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Title: Pre-emptive arrests in terrorism plots attract criticism
Source:
chron.com
URL Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4033886.html
Published: Jul 9, 2006
Author: ERIC LIPTON
Post Date: 2006-07-09 09:55:53 by Eoghan
Keywords: None
Views: 43
Comments: 1
Attorneys raise concerns that people are rounded up for words, not actions In Miami last month, and now in New York, terrorism cases have unfolded in which suspects have been apprehended before they lined up the intended weapons and the necessary financing or figured out other central details necessary to carry out their plots. For officials in Washington, it is a demonstration of the much-needed emphasis on pre-emptive arrests in the post-9/11 era. "We don't wait until someone has lit the fuse to step in," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday at a news conference about the New York plot. But the Miami and New York cases are inspiring a new round of skepticism from lawyers who are openly questioning whether the government, in its zeal to stop terrorism, is forgetting an element central to any case: intent to commit a crime. "Talk without any kind of an action means nothing," said Martin Stolar, a New York defense lawyer. "You start to criminalize people who are not really criminals." In the two most recent suspected plots, the authorities have simultaneously warned that the suspects were contemplating horrific attacks — blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and setting off a bomb in a tunnel between New York and New Jersey — but then added that as far as they knew, no one was close to actually making such a strike. In the Miami case, an FBI official said at a recent hearing that the suspects apparently did not have written information on how to make explosives, details on the layout of the Sears Tower or any known link to a terrorist group. In New York, officials said Friday that none of the eight suspects thought to be planning the tunnel attack were in the United States, that they apparently did not have bomb materials and that they had not completed reconnaissance on their supposed target. The arrest on April 27 in Beirut, Lebanon, of Assem Hammoud, 31, a Lebanese man who is accused of being the mastermind of the tunnel plot, came after the authorities monitored Internet chat rooms used by Islamic extremists. In announcing the case, federal officials, including Chertoff, said the government could not waste time trying to determine whether the suspects were smart enough or serious enough to turn their threats into destructive action. "It is a mistake to assume that the only terrorist that's a serious terrorist is the kind of guy you see on television, that's a kind of James Bond type," Chertoff said Friday. "The fact of the matter is mixing a bomb in a bathtub does not take rocket science."
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#1. To: Eoghan (#0)
Vigorously pursuing Aspirational Criminals. Jesus H. Christ, this is insanity.
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