Federal judge orders release of Gitmo jihadi who recruited four 9/11 hijackers

[darrels joy]

Federal judge orders release of Gitmo jihadi who recruited four 9/11 hijackers

posted at 10:05 pm on March 22, 2010 by Allahpundit


Not just the hijackers, though. He also apparently recruited Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium Bomber. The feds used enhanced interrogation techniques on him at Gitmo and a military prosecutor decided there wasn’t enough untainted evidence to prosecute him — but not before acknowledging, “Of the cases I had seen, [Slahi] was the one with the most blood on his hands.”

Now he’s going free. Maybe.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a district judge has ordered Mohamedou Slahi – a known al Qaeda recruiter who worked for Osama bin Laden – freed from Guantanamo. The Journal’s account does not explain the judge’s reasoning and the decision was not immediately available online. But the decision is inexplicable in light of Slahi’s notorious track record.

There is no doubt that Mohamedou Slahi is one of the worst terrorists held at Gitmo…

During his hearings at Guantanamo, Slahi denied many of the allegations levied against him. But in the context of those denials he also made some important admissions. Slahi admitted that he swore bayat (an oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden, and was trained in al Qaeda’s notorious al Farouq camp.

During his first administrative review board hearing, Slahi conceded, “…I was in jihad and I swore bayat to Bin Laden and everything but that was a very long time ago.”

Slahi’s denials at Guantanamo were also not credible. For example, Slahi admitted that he transferred thousands of dollars linked to al Qaeda, but claimed he did not know it was for terrorist purposes. Slahi admitted that he moved the money for a cousin (who is also his brother-in-law, as the two are married to sisters) who called him from a satellite phone linked to Osama bin Laden, but said he did not know bin Laden was involved. Slahi’s cousin is Abu Hafs al Mauritania–a senior al Qaeda theologian and long-time spiritual advisor to bin Laden.

Follow the link for lots more background from ace terror analyst Tom Joscelyn, who notes that U.S. intel had the goods on Slahi long before he was interrogated. If you want to know what precisely they did to him at Gitmo, go here, type in 166 in the page field, and read through to page 171. This isn’t the extent of it, but here’s the key bit:




There’s no way Obama and Holder will sign off on freeing a guy who’s directly connected to 9/11 when they’re mired in negotiations with Congress over closing Gitmo and promising that a decision on where to try KSM is merely “weeks away.” Quoth The One last May, while he stood in front of the Constitution: “I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people,” even if the evidence against them is so tainted as to make them untriable. Slahi is a textbook case; the question is whether Obama will keep his word and try to develop “clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category” or whether he’ll pack Slahi off to Canada or Mauritania or god knows where else in the hope that they’ll lock him up there. In the meantime, I assume they’ll delay by appealing the ruling: Even if they lose and the media has a fainting spell over the techniques applied to Slahi, the White House can blame Bush and celebrate this as a vindication of the due process principle by which untriable archterrorists must be returned to the battlefield.

On a not unrelated note, I’ll leave you with this tidbit from today’s LA Times on how the feds are now thinking of transferring captured jihadis to Bagram in Afghanistan to keep them out of the U.S. court system. Quote:

That the option of detaining suspects captured outside Afghanistan at Bagram is being contemplated reflects a recognition by the Obama administration that it has few other places to hold and interrogate foreign prisoners without giving them access to the U.S. court system, the officials said.
Without a location outside the United States for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning the suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to the U.S. or even killing them.

In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/2...911-hijackers/

[darrels joy]

So, You Still Want to Close Gitmo?
Judge’s order to release 9/11 jihadist is a sign of things to come.

Mohamedou Slahi is responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans. He was a core member of the 9/11 conspiracy — the recruiter of Mohamed Atta and the other ringleaders. If he’d had his druthers, even more Americans would have been killed: He is almost certainly the al-Qaeda middle manager who activated the Canadian cell that attempted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. On the scale of war criminals, he edges toward the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed range, as bad as it gets.

A federal judge has ordered that he be released.

Cassandra did not like being Cassandra. It is not enjoyable to foresee avoidable catastrophes again and again (and again and again and again) only to watch as no remedial measures are taken and disaster strikes. To repeat: The courts are institutionally incompetent when it comes to matters of national security, particularly the prosecution of war.

