Below The Beltway

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has suggested that the 9/11 plotters currently being held at Gitmo should be spared from paying the ultimate price for their crimes:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey suggested Friday that he believes the alleged 9/11 plotters held at Guantanamo Bay should not be executed if convicted.

“I kind of hope they don’t get it,” Mukasey said after a speech at the London School of Economics. “Because many of them want to be martyrs, and it’s kind of like the conversation & between the sadist and the masochist.”

“The masochist says hit me and the sadist says no, so I am kind of hoping they don’t get it,” he said.

In February, the Pentagon charged six of the 9/11 conspirators, including the alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The others: Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa al Hawsawi — who the government claims is a key financier for the attacks — and Mohammed al Kahtani, who is alleged to have been the 20th hijacker on United flight 93 but was denied entry into the United States at the Orlando International Airport.

Mukasey told the London audience that he would not speak to the legality of the death penalty, saying, “We have rather a different society, we have rather different traditions” in the United States. The European Union, of which the United Kingdom is a member, is opposed to the use of capital punishment in all cases.

Of those charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, “one of them at least is proud enough of it to have written to his wife that he thinks he is innocent because it was only 3,000,” Mukasey said. “If those are not poster children for the death penalty, I don’t know who is.”

At least one blogger is outraged:

For a number of reasons, I am deeply, deeply troubled that the current US attorney general would make these kind of statements to an international audience. I am sincerely hoping that this media report on the AG’s comments are inaccurate, because if they are accurate I think the comments are truly scandalous and seriously risk undermining the US position in the war on terror.  His comments cannot help me wonder whether AG Mukasey was secretly glad that his Justice Department failed to get the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, and whether AG Mukasey is troubled that the Iraqi justice system executed Saddam Hussein and others who committed horrendous war crimes.

Working off of the old adage that hard cases make bad law, it’s hard for me to think about a question like this without remembering images that will be burned in my mind forever. The visceral reaction is to say that these men should die a slow, painful death. But I’ve got to wonder what that’s going to accomplish at this point.