9/11

9/11, Barack Obama, DOJ, Eric Holder, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM

AG Eric Holder inflated terror case convictions

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One difference between the man now heading the Justice Department and most of those he touted as “hundreds of successful prosecutions for terrorism” is at least the latter paid some price for deceiving or endangering the American people. Friday’s document dump (first leaked to friendly media by the DOJ) is further evidence of what Attorney General Eric Holder previously withheld that refutes his public statements and prior testimony before Congress. Senator Jeff Sessions and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy summarize it correctly:

“The contention that the civilian criminal justice system is always an effective tool against terrorism, though wrong, is not a frivolous argument. But it is diminished when posited by unserious people — and the people running this Justice Department are embarrassing themselves. Finally today, after months of delay, DOJ officials released what they claim is the back-up for Attorney General Holder’s oft-repeated and outlandish claim that there are “hundreds” of convicted “terrorists” incarcerated in federal prisons, which “fact” supposedly shows that civilian justice processes are our best method of trying, convicting and securely detaining terrorists. The Friday data dump is a joke. No wonder they waited til everyone was headed out of town to dump it.” — Andrew McCarthy

And:

“The information provided today confirms what Republicans have been saying all along — and removes perhaps the last remaining pillar underneath the Attorney General’s collapsing argument for the civilian trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. It is clear why the Attorney General was so reluctant to provide it. The Attorney General assured senators that KSM’s trial in New York City was ‘in the best interests of the American people in terms of safety.’ He justified that assertion by claiming that 300 terrorists were already safely convicted and in prison. In other words, the Attorney General was saying we’ve done this 300 times before and we can do it again. But we now know this is simply not true. The great majority of the terrorism cases cited by the Attorney General are in no way comparable to KSM’s case. Most of the convictions in this list are for far lesser offenses, such as document fraud and immigration violations, while only a small handful concern conduct even remotely similar to a mass-casualty terrorist attack. And none are on the level of KSM, who masterminded 9/11.” — Senator Jeff Sessions

Eric Holder claimed during his January 15, 2009 confirmation hearing to have learned while the DAG from his mistakes in the handling of the FALN and Marc Rich pardons. Obviously, he mostly learned he could make them with impunity and even bigger ones in furtherance of the political objectives of President Obama as the Attorney General of the United States.

9/11, al Qaeda, Debra Burlingame, Eric Holder, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Lawfare

Stalking the CIA; Justice lawyers at daggers drawn with the ­intelligence community

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Following up on Monday’s op-ed, ‘Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers,’ Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn have more about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and current Department of Justice Gitmo Task Force lawyer Jennifer Daskal today in The Weekly Standard. Here is an excerpt and the link:

President Bush “will go down in history as the torture president,” Daskal told the Associated Press in March 2008. “The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold,” Daskal added.

Daskal’s anti-CIA activism was not limited to making hyperbolic statements to the press. Daskal and Human Rights Watch played a significant role in uncovering the CIA’s secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, where top terrorists were detained and interrogated.

On November 2, 2005, Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported that the “CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.” The Post, citing the government’s security concerns, did not name the countries where the facilities were located. But just a few days later, on November 6, 2005, Human Rights Watch revealed the countries in a posting on its website. The organization said it had “collected information that CIA airplanes traveling from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 made direct flights to remote airfields in Poland and Romania.” The organization encouraged European officials to investigate further, and the Europeans did just that.

Next week, when Attorney General Eric Holder appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I hope they ask him if Daskal has had direct access to the CIA’s agreements with the countries that assisted America, the transportation assets, and what intelligence Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other high-value al Qaeda detainees provided. I mean, it seems like a good place to start.