Were Obama interested in ensuring that the public supported and trusted his handling of American foreign policy, he would repudiate his plan to transfer terrorists now jailed at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen and cancel his plan to try senior terrorists like September 11 architect Khaled Sheikh Muhammad in civilian trials.
The trial is the first conducted under the Military Commissions Act, a law passed in 2006 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against an earlier Bush administration plan for trying Guantanamo Bay detainees under military rules.