Put the 9-11 Mastermind on Trial in Otisville!

Give him a clean shirt and ship his ass off to Otisville

I'm delighted to read today that Mayor Bloomberg has seen the light, and is now against the simply awful idea of trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in lower Manhattan.

Sure, he was right that trying the Sept. 11 mastermind at the scene of his crimes had a certain panache--and it would be even nicer to execute him there, preferably by something slow--but it just would disrupt the city too much.

I like the idea, suggested by the local community board, to try him at a military base or perhaps the federal prison at Otisville in upstate New York. I especially like the Otisville idea.

Otisville was one of the places that was considered for Bernie Madoff. He wasn't sent there--he wound up in North Carolina--but Otisville is known as one of the repositories for a number of the Wall Street mob defendants. I like the idea of Mohammed being exposed to these particular exemplars of American capitalism, if at all possible. Perhaps they'll teach him a thing or two about stock swindling or IPOs? A new career for New York's favorite jihadist!

Or maybe they'll teach him about naked short selling, and then Overstock.com's crazy CEO Patrick Byrne will really have some to crow about. (And maybe become a neighbor, at the rate he's going.)

Hopefully, after conviction, the feds will give some thought to the "slow execution" idea I broached above. Just a suggestion.

© 2010 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.