(updated below)
Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).
What is the “material support” he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit — “a number of terrorist logos.” That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.” The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.
Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders. One can dislike this legal fact. One can wish it were different. But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.
In doing so, the Brandenberg Court struck down as unconstitutional an Ohio statute (under which the KKK leader was prosecuted) that made it a crime to “advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.” Such advocacy — please read the part in bold — cannot be a crime because it is protected by the First Amendment. The crux of the Court’s holding: ”the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force“ (emphasis added; for more on the First Amendment law protecting this right to advocate violence, see my discussion here).
To put this less abstractly, and as I’ve noted before, a person has — and should and must have — the absolute free speech right to advocate ideas such as this:
For decades, the U.S. Government has been engaging in violence and otherwise interfering in the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children have died as a result. There is no end in sight to this American assault on the Muslim world and those of its client states. Therefore, it is not only the right, but the duty, of Muslims to engage in violence against Americans as a means of self-defense and to deter further violence against Muslims. That is the only available means for fighting back against the world’s greatest military superpower. The only alternative is continuing passive submission to this onslaught of violence aimed at Muslims.
One may find that idea objectionable or even repellent, but does anyone believe that someone should be prosecuted for writing that paragraph? Anyone who would favor prosecution for that doesn’t understand or believe in the Constitution, as those ideas are pure political speech protected by the First Amendment, every bit as much as: the climate crisis now justifies violent attacks on polluting corporations; or capitalism is so destructive that the use of force in service of a Communist Revolution is compelled; or “if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken” (Brandenberg); or such is the tyranny of the Crown that taking up arms against it is not merely a right but the duty of all American patriots (The American Revolution). The Jerusalem Post just fired one of its columnists, a Jewish leftist who wrote that Palestinian violence against Israel is ”justified” because they have the “right to resist” the occupation; is he guilty of a crime of materially supporting Terrorism? Should Ward Churchill, widely accused of having justified the 9/11 attack (or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who did the same) have been indicted?
Judging from the description of Ahmad’s video in the FBI Affidavit (Ahmad’s YouTube account has been removed), the video in question does not go nearly as far as the clearly protected views referenced in the prior paragraph, as it does not explicitly advocate violence at all; indeed, it appears not to advocate that anyone do anything. Rather, the FBI believes it is evocative of such advocacy (“designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT”), which makes this prosecution even more troubling. Apparently, if you string together video and photographs (or words) in a certain way as to make the DOJ think that you’re implicitly trying to “develop support” for a Terrorist group — based on the political ideas you’re expressing — you risk decades of imprisonment. Is it possible to render the ostensible right of “free speech” more illusory than this?
This case is not an aberration; as indicated, prosecuting Muslims for pure political speech is an increasing weapon of the DOJ. In July, former Obama OLC official Marty Lederman analyzed the indictment of a 22-year-old former Penn State student for — in the FBI’s words — “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the [October, 2010] shootings” at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Museum and ”a number of postings encouraging attacks within the United States.” He also posted links to a bomb-making manual.
Regarding the part of the indictment based on “encouraging violent attacks,” Lederman — who, remember, was an Obama DOJ lawyer until very recently — wrote: it “does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial First Amendment protection under the Brandenburg line of cases.” As for linking to bomb-making materials, Lederman wrote: ”the First Amendment generally protects the publication of publicly available information, even where there is a chance or a likelihood that one or more readers may put such information to dangerous, unlawful use.” Lederman’s discussion of the law and its applicability to that prosecution contains some caveats (and also raises some other barriers to these kinds of prosecutions), but he is clear that the aspect of the indictment based on the alleged advocacy and encouragement of violence in the name of jihad “would appear to be very vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge.” That’s government-lawyer-ese for: this prosecution is attempting to criminalize free political speech.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this trend is the fact that a Pakistani man in New York was prosecuted and then sentenced to almost six years in prison for doing nothing more than including a Hezbollah news channel in the package of cable channels he offered for sale to consumers in Brooklyn. On some perverse level, though, all of these individuals are lucky that they are being merely prosecuted rather than targeted with due-process-free assassination. As I documented last month, that is what is being done to U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki due — overwhelmingly if not exclusively — to the U.S. Government’s fear of his purely political views.
If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was designed to prevent the government from imprisoning people — or killing them — because of the political ideas they promote. Yet that is clearly what the Obama administration is doing with increasing frequency and aggression.
