Terrorism Fight Creates Battle Over Prosecution

[Pirate Smile]

Source: The New York Times

John Walker Lindh and David Hicks were both young Muslim converts who traveled to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and were captured there in 2001 by American troops. But then their cases diverged — in ways that might surprise anyone following the fierce political debate over how the Obama administration should treat terrorism suspects.

Bush administration officials decided to charge Mr. Lindh, an American, in the civilian criminal justice system. He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison and will not get out until at least 2019.
Mr. Hicks, an Australian, was treated as an enemy combatant — the approach now pressed by President Obama’s Republican critics. He went before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and got a seven-year sentence with all but nine months suspended. He is already free.

The Dec. 25 arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, has reignited an old argument over how to treat terrorism suspects. Republican critics have denounced the decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab criminally, read him his rights and give him a lawyer. He was a combatant in Al Qaeda’s war on the United States, critics say, and should have been treated accordingly.
But the assumptions behind the criticism — that the military approach will gain more intelligence, avoid the meddling of government-paid defense lawyers and lock away a convicted terrorist for a longer sentence — are undercut by the record since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

-snip-
Robert M. Chesney, an expert on national security law at the University of Texas, said the attacks on the Obama administration’s handling of Mr. Abdulmutallab were “mired in misinformation, some of it willful.”
Mr. Chesney said the Republicans were largely to blame for what he called “a bizarre public discussion that is 90 percent politics and 10 percent substance,” since they never complained when the Bush administration handled terrorism cases the same way. But he said the Obama administration might have invited the attacks by itself applying partisan spin to security.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/us/12detain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

[Name removed]

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[EFerrari]

2. John Walker Lindh was railroaded so he couldn't testify against Bush/Cheney.

He is a political prisoner as far as I'm concerned.