Attorney General Eric Holder has consistently maintained that civilian courts are an effective means of prosecuting and convicting terrorists, but a recent memo released by the Department of Justice shows that the administration is using what most would consider an overly broad definition of the word “terrorist” to reach that conclusion.
In February, Holder made plain the Justice Department’s position on the matter: “We are at war against a very dangerous, intelligent and adaptable enemy and we must use every weapon available to us in order to win that war. In this case as in so many other ones, the criminal justice system has proved to be an invaluable tool,” Holder said. “We will continue to use it.”
And on March 16, Holder told a House Appropriations subcommittee that civilian courts have successfully sent “hundreds” of terrorists to jail, a claim he has often repeated to challenge claims that terror tribunals are a more effective solution.
Late Friday, a time typically reserved for dumping bad news, the Justice Department finally released a long-awaited memo that it says supports Holder’s assertions. The memo, which indicates that 403 “terrorists” have been convicted for terror-related crimes since 2001, has already attracted criticism from those arguing it dramatically overstates the civilian court system’s effectiveness.
The memo includes the following as “terror-related” offenses:
Category II cases include defendants charged with violating a variety of other statutes where the investigation involved an identified link to international terrorism. These Category II cases include offenses such as those involving fraud, immigration, firearms, drugs, false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, as well as general conspiracy charges [i.e., cases that charge other kinds of conspiracies, not terrorism conspiracies].
The claim that there are 403 terrorists in custody is absurd. DOJ arrives at this figure by counting what it describes as two categories of case. The first involves real terrorism charges. Sounds fair enough, but what types of “terrorism charges” are they counting? Well they include, for example, convictions under statutes barring “Animal Enterprise Terrorism,” “Narco-terrorism,” “crimes against internationally protected persons” (which can be terrorism-related but are not necessarily), hostage-taking (ditto), and offenses like harboring terrorists and material support to terrorism (which are surely terrorism-related, and involve assistance provided to terrorists, but are charges generally brought against facilitators, not actual terrorists).
The problem is not simply that Justice’s numbers are bogus, just like Dana Perino, Bill Burck, I, and others said they were. It is that Justice’s purpose is fraudulent. It was the Left, throughout the Bush years, that pooh-poohed these prosecutions as overblown — an exaggeration of the terrorist threat as part of the “politics of fear.” We, to the contrary, have always thought these cases were quite important. One key to stopping terrorism from happening is using less serious crimes and terror facilitation crimes to kill cells and interrupt plots in an early stage.
Furthermore, those of us who oppose the use of civilian courts to try alien enemy combatants during wartime have never said that the civilian courts are not the right forum for prosecuting (a) these terrorism related cases, and (b) actual terrorism cases that do not involve the enemy with which we are at war and as to whom Congress has provided for military commissions. The claim by Attorney General Holder and his minions that we are “denigrating” criminal prosecution or trying to remove the “tool” of law-enforcement from government’s anti-terror arsenal is just specious.
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
