires the whole Muslim world to invade America. That’s just silly. It’s not going to be OJ. It’s going to be a terror trial which is highly controlled and very, very serious.

In any case, the two experts were unable to convince Matthews. He’s convinced, as I assume many Americans are, that giving terrorist suspects rights and a fair trial is too good for them. Of course, that’s what the KKK used to say about blacks too when terrorism went by the more prosaic term “lynching.”

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