ISIS Border Plotters Exploit U.S. Courts

 

Legal representation for ISIS sympathizers, one accused of seeking to help terrorists cross the Mexican border and commit atrocities within the U.S. homeland, demand that terrorism and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks not be mentioned to jurors. (AP)

Homeland Security: In the trial of Islamic State sympathizers, one plotting to have terrorists cross the Mexican border, lawyers try to prevent mention of terrorism. The U.S. legal system is a weapon of jihad.

Gules Ali Omar, 21 years old and accused in Minnesota of seeking ISIS membership, gave members of the Iraq-Syria caliphate information for establishing a means of transporting ISIS operatives from Syria to Mexico, then finally to the American homeland. There they would conduct terrorism operations, according to a document prepared by prosecuting attorneys and filed in court on Wednesday.
The lawyer for one of Omar’s three fellow Somali-American suspects, 22-year-old Abdirahman Yasin Daud, actually argued that specific evidence showing that Daud threatened terrorism within the U.S. homeland, or references to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, “would cause the jurors to decide out of fear and contempt alone.”

The logic presumably goes something like this: we can’t mention terrorism when we try terrorists within the U.S., because jurors — like almost all Americans — deplore terrorism. And so a terrorist wouldn’t get a fair trial.
Maybe we want to add terrorists to the list of protected groups under federal anti-discrimination law, in addition to race, color, religion, sex, disability status, and soon, no doubt, sexual orientation.

That would mean jurors would be denied hearing audio of these suspects plotting to kill FBI agents, shooting rockets at U.S. planes, and the other carnage they were apparently planning.

This is a perfectly illustrative example of why we cannot allow foreign terrorist groups or states to use the American legal system as their playground, assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union and other leftist legal powers. That’s especially true for a federal judiciary with so many appointments from President Obama.


As former Vice President Dick Cheney charged, Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder, “insists on thinking of terror attacks against the United States as criminal acts, as opposed to acts of war.” The big global law firm Holder returned to after leaving the Justice Department, Covington & Burling, has bestowed thousands of hours of pro bono representation upon Guantanamo Bay terror detainees.
And Holder was committed to having the federal government engineer civilian trials just a short walk from Ground Zero in New York City for terrorist suspects incarcerated at Gitmo, where there was the risk of non-guilty verdicts and early parole allowing them to return to terrorism against Americans.

President George W. Bush and Cheney’s post-9/11 decision to keep captured terrorists in the limbo of Guantanamo Bay was close to a perfect solution to the problem of what to do to with these enemy combatants, although all too many of Gitmo’s dangerous residents have been released early.

Our courts are themselves an incendiary device for terrorists.