The Framers intended it that way. National-security decisions are the most important ones a political community makes, so our system of government was designed to have them made by the political branches — by those who answer to the voters, to the people whose lives are at stake. When the political branches abdicate this first responsibility of government, sitting by as it is usurped by politically insulated judges, they deny us the freedom to decide for ourselves what our security requires. We are then the subjects of judges rather than masters of our own destiny.

The courts, moreover, are the worst institution to which we could surrender this authority. Not only are we powerless to vote them out if they get national-defense matters wrong, they are guaranteed to get them wrong. This is not because judges are bad people; it is because they have no responsibility for protecting the country. They are generally good people whose job is to ensure that the parties before the court are given due process. When a judge does that job conscientiously, due-process rights are inevitably inflated. That judges do not run completely out of control in maximizing due-process rights owes not to judicial temperance but to the powers of the political branches.

This genius of separation of powers is on display in the civilian justice system. We know that judges are hardwired to maximize the rights of accused criminals. So we don’t give them free reign. It is Congress that writes the statutes that courts must apply and prescribes the rules of procedure. It is Congress that tells the judges what the punishment for a crime must be and whether an offender may be released — it doesn’t matter whether the judge thinks the criminal is unlikely to threaten society.

But the same Congress that performs these duties exactingly in the civilian justice system, where judges have institutional competence, has abdicated its responsibility in the conduct of war, in which judges have no expertise. In the 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision, the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc turned its back on precedent and empowered America’s enemies to use our courts against us — inviting alien enemy combatants into federal court to challenge the military’s determination that they are, in fact, enemy combatants. The Supremes further exacerbated the problem by giving no guidance to the lower courts as to how these cases should proceed: What rights to discovery and confrontation do our enemies have? What rules of evidence obtain? Who bears the burden of proof that a detainee is or is not an enemy combatant? What is the standard of proof to be applied? We don’t know. The Court left it up to the district judges to make it up as they go along.

As they continue making it up, here is the most important point to consider: Judges are inherently hostile to the concept of detention without trial. That we have been permitted for centuries to hold enemy combatants through the conclusion of hostilities, and that we have in fact done this to millions of prisoners, is irrelevant to them. They figure that we just weren’t enlightened enough before 2004 to involve the courts in this core aspect of warfare. But the fact is that we didn’t involve courts because it wasn’t the courts’ affair; fighting war is the military’s job, under the direction of the commander in chief and the authorization of Congress.

Now, we’ve somehow made it the job of Judge James Robertson, a progressive civil-rights activist appointed to the bench by President Clinton in 1994. Robertson is the district judge who started it all, the first to rule — back in 2003 — that Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard and driver, had Geneva Convention rights and could not be subjected to a military-commission trial. He later quit the FISA court in apparent protest over the president’s wartime effort to penetrate our enemies’ international communications without asking permission from federal judges. Now, he is ready to spring Slahi, the terrorist who set 9/11 in motion.

Bear this in mind: Because Slahi is still at Guantanamo Bay, Judge Robertson only has the authority to review his status as an enemy combatant. That means the judge could do nothing more than order Slahi’s release; if the Justice Department does not successfully appeal the decision, we will find another country to take Slahi. But if Gitmo had been closed, as the Obama administration and Sen. Lindsey Graham want, Slahi would have been physically inside the United States. Judge Robertson then would have claimed that his physical presence in our country entitled Slahi to all of the Constitution’s protections (not just habeas corpus). He would have ordered that Slahi be released in the United States if no suitable alternative could be found.

Who is still at Gitmo? The worst of the terrorists, including scores who are known to be dangerous but cannot be tried because, as in Slahi’s case, there is not sufficient admissible evidence to convict them of war crimes: There is only intelligence and coerced admissions — useful information but inadmissible in a trial court, civilian or military.

Scores of detainees fall into the detention category to which judges are most hostile: indefinite imprisonment without trial. If that imprisonment is happening here rather than in Cuba, judges will be free to order the terrorists released here.

And if they’d release Mohamedou Slahi, who wouldn’t they release?

— National Review’sAndrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author ofWillful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

http://article.nationalreview.com/pr...WQxZGE5ZDEzOWE=