Recent Arrest, Detention and Charging of Attempted Airplane Bomber Illustrate Fed’s Ability to Handle Terror Suspects in Civilian Courts
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Two recent decisions by President Obama’s administration has drawn intense criticism designed to manipulate the natural fear Americans have of terrorism since 9/11: the decision to try the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), and his co-conspirators, in a New York federal civilian court and the decision to transfer “terror suspects” currently housed at the U.S. detention facility (“Gitmo”) in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois.
The critics, fueled primarily by a Republican political agenda to undermine the Obama administration and regain future control of the White House and Congress, have charged that confining and trying terror suspects on American soil would somehow endanger the American public with future terror attacks. If these charges were not so politically motivated and so readily accepted by many Americans, who believe every word launched out of the mouths of conservative wing nuts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, they could be casually dismissed laughably ludicrous.
The Christmas Day attempted terror attack on a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight by 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who allegedly attempted to detonate the high explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) as the plane approached the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport for landing underscores this point. The Abdulmutallab terror attack was thwarted because his detonator either malfunctioned, or he did not correctly use it, and by the heroic efforts of fellow passengers who attacked and subdued the terrorist before he could fulfill his objective: to blow up an American plane on American soil on Christmas Day.
This attempted terror attack illustrate precisely why the politically-motivated criticisms of the decision to try KSM in federal civilian court and to house Gitmo prisoners in a super-max federal penal facility are in fact so wrong-headed. Abdulmutallab was charged in federal district court the day after Christmas. The United States Justice Department issued the following “press release” entitled “Nigerian National Charged with Attempting to Destroy Northwest Airlines Aircraft:”
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