July 28, 2005
Catch And Release
Judge will tolerate a little junk in your trunk...
The presiding judge in the Millennium bombing case has boldly proclaimed the courts ready to handle terror trials as well as disparaging US policy toward detainees.
Good to know we've found an avant garde terror judge ready to find anyone with 124 pounds of explosives in their car trunk trying to sneak into the country guilty, give him a light sentence, and of course assume that is how to treat hundreds of people taken on foreign battlefields or arrested through tangental investigative means in foreign lands. The arrogant presumption that it takes to conflate your one case with every case is unfortunately atypical of a lifetime-appointment.
This sentence shows the folly of the "criminalist" mindset on terrorism. John C. Coughenour, an early Reagan appointee, handed down 22 years in addition to his running commentary on US terror policy. Ahmed Ressam, the man who tried to cross into the United States from Canada with enough explosives to blow the Bridge Over the River Kwai, will be out in 22 years... or far less most likely, provided he trims the hedges on the grounds well and doesn't construct a bomb from soap flakes and cleaning solvent in prison.
The judge's lecture of the Bush Administration argues against itself. First, he floats this tired canard:
...the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and some believe "this threat renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."
Silly me, I thought the United States Constitution was a document detailing the rights of American citizens - those rights and privileges laid forth apply to American citizens, not Algerians crossing into America carrying so much explosive in their trunk the muffler drags the pavement. Very troubling to read such an ill-considered bit of political sloganeering like "rendering our Constitution obsolete" from a Circuit judge, and especially directly from the bench. There's more:
"We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel...The message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart."
The message isn't "if we blah blah blah, the terrorists will have won". The message is - "Hey terrorists, give it a whirl." If you get caught, you'll get three squares and access to the prison legal library. If you don't, you can go for the big prize of 75 virgins in paradise. If we catch them before the act, we massage the sentence and the crime. It's like catch and release at the pond - the guy tried to drive a car full of explosives into the United States to murder hundreds, there is no way on Allah's green earth Ressam should see the outside of prison, unless it's on the way to the potter's field in a pine box. We treat attempting terror as a far lesser crime than actually pulling it off. That must stop. Being caught in the commission or attempted commission of an act of mass terror must bring with it a permanent removal from polite society. You cannot catch those attempting to commit mass murder and release them back into society, ever.
Indeed, the VERY reason we need military tribunals is precisely embodied in this judge's words and actions in this case. Given abject prima facie guilt - the man was caught red handed with explosives crossing the border to commit murder and mayhem - and the judge cannot see fit to do more than perhaps a dozen or so years - what sentence do we expect for those taken at an Al Qaeda training camp? Four years? Five? Any? It is precisely because terrorism isn't a criminal act, it is a belligerent act of war, that these people and this process must be kept far away from the process designed to prosecute American citizens for infractions against it's legal code in crimes committed within it's borders.
We've long bemoaned that we possess a legal system, and not a justice system. The system doesn't work well in keeping child predators and other sociopaths behind bars, why would we consider involving it in cases of foreign terrorists and enemy forces?
Posted by MEC2 at July 28, 2005 07:50 PM | TrackBack