Terror Verdict Tests Obama's Strategy on Trials - New York Times

Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantanamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantanamo.”

Adding political force of such criticism, Mr. King is set to become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January, and he promised to use oversight hearings to pressure the administration over its handling of terrorism trials.

Several other soon-to-be-powerful Republican lawmakers — including Lamar Smith of Texas, in the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman — made similar statements denouncing the use of civilian courts to prosecute terrorism cases.

But the Obama administration rejected portrayals of the verdict as a disaster. In a statement, Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the administration was “pleased” that Mr. Ghailani would face a lengthy prison sentence because of his role in the embassy bombings.

Several officials were reluctant to speak openly about the case because Judge Kaplan has not yet handed down a sentence. But privately, several officials expressed frustration at the reasoning behind the criticism. Even if the sentence is just 20 years, it will be longer than most of the terms handed down by the military commission system to date, they said. And they noted that the reason some Guantánamo cases are hard to prosecute is that under the Bush administration, evidence was obtained by coercion, creating a problem for prosecutors regardless of the legal venue.

Mason Clutter, the counsel of the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan nonprofit group that supports civilian trials for Guantánamo detainees, also noted that Mr. Ghailani will have far fewer arguments to make in appealing his conviction than he would have if he had been tried by a military commission.

“The system worked here,” she said. “I don’t think we judge success based on the number of convictions that were received. I think we judge success based on fair prosecutions consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Ms. Clutter also noted that most of the usual arguments that proponents of military tribunals make about the risk of civilian trials — like extreme security costs, grandstanding by the defendant, and the disclosure of classified information — did not happen in the Ghailani case.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said late Wednesday that his office would seek a life sentence for Mr. Ghailani.

The jury did not explain its verdict, which seemed contradictory: it convicted Mr. Ghailani of conspiring to blow up the buildings, but acquitted him of conspiring to murder the people inside the buildings. Some legal observers speculated that it might have been a brokered deal among the jury, after signs this week that one of the 12 members had been holding out for a different result than the other 11.

Moreover, many observers attributed any weakness to the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness apparently because investigators discovered the man’s existence after interrogators used abusive and coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani.

Much of the criticism of the verdict was premised on the idea that such evidence would have been admissible in a commission trial. Mr. Smith, for example, pointed to the exclusion of that evidence as undercutting the idea that foreign terrorists “can be adequately tried in civilian courts.”

“The judge in this case, applying constitutional and legal standards to which all U.S. citizens are entitled, threw out important evidence,” he said. “The result is that the jury acquitted on all but one conspiracy count.”

View the original article here