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| Terror Networks |
| War on Terrorism suffering legal setbacks |
| 2004-03-22 |
| The post-Sept. 11 war against terrorism is suffering as much in the courts as in the streets with several legal setbacks involving suspected members of al-Qaida and other groups around the world. The biggest reversal came in Germany when a court threw out the only conviction of a Sept. 11 suspect. But other cases have been hindered, too, including against a militant Indonesian cleric and Zacarias Moussaoui, the only alleged Sept. 11 conspirator charged in the United States. The U.S. reluctance to let witnesses in custody testify and the sheer complexity of cross-border investigations are mostly to blame. And the Madrid bombings that killed 202 people last week showed that while investigators struggle to build judicial cases against suspects, terrorists are still successfully plotting and carrying out attacks. Spanish authorities had one of the chief suspects in the Madrid bombings, Jamal Zougam, on their radar since at least 2001 as a possible al-Qaida operative, even once searching his apartment, but were unable to build a case against him. Zougam, arrested two days after the bombings, operated in at least two countries, Morocco and Spain. The court decision in Germany to order a retrial for Mounir el Motassadeq - charged with aiding the three Hamburg, Germany-based Sept. 11 hijackers - focused attention on the limits of international cooperation. ``The threat is a very broad global Islamic front where terrorist operatives of one nationality will go to a second country to plan a terror operation then move to a third country to carry out their attacks,'' said Richard Evans, editor at Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London. ``Intelligence cooperation between countries like the United States and its allies has increased enormously, but there's still a long way to go,'' he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. In granting el Motassadeq a retrial last month, a German appeals court pointed to the lack of evidence from Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni in secret U.S. custody who is believed to have been the key al-Qaida contact for the Hamburg cell that included lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. Judges ruled that the lower court, which found the Moroccan guilty in February 2003 of more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and belonging to a terrorist organization, failed to weigh how the United States' refusal to allow Binalshibh to testify influenced the case. Fighting terrorism is no ``wild, unregulated war,'' Presiding Judge Klaus Tolksdorf explained in the March 4 verdict, saying authorities' need for secrecy can't outweigh a defendant's right to a fair trial. A German investigator in the case said the dilemma persists. ``Every country and every service has its own ideas and purposes and has to be careful with human sources and information or the politics of their country. So of course the flow of information is not one-to-one,'' said Manfred Murck, deputy head of the Hamburg state agency that tracks extremists. ``Nobody gets the full information of the other services.'' U.S. authorities provided German intelligence with interrogation transcripts from Binalshibh, who was captured in Pakistan on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. But they came with the proviso that the information not be used in court. Even if they were allowed, Murck said the judges likely would have wanted the witness in person to evaluate the testimony. The ban was also a key factor when the Hamburg state court found el Motassadeq's friend and fellow countryman Abdelghani Mzoudi not guilty of the same charges last month. In the United States, the federal conspiracy case against Moussaoui has stalled because the Justice Department refuses to let Binalshibh testify. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia ruled that unless Binalshibh appears in court, she would ban any evidence connecting Moussaoui to the Sept. 11 attacks, and bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty. An appeals court is considering Moussaoui's right to question Binalshibh and two other al-Qaida suspects. While the United States never explained its stand in the Hamburg trials, government attorneys argued in the Moussaoui case that U.S. national security should override his right of access to the witness. One reason behind the U.S. position may be that keeping operatives like Binalshibh incommunicado could keep prime suspects guessing, including al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden who's still at large. ``If you're Osama bin Laden you have to be sitting around wondering if they're talking ... but if you produce one of them and he's not cooperating, that sends a clear signal he's not talking,'' said Walter Purdy, director of the Terrorism Research Center outside Washington. In Indonesia, a problem with witness access also emerged in the Jakarta trial of militant Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, suspected of al-Qaida