A peaceful demonstration of at least a million — hey, if we can get 10 million, even better — but at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington. A peaceful demonstration. No shooting, no one gets hurt. Just a demonstration. The only difference from any typical demonstration is we will all be armed.

Today, the 27-year-old Sickles is one of nine militia members charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government. Also, I can’t help but notice that the commentary about this on fairly mainstream conservative sites is more skeptical of the FBI than of Sickles and the militias. Neither the left nor the right takes this stuff as seriously as law enforcement does.

Donald Rumsfeld called the Gitmo detainees "the worst of the worst." (Wikimedia Commons)

In February 2004, Ubrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi was charged with conspiring with al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to attack and murder civilians and destroy property. The government claimed that al Qosi was an armed guard and driver for Osama bin Laden going back to 1996, provided logistical services and supplies for an al Qaeda compound in Kandahar, and traveled to to Kabul to fight with an al Qaeda mortar crew near the front lines.

Al Qosi was never tried on those charges, however, because in 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the military commissions unconstitutional and a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Congress re-created the commissions with a new law later that year, and Al Qosi was charged again in 2008.

[Law]Then in January, just after President Barack Obama took office, he suspended the 2006 military commissions while he decided what to do with them.

Now, about a dozen military commissions cases that were left in limbo are being revived. And, the government is sending more suspected terror cases for trial there – either at Guantanamo Bay, where they’re currently located, or in Thomson, Illinois, where they could be moved. Judging from recent protests against sending the suspected co-conspirators of the September 11 attacks to civilian trials, some might think that convicting terror suspects in a military commission would be easier. But the new Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in October and signed by the President, is an untested military system that, like its earlier incarnations, is ripe for constitutional challenge. Whether it will provide the swift justice the Obama administration and others hope for remains to be seen.

The case of al Qosi, now being heard before the new military commission, highlights the sorts of problems that lawyers say are likely to come up in many military commissions trials. Most importantly, they include a range of constitutional challenges to the new military commissions law itself, from whether its jurisdiction inappropriately extends beyond war crimes to include ordinary criminal acts, to whether the law’s permissiveness about the use of hearsay evidence against terror suspects violates their rights to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against them.

Although the case has been pending for almost six years now, at a hearing earlier this month, the government announced for the first time that it wanted to add more charges against al Qosi alleging he participated in a conspiracy with al Qaeda dating back to 1992. That’s also the date that Osama bin Laden allegedly began urging others to attack the United States, according to a U.S. criminal indictment of bin Laden. If the government can show that al Qosi participated in the conspiracy dating back to that time, then he could be held responsible for all of the crimes it committed between 1992 and 2001, when he was captured.

“That’s the way the conspiracy charge works,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, who attended the military commission hearing at Guantanamo Bay in al Qosi’s case earlier this month. “You don’t need to have participated in all of the acts that the conspiracy carried out.”

Advised of the four years’ worth of new charges only hours before the government sought to add them, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, al Qosi’s lead military defense lawyer, protested, calling them “sweeping changes” that would require al Qosi’s defense team to travel to Somalia, Ethiopia and Chechnya to prepare for a trial.

At the hearing, the judge rejected the government’s request to add more charges to the current case against al Qosi, but said it could withdraw the case and refile it with those new claims. If prosecutors do that, however, it will only highlight one of the tenuous bases for the new military commissions, which is its broad jurisdiction.

The crimes the government wants to add in al Qosi’s case did not even take place in the United States or against it. But under the new Military Commissions Act, they can be considered part of a larger conspiracy to attack the United States, and al Qosi’s support for al Qaeda in that period can be considered a war crime.

“It’s absurd in these circumstances,” said Prasow. “But in a conspiracy, the action that the defendant has to take doesn’t need to be criminal. It can be cooking for people, as long as you have a meeting of the minds of all the participants. The government will argue that joining al Qaeda is a meeting of the minds, and a joining of the intent to carry out bad things.”

“We are breaking new ground,” conceded Navy Cmdr. Dirk Padgett, the military commissions prosecutor, at the hearing, according to a blog post Prasow wrote from the hearing at the time. Prasow says the prosecutor defended his bid to reach back to 1992 because “the planning, the conspiracy began years before.”

