perfidy

According to the Associated Press, The US Department of Justice has dropped the charges against a suspected Al Qaeda cell in Detroit. Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan and Farouk Ali-Haimoud were arrested on September 17, 2001 (alleged ringleader Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi was arrested in November) in was trumpeted as the first clear victory in the newly minted "War On Terror."

In a dramatic reversal on the eve of President Bush's nomination acceptance [zing!], the Justice Department acknowledged its original prosecution of a suspected terror cell in Detroit was filled with a ''pattern of mistakes and oversights'' that warrant the dismissal of the convictions.

In a 60-page memo that harshly criticizes its own prosecutors' work, the department told U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen on Tuesday night it supports the Detroit defendants' request for a new trial and would no longer pursue terrorism charges against them. The defendants at most would only face fraud charges at a new trial.

The Justice Department had to spike its own case, citing instances of prosecutorial misconduct serious enough that the government had "no reasonable prospect of winning" the case. ''In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence (including impeachment material) and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist. . . ."

All of which is what I feared would happen. Not to come over all negative-nellie, but I haven't exactly been confident of the current administration's abilities in any arena, before or after 2001. (Man, thanx to those tax cuts, the economy's really crankin'! Iraq sure cut the heart out of international terror! And Afghanistan? I plan to vacation there next year!) The War on Terror tastes to me exactly like the War on Drugs (can you still get drugs for cheap?) and the War on Poverty (been panhandled recently?), which is a shame. So far, the public failures of the WoT look like unserious responses to serious problems that leave everyone with egg on their face and just makes it harder to fight the actual, important battles that come up. These four guys were very probably terrorists, but now we'll never frickin' know.

Nice work, guys. Tommy Chong rots in prison while murderous fanatics walk free. Good to see we all have our priorities straightened out.

[wik] Days like today just underscore the importance of winning this thing. In the space of 24 hours, a suicide bomber killed ten and wounded 50 outside a Moscow subway station, Iraqi goons beheaded twelve Nepalese citizens for no good reason outside of murderous pique, Palestinian suicide bombers blew up two buses in Jerusalem, killing 16 and wounding at least 80, and, in the most twisted variation yet on the suicide-hostage riff, Chechen rebels wearing bombs have invaded a Russian grade school, taking 200 schoolchildren and their teachers hostage on the first day of school.