Behind the TIMES - The “paper of record” doesn’t understand the terrorist threat.

Let's imagine it's August 2001. And let's pretend that the Clinton Justice Department never erected the procedural war that, to borrow the words Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick wrote in 1995, went "beyond what is legally required" in obstructing communications between the FBI's intelligence division and its criminal investigators.

As a result, let's say the FBI connects its dots. When an intelligence agent realizes terrorists Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi (two of the eventual 9/11 hijackers) are in the country and asks the Bureau's criminal division for help in locating them, headquarters encourages a cooperative effort instead of turning him down because of the wall. Agents thus collaborate and intensify surveillance of these men. They turn out to have vague connections to the al Qaeda bombers of the U.S.S. Cole ten months earlier. With a rapidity that defies experience, the Bureau knits this together with clues about flight training by a cabal of Middle Eastern men, all Muslims and mostly Saudis.

Mind you, there have been no 9/11 attacks at this point. But the agents discover evidence of visa fraud, some immigration violations, and some questionable transfers of money from overseas. Plus, the flight training, though not illegal per se, is highly suspicious. The FBI throws into the mix some non-specific chatter that al Qaeda is looking to attack American interests (as noted in a briefing memo given by the intelligence community to President Bush in early August); and that, back in the mid-1990s, there was some talk among al Qaeda-linked terrorists about maybe crashing explosive-laden planes into structures located in densely populated areas.

Out of the endless streams of intelligence sluicing into the system, the Bureau culls out these disparate nuggets, fits them together, and boldly concludes that al-Midhar, al-Hazmi, and their associates are conspiring to hijack jumbo jets and pilot them into buildings of political and economic significance in major metropolitan areas. The men are immediately arrested on immigration and visa-fraud violations. Weeks later, the case remains thin and no one has cooperated — the FBI having done its investigation by the book, gotten the subjects counsel, and provided all the Miranda rights and then some that the ACLU could conceivably have asked for. Nonetheless, Attorney General Ashcroft holds a press conference announcing the defendants' indictment for conspiring to carry out a massive terrorist attack.

"HARDLY A THREAT" You can bet your bottom dollar that the Gray Lady would have unburdened itself of just the type of splenetic editorial it spouted last Friday. It would have railed at how "[o]ur investigators, sent after dangerous terrorists, came back with a motley crew of hapless innocents and people who had said and done stupid things but were hardly a threat to the nation's security." It would have slammed the attorney general, its favorite punching bag, for "mak[ing] a huge deal out of arrests that turn out to involve unimportant people with bad attitudes but no ability — or even any apparent will — to do anything dangerous."

In a nutshell, that was the assessment the Times offered regarding the Justice Department's overall post-9/11 performance. Worse, and equally libelous, it laid a disingenuous catalogue of abuse directly at the feet of the Patriot Act — tellingly starting out by conceding that Patriot was comprised of "minor infringements of civil liberties" but, within a few peevish paragraphs, lathering itself into a summation that these "extraordinary powers of federal authorities" needed reining in.

The Times, alas, inhabits a delusional September 10 world, and its indictment is far shoddier than anything of which it accuses the Justice Department. The newspaper haughtily declaims that it was expecting law enforcement, as a consequence of being handed Patriot tools, to perform "well-planned and well-executed operations that would make us safer." Naturally, without mentioning that we have in fact been safer, there having been no domestic terrorist attack in over three years, the Times proceeds to list an array of horrors — most of which are misleadingly described and almost none of which even implicates the Patriot Act, much less raises a legitimate civil-liberties concern about its provisions. On this, the paper surmises that the legislation needs overhauling.

It boggles the mind how little the Times and its 9/10 allies have absorbed about the perilous realities of our 9/11 era. How irrationally circular, how suicidal, is their view of how we should confront these challenges. Or, more aptly, shrink from them.

