Today in Counter Terrorism; new arrests and politicization

Lots of good stuff in this post; please read the whole thing !


Will Congress Challenge the Justice Department on Those Bogus 'Terrorist' Conviction Numbers [Andy McCarthy]

It was just brought to my attention that, if you don't read carefully, the phony figure of 195 convictions of "international terrorists" since 9/11 magically becomes 300 by the time the Justice Department is done with it. Last week, DOJ put out a "fact sheet" on "The Criminal Justice System as a Counterterrorism Tool." Among other things, it claims (the italics are mine, for reasons that will become clear):

Hundreds of terrorism suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court since 9/11. Today, there are more than 300 international or domestic terrorists incarcerated in U.S. federal prison facilities.

Note first the slippery use of the word "suspect." All this means is that a person was suspected of being a terrorist at some point in the course of an investigation. It does not mean he actually was one, that he was ever charged with an actual terrorism crime, or that he was ever convicted of such a crime.

During the Bush years, lawyers sympathetic to suspected terrorists (several of whom now work in the Justice Department) claimed that the Bush administration was overstating the terrorism problem by counting as "terrorism" cases those matters in which suspects were prosecuted for less serious crimes, such as false statements, or perhaps not prosecuted at all — just deported under the immigration laws.

As I said in my column today, the use of immigration procedures in particular was slandered as "racial profiling." In debates, I would routinely point out that many of those deported were likely terrorists, but that we probably had weak cases because we could not use some of the intelligence we had on them; by deporting them, we were at least able to get them out of the country without having to reveal our intelligence publicly in trial proceedings. Nonsense, the lefty lawyers would scoff: "If these people were really terrorists, we would charge them with terrorism offenses and convict them in court!" Any other position, I was told, violated the presumption of innocence.

Now that Obama is president and wants to portray civilian courts as effective, however, the presumption is thrown overboard. Now we are supposed to assume someone is a terrorist simply because someone — even someone from the dreaded Bush administration — once suspected, for whatever reason, that he might be a terrorist.

The DOJ "fact sheet" goes on to tell us there are 300 "terrorists" in custody. But look at what they have to do to get there: (a) gone is the "since 9/11" limitation — the 300 figure represents all terrorists ever convicted who are still in jail; and (b) they have to add in domestic terrorists to goose up the numbers — even though no one is contending that domestic terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants. We are at war with al-Qaeda, not PETA.

Quite clearly, the 300 figure is a gross exaggeration if our focus is the number of international terrorists convicted since 9/11. As I show in my column, the Human Rights First report had to include all sorts of non-terrorism crimes just to get to 195. DOJ can't conceivably get anywhere close to 300.

Congress should be demanding, right now, this disclosure from the Justice Department:

Mr. Attorney General, your Department has represented to the public in a "fact sheet" that "hundreds" of terrorism "suspects" have been 'successfully prosecuted' since 9/11. Federal law defines international terrorism as involving "violent acts or acts dangerous to human life" that are intended to intimidate a civilian population, influence government policy by coercion, or affect the conduct of government by "mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping." Title 18, United States Code, Sec. 2331.

Please respond to the following:

1. Are you saying that the Justice Department has obtained convictions on crimes involving violent acts that fit this legal definition of terrorism?

2. Provide a list of the hundreds of terrorism suspects you say have been convicted since 9/11, indicating in each case the offenses that were charged and the crimes of conviction, and indicating in each case whether the crimes of conviction involve violent acts that fit the legal definition of terrorism set forth above.

3. Provide a list of the approximately 300 "international or domestic terrorists" you've represented are currently incarcerated in U.S. federal prison facilities. In each case, indicate (a) the offenses that were charged, (b) the crimes of conviction, (c) whether the case involved violent acts that fit the legal definition of terrorism set forth above, and (d) whether the crimes occurred before or after the 9/11 attacks.

It would be interesting to see what that "fact sheet" looked like


Who's in charge ? What is the policy ?

Ten with Ties to Abdulmutallab Arrested in Malaysia [Marc Thiessen]

AP has reported that “ten terrorism suspects arrested in Malaysia allegedly have ties to a Nigerian suspected in the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner.”

The question is: Who is interrogating them? The CIA interrogation program is shut down, and, according to the Obama administration, the new High-Value Interrogation Group has not been stood up. Are they being left to the Malaysians for interrogation? And if U.S. law-enforcement officials are involved, are they reading them their Miranda rights? These are questions the administration needs to answer.


Rigging the Numbers http://article.nationalreview.com/423463/rigging-the-numbers/andrew-c-mccarthy

We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”
It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making. The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases. No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game. Rigging the Numbers We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”

It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making. The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases. No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process.

Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game.

“We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.” That 195 number is making the rounds. It is both false and an exercise in hypocrisy. The figure is mined from “In Pursuit of Justice,” a report published by Human Rights First (HRF) in May 2008 and updated last July (available here). But the report does not claim that 195 international terrorists have been convicted. Rather, it says that 195 defendants have been convicted so far in 119 cases that have some connection, however attenuated, to terrorism. (See the report’s preface.) HRF goes on (at page 5) to explain its methodology. It examined prosecutions that were in some way “related to Islamist extremist terrorist organizations” (emphasis added). It should be obvious enough that this does not mean the people prosecuted were necessarily “international terrorists,” or that the cases involved actual terrorism charges.