There is one last point that bears emphasis here. Numerous prominent politicians from both political parties — Michael Mukasey, Howard Dean, Wes Clark, Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell, Fran Townsend, Rudy Giuliani, and many others — have not only been enthusiasticaly promoting and advocating on behalf of a designated terrorist organization (MEK of Iran), but they have been receiving substantial amounts of cash from that Terrorist group as they do so. There is only one list of “designated Terrorist organizations” under the law, and MEK is every bit as much on that list as LeT or Al Qaeda are. Yet you will never, ever see those individuals being indicted by the Obama DOJ for their far more extensive — and paid — involvement with MEK than, for instance, Ahmad has with LeT. That’s because: (1) the criminal law does not apply to politically powerful elites, only to ordinary citizens and residents (indeed, many of those MEK-shilling politicians cheer on broad and harsh application of the “material support” statute when applied to others), and (2) MEK is now devoted to fighting against a government disliked by the U.S. (Iran), so they’ve become (like Saddam Hussein when fighting Iran and bin Laden when fighting the Soviet Union) the Good Terrorists whom the U.S. likes and supports.
Nonetheless, MEK remains on the list of the designated Terrorist groups, and lending them material support — which certainly includes paid shilling for them — is every bit as criminal (at least) as the behavior in the above-discussed indictments. As usual, though, “Terrorism” means nothing other than what the U.S. Government wants it to mean at any given moment. The evisceration of the rule of law evidenced by this disparate treatment is as odious as the First Amendment assault itself.
UPDATE: A couple of commenters, such as abhisaha, argue that the government’s prosecution of Ahmad has been made more plausible by last year’s Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law (which I wrote about, among other places, here, when I interviewed the plaintiffs’ counsel). It’s certainly not an unreasonable point, except (1) that case did not overrule or purport to overrule Brandenberg, which remains good law; and (2) Holder itself emphasized that “pure speech” remains protected. It did, however, allow that one “may not coordinate the speech with the groups on the terrorist list,” though whether Ahmad did that is far from clear, as opposed to the MEK advocates, who quite likely would be found to have done so virtue of those payments (nor would it have any bearing on the indictment discussed by Lederman). In any event, Holder is easily one of the worst free speech decisions in several decades, and the fact that prosecutions are now being brought that hinge on a broad reading of it only underscore how relentless is the free speech assault from the Obama DOJ (which, naturally, vigorously advocated for the broad “material support” interpretation upheld in Holder).
In Newsweek, Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer explore the question of President Obama’s Justice Department’s failure to press any major criminal charges against Wall Street. We learn, distressingly, that “finance-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows.” Ex-Countrywide whistle-blower Eileen Foster, to name one prominent critic of the Justice Department’s inaction, is still urging the Justice Department to do something about her former colleagues, but to no avail. What’s holding them back?
Well, a lot of things. For one, criminal cases for finance-related wrongdoing are hard and complicated to prosecute. The Justice Department is stocked with a lot of people with experience defending financial institutions — including Attorney General Eric Holder, a former partner at Covington & Burling, which represents many of the worst of the mega-banks. Plus, curiously, a lot of Goldman executives and other Wall Street types keep donating lots of money to Obama! (Though less money than they gave him in 2008.) The simple answer is that Holder, and Obama, seem to think that while Wall Street did a lot of stupid, venal things that ruined everyone’s lives, those things were largely … legal. Obama said as much to Rolling Stone: “In some cases, really irresponsible practices that hurt a lot of people might not have been technically against the law.” He might be not entirely wrong! Lots of horrible finance industry practices were and are perfectly legal. But we’ll never quite know whether the line was crossed until we … actually investigate.
So it’s all the odder that Wall Street is so damn mad at Obama, right?
In the only slightly oversimplified narrative of the financial crisis and subsequent recession as you and I and most non-billionaires understand it, Wall Street blew up the world economy, then got bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars, and then resumed being hugely profitable and irresponsible as everyone else suffered through foreclosures, massive debt and mass unemployment. In this narrative, the government, led at various points by members of both parties, did everything in its power to maintain the status quo on Wall Street, while offering primarily temporary relief and various ineffectual half-measures to everyone else. Eventually the Democrats passed some form of “financial regulation” that largely has not yet gone into effect and that will not do much to stem or reverse the financialization of our economy. (The SEC is way, way behind on implenting Dodd-Frank and seems in no great hurry to finish.) The president eventually began noting the existence of mass outrage toward the financial sector, but he did little to actually address that outrage beyond proposing a new tax bracket for millionaires.
