WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
From today's NYT:
March 14, 2006
Judge Calls Halt to Penalty Phase of Terror Trial
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 13 -- An angry federal judge delayed the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui on Monday and said she was considering ending the prosecution's bid to have him executed after the disclosure that a government lawyer had improperly coached some witnesses.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said she had just learned from prosecutors that a lawyer for the Transportation Security Administration gave portions of last week's trial proceedings to seven witnesses who have yet to testify. In e-mail messages, the lawyer also seemed to tell some of the witnesses how they should testify to bolster the prosecution's argument that Mr. Moussaoui bore some responsibility for the deaths caused by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"In all my years on the bench, I've never seen a more egregious violation of the rule about witnesses," Judge Brinkema said before sending the jury home for two days. She said that the actions of the government lawyer, identified in court papers as Carla J. Martin, would make it "very difficult for this case to go forward."
Ms. Martin's missteps were amazingly blatant - ranging from summarizing previous testimony to witnesses who weren't supposed to hear it prior to their own testimony, to actually putting words in her witnesses' mouths. These would be out of bounds at any trial, even without Judge Brinkema's specific prohibitions.
Now why would an experienced government lawyer make such a bonehead mistake? Why, to protect the Bush Administration from something even worse - evidence that it had dropped the ball on airline security even after multiple warnings like the PDB "bin Laden determined to attack within the United States." Martin's own emails confirm this:
Again from 3/14/06 NYT:
In one of Ms. Martin's e-mail messages, dated last Wednesday, she told Lynne Osmus, who was the Federal Aviation Administration's head of security on Sept. 11, to be careful about her testimony about allowing passengers with short-bladed knives aboard airliners before the attacks. Prosecutors have argued that the F.A.A. might have stopped people with boarding airliners if they had short knives, which they did not do before Sept. 11.
Saying that the prosecutors created a wide credibility gap, she told Ms. Osmus, "There is no way that anyone could say that the carriers could have prevented all short-bladed knives from going through." She said the prosecutor "must elicit that from you and the witnesses on direct and not allow the defense to cut your credibility on cross."
To Claudio Manno, who had been Ms. Osmus's deputy at the time, Ms. Martin wrote last week: "The defense will try to exploit the fact that the F.A.A. was not clued in to what was going on. You need to assert that we did not necessarily need to wait until we got all available information, that we acted independently, indeed we thought that we had a statutory mandate" to act on safety issues.
So why is the CM completely ignoring this aspect of the story? The media that was a pit bull going after Clinton's sex life morphs into a poodle when BushCo puts our Constitution and even our lives at risk. Hard to beleive there are people so delusional they think that the MSM is liberal!