Intercept by Patrick Robinson Page B

poisoned opinion against us.

    “Your honor, this cannot be right. And I beseech you to end this most terrible stain on the name of American justice. I’m imploring you to free these four men, allow them to return home, and help the world to understand that we are indeed the bright City on the Hill, the shining hope of the human race. That we are Americans, to whom a lack of fair play is nothing less than abhorrent.”
    Myerson sat down next to Renton, who subtly patted him on the shoulder. Judge Osborne nodded his appreciation of the manner in which Myerson had delivered his case. And the clerk signaled for Captain Surprenant to proceed with the motion for the military.
    The Navy attorney stood and briefly reminded the justices that the U.S. military had tracked and grabbed Ibrahim Sharif from the remotest of Afghani mountain villages, where Yousaf Mohammed was also hiding out. There was plainly no doubt that these men were bomb makers. With assistance from another Middle Eastern Intelligence Service, they had been identified with no reasonable doubts. Well, almost.
    The other two were high on the list of Israel’s most wanted mass murders, and they were both from Gaza City. “I understand,” said the captain, “that the evidence was not one hundred percent decisive, and that it was, in a sense, circumstantial. But no one would dispute it was ninety-eight percent decisive. Circumstantial or not.”
    He outlined the crimes and the continuing dangers posed by such men. The scale of the mayhem that might break out if such men were free to return to the lands where they plotted and launched the 9/11 attacks.
    “Your Honors,” he continued, “These men are disciples of Osama bin Laden. All of them are members of the most sinister terror groups in the Middle East. The world has changed. These men do not fight in uniform, they do not represent Nation States. They are secretive, underhanded killers, who strike indiscriminately at both military and civilian targets. They have loyalty only to fellow jihadists. They observe no national borders. No nation even recognizes their organizations, with the exception of the pariahs of Iran and the West Bank.
    “There are no standards in the world today by which such men can be judged. They render, by their own actions, the Geneva conventions and protocols obsolete. I am not pleading for them to remain in jail to justify some ephemeral and hopelessly outdated sense of fair play. There is no fair play left in our fight against terrorism. That ended around 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.

    “Your Honors, I cannot believe you are prepared to grant this appeal, to liberate these men who will surely come at us again. Every military expert in the country understands that they cannot, they must not, be freed to fight again. We might be the City on the Hill, the beacon of freedom and fairness, but those four men, the ones in manacles in this courtroom, would surely flatten it, given even a semblance of a chance. I ask their appeal be denied.”
    The clerk immediately declared a recess for the judges to retire to consider their verdict. A timeframe that would, unusually, be announced within the hour.
    It was soon announced that the decision would be at 3 p.m., and when it came, the entire law enforcement and security forces of the United States of America understood that this was the appeal that was decided before it was heard.
    “We have listened to the arguments,” the judge said. “And we have studied the evidence exhaustively. We are unanimously drawn to the truth that the moral standards of the United States of America are being examined here, and that Captain Surprenant offered the most compelling case to cast them aside.
    “However this great nation’s sense and reputation for what is right, respectable, and fair, must always be paramount. Otherwise, we should perhaps ask ourselves, who indeed are we? But it was with some misgivings that we nonetheless reached an