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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > August > 31 > Entry
Martin Gottlieb: Ohio terrorists not the most impressive enemies
Ever since Iyman Faris was arrested in 2003, he has intermittently been a poster boy for the Bush administration and some of its critics.
The truck driver with the Dayton connection (see the editorial above) was a symbol of everything that was right about the administration’s war on terror — or of everything that was wrong.
The first person to raise a fuss was Jimmy Breslin, the legendary columnist in New York. He was appalled that the media had treated the news about Faris matter-of-factly. After all, the news surfaced all at once that he had been taken into custody, pleaded and been sentenced. That is certainly not the official, normal American way.
Breslin referred repeatedly to his “kidnapping” by the government. He said the police had held Faris long enough to do plenty of torturing. Yet the media said nothing.
“It could be time,” he said, “for me to begin thinking about leaving this news business. It is not mine anymore.”
However, when Faris did get lawyers, they did not complain about him being kidnapped or tortured. They did say that he asked repeatedly for a lawyer before pleading and didn’t get one (which the feds deny).
But Faris seems to have wanted the secrecy himself, out of concern for his relatives in Pakistan.
The way the Faris story surfaced was suspicious. Newsweek reported that he had pleaded guilty, and it suggested that his whereabouts were unknown. At that point, the feds went to court to ask that the records of his case be unsealed, because the public impression was that he was at large. They wanted it known that he was in custody.
The judge said this is odd: the government asking for disclosure and the defendant opposing it. Usually in national security cases, it’s the opposite. But the judge saw no reason not to tilt in favor of the public’s right to know.
The suspicion is hard to avoid that the feds leaked the story to Newsweek in the first place because they wanted public credit for the arrest.
In 2004, President George W. Bush, seeking re-election, came to Ohio to highlight the case. He said the arrest was an outgrowth of the controversial Patriot Act, which he was trying to get renewed.
Now Faris is pointed to by former Vice President Dick Cheney and others as somebody whose arrest resulted from the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. That’s the practice some call torture and Cheney calls a “no-brainer,” meaning its use is obviously legitimate, if the goal is to prevent other terrorist acts.
Besides the secrecy and torture controversies, there’s also the matter of wiretapping, specifically the Bush administration’s highly dubious claim that the war on terror gave it the power to tap without a court warrant.
Through wiretapping, the FBI may actually have been on to Faris before the CIA got on to him through Mohammed.
The controversies about methods notwithstanding, certain things about Faris are not being disputed. He did travel to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan, where he reportedly met Osama bin Laden. He did favors for al-Qaida, like buying sleeping bags. And he sent a message saying he didn’t think it would be realistic to attack the Brooklyn Bridge, a possibility he had been asked to check out.
In cooperating with the feds, he offered the names of two acquaintances in Columbus, Christopher Paul and Nuradin Abdi, with whom he apparently discussed various possible terrorist plans. They’ve pleaded guilty, too, after investigations by the office of southern Ohio U.S. Attorney Gregory Lockhart.
None of the three is connected to any violent terrorist act that actually happened. If you go back through the news clippings relating to the three cases, you get the impression of naive, feckless losers.
One went to Africa looking for a terrorist training camp but never found it. In one often noted incident, they met at a Caribou Coffee shop. One of them suggested blowing up an unnamed mall (or shooting it up; that’s in dispute). Another said that was an awful idea. Such was the sophistication.
They and their al-Qaida connections had no conception of the difficulties of various schemes, like blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge or messing with railroad tracks to send a train over a cliff. (That was reportedly the Hollywood-induced fantasy of one of their connections.)
One has apologized for everything, saying he was never anti-American, but was just furious about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and was talking dumb.
They might have done something terrible eventually. Who knows? You needn’t be competent to shoot up a mall. And, yes, conspiracies to do such things must be prosecuted.
Still, if these are the country’s greatest internal enemies, it’s a fortunate country.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, terrorism
Comments
By TRS
August 31, 2009 4:08 PM | Link to this
Faris seriously looked into the Brooklyn bridge destruction but when he saw the NYPD had increased security because they found out about the plot, it was deemed it not feasible. I wouldn’t be so quick to scoff at the harm “naive and feckless” people can do. 20 unremarkable, yet fanatically dedicated men, did great harm to this country on 9/11. On the surface they appeared no more dangerous than Faris and his group.By Ice Bandit
September 1, 2009 12:01 AM | Link to this
Let the revisionism begin. By trying to portray various Jihadi groups as an Islamic version of the Three Stooges, Marty tries to discredit the various Bush administration initiatives that kept the American public safe. Sorry Marty, but a lot of muggers, rapists and murderers are inept, yet it shouldn’t diminish our resolve to find them and deal with them….By Terri
September 4, 2009 6:12 AM | Link to this
How do you know you won’t be the next “suspect” to be waterboarded? When there’s no limits on Cheney et.al, what will happen to the America we’ve been proud to live in???