MaxedOutMama
Thursday, July 28, 2005
More About Ahmed Ressam
My Way News has some pretty good information. This is the man who was nabbed by the alert Customs agent as he drove off a ferry. A search of his car turned up explosives and maps; his intent was to bomb LAX. He could be out of jail in 14 years (he's getting credit for the five years he has already spent imprisoned):
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.Sympathetic as I am to the judge's views here, not everyone is captured in the same way or on American soil. I think the judge might be talking about the "enemy combatant" rule as applied to arrests on American soil. What are your thoughts?
"We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel," he said Wednesday. "The message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart."
He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe "this threat renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."
