Enemy Within? Not Quite.
By Dina Temple-Raston
Sunday, September 9, 2007; Page B01
... At the time of their arrest in September 2002, none of the Lackawanna Six appeared to be actively plotting to attack anything ...
They were U.S. citizens bound together by their Yemeni heritage. They went to Lackawanna High School ("Home of the Steelers") and played soccer for the varsity team ... They traveled to Yemen once a year, where they were greeted in their villages like conquering heroes simply for surviving in America.
Their parents wanted those trips to provide them with a strong connection to their Arab and Muslim heritages. To a large extent, it worked. As teenagers, the boys straddled two worlds, an American one and a Muslim one ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/07/AR2007090702049.html False Victories in the War on Terror
By Karen J. Greenberg .. and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
March 14, 2005
... In the Buffalo case, the defendants – known as the Lackawanna Six – were initially accused of belonging to an "al-Qaeda sleeper cell," but instead ended up pleading to material support charges.
What's especially interesting here, however, is the way in which some of those plea bargains seem to have been achieved. According to defense attorneys, the defendants were threatened with the prospect of being classified as "unlawful combatants," the new Bush-administration-defined status that entails imprisonment without end as well as the loss of the right to a lawyer and to communicate with anyone in the outside world. Nor did these appear to be idle threats ...
http://www.lawandsecurity.org/get_article/?id=41Immaterial and Unsupportable
Ashcroft and Co. are going after supposed supporters of terrorism with a blunt and unjust instrument.
Alex Gourevitch | August 31, 2003
On May 19, in one of the first anti-terrorism cases brought against U.S. citizens since September 11, Mukhtar al-Bakri, a 23-year-old Yemeni American from Lackawanna, N.Y., pleaded guilty to the charge of providing "material support" to al-Qaeda. Prior to 9-11, al-Bakri and five other young Yemeni Americans had traveled to an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where they received six weeks of training before deciding to return home. According to the defendants, they left the camp because they did not feel comfortable with al-Qaeda's militancy; one even faked an ankle injury to leave early. A post-9-11 Department of Justice investigation led authorities to the young men, who were quickly dubbed a sleeper cell and brought to trial. After a great deal of prosecutorial pressure, and against the advice of at least one of their lawyers, each of the defendants eventually pleaded guilty. Defense attorney Patrick J. Brown told The Washington Post, "We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us." Al-Bakri's plea, the last of them, put the finishing touches on a case that the Justice Department touted as "a model in pursuing and prosecuting terrorism suspects, and in preventing terrorist acts here and abroad."
The case of the Lackawanna Six was indeed an important one, but not so much for the reasons the Justice Department asserts as because of the concerns about justice that it raises. The defense lawyers still maintain that their clients are innocent victims of overeager U.S. attorneys. During the initial bond hearings, even the magistrate, H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr., asked, "Is the government asking me to speculate some sort of potential act of violence or danger?" A post-plea bargain article in The Washington Post noted that "prosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism," and investigations by Mother Jones and Salon found no weapons cache, no orders and no plots. The government's main argument for calling the Lackawanna Six an "active cell" is that the young men did not voluntarily come forward after 9-11 to tell authorities about their trip.
Nonetheless, scared to risk a trial in today's climate, the Lackawannans plea-bargained. Under the law that makes it a crime to provide "material support for terrorist groups," it's not certain whether any more evidence would even have been necessary to convict them. What constitutes material support is so vaguely and broadly defined in this law that it risks criminalizing basic freedoms ...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=immaterial_and_unsupportableJust another example of Rovian prosecution ...
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