jonathanturley.org
By Jonanthan Turley
October 21, 2009

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey now appears to be blaming our legal system for the 9-11 attacks as opposed to documented failures by the FBI and the failure of the Bush Administration to heed direct warnings of an imminent attack. In an op-ed piece this week, Mukasey puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of our rights-infested legal system.

Mukasey stated in the Wall Street Journal that “we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these [previous terrorism] cases…

In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents….”

To bring the point home, the editors added a subheading that reads: “We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.”

Mukasey is, of course, the same person who stated under oath that he did not know what waterboarding was. When it was defined for him, he then refused to answer questions about it being torture. He is also the man who blocked torture and war crimes investigations. He is also the man who sought to block investigations into the CIA’s knowing destruction of evidence of torture. He is also the man who blocked efforts to punish Bush officials who politicized the Justice Department.

Mukasey’s op-ed is a disgraceful effort to use these attacks to further an extremist legal campaign. If there were a right of constitutional defamation, this would meet the test. Our constitution has survived every challenge and we have found that our laws are our strength not our weakness in fighting extremism. Mukasey long ago joined the forces of those at war with our fundamental principles of law and legal process. Not only is his historical revisionism patently absurd, but his legal relativism is patently obvious in this column.