Posted by
Defend America on Thursday, July 30, 2009 11:38:46 AM
Revenge of the ‘Shoe Bomber’
The terrorist sues to resume his jihad from prison. The Obama administration caves in.
Last May at the National Archives, President Barack Obama warned that
“more mistakes would occur” if Congress continued to politicize
terrorist detention policy and the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “[I]f we
refuse to deal with those issues today,” he predicted, “then I
guarantee you, they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat
terrorism in the future.”
On June 17, at the Administrative Maximum (ADX) penitentiary in
Florence, Colo., one of those albatrosses, inmate number 24079-038,
began his day with a whole new range of possibilities. Eight days
earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Denver filed notice in federal
court that the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which applied to
that prisoner—Richard C. Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”—were being
allowed to expire. SAMs are security directives, renewable yearly,
issued by the attorney general when “there is a substantial risk that a
prisoner’s communications, correspondence or contacts with persons
could result in death or serious bodily injury” to others.
Reid was arrested in 2001 for attempting to blow up American
Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with 197 passengers and crew on
board. Why had Attorney General Eric Holder decided not to renew his
security measures, kept in place since 2002?
According to court documents filed in a 2007 civil lawsuit against
the government, Reid claimed that SAMs violated his First Amendment
right of free speech and free exercise of religion. In a hand-written
complaint, he asserted that he was being illegally prevented from
performing daily “group prayers in a manner prescribed by my religion.”
Yet the list of Reid’s potential fellow congregants at ADX Florence
reads like a Who’s Who of al Qaeda’s most dangerous members: Ramzi
Yousef and his three co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing; 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui; “Millennium bomber” Ahmed
Ressam; “Dirty bomber” Jose Padilla; Wadih el-Hage, Osama Bin Laden’s
personal secretary, convicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing that
killed 247 people.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203609204574317090690242698.html