So, based on all that, it is very hard to see what Wall Street is so mad about! But as I explained earlier today, most of these rich financial industry titans are also dumb, spoiled children. If anything, the president’s failure to treat the chicanery and fraud that led to the crisis as crimes worth prosecuting had the same effect that his failure to prosecute the architects of Bush’s torture regime had: It emboldened the wrongdoers, who are now convinced that they never did wrong. In this environment, the public’s real and justified outrage at Wall Street is wholly inexplicable to finance types, who blame it on the media and Obama’s occasional rhetorical populism. (He is making people hate bankers by pointing out that people hate bankers!)
Now, in lieu of subpoenas and indictments, we have mild criticism — Obama’s occasional off-message mentions of “fat cat bankers” or whatever — and those mild criticisms set off hysterical waves of paranoia and self-righteous fury. Because no one was hauled off in chains, the people who wreaked so much havoc think it’s actually been established that they did not do wrong.
So Obama has now not succeeded in cowing or placating Wall Street.
After a Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout a year ago this week, it flew his body to the Arabian Sea, weighted it down, and slid it silently off an aircraft carrier into the watery depths.
For many Americans, the secret raid provided a measure of revenge and catharsis for the strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. But it didn’t provide the kind of justice and official reckoning that the country needs to gain real closure. Now the government has a chance to achieve that through a full, fair and open trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants, so the world can finally see the evidence against him as the true architect of the attacks on New York and Washington. The trial kickoff — an arraignment for the men — is scheduled for this Saturday at the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.
The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.
“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’
Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.
Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.
Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.
“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’
Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.
And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.
It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.
The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.
A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.
Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.
The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.
To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.
Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.
By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.
We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.
The clock struck at 1,095 days and 11 hours today for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. — or, at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: “How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?”
That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” in Arpaio’s office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff’s department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented “a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,” resulting in gross violations of constitutional rights.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012, to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit. Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.
That’s a big if. Now a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff.”
One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.
The announcement comes amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.
Rep. Raul Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down.
“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said last week, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”
A few days later Rep. Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement this week that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”
On Monday, religious leaders from 14 mainline denominations called on the attorney general to release its findings and take “immediate action to quell the growing human rights crisis in Arizona,” a reference to Arpaio’s law enforcement regime.
Citizens for a Better Arizona, a new group, which organized the successful recall of Tea Party leader and former state Senate president Russell Pearce in November, organized a major turnout at the Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday to call for Arpaio’s resignation.
“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”
The 79-year-old sheriff has rarely failed to express disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration. Last week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his “Cold Case posse” investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”
Two years ago, after Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano had also announced her intentions to terminate the DHS cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Arpaio appeared on the Glenn Beck show and openly mocked federal authority. Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allow him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared … whatever … if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
The DOJ report concluded that Arpaio engaged in racial profiling.
“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”
The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”
Another law enforcement officer last week levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in El Mirage, wrote an Op-Ed in the Arizona Republic declaring that ”Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”
Not that criticism or outrage has ever moved Arpaio to veer from the style that has made him a hero to some conservatives: his high-profile immigrant sweeps, his order that prisoners had to wear pink underwear, or his reality TV exploits. Last spring, he simply shrugged off calls for his resignation over allegations of his department’s misuse of $100 million.
Will Arpaio comply with the Justice Department’s demands?
“I’ve seen police chiefs, DAs and others who have been able to reform the system,” Perez said at his press conference today.
But “reform” and “Arpaio” are two words rarely seen together.
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(Update: At a Thursday afternoon press conference, a perturbed but defiant Sheriff Arpaio bristled at the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of its immigration data agreement with his department. He warned such a move would allow undocumented criminal offenders to go undetected and be “dumped back onto a street near you.” Arpaio suggested that “President Obama might as well erect a sign on our border, [saying] ‘Our home is your home.’” He did not address any of the allegations of racial profiling and civil rights violations in the DOJ’s report.
Nonetheless, Arpaio said that his office will cooperate with the Department of Justice, “to the best we can,” and he thanked the President for injecting immigration into the national presidential debate. ”But don’t come here using me as a whipping boy for a national and international problem,” he said, adding ”I will continue to enforce all of the laws.”
