Prosecution Gone Wrong

Prosecution Gone Wrong

March 14, 2006

The Bush administration’s prosecution of the “war on terror” has hit stumbling blocks at home as well. In the latest incident, the administration has jeopardized the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20^th hijacker,” by tampering with witnesses. By illegally coaching witnesses, the government put the case in jeopardy. This isn’t the first time a key terrorism prosecution has been jeopardized by government incompetence. This administration put such “a high premium on convictions at any cost,” that prosecutors are more and more going overboard. The record of the Bush administration on prosecuting terrorist suspects is not one to be admired —they have mishandled key cases.

• The administration bungled a terrorism case in Detroit. In what the Bush administration hailed as “a landmark case in the war on terrorism,” the convictions of two men were thrown out of court after the Justice Department “admitted widespread prosecutorial misconduct.” In 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was threatened with a contempt of court charge for speaking publicly about the case despite a gag order. A lead prosecutor was removed from the case. He in turn accused the Justice Department with not providing him with the appropriate resources and sued Ashcroft under a federal whistle-blower statute.
  
  
• The administration wasted precious resources prosecuting innocent people. For two weeks, the government held Brandon Mayfield, a former army lieutenant, “as a material witness in the Madrid bombings case,” only to release him after they realized that the fingerprint they thought was his did not match. In another mess-up, the Justice Department accused a University of Idaho student “of running websites used to recruit terrorists, raise money and spread inflammatory rhetoric.” Turns out Sami Omar Al-Hussayen ran a website that promoted the study of Islam and was acquitted of all terrorism-related charges. Al-Hussayen spent nearly a year and a half in jail.
  
  
• The administration has been sending suspects straight to jail, even when lacking evidence. The AP reported that “[T]he Justice Department is investigating its lawyers’ conduct in sending terrorism suspects to jail when there was insufficient evidence to charge them with a crime.” The investigation appears to be centered on a case of “eight Egyptian men from Evansville, Ind., who were held for about a week in 2001 on material witness warrants when one of their wives falsely accused them of planning a suicide attack.” The Bush administration “has apologized to them and to at least five other people detained under that law.”