Justice wants Detroit terror convictions thrown out
Heralded as 'major victory against terror,' US government now says it made too many mistakes.
In a move that the
BBC reports
could not be worse timing for President Bush as he goes in front of the nation Thursday night to make his case that he is the best presidential candidate to lead the fight in the war on terror for four more years, the US Justice Department Wednesday asked a federal judge in Detroit to throw out the 2003 terror convictions in a case involving what Attorney General John Ashcroft had called a "sleeper operational combat cell."
USA Today reports Thursday that legal experts say the decision "is
a setback in the Bush administration's legal war on terrorism."
The New York Times reports that the 60-page document filed by the government also asked for
a new trial of the three men, who are all Morrocan immigrants, for document fraud only.
After nine months of investigation, federal prosecutors compiled a wealth of evidence that they said fatally undermined every aspect of their terror case. They also sharply rebuked the prosecutor who led the case, Richard G. Convertino, suggesting he knowingly withheld evidence that he was obligated to share with defense lawyers. Mr. Convertino, who was removed as the case prosecutor last year and is the subject of a department investigation, has denied accusations that he did anything wrong and has filed a lawsuit against the department.
The Voice of America reported Wednesday that two of the men were arrested
six days after 9/11 when the FBI was actually searching for the previous occupant of their apartment, while the third was arrested a year later in North Carolina. All three men – Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, Karim Koubriti and Ahmed Hannan – were convicted in June, 2003, of conspiring to provide material support to terrorism and document fraud.
Reuters reports that at the time of the convictions Mr. Ashcroft heralded them as
sending a clear message that the United States would work diligently to disrupt and dismantle terrorist "sleeper cells" at home and abroad.
The Chicago Tribune says the documents filed Wednesday by the government with the federal judge are filled with "
blunt language more common to an attack on an opponent's case."
"In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence ... and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist," it states.
In an editorial on the case,
The Cincinnati Post records the numerous mistakes made by the prosecution in the case, by its own admission.
Photos and drawings found in the pair's apartment did not represent what the prosecution said they did. A key witness turned out to be a known jailhouse liar. A videotape of alleged terrorist targets may well have been an ordinary vacation video. Potentially exculpatory evidence by an ex-CIA agent was withheld from the defense. The
Post also points out this was the same case in which Ashcroft was
admonished by Judge Robert Rosen for a "distressing lack of care" in his public comments on the case.
Combined with the attorney general's deep penchant for secrecy [the
Post writes], the public could be excused if it begins wondering if, like this case, there's less there than meets the eye. Robert Precht, an assistant dean of the University of Michigan Law School and a defense attorney in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, tells the
Tribune that in his 20 years as a lawyer, he has never seen a document "that so thoroughly and candidly indicts (the government)."
Attorney General John Ashcroft has set a tone in which suspects 'are guilty until proven innocent,' Precht said. 'The Justice Department has to be more impartial or it's going to have more of these cases.'
Knight Ridder reports that other legal experts say Ashcroft and the Justice Department deserve
much of the blame for the collapse of the case.
'Senior officials at Justice didn't vet the case, didn't ask tough questions of the line prosecutors or adequately supervise them,' said Peter Margulies, a professor at Roger Williams Law School in Rhode Island. 'The case should never have gotten this far. Although the line prosecutors bear some responsibility, the Justice Department needs to stand up and be much more critical about its handling of the case,' added Mr. Margulies, who has written extensively about terrorism and prosecutorial ethics.
The Associated Press reports that while the lawyers for the three men were pleased with the government's actions Wednesday, they called upon the judge to go further and throw out the government's request for a second trial. Meanwhile, Imad Hamad, midwest regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the Detroit case should
serve as a wake-up call that the government appears to believe that any kind of crime involving an Arab is automatically being treated as terrorism by the Justice Department.
"Crimes committed by individuals who happen to be of Middle Eastern descent are treated in a more high profile way, and in the vast majority of cases, linked to terrorism," Hamad said. One other person who was glad to see the government admit to serious errors in the case was Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports Thursday that Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the Detroit case, had recently accused Las Vegas law enforcement officials of "
keeping quiet about videotapes seized "from possible terror cells in Detroit and Spain." Convertino said officials were worried that the tapes, which showed various locations in Las Vegas, would drive away tourists.
"My credibility was at stake," Goodman said Wednesday. "And this shows that guy is a liar....I feel vindicated." The Detroit case is one of several high-profile setbacks for the Justice Department in recent months. It lost a case last month in Iowa against a college student that who was on trial for using the Internet to recruit and raise money for terrorist causes. In mid-August, federal prosecutors acknowledged possible flaws in key evidence of evidence used in their case against two leaders of an Albany mosque charged with supporting terrorism. And
CNN reported last week that Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim from Oregon, who was
falsely accused by the FBI of involvement in March's Madrid train bombings, announced that he planned to sue the US government.
Also...
•
US standing with Arabs hits a low (
Christian Science Monitor)
•
Worldwide terrorism-related deaths on the rise (
NBC)
•
Straw calls for reform of UN (
Guardian)
•
US air raid kills many civilians in Falluja (
Al Jazeera)
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