THE DAILY BLADE: We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: Part XV
That there are Muslims amongst us plotting and attempting terror is old news. What’s new is that lawyers have been spectacularly unsuccessful in convincing juries that the use of government informants to find and lead them down the primrose path to the perp walk is entrapment – that is, that informants may be “creating terrorists,” as Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University law school put it.
The latest example is the convictions of James Cromitie 44, Onta Williams, 34, David Williams, 29, and Laguerre Payen, 29, all of Newburgh, NY, on charges of conspiring to blow up a synagogue and a Jewish community center in The Bronx, and of planning to shoot down military planes at Stewart International Airport with heat- seeking missiles, reports Bloomberg News:
Prosecutors told jurors in the New York trial the men were "ready and willing" to commit terrorism. Defense lawyers said their impoverished clients were entrapped by an informant promising them as much as $250,000.
"It tells you that entrapment will not likely work in a terrorism case" as a defense, Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University law school, said outside the court. "This was the strongest entrapment defense we've seen."
Entrapment hasn't been successfully argued in a post-9/11 terrorism trial, according to the center. To prevail as a defense, the accused must show they wouldn't have committed the crime without being urged on. …
As of last month, informants were key to arrests in about 62 percent of the 50 most serious alleged terrorist plots since 9/11, according to the NYU center. The entrapment defense was raised in about 28 percent of those cases, including that of a man convicted of plotting to bomb a subway station in Manhattan before the 2004 Republican National Convention. …
It would be impossible for the government to foil terror plots without using undercover agents, said Robert M. Chesney, a University of Texas law professor who lectures on terrorism and the law.
"This is a tension that we normally handle by letting the jury decide whether they credit the defense" of entrapment, he said. …
Jake Ryan, a former federal prosecutor, said the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which includes local and federal personnel, look for suspects who present a genuine threat.
"They're not interested in trying to create dangerous people," said Ryan, who's now with San Diego-based law firm Latham & Watkins LLP. "They're interested in identifying dangerous people."
Note to CAIR: Porking mosques seems rather tame in comparison to blowing up synagogues to smithereens, as these four planned.
Bush Lied
A review of the latest WikiLeaks document dump by Wired finds no evidence that Saddam Hussein was continuing to pursue a WMD program, “[r]emnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War” had fallen into the hands of jihadi, insurgents and foreign agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and they “may have brewed up their own deadly agents”:
In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.
But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”
A small group - mostly of the political right - has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were lead to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.
The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.
But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms.
If the “relatively small” stockpiles were too piddling to bother with, our enemies wouldn’t have been trying to get their hands on them. How massive does the mass destruction have to be to get a liberal’s buy-in to go to war (second item)? Just a child, or does someone have to raze a village?
Editorial Note: Bush’s claim that Iran was the unseen hand behind the insurgency in Iraq was also vindicated by the WikiLeaks revelations. Which means that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama (he wasn’t using his middle name back then; only “racists” were) naively voted against a September 2007 resolution by Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) condemning Iran’s role in undermining our military effort in Iraq and officially designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist group – and then cynically used that vote to cast Hillary Clinton, who supported the resolution, as a warmonger before the IA caucuses.
The Stiletto Scoops M.I.A.
At Berlin Fashion Week 2010, German label Starstyling presented two face veils that are ideal for the young, fashion-forward Muslim woman (but not in France):
- Update to (Islamo)Fascist Fashionistas, The Stiletto Blog, July 14, 2010
M.I.A. attended Spike TV's Scream Awards ... wearing a burka printed with lyrics to her song "XXXO":
- M.I.A. Fashioned an ‘XXXO’ Burka for Herself, New York Magazine, October 20, 2010
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