WHAT THE TIMES DOESN'T TELL YOU So what is the Times's latest litany of complaints? The first is the recent decision to redirect a flight because a passenger, the British singer once known as Cat Stevens, was on a terrorist watch list. Of course, leaving aside that it was the government's failure to keep a sufficiently inclusive watch list that led to the terrorists' success on 9/11, the Times neglects to mention that there may be excellent reasons for the pop star's presence on the list. Instead, it insinuates that the cause may be his conversion to Islam. Yet even though the government has not released all of the relevant intelligence, it has been widely reported that the man now known as Yusuf Islam has a history of advocating jihad (including public support of Iran's fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie) and, possibly, of backing militant Islam financially (he was, for example, expelled from Israel in 2000 on suspicion of having given Hamas thousands of dollars in 1988 — which he denies having done knowingly). But he did, after all, once croon about riding on the "Peace Train," so what could the authorities have been thinking?

Next is the unraveling of the Detroit terror cell case, to which the Times devoted nearly 4000 words last Thursday. The paper editorializes about DOJ's "terrible miscarriage of justice" in choosing to "mov[e] against four Middle Eastern immigrants[,]" with the result that "[t]hree of them were convicted and imprisoned — two on terrorism charges — until the government was forced to repudiate its own case."

Here's what the Times doesn't tell you: These particular "Middle Eastern immigrants" were found in an apartment with, among other things, forged green cards and visas, fake passport photos, and 105 audiotapes advocating jihad. Only the charge of material support to terrorism has collapsed. That happened because of overly aggressive tactics by the local prosecution team. It goes without saying that this is cause for great concern and censure. That is precisely why DOJ itself unearthed and brought the misconduct to the attention of the trial judge, who commented that this was an example of "the highest and best tradition" of the Department.

As it happens, three of the "Middle Eastern immigrants" were convicted of fraud and misuse of identification documents. Although it admirably asked the court to reverse those convictions because of its prosecutor's errors, DOJ, far from "repudiat[ing] its own case," will be re-trying the three defendants on the fraud charges — serious felonies founded on strong evidence that will likely result in re-conviction and ultimate deportation.

A record that includes, among other accomplishments: the conviction of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and the recent indictment of his accomplice for trying to blow up a commercial airliner in flight; the Portland 7 case breaking up a terror cell that was scoping out Jewish schools and synagogues for a terrorist attack; the Virginia Jihad case dismantling still another cell of nine defendants convicted on charges ranging from support of the Qaeda-affiliated Lashkar-e-Taiba to conspiracy to levy war against the U.S.; the guilty plea of Abdurahman Alamoudi for terror funding; the indictment of Florida professor Sami al-Arian for helping run the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization which is responsible for scores of murders by suicide bombers in Israel; the conviction of bin Laden intimate Enaam Arnaout for using his Benevolence International Foundation as a conduit to fund terrorist cells in Bosnia and Chechnya; and the recent racketeering indictment against members of Hamas...Most of the cases I just mentioned were advanced in one way or another by investigative improvements made possible by the Patriot Act.

http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200410180840.asp

http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/terrorismaftermath.html

Next is the unraveling of the Detroit terror cell case, to which the Times devoted nearly 4000 words last Thursday. The paper editorializes about DOJ's "terrible miscarriage of justice" in choosing to "mov[e] against four Middle Eastern immigrants[,]" with the result that "[t]hree of them were convicted and imprisoned — two on terrorism charges — until the government was forced to repudiate its own case."

Here's what the Times doesn't tell you: These particular "Middle Eastern immigrants" were found in an apartment with, among other things, forged green cards and visas, fake passport photos, and 105 audiotapes advocating jihad. Only the charge of material support to terrorism has collapsed. That happened because of overly aggressive tactics by the local prosecution team. It goes without saying that this is cause for great concern and censure. That is precisely why DOJ itself unearthed and brought the misconduct to the attention of the trial judge, who commented that this was an example of "the highest and best tradition" of the Department.

As it happens, three of the "Middle Eastern immigrants" were convicted of fraud and misuse of identification documents. Although it admirably asked the court to reverse those convictions because of its prosecutor's errors, DOJ, far from "repudiat[ing] its own case," will be re-trying the three defendants on the fraud charges — serious felonies founded on strong evidence that will likely result in re-conviction and ultimate deportation.

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