It is utterly conspicuous to me that John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice can’t actually find and arrest any terrorists. Ah ha, you say, but he’s obtained numerous convictions. No, he hasn’t. He has obtained numerous plea bargains. Plea bargains are obtained by threatening a person, innocent or not, with severe sentences until he or she agrees to plead guilty to a slightly less severe sentence.
To give a plea bargain even the slightest credibility you have to believe that an honest-to-god all American jury might actually look for evidence and fail to convict someone for whom there is none even if the government tells them he’s guilty. It will not happen: all you have to do to an average American jury is say “boo” and they will convict.
Making your persecutor look good is always part of the deal. You will sign a confession and you will not contradict them.
The advantage to Ashcroft is obvious. He doesn’t have to actually catch anybody! He gets to go on TV and claim– surely, this is an outright lie– that another suspect has admitted terrorist activities. Ashcroft knows full well that these suspects are not making free and clear admissions of guilty. They are making deals after being threatened.
Well, what do you expect? Take the latest case– Iyman Faris. Here’s what Ashcroft lets you know about Iyman: he is a truck driver. He traveled to Afghanistan. Someone he knows thought he was kind of weird and finked on him to the authorities.
In our current political climate, he was doomed at that very instant.
The FBI, convinced that anyone who is suspected of being a terrorist must be a terrorist, arrested him. By the time you are arrested, in this day and age, you are already 99% guilty.
He was charged not with conspiracy or with any actual crime– that would require evidence, you see (strange world, isn’t it). Oh no. He was charged with the ever-useful generic “providing material support to a terrorist organization”.
It is important to notice– if you even care about injustice– that he was not arrested with a truck load of explosives, a basement full of bomb parts, a suitcase filled with guns, or anything of the sort. No no– again, that would constitute evidence and then we would have an actual trial, and it might even be public (Faris is a naturalized American citizen). No, no, no. He was charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, which, as we learned from other cases, means that he traveled to suspicious-sounding places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and talked to suspicious-looking people and looks suspiciously Arabic (he was born in Kashmir).
Did you know that the U.S. government itself has, on numerous occasions, provided support to terrorist organizations? You don’t have to be particularly finicky about the definition of “terrorist organization” to include the Taliban, which the U.S. sponsored when they were the muhajadeen and they were fighting the government of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980’s, but you could also include anti-Castro Cuban paramilitary organizations and the Contras in Nicaragua. I would include Pinochet and his generals in Chile but, for argument’s sake, let’s just stick to the obvious.
Ashcroft admits that Faris appeared to be a hard-working truck driver. Tell me, do you think Al Qaeda, with their enormous resources, can’t afford to put their operatives up for a few months while they assemble their devices of international terror? They have to get real jobs?
Mr. Faris drove back and forth across the country delivering things. The level of intelligence of this government is such that you envision top officials going “ah ha!” when they learned that. Next is, “so you deny being a witch?!” (As you might recall, during the height of the Spanish Inquisition, it was a crime to be a heretic, but it was a worse crime to deny being a heretic. If you were merely a heretic, you were strangled and then burned at the stake. If you denied being a heretic, you were burned alive.)
Apparently some of the information used to implicate Faris came from captured Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Hmm. Certainly a reliable source. Mr. Mohammed convinced the Department of Justice that Faris was planning to cut the supports of the Brooklyn Bridge with a torch, causing the bridge to collapse. This from one of the men responsible for planning 9/11? Do you think he’s serious? I’ll bet he also offered them information on plots to take Mickey Mouse hostage, blow up a McDonalds’ in Paris, and assassinate John Ashcroft.
A Palestinian friend of Faris’ said that he was surprised at the guilty plea because Faris didn’t seem interested in politics at all. I’m surprised this gentleman would even admit he had ever known Iyman Faris. This Palestinian friend will be John Ashcroft’s next suspect… unless he agrees to testify against someone else, so the FBI can run up the count.
It is a scandal that Faris was not tried in open court so we could all see and evaluate the evidence against him. It is unbelievable that the American people tolerate and accept secret trials of American citizens for nebulous crimes of association and insinuation, and it is an even greater crime that Ashcroft, after striking a plea bargain with almost all of his targets, still claims to have proven that there are terrorists active on U.S. soil.
What he has proven is that the government of the United States employs thuggery and intimidation and bullying in the pursuit of political bullshit.
Update July 2005: by the way, if you do a search on Iyman Faris you may find an article or two like this.
By golly, sounds like a regular high level Al Qaeda plotter, doesn’t he? Now please take note that almost all of that information was supplied to the FBI by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who now admits that he was making all this stuff up.
And do you care about the fact that millions of voters might be misinformed about a witness of whom the authorities claim such monumental significance?
Does it worry you that your government may never wish to put this guy on trial for the same reason it might never really want to hear, in a court room, from Osama Bin Laden?
Updated July 2005.
The most important point: do you honestly think that this government would negotiate a plea-bargain with known terrorists if they really had the goods on any of them?
Come on– be serious.
They would love a public trial where they can introduce impressive documentation, video, or material evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is actually plotting terrorist acts against the United States and that the mighty U.S. government is skillfully protecting you and me against their evil designs.
It is the duty of every American to assume that the unfortunate victims of Ashcroft’s jihad are innocent until proven guilty the old-fashioned way: in publicly accountable courtrooms.