But the report makes the obvious explicit:

In building our data set of terrorism cases, we have attempted to capture prosecutions that seek criminal sanctions for acts of terrorism, attempts or conspiracies to commit terrorism, or providing aid and support to those engaged in terrorism. We have also sought to identify and include prosecutions intended to disrupt and deter terrorism through other means, for example, through charges under “alternative” statutes such as false statements, financial fraud, and immigration fraud. [Emphasis added.]

This explanation makes clear that the cases HRF is talking about are, in the main, cases that no one disputes can be handled safely and efficiently by the civilian courts. For example, let’s say the FBI is investigating al-Qaeda and it interviews a person suspected of having relevant information. That person lies during the interview, so the prosecutors indict him for making false statements, and he pleads guilty. Under the HRF’s standards, that gets tallied as a conviction in a “terrorism case.” But it hardly means the defendant is an international terrorist, let alone a KSM.


A Word about the Human Rights First Report and the Left's Claim that We've Convicted 195 Terrorists Since 9/11 [Andy McCarthy]

The subject of my column this morning is the bogus number — 195 convictions — being thrown around by lefty lawyers and the DOJ to support their wayward argument that trials in the civilian criminal justice system make for an effective counterterrorism strategy. This, obviously, is the push-back against the temporary victory of common sense, the Obama administration's reversal of its decision to try KSM & Co. in federal court in Manhattan.

As I demonstrate in the column, the claim that there have been 195 convictions of "international terrorists" since 9/11 is false. It comes from the dishonest use being made of an 2009 update of a report published by Human Rights First in 2008, called "In Pursuit of Justice."

My column links the report and explains that it came up with the 195 number by aggregating cases that involved a lot more than terrorism charges (e.g., false-statements cases, immigration fraud, etc.) if those cases were somehow related to terrorism investigations.

There is something I didn't address in the column but I think I should make clear. The Human Rights First report itself is not the problem. For many years, I've known the authors of the report — Rich Zabel and Jim Benjamin. I think very highly of them, so much so that I cooperated in the original 2008 report, sitting for interviews at great length. I disagree philosophically with Rich and Jim regarding what we ought to conclude from the facts about civilian terrorism prosecutions. But I admire what they did in the report because they made a determined, good-faith effort to report honestly what the facts actually are. You can't have an intelligent debate until you know what the real facts are, and they tried to make sure we did.
The report itself is completely transparent in how it arrived at its number of 195 convictions since 2001. It does not attempt to mislead the reader — indeed, my explanation of why the 195 number is bogus comes from quoting the report itself.

I do not want to be misunderstood as criticizing the report. I don't agree with the report's bottom line that the civilian justice system is an effective tool against war criminals. But my quarrel is not with the data as laid out in the report. I object, instead, to the dishonest way the report is being used. The report is very clear that it is not labeling the 195 convicts as "international terrorists." Thus, the misuse of the report to make that suggestion is all the more disingenuous.

The same holds true for crimes like financial fraud and material support. These often involve people in the U.S. who are not themselves terrorists. Instead, they either contribute money and other assets to the jihadist cause (e.g., by contributing money to “charities” that are actually fronts for al-Qaeda or Hamas), or else help terrorists surreptitiously move their funds from place to place. To be sure, this is not always the case. As I recounted back in May, the Obama Justice Department gave a sweetheart deal to Ali Al-Marri. He was a hardcore terrorist, yet prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of material support to terrorism. As a result, he got an absurdly short sentence rather than the life-imprisonment term he’d have gotten if convicted on an actual terrorism charge. Al-Marri, however, is an unusual result. At least up until 2009, if a person could be proved to have committed terrorism crimes, he was almost always charged with terrorism crimes.

No opponent of civilian trials for enemy combatants is claiming that everyone who is connected in any way to a terrorism case should be transferred to the military courts. The quarrel here is over how to handle real operatives of al-Qaeda (and its components, like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). We are talking about jihadists who are captured plotting, carrying out, or having carried out attacks against the United States — not just anyone who happens to get ensnared in the broad net of a terrorism investigation.

A handful of the 195 convicted defendants counted by HRF really were terrorists, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are better ways than civilian trials to try enemy combatants. Calling a prosecution “successful” just means that we convicted the defendant; it does not mean that national security was well served. If, because of civilian due-process rules, we had to reveal national-defense information that we could have kept secret in a military commission — or if we had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to address security concerns that could have been obviated by having a military trial in the safety of Gitmo — then the country would have been better off getting the same result in a military commission. That is common sense.

The numbers rigging, moreover, is a bit rich coming from left-wing lawyers. They spent the seven years after 9/11 accusing the Bush Justice Department of artificially inflating its numbers to convey a false sense of counterterrorism effectiveness. How? By opening cases as terrorism investigations but disposing of them without terrorism charges — especially through the immigration laws (i.e., deporting suspected terrorists and facilitators).

That’s right: When the Bush administration used the immigration laws to boot terror suspects out of the country, the Left and its fellow travelers like CAIR claimed this was racial profiling masquerading as counterterrorism. Now, in the age of Obama, we learn from HRF that “immigration fraud” counts as a “terrorism case” — so the group can boost the numbers and claim that the same Justice Department (under the Bush administration for most of the period covered in the report) has done a great job of combating terrorism in civilian court.

In any event, the fact that Umar Farouk Whoever can safely be handled in civilian federal court for procuring his green card by fraud hardly means Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should be brought to civilian federal court for a wartime mass-murder strike targeting nearly 300 Americans — or that we should bestow on KSM the same Bill of Rights protections no longer enjoyed by the nearly 3,000 Americans he slaughtered in a wartime attack. It’s time to cook up a new plan. Cooking the books is not going to cut it.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).