Glenn Reynolds first mentioned this on his weblog a couple weeks ago, but a CNN story about the guilty plea entered by one of six Americans from Buffalo, New York accused of attending an Al Qaeda training camp offers more details about a disturbing tactic apparently being used by prosecutors — threatening to classify defendants as enemy combatants unless they take the plea bargain.
On April 8 Sahim Alwan, 30, plead guilty to attending the training camp, becoming the fourth of the six men to plead guilty. Alwan plead guilty to one count of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization (as CNN points out, the terrorist organization was essentially just the 6 men indicted).
The disturbing part is in the very last paragraph of the CNN story about the plea bargains,
The government has explicitly renounced in the plea agreement any right to detain Alwan as an enemy combatant, an assurance also given to Galab, Mosed and Goba, although Battle conceded that his office had discussed that possibility with the Defense Department.
Why include that sort of renunciation as part of the plea bargain unless the government had not only been considering classifying them as enemy combatants, but also made it clear to the defendants that if they didn’t reach a plea they might be classified as such?
If that’s what happened here, that really goes to confirm all of the darkest suspicions about the way the Bush administration is using (and apparently abusing) the enemy combatant designation.
Source:
Fourth guilty plea in Buffalo terror case. Phil Hirschkorn, CNN, April 8, 2003.