And 179 convictions. You won't be hearing too much about this until after the elections, if ever. From the Washington Times, :
The USA Patriot Act has helped federal, state and local terrorism investigators arrest 310 persons since the September 11 attacks, 179 of whom have been convicted, and has proved to be "al Qaeda's worst nightmare," the Justice Department said yesterday in a report.Attorney General John Ashcroft, attempting to dissuade Congress from weakening the act, key provisions of which will expire next year, delivered the 29-page document to the House Judiciary Committee, saying it gave authorities access to new legal tools and technology to "hunt down al Qaeda, destroy their safe haven and save American lives."
"We are a nation at war. ... We have to use every legal weapon available to protect the American people from terrorist attacks," Mr. Ashcroft said at a press conference with Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican.
The report said the act helped secure six guilty pleas from an al Qaeda "sleeper cell" in Lackawanna, N.Y.; allowed the surveillance of a reputed terror cell in Portland, Ore., resulting in convictions of six persons in a scheme to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces; and the successful prosecution of a money launderer for Colombia's leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Maybe some of the details of the cases in question need to be made public. Of course, the NY Times and Washington Post probably can't be expected to do it.
Re the Lackawanna convictions, they were possible because local Yemeni immigrants went to the authorities.
Okay so now they've been convicted can you PLEASE execute them???Give the rest of the Al qaeda and other middle eastern terrorist sewage something to dread about being caught.Drive them back into their shitty little rat pits ,were they belong then collapse the cave roofs on top of them!!!Maybe with a bit of luck Osama bin liner might get killed "by accident" in the process!!!
If you would like some idea as to the kind of people wrapping themselves in the mantle of Roger Baldwin, and historic memories of the old, perfectly admirable ACLU, which has metamorphosed into something quite different and quite sinister, you need only look at one Nancy Murray (do google her, and do google her daughter Rebecca -- and while googling both their names, also google the word "Israel" or "Palestine"), who is, in one of the most important ACLU states, Massachusetts, in charge of defending, like some female Horatio at the bridge, our "precious Constitutional liberties" -- the absence of which liberties, in the completely corrupt, vicious, murderous, and racist regime of Arafat and the PLO, has never seemed to bother Nancy or her daughter Rebecca (who was at the Muqatta, defending Arafat with her own body), seems not to have bothered Nancy Murray (or her daughter) -- indeed, before she landed her sinister gig at the ACLU, she seems to have been quite a busy bee on behalf of Arafat, the PLO, e tutti quanti.
And if that isn't enough, do look up Matt Bowles as well, the "National Field Coordinator" for the ACLU who was photographed trying to coordinate the shouting down of Daniel Pipes at a lecture -- talk about attempts to limit Free Speech from those Gestapo troops behind the Patriot Act, indeed.
Hugh,
How do you do it, were does all the knowledge come from, sometimes just reading your posts makes my brain hurt. You should be president, no shadow of a doubt!!!
Thank you for the kind words. Since I don’t deal with such matters as Juggling the Demands of Work and Family, and I don’t March for World Peace, and I don’t wrestle with the problem of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, and I don’t try to plumb the Dark Night of the Soul, and I avoid Confronting my Own Demons, I have time to read and think about how to pronounce “aposiopesis.”
And as for your kind suggestion, if only I were over 35 and had, like Podsnap, married a good inheritance, I’d think about throwing that hat into that ring.