links and being a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah extremist group. At trial, three key suspects held in Malaysia and Singapore were only allowed to testify by video linkup. Defense attorneys argued they could have been under duress and the court discounted their statements. The United States also refused to allow a witness in its custody to testify, providing investigators' notes in which the man implicated Bashir. Attorneys argued the evidence was inadmissible, and the judges ignored it. Bashir's sentence was reduced on appeal to three years after a court annulled the treason conviction. Last Tuesday, the Indonesian Supreme Court halved that sentence as too harsh for the remaining charges and Bashir is now scheduled to be released next month. The question now is whether Washington will give Indonesian authorities access to another key witness it is holding, suspected Jemaah Islamiyah operations chief Hambali, who is believed to be able to link Bashir to terror attacks, said Sidney Jones, who has followed the case for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. ``They can't just work with interrogation reports,'' she said in a telephone interview from Jakarta. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #11 Squire Cingold 20% of gross? OK, OK, as long as we’re really aggressive. I want all the toys! Now, off to do the pro bono stuff I call working (or is it working stuff that should be called pro bono?) . . . |
| Posted by: cingold 2004-3-22 3:28:45 PM |
| #10 Jarhead... ever do any training in boarding parties? Once we get our Letter of Marque (Squire Cingold 20% of gross?) we'll need a small (tho well-armed) landing team. I volunteer to personally take charge of the galley and it's fine assortment of food from the world over. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-3-22 3:20:45 PM |
| #9 The Constitution grants Congress the power to issue letters of Marque and Reprisal, decidedly non-judicial, violent means to attack and destroy the enemies of the United States. It's really up to Congress to either exercise this power or delegate it to the Executive branch. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-3-22 12:00:53 PM |
| #8 IGS - it's bad to set fires - no? Is it bad to set a backfire? You are setting a fire to put out a big fire that will overwhelm you. To the little birds and baby ducks burned in the backfire, it's no consolation or less painful to them that their death was for a good cause. Yet, if their death allows millions of other birds and baby ducks to survie - is the backfire a bad thing. Evil out of control is like a fire - it starts to build it's own momentum and will burn until it is either stopped or burns everything in its apth. Our CIA and military are like a backfire. Fire fighting fire on it's own terms. And the sooner you put out a fire, no matter how you accomplish it, the less people who will get burned. |
| Posted by: B 2004-3-22 7:57:12 AM |
| #7 And the Madrid bombings that killed 202 people last week showed that while investigators struggle to build judicial cases against suspects, terrorists are still successfully plotting and carrying out attacks. Anyone who has been reading my posts re: collecting information vs acting on it - will know that this quote allows me a big, "I TOLD YOU SO!" btw .com ...good post. |
| Posted by: B 2004-3-22 7:49:34 AM |
| #6 Igs - Your response is anticipated - because I understand your reservations. The truth is, we are all forced to trust in the judgement of others - every day - from the judges of the judiciary to the cop on the beat to the teachers who influence our children to the President or Prime Minister. I am also anticipating a future in which the Bad Guys are hurting us because they have discovered how to take advantage of our social systems -- of our good intentions, honorable institutions, and ethical restraint. At this point I won't argue WHO and I don't much care if we agree upon that point - you will know them when your child is murdered on a bus or a train or while at the daycare center in the basement of a toppled office building. The judicial oversight you apparently feel comfortable with, is merely yet another sequence of one or more humans exercising individual judgement. You obviously believe there are checks and balances - thus errors are avoided or caught in time. Every system involving humans has sufficient examples where a common ideological mindset, or other human foible, can and does negate these mechanisms. Check history, it happens. It also happens that the potential for negative manipulation can and does occur in systems based upon trust - but not with significant frequency, else it wouldn't be "news" and a large number of our judges and police and teachers would be in jail. So where does your confidence in your version come from? It's just as fallible as any other - including mine. Why the assumption that the people in my pragmatic self-preservation response are less honorable or intelligent or ethical? In fact, they would be from among the very same people you / we are trusting right now - in the US, most are