WaPo: 'Fatal Blow' to Obama's Terror Trial?

Marc Thiessen writes in the Washington Post:

“If President Obama needed a clarifying moment to help him decide whether to try Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court, a federal judge’s decision last week to bar the testimony of a key witness in the trial of Ahmed Ghailani should have provided it.

Ghailani’s prosecution for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa was supposed to be a slam dunk, which Attorney General Eric Holder would then hold up as evidence that civilian courts could handle the prosecutions of other Guantanamo detainees with more complicated cases. But then Judge Lewis Kaplan threw a wrench in Holder’s plans, declaring that the government’s star witness — the man who delivered five crates of TNT to Ghailani — cannot testify because he was first identified by Ghailani during coercive CIA questioning. The loss of this witness is a potentially fatal blow to the prosecution’s case. Instead of a slam dunk, Holder is now facing a catastrophe of his own making.”