Debunking the most recent criticism of the U.S. justice system for terrorism trials.

Lawyers made opening statements Tuesday as the trial began in earnest for the first former Guantanamo detainee transferred to U.S. soil. While the government portrayed the slight, baby-faced 36-year-old as a vicious al Qaeda murderer who helped plan two US embassy bombings that killed 224 people, the defense told a very different story. Although not contesting much of the evidence the government plans to present — about the bombings themselves, its destructiveness and their innocent victims — defense lawyers argue that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was a hapless young Tanzanian duped into helping his powerful childhood friends who, unbeknownst to him, were al Qaeda killers.

On Wednesday, to the surprise of some spectators in the courtroom, a U.S. federal judge did the right thing: he followed the law.

When Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was first transferred to New York from Guantanamo Bay last year, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio called it “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”

I’ll agree with Sen. Lindsey Graham on one thing: “Americans still wait for justice.” That’s the headline of a column he wrote that ran in the SunNews and other South Carolina newspapers on Monday, lamenting that the U.S. government still hasn’t put the plotters of the September 11 terrorist attacks on trial. But Graham’s explanation for why we haven’t yet seen justice is actually backwards.

The New York Times today highlights a new report released by ProPublica and the National Law Journal concluding that torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush Administration and used on suspected terrorists has made it impossible to bring many of those alleged terrorists to justice.

The world of the Washington beltway has long provided a fertile ground for incestuous relationships between the regulated and their regulators.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration is scheduled to begin its first trial of a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay. Omar Khadr was only 15 when he was captured in a firefight in 2002 with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Now 23, he’ll finally have his day in court. Only instead of an experienced federal court with a long history of trying terror suspects, Khadr will be tried in a military commission, created just last year. In the eight years since President George W. Bush created the first military commissions at Guantanamo, they have convicted only four terrorists – only two in contested trials. Regular federal courts in the United States, by contrast, have convicted more than 400 in the same time period.

Read Daphne Eviatar’s observations from today’s hearings with Eric Holder and the House Judiciary Committee.

Lyndsey Graham is unable to produce positive results on an idea that no one supports.