Indict the Department of Justice!

Has there been a single terrorism case post-9/11 that wasn’t a complete farce?

Remember the scary paintball terrorists? (innocent – convicted anyway)

How about the falsely convicted and later released in the Detroit Case? You know, the one where the prosecutor is now being prosecuted?

Wow, we sure felt like we needed government the week they were arrested, huh?

There was the “worst of the worst” in the form of Mr. Hamdi, who was set free by the military after the court said he was eligible for a writ of habeus corpus.

You may not have heard of Ali al-Timimi. He was convicted of talking, and was sentenced to life +70.

Remember the “sleeper cell” in Buffalo? “Plead guilty or we’ll turn you over to Don ‘personally involved in torture‘ Rumsfeld.”

That poor lawyer in the Spanish train bombing case who “fingerprints matched”? He’d have gone to the chair if Spanish authorities hadn’t proven his innocence.

Then there’s Abu Ali, who was tortured by the Saudis into “admitting” that he planned to kill Bush. The judge said evidence gained under foreign torture was perfectly acceptable, evidence that he was tortured was not. He’s doing 30 years.

Don’t forget Jose Padilla, who Paul “Liar” Wolfowitz finally admitted was innocent of the accusation – fittingly announced by former Attorney General John Ashcroft from Moscow – that he was going to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb,” and blow up apartment buildings.

After 3 years in a Navy brig as an “enemy combatant,” this American citizen arrested on American soil was finally turned over to the court system before the USSC could get a hold of his case.

Now, we arrive at the trial of the “terrorist sleeper cell” in Lodi California. Turns out, the people of that town – who were as frightened of terrorists as they had once been of Saddam’s nukes after the arrest with great fanfare last summer – were absolute fools to fear their neighbors for a single minute.

Funny thing is that if the federal infomant hadn’t so obviously perjured himself on the stand, this father and son would surely have been kidnapped and locked away for many years. They may yet – the jury deliberates…

From Knight-Ridder:

“The government introduced no evidence that Hayat plotted any specific terrorist acts. Other than Hayat’s own disputed admissions, prosecutors produced no evidence that he actually received any training.

“The government’s case relies largely on the testimony of its star witness, a convenience-store manager who received $230,000 in FBI payments for infiltrating the Lodi mosque to target its conservative clerics. The informant, Naseem Khan, stunned the court when he testified that he had seen Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque in 1999.”

From the AP:

“Defense attorneys and terrorism experts said it was highly unlikely they would have been in the United States, a point prosecutors conceded later in the trial.”

It’s high time that all law enforcement powers over the citizen in this country are returned to the state governments and county courts.

The leadership of the US Department of Justice have proven themselves nothing but liars and murderers.

And don’t give me Moussoui, they could’ve stopped the attack in the first place if they’d listened to the agents in Minnesota.

Discussion over at Stress.

Update: The stupid jury convicted the kid.

Underlying Causes, Warbot Edition

The wimp still won’t link to Antiwar.com, but today he offers an etiology of Dubya’s youthful delinquency – and, apparently, his adult worldview. Under the heading “Bush Insulter Dies,” James Taranto relates the following story about recently deceased Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. (from a 1999 Washington Post article):

    When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

    Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

    The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. “I knew your father,” Bush remembers Coffin saying, “and your father lost to a better man.”

    Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father’s values were not universally admired.

    “You talk about a shattering blow,” said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. “Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”

Oh, yes, a shattering blow, one many of Dubya’s contemporaries must be glad they never had to face. The whole world doesn’t adore Daddy? Keep ’em coming, barkeep!

Taranto sighs this deep sociological insight re: liberal academics:

    One wonders if it ever dawns on these people what effective recruiters they are for the political right.

Hey, hippies, we remember how you treated us in college – now we have nukes. Our asses ain’t gonna kiss themselves!

Hersh on CNN/D-Now!

Two great interviews of Seymour Hersh regarding his new article “The Iran Plans,” about the “consideration” by the Air Force and White House of the use of nuclear weapons against Iran’s empty Natanz facility.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Hersh on Wolf Blitzer’s show.

Amy Goodman also interviewed him on Democracy Now this morning. This is a Must See/Hear/Read. Who knew Iran’s government had offered to recognise Israel?!

James Taranto, Wimp

From James Taranto’s “The Ugly Side of Libertarianism“:

    [David Bernstein] probably thinks of [libertarians] as cute little nerds who have basically sound (if somewhat extreme) ideas about economics along with various eccentric enthusiasms: private toll roads, pornography, drugs, head-freezing. This is the libertarian world of Reason magazine. (Disclosure: This columnist was an intern for Reason nearly two decades ago.)

    But libertarianism is an ideology. Ideology can lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism to hatred. Check out the Independent Institute’s Web site (please note: not to be confused with the Independence Institute) or, even worse, Antiwar.com (sorry, we’re not linking), and you’ll find far libertarianism to be pretty much indistinguishable from the far left and the far right.

A couple of points: First, to all of you respectable libertarians who try so hard to impress the James Tarantos of the world, this is what they think of you. You’re harmless little dorks whose “extremist” views make no difference whatsoever. Congratulations.

Second, why no link to Antiwar.com? Are Taranto’s readers too delicate to handle today’s headlines? Let’s see: “Political Turmoil Leaves Iraq Adrift” (a story from the neo-Nazi LA Times), “Iraqi Politician Warns of ‘River of Blood'” (from Deutsche Presse-Agentur – Germans), “Prosecutor Links White House to CIA Leak” (by noted Islamofascists David E. Sanger and David Johnston), “US Pushed WMD Claim Despite Counter-Evidence” (a link to the Castro-owned Washington Post), etc. Yep, far-left and far-right extremism all around. And what about that viewpoint entitled “US Army Is Looking for a Few Good Rabbis“? Must be some rabid anti-Semitism there! Oh, wait, it’s about a rabbi who quit the US Army after being harassed by fundamentalist Christian chaplains; he’s now wanted on AWOL charges, despite the fact that his superiors told him he could leave.

We wouldn’t want James Taranto’s readers to learn about any of that, now would we?