Every now and then, right-wingers like to argue for the inherently violent nature of Islam by pretending the very of idea of a “Christian terrorist” is unimaginably ludicrous. These right-wingers also tend to ignore abortion clinic bombers and other Christian and right-wing murderers who follow the terrorist script, so don’t expect them to devote much time to the story of the Waffle House gang recently indicted by the FBI.
Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to “save this country” by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:
What was the ostensible purpose of all this killing? Saving the country of course. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” Thomas reportedly said. “When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die.” The FBI also alleges that “Thomas, Roberts and others discussed the need to obtain unregistered silencers and explosive devices for use in attacks against federal government buildings and employees, as well as against local police.”
The group also had a “bucket list” of politicians and members of the media that they planned to kill, which seems to be a misreading of the “bucket list” concept. Two of the men bought “what they believed was a silencer and and unregistered explosive” from an FBI informant, as well. They also — with the informant — drove to Atlanta to “scope out” IRS and ATF buildings.
The “good news,” I guess, is that now the Justice Department is carrying out the same ridiculous stings on old Christian guys that it regularly carries out on young Muslim guys. Because let’s be honest, we have no way of knowing whether these four guys would’ve actually acted on their anti-government beliefs if they hadn’t been led to action by the “informants.” They met at a Waffle House and called themselves “the covert group.” They range in age from 65 to 73. How much of a real threat could they possibly have been? How much of a role did the “informant” play in pushing the men toward formulating an actual terror plot instead of just grumbling fantasies of revolution over omelets?
They may have been able to manufacture ricin — one of the men “used to work as a lab technician for a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency known as the Agricultural Research Service,” according to ABC News — but it’s unclear how practical ricin is as a chemical weapon. A terrorist needs tons of ricin to kill people through mass dispersal. Ricin is what terrorists turn to when they fail to make anthrax.
This looks like the same “entrapment in all but name” approach to fighting terror that the Justice Department has been pursuing against American Muslims for years. What will be interesting to see is whether the entrapment defense works any better for a gang of four elderly white guys than it does for teenagers with names like “Hosam Maher Husein Smadi.”
Richard Cohen, the universe’s worst opinion columnist, has rather belatedly and unexpectedly grown alarmed at the size and scope of the expensive, unaccountable death machine that is our counter-terror state. Don’t get alarmed — he’s still no bleeding-heart anti-American hippie crying about the “rights” of terrorists who hate us and want to destroy us for our freedom — but the idea that an American citizen’s death warrant can be secretly signed by a couple of Justice Department lawyers seems to have shaken Cohen out of his 40-year fog of elite Beltway complacency. Sort of.
This is a big leap for Richard Cohen, a writer who hates democracy and defended Dick Cheney’s torture regime as recently as 2009. (2009!)
So he begins by pointing out that he cheered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki:
A little “yippee” emitted from me when I heard the news. Awlaki was a traitor to his country and its values. He was allegedly a senior recruiter for al-Qaeda and was linked to the Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Malik Hasan as well as other attempted terror acts. Awlaki was not shy about his activities, and so they, not to mention his allegiance, were not in question.
But! This whole targeted killing of an American citizen thing is sort of problematic, according to the Constitution and “our founding ideals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has criticized Awlaki’s killing. But so far, the only politician of note to do so is Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate with a touching reverence for the Constitution as written. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he’s an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes,” he exclaimed. Paul, though, gets dismissed as a constitutional kvetch.
I do not share Paul’s indignation, but I do his dismay. Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.
(This Barron guy and this Lederman guy are actually very prominent attorneys known, ironically, for their particularly sharp criticisms of the Bush administration’s abuses of presidential war powers, but I wouldn’t expect a man who’s had a political column at Washington primary newspaper for 35 years to actually know anything at all about what he writes about, ever.)
But the last line gives the game away: Richard Cohen finds the idea of the president having the power to unilaterally order the execution of an American citizen absurd on its face. This puts him in league with people like Ron Paul and the ACLU. He does not wish for that sort of company. So he is begging for some grown-up Washington person to explain why this is all totally OK. He would like the president to reassure him. Won’t somebody please reassure Richard Cohen that it’s OK for the president to assassinate people?
(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts) 
(Credit: Reuters//Brennan Linsley) 
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has seen better days (Credit: Rick Scuteri / Reuters) 
Richard Cohen (Credit: Sigrid Estrada/Washington Post) 
