Justice Department says it botched terrorism case

By Andrew Zajac
Chicago Tribune

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In an unusually self-critical filing, Justice Department attorneys asked a judge to throw out the June 2003 convictions of three men in the so-called "Detroit sleeper cell" and to permit a new trial on lesser, nonterrorism-related charges.

The department's retreat came in the midst of an all-out push by Republicans at their convention in New York this week to portray President Bush as an unflinching and successful leader in the war on terror.

The 60-page filing is filled with blunt language more common to an attack on an opponent's case.

"In its best light, the record would show that the prosecution committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the defendants of discoverable evidence ... and created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist," it states.

The case already was under appeal by attorneys for Karim Koubriti, Abdel-Ilah El Mardoudi and Ahmed Hannan, who argued that their convictions should be set aside because government attorneys withheld evidence favorable to the defense.

The lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, is under investigation for prosecutorial misconduct. Convertino, in turn, has sued the Justice Department, claiming its investigation of him is payback for his criticism of the government's conduct of the war on terror.

Koubriti, Hannan and El Mardoudi were charged with helping terrorists target sites in Las Vegas, Disneyland and military bases in Turkey and Jordan.

In essence, the government admitted that it suppressed information that drawings, videos and testimony in the case could be plausibly explained as something besides terrorism activity.

Margaret Sind Raben, an attorney for El Mardoudi, said she thinks Rosen nudged the government to acknowledge error to avoid the "spectacle of government agents calling each other liars. I think Rosen said to them, 'You might think about damage control.' "

The number of missteps points to a systemic failure at the Justice Department to supervise the case, said Robert Precht, an assistant dean of the University of Michigan Law School and a defense attorney in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. "In my 20 years as a defense lawyer, I have never seen a government document that so thoroughly and candidly indicts (the government)," he said.
 
Attorney General John Ashcroft has set a tone in which suspects "are guilty until proven innocent," Precht said. "The Justice Department has to be more impartial or it's going to have more of these cases."

Among the evidence allegedly hidden from the defense was testimony by a credit-card scam artist, Youseff Hmimssa, who had described the defendants as involved in terrorist plots.

In a statement not made available to the defense at trial, a jailhouse companion of Hmimssa, Milton "Butch" Jones, told authorities that Hmimssa bragged that "he lied to the FBI, how he fooled the Secret Service agent on his case."

In recent months, the Justice Department has lost an important case in which it accused an Idaho man of using the Internet to recruit and raise money for terrorist causes, and was embarrassed by the FBI's erroneous detention of an Oregon man for involvement in the Madrid train bombings based on an inaccurate fingerprint match.

Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said that the government has had a number of successful terror prosecutions and that any setbacks should be looked at individually.

"Each case is going to be unique. I don't think it's fair to generalize," Sierra said.