Coalition Statement

On September 11, 2001, the entire world watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then turned the fully-fueled planes into weapons of mass destruction, flying them into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  3,000 of our fellow human beings died in two hours.

The American people rightly understood that this was an act of war.  It is incomprehensible to us that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and members of Congress would propose that the same men who today refer to the murder of Americans as a “blessed day” and who targeted the U.S. Capitol for destruction should be the beneficiaries of a social compact of which they are not a part, do not recognize, and which they seek to destroy: the United States Constitution.

It is morally offensive to provide Constitutional protections to foreign war criminals charged with brutally killing 3,000 innocent people in defiance of the laws of warfare accepted by all civilized nations in order to appeal to the international community.  We adamantly oppose prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in Article III civilian courts, an unprecedented and reckless decision, in view of the fact that all were battlefield captures properly detained for years as unlawful enemy combatants, not as criminal defendants with rights that immediately attach.  We believe that military commissions, which have a long and honorable history and which the Attorney General declared “fair, lawful and effective” and “consistent with our highest standards as a nation” are the appropriate legal forum for the individuals who declared war on America.

Further, the decision to try the worst war criminals in federal court means, in essence, that killing civilians where they live and work will result in greater due process protections for the perpetrators than killing military personnel overseas.  We reject the notion that a foreign attack on military personnel in the U.S. is an ordinary crime if civilians are also killed, while an attack by that same enemy on U.S. forces stationed abroad is a war crime. 55 Purple Hearts were posthumously awarded to the uniformed military personnel who died at the Pentagon on 9/11 in an act of war, not a street crime.

Finally, we adamantly oppose the decision to subject victims’ families, New York City residents and workers and the American people to a trial in New York City, with procedural rules that will enable Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to make a mockery of his victims, exult in the pain of their families, ridicule the proceedings and, worst of all, use the media to urge his brother terrorists to spill more American blood, all just blocks from the site of Al Qaeda’s greatest victory.

Founders:

TheBravest.com

9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America

Signatories will be posted Tuesday, November 24 and updated daily.