DOJ's Civilian Trial Of Embassy Bomber Crumbling

From Creeping Sharia:

DOJ’s civilian trial of Embassy bomber crumbling


Posted on October 11, 2010 by creeping

via Connie Hair, Obama Enabling Violent Jihad



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.”