professional soldiers, but they are backed up by a large number of citizen soldiers. Is it because they can and do kill? Do you actually know anything about war? Do you actually know anything about soldiers? American soldiers? British soldiers? Aussies? Poles? I do. The people who must do it are, by an amazingly wide margin, the most loathe to do it except when it is forced upon them. Had you been reading the real-world blogs of the soldiers, you might get an inkling of what I'm talking about. Life is full of these moments: trust me, or not, the US Soldier is extremely humane. Honestly, your response is rife with your own personal assumptions. Perhaps you're more astute and beyond the norm, I don't know that, nor pretend to. On average, most people are not astute - that's why it's an outstanding quality. Most cary around mindsets which have been served up ten thousand times in movies and books and conventional wisdom. It has been standard fare for the last 15-20 years to represent the Bad Guys as either Bad Gov't or Rogue Elements within lax or corrupt Gov't. Yadda3. Does this collection of Hollywood fantasies make it so? Lol! No. As the Firesign Theater routine goes, "Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, as played by rich Hollywood movie stars." They know not whereof they spin their yarns - amd mere yarns they be. The fact is, you have no evidence to support your supposition. I will not be disingenuous and suggest the effort would be perfect, but what it reminds you of is of no consequence and has no value in point of fact. I have stated the case that the choice may well be taken away - this may be what MUST be done to preserve our way of life. And it will be what it will be. If you carry high ethical standards and conduct yourself with presence of mind both in times of peace and times of danger, then perhaps you should be a part of the decision-making process when the time comes. If that doesn't occur and if the nightmare comes true, you will pray somebody, somewhere, has had the guts to consider and implement the idea. Sorry for being so windy, but it's not a simple topic nor is it easy to prove a negative. I haven't proven anything, neither did you, but I hope you recognize that your fears are out of proportion to reality. And nightmares do happen. Being open-minded and prepared beats being decimated. |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-22 4:24:05 AM |
| #5 Well, you gotta fight fire with fire. If they wanna stand up and fight, let's get it on. If they wanna lurk in the shadows, we can do that too. But, gloves off, in either case. |
| Posted by: Texan 2004-3-22 2:56:05 AM |
| #4 The concept is not necessarily repulsive however it does raise a few questions as tho who makes the final decision and based on what evidence. What you are insinuating is that this process would be closed and not open to standard judicial oversight. This I do find rather disturbing. There have been a number of cases reported from both Afghanistan and Iraq where people pointed fingers at others purely because of past disputes which in many cases had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, just some old family disputes which lead to the loss of innocent lives. A 'hit team' which acts on raw intel without further corroboration, which is how I read your proposal, reminds me Stalinist USSR, Cambodia under Pol Pot...as well as many others. |
| Posted by: Igs 2004-3-22 2:45:23 AM |
| #3 At some point, it will become even clearer that the slow sure legal systems of the West, so heavily weighted in favor of the defendent, will be unworkable, unusable, and self-defeating. The old saw about a rumor making it half-way around the world before the truth has even gotten its boots on is true of terrorism, as well. While our ponderous agencies, made 10x moreso by the necessity of inter-agency cooperation and international sensitivities, are still working out the outline of an attack, the asshats have 2 more in the cooker. One day, when it has become so painful that we can bear no more, we will take off the gloves and create the antithesis of the terrorists: global hunter-killer teams that take the intel as it comes in and act sans the imprimatur of imaginary agents of moral legitimacy. I KNOW that the concept is repellant to the squeamish and that there are those who could never accept such pragmatism, so steeped are they in their ethereal principles. Fine. They can sleep the sleep of the innocent and keep their warm 'n fuzzy moral superiority. It is but a precept that they've personally elevated to basic self-apparent truth - a snobbish pretense that suits their egotistically-rooted sensitivities. Sleep on, children. Others will make it safe for you to live in your dreamworld. Gloves off, ASAP, please. |
| Posted by: .com 2004-3-22 1:03:47 AM |
| #2 No, it NEVER goes away on its own. There is only one cure and it has been invented by a Joooooo so you will have to withstand the itch for life. |
| Posted by: JFM 2004-3-22 12:50:59 AM |
| #1 Does jock itch ever go away on its own? |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2004-3-22 12:33:01 AM |