Prosecuting Vintage Terrorists Will Have To Do

The US authorities announced with zeal today that they will pursue arch-terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi, and bring him to justice in the US in an apparent further victory in the war on terror. For close watchers of the administration's 'anti-terror' maneuvers, however, this case fits a long-standing pattern in which the initial fanfare conforms poorly with the actual substance of the case.

In a series of high profile cases - the Lackawanna Six, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, the Michigan Four (see also here), and James Ujamaa - the initial hype following the indictments has been shown to be just that: hype. Key witnesses have lied, convictions thrown out, government prosecutors investigated for misconduct, convictions achieved on irrelevant (ie document fraud) or highly tenuous grounds, or government promoted plea bargains to avoid the embarrassment of a trial. High profile cases have reflected the general prosecutorial trend: expand terrorist crime definitions, inflate statistics, and include Mexian immigrants, Chinese sailors, and drunken airline passengers in official 'terrorism convictions'. This month’s acquittal of Sami al-Arian is a further embarrassment - with the government hoist by its own petard: the defense called not a single witness, allowing the government's case to simply defeat itself.

So it's not surprising that the government, desperate to show it's on to something, is actually now prosecuting a man, Hamadi, who was just released after serving 19 years in a German jail for the 1985 murder of a US Navy diver. Though at the time the White House claimed that the sentence “satisfies the demands of justice,” apparently the administration's political needs have redefined the demands of justice. If you can't find any new terrorists, just re-prosecute old ones...