Obama Enabling Violent Jihad

[Sandra]

Obama Enabling Violent Jihad

URL Source: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=39310
Published: Oct 7, 2010
Author: Connie Hair

The Obama administration's first show trial for a violent Guantanamo Bay jihadi in a civilian court -- a man who has never set foot in America -- and endowing this enemy combatant
with full citizenship-level Fifth Amendment rights is unraveling in the
courtroom and putting America at risk.

It would be a laughable, "I told you so" moment if it weren't so dangerous. Stopping these violent jihadis from killing Americans is the government's job. The Obama
administration is putting American lives at risk and jeopardizing the
integrity of our legal system which was not designed to handle war
crimes.

Dealing with violent jihadists on the worldwide battlefield is a matter for military not civilian courts. Matters as simple as chains of custody for evidence take on different standard when
dealing with America's civilian courts. Our soldiers are not law
enforcement officers. They are paid to fight wars and break things, not
read Miranda rights and put evidence in baggies on the battlefield.

To left-wing elitists like Obama, acts of terrorism are matters for lawyers not soldiers. Now the first of these Gitmo detainee civilian
court trials has been delayed this week because the star witness was barred from testifying by trial judge Lewis Kaplan.

“Today’s decision to preclude Hussein Abebe from testifying in the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is a bad day for the U.S. Department of
Justice and a terrible day for the War on Terror. Unfortunately, it was a
bad day that was completely predictable," said Rep. Mike Rogers
(R-Mich.), a former FBI Special Agent who currently serves on the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "Attorney General
Holder’s decision to turn intelligence operations into legal cases was
always fraught with peril, and today the difficulty of actually
executing this strategic change was made clear. The Department of
Justice just lost a witness that they described as ‘a giant’ and will
likely now have to litigate each and every piece of evidence they
attempt to bring to trial."

The most thorough assessment of the state of disarray surrounding this prosecution came from Andrew McCarthy, the former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney who successfully
prosecuted Omar Abdel-Rahman -- the blind sheikh who first tried to blow
up the World Trade Center in 1993. McCarthy says civilian due-process
standards are crippling the government’s case.

From McCarthy's piece in National Review:

Ahmed Ghailani has confessed to bombing the U.S. embassy in Tanzania twelve years ago. As he explained to the FBI in a series of 2007 interviews, he
bought the TNT used in the explosion. He even identified the man from
whom he purchased it -- a man who was subsequently located, who
corroborated Ghailani’s confession, and who has been cooperating with
American and Tanzanian authorities ever since. Ghailani also helped buy
the truck and other components used to carry out the suicide attack.

"The two simultaneous embassy bombings -- Ghailani’s in Dar es Salaam and a second, more devastating one at the American embassy in Nairobi,
Kenya -- killed at least 224 people. The bombings made Ghailani, then in
his early 20s, an icon of the jihad. He strode al-Qaeda’s training
camps in Afghanistan and bonded with fellow terrorists, including some
who would later conduct the 9/11 attacks. In fact, Ghailani was so
highly regarded that he was chosen to serve as a bodyguard for Osama bin
Laden himself.

"All of that should make Ghailani’s trial, which is slated to begin in Manhattan federal court this week, a slam dunk. It is, however, anything but. Once again, politics has
trumped national security and common sense.

"The Obama administration has made Ghailani its test case to prove that the civilian criminal-justice system works perfectly well in wartime against
enemy combatants -- to show that we don’t need military commissions or
other alternatives specially tailored to address the peculiarities of
terrorism cases. The administration figured Ghailani was a safe bet.
After all, the embassy-bombing case had already been successfully
prosecuted once: In 2001, prior to 9/11, four jihadists were tried,
convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment (although the jury voted
to spare the two death-penalty defendants).

"Yet, to prove its political point that there is no downside in vesting Ghailani -- a Tanzanian national whose only connection to the United States is
his decision to make war on it -- with all the constitutional rights of
an American citizen, the Justice Department has had to slash its case.
DOJ is also finding that even more critical evidence may be suppressed
by the trial judge. In short, the slam dunk has become a horse race, one
the government could actually lose.

"The jury won’t be hearing about Ghailani’s confession. It has been reported that, because he was a highly sought and highly placed al-Qaeda operative, Ghailani
was subjected to harsh interrogation tactics by the CIA after being
captured in Pakistan in 2004. To be sure, no jury should be permitted to
hear a coerced confession. That is not because an alien terrorist held
outside the U.S. in wartime has Fifth Amendment rights; it is because a
proceeding in which a person is forced to be a witness against himself
does not meet rudimentary standards of justice. Nevertheless, we are not
referring here to what Ghailani may have told the CIA under duress; we
are talking about the confession he gave the FBI three years later. The
FBI does not use the CIA’s controversial tactics."

A judge has not only disallowed his confession to the FBI three years after Ghailani's capture that was in no way coerced, but he's delayed the case
barring the corroborating testimony of the main witness whose name was
part of that disallowed confession. The prosecution now has to decide
whether to appeal.

We are not talking in this case about a perpetrator accused of robbing a liquor store. They're trying a man responsible for the coordinated bombings of U.S. embassies killing
hundreds of people. When the case evaporates, do we simply put him on a
plane back to Pakistan to continue his violent jihad? Do we hold him
indefinitely if he's been acquitted? What damage would that do to the
civilian U.S. legal system that Obama and his attorney general profess
to care so much about?

Much more at the link of McCarthy's assessment of the gutted case prosecutors are left with at the hands of President Obama and his purely political attorney general.

The naive (at best) decision to try this foreign jihadi in the American civil court system is another tough lesson in the consequences resulting
from the incompetency of this administration as we head into the
November elections and into 2012 beyond.

Obama chose to politicize these trials and like everything else this polarizing president touches, it's backfiring politically because he's so far to
the left of the average American, he can't see the rest of us anymore.

Congressman Rogers, also the highest ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Intelligence,
suggests a different course borne of actual experience.

“I do not know what will happen with this particular case, but it should prompt us all to reconsider the administration’s broader law-enforcement
first strategy. The correct lesson to take from today is that our law
enforcement-first strategy is wrong, and it is destined to fail, and now
it is actually failing," Rogers said. "We need to pivot, while we still
can, to an intelligence-first standing that prioritizes capturing and
neutralizing enemy combatants.”

[Sandra]

Your correct Teresa, I plan on again voting against all judges in my area. Always have and now I know I will, especially the Federal ones. We have a couple running for reelection that are just horrible. They should have to disclose there party too and they do not. I feel we will have another issue, we are not safe and they can get here from Mexico and more than likley already have and are just waiting... DC is afraid of us normal Americans and the tea party people too. Many years to undo the mess we are in...

[Teresa Smith]

In my heart I think that the Judicial system is more than corrupt, and we need to clear them out of the court room and hold them all for treasonus acts to America. They prefer to look at Christians as a problem and Tea party and 9/12ers as dangerous and raciest. I'm here to say they are poking the average Home Town American right in the gut and if we are attacked again there is going to be a war here. We the people will not sit by and take this crap from some black robe who thinks they are our God. Do your job or get off the bench I'm sick to death of pedophiles and murders getting off and moving on the next victim.

[Sandra]

Looks like our Judicial system is broken. Sicking to allow this terrorist on American soil and give him rights as if he where an American citizen!