Today, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled ‘Revenge of the ‘Shoe Bomber’: The terrorist sues to resume his jihad from prison. The Obama administration caves in,’ Debra Burlingame writes:

Last May at the National Archives, President Barack Obama warned that “more mistakes would occur” if Congress continued to politicize terrorist detention policy and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “[I]f we refuse to deal with those issues today,” he predicted, “then I guarantee you, they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.”

On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in Florence, Colo., one of those albatrosses, inmate number 24079-038, began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days earlier [June 9, 2007 pdf file at link], the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to that prisoner — Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber” — were being allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly, issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others.

Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his security measures, kept in place since 2002?

According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.” Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that killed 247 people.

Reid’s hand-written complaint. Click on image to open pdf file

In December 2008, the Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss Reid’s lawsuit. It cited the example of ADX inmate Ahmed Ajaj as an illustration of “the dangers inherent in permitting a group of inmates, of like mind in their opposition to the United States, to congregate for a prayer service conducted in a language not understood by most correctional officers.”

While imprisoned for passport fraud in 1992, Ajaj assisted in the plans to destroy the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, making phone calls to Ramzi Yousef and speaking in code to elude law enforcement monitoring. Ajaj tried to get his “training kit” to Yousef, which included videotapes and notes he had taken on bomb-making while attending a terrorist camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Reid’s own SAMs on correspondence had been tightened in 2006 after the shocking discovery that three of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers at ADX, not subject to security directives, had sent 90 letters to overseas terrorist networks, including those associated with the Madrid train bombing. The letters, exhorting jihad and praising Osama bin Laden as “my hero of this generation,” were printed in Arabic newspapers and brandished like trophies to recruit new members.

When setting restrictions on inmate religious practice, the Bureau of Prisons need only meet a reasonableness standard, a very low bar in the case of Muslim terrorists. Justice would easily have prevailed against Reid’s lawsuit; nevertheless it dropped the security measures on Reid after he missed 58 meals in a hunger strike that required medical intervention and forced feeding in April.

On July 6, Justice Department lawyers informed the court that Reid will be given a “new placement” in a “post-SAMs setting.” Whether that entails stepped down security in a different unit or transfer to a less secure facility, the Bureau of Prisons won’t say, and Justice refuses to comment.

Mr. Obama likes to observe that “no one has escaped from supermax,” but if Reid is moved from ADX Florence, he will be the first convicted terrorist to use the First Amendment to sue his way out. … READ THE REST of Debra Burlingame’s op-ed.

— additional information and links —

On June 9, the very same day the District Court was notified that the SAMs against Reid would be allowed to expire, the DOJ issued a press release within which they made no mention of that fact. That same day, the DOJ emailed notice of the press release to 9/11 and U.S.S. Cole bombing family members. In ‘Fact Sheet: Prosecuting and Detaining Terror Suspects in the U.S. Criminal Justice System’ the DOJ stated:

“[T]he U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has investigated and successfully prosecuted a wide range of international and domestic terrorism cases,” adding, The “Supermax” facility in Florence, Colo. (ADX Florence), which is BOP’s most secure facility, houses 33 of these international terrorists. There has never been an escape from ADX Florence.”

In Section III of their press release, the DOJ listed Reid among seven infamous Islamic jihad terrorists and touted the Special Administrative Measures:

* Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
* Ramzi Yousef, convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
* Ahmed Ressam, the Millenium Bomber
* Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa
* Richard Reid, convicted of attempting to ignite a shoe bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami carrying 184 passengers and 14 crewmembers
* Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, convicted of plotting to assassinate the U.S. President as well as attack and destroy civilian airliners
* Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring with al-Qaeda to hijack and crash planes into prominent U.S. buildings as part of the 9/11 attacks

“the Attorney General may direct the BOP to initiate … with respect to a particular inmate … when there is a substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons, or substantial damage to property that would entail the risk of death or serious bodily injury to persons. Generally, these measures can be initiated to prevent acts of terrorism, acts of violence, or the disclosure of classified information.

“SAMs are specific to a particular inmate. The special administrative measures may include housing the inmate in administrative detention and/or limiting certain privileges, including, but not limited to, correspondence, visiting, and other communications, as is reasonably necessary to protect persons against the risk of acts of violence or terrorism, while still maintaining the inmate’s attorney/client privilege. The SAMs authorization automatically expires after one year, unless renewed or vacated.”

On July 08, 2009, USA Today reported that Reid had been relocated within Supermax, to general population. Last week, 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America reported that since June 30, President Barack Obama has cleared two dozen beds at the 490-bed Supermax in Florence for Gitmo detainees. Fox News received a letter last week from Supermax inmate and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph who wrote, “Many of the less than honest inmates ‘convert’ to Judaism or Islam just to get the Kosher Halal food tray. In contrast, the government’s treatment of Christians is different. Christians cannot get the Kosher-Halal food tray.” TV there seems similarly slanted for Rudolph adds, “We get treated to a weekly dose of Farrakan, but The Passion is too controversial.”

The DOJ’s Inspector General issued a September 2006 report where, in part, they found:

“[T]he BOP has not effectively monitored the mail of terrorist and other high-risk inmates. Our review determined that the [Bureau of Prison’s] monitoring of inmate mail is deficient in several respects: The BOP does not read all the mail for terrorist and other high-risk inmates on its mail monitoring lists, does not have enough proficient translators to translate inmate mail written in foreign languages, and does not have sufficient staff trained in intelligence techniques to evaluate whether terrorists’ communications contain suspicious content.”

On December 21, 2006, the Washington Post reported

“No one’s getting out of the Supermax, period. End of story,” said Robert Hood, warden of Supermax from 2002 to 2005. Even union officials concede that an escape is unlikely. But they say staff cuts have made the prison dangerous for employees and vulnerable to attack from the outside. This year, a federal arbitrator agreed. The evidence, the arbitrator wrote, is clear: 3,147 critical shifts left unfilled; some housing units unsupervised for entire shifts; cells no longer being regularly searched; a rise in assaults on staff and threats of assaults by inmates angry they can’t get their one hour per day of recreation; two murders at the prison in two months last year, after a decade without any. Suddenly, the issue was viewed as more than union blustering over staff cuts.

“One of the problems we run into as a union is we’re always dismissed as trying to pad federal jobs,” said Mike Schnobrich, a correctional officer and secretary/treasurer of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals 1302. “We’ve been saying from the beginning this is not just a management-labor issue. This is a good-government issue.” Federal officials have acknowledged the problem and recently hired or will hire 18 staff members, bringing the total to at least 208 — still fewer than the 240 the prison had when it opened in the mid-1990s.

With perhaps dozens more Islamic terrorists headed to Supermax from Guantanamo, the amount of mail, phone calls, and prison conversations for BOP staff to monitor will at least double, as will the lawsuits. Yet President Obama and AG Holder were handed an easy solution to both those problems: Richard Reid offered them terms and they surrendered to his wishes.