The Ashcroft-led Department of Justice isn't just scary, it's also hapless. Consider the case that yielded the first post-September 11 terrorism convictions:
The jury verdict was hailed by the Bush administration as a major victory in the nation's war on terror. One other defendant was convicted of document fraud; a fourth was acquitted.
But an array of problems now threaten to unravel those verdicts. Among them:
· An ongoing court-ordered review has found the government withheld more than 100 documents from the defense, including CIA intelligence reports. Also withheld was an interview with a man who claimed the prosecution's star witness admitted lying to investigators.
· The government's key witness, Youssef Hmimssa, is a serial con man who was wanted for crimes in Europe and had lied to U.S. authorities before. During 20 hours of interrogating Hmimssa about terrorism--often without his attorney present--FBI agents took few notes.
· Before the trial began, the government deported at least two witnesses who challenged the prosecution's case.
· In at least one file prosecutors handed over to defense lawyers, a page with information critical to the defense was missing, defense lawyers say.
· Violations of a court gag order by Ashcroft and government leaks raise concerns about whether the defendants got a fair trial.
The arrests of three Arab men, just days after the September 11th attacks, garnered international attention. The Justice Department and FBI said they had broken up an Al Queda sleeper cell whose members were plotting attacks here and abroad.
The three men were probably up to no good. All North Africans, they were not at all integrated into the Detroit area's massive and mostly Lebanese, Iraqi and Palestinian Arab community, and they appeared to be trying to live under the radar. They had in their possession fake documents, airport identifications (two of them worked for a food vendor at Detroit Metropolitan Airport), and cryptic drawings suggestive of airport takeoff and landing patterns.
Federal officials were quick to claim the drawings were of Incirlik Air Force base in Turkey. The fourth suspect, a Moroccan lawyer named Elmaroudi who was arrested in North Carolina a year later, was a shady character wanted in MN for fraud. He was accused of being the head of the sleeper cell.
Attorney General John Ashcroft was all over the case. On October 31, 2001, just eight days after the judge issued a gag order, Ashcroft violated the order at a press conference where he announced that "Three Michigan men suspected of having knowledge of September 11 attacks were arrested on charges of possessing false documents." The men were never convincingly linked to Al Queda; the only evidence offered tying them to Al Queda came from another Moroccan, Youssef Hmimssa, who had been arrested in Chicago for federal fraud violations and whose charges were reduced from a possible 81 year jail term to just 46 months in return for his testimony. And to make it even more ridiculous, the FBI used a confidential informant to translate Arabic, and that informant, facing charges of trafficking cocaine, accused the FBI of asking him to break the law and has since fled the country.
But the follies weren't yet over. On the day that Hmimssa finished his testimony against the defendants, Ashcroft again violated the gag order, this time to say that regarding Hmimmssa's credibility, his "testimony is, has been of value, substantial value, in that respect."
Now the judge who presided over the trial is reviewing all the charges, and he could overturn the case.
One final thing:
The former lead prosecutor, Richard G. Convertino, who was removed from the case last September, has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top officials, accusing them of playing politics with the case.
"DOJ Washington had continuously placed perception over reality to the serious detriment of the war on terror," Convertino charged in his complaint.
Ashcroft being sued...couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.
