Terrorist Asks Judge to Dismiss Case

December 2, 2009

The Obama File

Lawyers for a terrorism suspect once held at Guantánamo Bay, who is now facing prosecution in Manhattan, asked a judge on Tuesday to dismiss his case on the ground that his nearly five years in detention denied him “his constitutional right” to a speedy trial.

The terrorism suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was a cook and a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, was captured in Pakistan in 2004.  He has been charged with conspiring to help carry out Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — attacks that killed 224 people.

His speedy trial motion could foreshadow issues that could arise in the prosecution of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed organizer of the 9/11 plot, and four other Guantánamo detainees who Obama ordered sent to New York for trial.

“We respectfully submit that this case presents possibly the most unique and egregious example of a speedy trial violation in American jurisprudence to date,” Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers said in a motion that was heavily censored because of its reliance on classified information.

The motion was originally filed several weeks ago with Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, but it was kept almost entirely under seal pending a review by the government.  The new version, with many pages blacked out, was made public on Tuesday.

“This motion asks one primary question,” the lawyers, Peter E. Quijano, Michael K. Bachrach and Gregory Cooper, wrote.  “Can national security trump an indicted defendant’s constitutional Right to a Speedy Trial?  We respectfully submit that the answer is emphatically and without qualification, ‘no.’'”

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Terrorist Criminal Trials and the Coming Jihad

By Abraham H. Miller

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After the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, the police found amid the belongings of one of the perpetrators the list of the unindicted co-conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.  The list had been submitted to the lawyers for the defendant, Sheik Abdel Rahman,  and signed by Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney.  Under the rules of discovery in a criminal trial, the defendant had every right to the list.  If you read through the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, one name will jump off the page and grab your attention.  It is Number 95:  Osama bin Ladin.

If ever you had to have a reason why terrorists had to be dealt with as foreign combatants, and not as criminals, it would have stared you in the face from the discovery process of Sheik Rahman’s trial.  But there was more.  Rahman’s activist attorney, Lynne Stewart, used her position to pass information from the cleric to his terrorist followers in Egypt.  Stewart was later disbarred and sentenced to twenty-eight months in prison.

Stewart, however, is not an anomaly.  Radical lawyers, bent on using the legal system for furthering a political agenda, will be falling all over themselves to represent the five alleged terrorists who will now stand trial in New York City.  These lawyers will put American foreign policy on trial for the events of September 11, 2001.  Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama — in putting September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators into the criminal justice system — have given the Jihadists an incomparable stage for their propaganda.

What then possessed the Obama administration to ignore the obvious and to try these defendants in civil and not military proceedings?  It most certainly is not to showcase the American justice system for the world.  Both the president and the attorney general, in a consummate act of legal stupidity, have announced to the world that the defendants are not only guilty, but they are also going to be sentenced to death. If ever a national jury pool was tainted, this one was.  In the Islamic world, no one remotely sympathetic to the defendants could ignore the hypocrisy of this conduct.

Obama is willing to compromise intelligence and provide the Jihadists with a propaganda platform because he needs to placate the extremist elements of his political base. By taking these terrorists out of the hands of the military and putting them in the criminal justice system, Obama is redefining terrorism as a criminal justice issue and not as irregular warfare. In this, Obama is beginning a process that will reshape the meaning of terrorism in consonance with the sympathetic and minimalist notions of leftist ideology.

Terrorist trials in the media capital of the world will be a magnet for the inspired publicity of Jihadism.  All terrorism finds its inspiration in violence as theater.  The theater in the courtroom will be overshadowed by the inevitable carnage in the streets.

Terrorists have always wanted a lot of people watching, a lot of people asking, “Why?”  From Abane Ramdane, who moved the Algerian insurrection against the French out of the anonymous Sahara and into the media-saturated streets of Algiers, to George Habash, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who blew up air planes, terrorist leaders have thrived on the oxygen of publicity.

It is inconceivable that the Jihadists will not find New York, during the terrorist criminal trials, a place for statements to be written in blood and punctuated by explosions.

Innocent blood will flow in the streets of New York because Obama chose to make a political statement rather than confront the reality of what terrorism is and how it works.

The Worst Decision By A US President In History

David Horowitz believes the Obama administration has taken a giant step in its march to throw in the towel in the war against radical Islam.  On FoxNews this morning, Peter King said of the decision to try the soldiers of al-Qaeda — who by their own account have no country but their cause — as civilians:

“may be the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.”

It certainly is.  It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.

The administration is justifying its decisions on the grounds that because the 9/11 attackers targeted civilians they should be tried as civilians.  This makes no sense unless you are a Democrat who believes that the “holy war” that Islamic jihadists have formally declared on us is no different from the acts of isolated individuals who have decided to break the law.  This is the approach to the war on terror that John Kerry championed in 2004.  Now that Americans have had the poor judgment — the suicidally poor judgment — to make a leftist their president, this is the strategy our nation is set to pursue.

The decision to try the jihadists in a civilian court is also a decision which will divulge America’s security secrets to the enemy since civilian courts afford defendants the right of discovery.  It is also a propaganda gift to Islamic murderers who will turn the courtroom into a media circus to promote their hatred against the Great Satan — a hatred shared by their apologists at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the pro-Castro Center for Constitutional Rights who have pioneered the campaign against Guantanamo and whose influence in the Obama Administration is pervasive.  (BTW, The newly appointed lawyer for the president is the husband of Obama’s recently departed Maoist communications director Anita Dunn.)

Finally, this move continues and enlarges the refusal of Obama and the American Left to recognize that:

1.  We are in a war that has been declared on us — in which we, in other words, are the victims.
2.  That the war is conducted by religious armies whose war is inspired by their reading of the Koran.
3.  That the number of Muslims who support their war plan is in the tens of millions
4.  That they are aided and abetted by many Islamic governments and by the international Left.