No Death Penalty Sought for Bomber of U.S. Embassy Dar es Salaam

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided not to seek the death penalty against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the Tanzanian who was part of the al Qaeda cell that planned and carried out the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. Eleven people were killed in that attack.

According to Bloomberg.com, which had the most detailed story I've seen so far:

The proceedings in the Ghailani case had been stalled as U.S. prosecutors weighed whether to seek the death penalty. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in New York said in a court filing today that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had instructed him not to do so.

“You are authorized and directed not to seek the death penalty against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani,” Holder wrote in an Oct. 2 letter to Bharara that was included in the filing. Bharara forwarded the Holder letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the case.

“Other defendants in the embassy bombings case have either already either received life sentences or will not be subject to the death penalty because the United States agreed not to seek it as a condition of their extradition,” the Justice Department said today in a statement. “Given those circumstances and other factors in this case, the attorney general authorized the U.S. attorney to seek a life sentence.”

So AG Holder thinks it would be improper to seek the death penalty in Ghailani's case because some of the mutt's co-defendants cannot be subjected to the same penalty? It wouldn't be fair, I suppose is the way Holder sees the situation.

Screw fairness. Fairness is not the same thing as justice. Since when did fairness drive the U.S. criminal justice system? It was Ghailani's own decision to hide out in Pakistan after the bombing, where he was arrested, and where the authorities do not go weak-kneed at the prospect of rendering a foreign terrorist to a death penalty state.

I'm certain that a man who cold-bloodedly participated in an act of mass murder for political and religious motives is willing to accept the full consequences of his actions. Why isn't the U.S. government willing to impose them?

Ghailani did the crime (here's a summary of the evidence presented in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, and here's his tribunal transcript), it carries the death penalty under U.S. law, and justice - the kind with a lower-case "J" - demands that he be tried accordingly. But, Justice with a capitol "J" has wimped out.

When Ghailani was transferred from Gitmo to New York last June for prosecution on 286 counts of terror-related charges, I feared that he might escape the hangman, but only because I figured a New York City jury might not pull the trigger. I didn't expect that the U.S. Justice Department would lack the moral fortitude to even seek the death penalty.

A Poet Finds His True Voice

A Washington Times editorial today notes the extensive conflicts of interest that exist at the top levels of the U.S. Justice Department on the matter of Guantanamo detainees. The Attorney General himself and five of his top ten officials, among others, all have to recuse themselves from some detainee matters due to their previous work at a law firm that represented the detainees:

Executive Order 13493 on Jan. 22 appointed Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. co-chairman of the Special Task Force on Detainee Disposition, the interagency group charged with determining the status of persons captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations. But according to Justice Department regulations, Mr. Holder is required to recuse himself from certain detainee matters because his law firm represented the detainees.

The Legal Times reported in March that there are more than a dozen such conflicted lawyers at the department. This includes five of the top 10 officials in the department, including the attorney general; Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden; Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli; Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Tony West; and Lanny A. Breuer, chief of the Criminal Division, who, like Mr. Holder, hails from the firm Covington & Burling LLP.

And there was this nugget about one of Covington's former clients, now deceased:

Former Covington attorney Marc D. Falkoff represented Kuwait-born Abdullah Saleh al-Ajmi and included poetry written by the inmate in an anthology he co-edited in 2007: "Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak."

Mr. Falkoff described the poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" whose verse was free of hatred. As Debra Burlingame reported in the Wall Street Journal, Abdullah was released in 2005 and next heard from in a martyrdom video posted on an al-Qaeda Web site celebrating his suicide truck bombing of an Iraqi Army compound in Mosul. This gentle poet killed 13 soldiers and wounded 42 others in the attack.

I hadn't seen the news about Al-Ajmi's extraliterary accomplishment before now. I thought the Gitmo detainee poems were sappy doggerel that sucked big time, but I have to say I'm impressed by Al-Ajmi's martyrdom statement. As reported by CNN:

A video posted on various jihadist Web sites shows a number of images of al-Ajmi, followed by text reading, "May God have mercy on you Abdullah al-Ajmi. I send you a warm greeting O you martyr, O you hero, O you, a man in a time where only few men are left."

He really found his poetic muse in mass murder. Probably because he was finally being honest, whereas the "Poems From Guantanamo" stuff was just a matter of telling sob stories to scam the gullible.