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Salim is an Iraqi, but the reason you’ve probably not heard his name owes only partially to the media’s cardinal rule that “Iraq†and “terrorism†must never be uttered in the same sentence. The main reason for the lapse is the embarrassing fact that Salim never made it to the embassy-bombing trial. To borrow the attorney general’s phrasing, he wasn’t “successfully prosecuted†because he wasn’t “securely detained.†On Nov. 1, 2000, while he was housed in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (a stone’s throw from the federal courthouse, as well as the headquarters both of the FBI and that of the NYPD), Salim was scheduled to meet for trial preparation with his attorneys — who, it goes without saying, were being paid by the American taxpayers he had sworn to kill. But Salim didn’t see it as an opportunity to exercise precious due-process rights. Instead, it was his chance to execute the escape plot he had hatched with his fellow defendants.Salim’s plan was to kidnap his American lawyers in order to escape with his confederates. The effort was foiled, but not before Salim jammed a razor-sharpened comb, fashioned and concealed in his high-security cell, several inches through the eye and into the brain of Louis Pepe, a 42-year-old Bureau of Prisons guard. Officer Pepe survived, barely, but was left maimed and impaired. Under the civilian-justice system’s generous rules, Salim was severed from the embassy-bombing trial of his co-defendants. Attempting to kidnap and perhaps murder one’s counsel can cause a knotty conflict of interest between attorney and client, interfering with Salim’s Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. To force Salim to face an imminent trial with brand-new counsel would have been terribly unfair, and to infect the case with his vicious attempted murder of a federal officer would have been downright prejudicial to the other terrorists — a violation of our enemies’ Fifth Amendment right to due process. So Salim was dropped from the embassy-bombing trial. He later pleaded guilty to the assault on Officer Pepe, a conviction Holder fails to mention in his list of DOJ’s counterterrorism successes. Perhaps that’s because Judge Deborah Batts, the Clinton appointee assigned to the case, declined to sentence Salim to life imprisonment. Judge Batts was unmoved by the government’s contention that a terrorist’s maiming of a prison guard might possibly have had something to do with terrorism. It didn’t seem to matter that the attempted murder arose out of a plot designed to facilitate an al-Qaeda escape, or that Salim, who pled guilty to conspiracy, had admitted to planning the attack with another al-Qaeda member. Thus, the thoughtful jurist refused to apply the sentencing guideline that governs “federal crimes of terrorism.†Though Batts did impose a term of 32 years, a federal appellate court finally reversed her absurd ruling last year, sending the case back to her court.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzBiNDhkMWUzNGM0ZmRhMzk5MmZiNDI2MTIxYTYwNDM=&w=MA==Feel better?
No.Please tell me that was an article from BNN.