But are conspiracy to attack and providing substantial support for those attacks even war crimes prosecutable by military commission? That’s not at all clear.

Lachelier last year moved to dismiss the case against al Qosi on the grounds that neither of these charges have traditiionally been considered war crimes, so the military commissions don’t legitimately have jurisdiction to prosecute them.

In fact, that could pose a serious problem for this latest incarnation of the military commissions, as even the Justice Department has acknowledged. In July, Assistant Attorney General David Kris testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.”

Congress enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2009 with its broad jurisdiction anyway, and despite senior Justice Department officials’ own doubts, the government is proceeding to prosecute al Qosi for conspiracy and providing “material support” to al Qaeda. Those charges “continue to fly in the face of traditional understandings of law of war violations,” wrote Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel for Human Rights First, in a blog post she wrote after attending the al Qosi hearing.

Indeed, when the MCA was enacted in October, civil liberties and human rights group objected in large part because it swept into untested military commissions with unknown rules ordinary crimes that have been successfully tried and appropriately belong in federal court.

Now, it’s not clear what is legitimate in the newly reconstituted commissions. “You don’t know what law applies,” Lachelier said of the military commissions. “You pick and choose. You try to draw from international and federal precedent.” How the commissions will use those remains unclear, however.

Another potential challenge to any conviction by the commissions, Lachelier explained, is that the military commissions allow the use of hearsay testimony in circumstances where it would be inadmissible in a federal court. That, too, could become a constitutional problem if convictions are appealed. “The right to confrontation is still significantly diminished in the military commissions,” Lachelier said, referring to the right to the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment right to confront and cross-examine witnesses. If the government claims the witnesses are not available, “these could be trials on paper,” she said.”That’s not what the confrontation clause and the Supreme Court would allow.”

Recently, Lachelier filed four more motions in al Qosi’s case. She claims that the military commission lacks jurisdiction over her client because the prosecutor hasn’t proved he’s an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” — meaning he was a member and substantial supporter of al Qaeda. She also claims that the Military Commissions Act is an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder, meaning a law designed only to punish a certain group of people (in this case unprivileged enemy belligerents), and that it violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution because it applies only to aliens (non-citizens).

Many of these claims have been made in military commission cases before. But since this is a new commission with no binding legal precedent, it will have to decide these issues all over again. “The question is, what law applies?” asked Lachelier. “And how will the commission interpret it?”

Ultimately, it may be the Supreme Court that answers these questions, probably several years from now. And if the court holds that Congress and the President overreached in the MCA of 2009, the government’s prosecution of Mahmoud al Qosi, and any other terror suspects charged before the new military commissions, will have to start all over again.

“These are all still open issues,” said Lachelier. “There are so many moving parts.”

In the event that the Administrator or the National Academy of Sciences has concluded, in the most recent report submitted under section 705 or 706 respectively, that the United States will not achieve the necessary domestic greenhouse gas emissions reductions, or that global actions will not maintain safe global average surface temperature and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration thresholds, the President shall, not later than July 1, 2015, and every 4 years thereafter, submit to Congress a plan identifying domestic and international actions that will achieve necessary additional greenhouse gas reductions, including any recommendations for legislative action.

And yet Vitter has the bizarre and fact-challenged version of this story up at his Website:

If that sounds a little vague, that’s because it is: as I wrote when the brothers were convicted in December, the alleged plot to attack Fort Dix appears to have been hatched as much by an undercover FBI informer who supplied them weapons — and had an incentive to encourage the crime — as by the immigrant men themselves.

The men were acquitted of the government’s attempted murder charges.

The three Muslim brothers from Macedonia were convicted of conspiracy and weapons charges, along with two other suspects, after they talked to paid undercover informants about the idea of attacking a U.S. military base and arranged to purchase weapons from one of them.

The men were also ordered to pay $125,000 to the Army to help cover costs of Fort Dix security.

Although the judge could have allowed for the possibility of future parole in the men’s sentences, Deputy U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick argued that even though no one was hurt, parole wasn’t warranted.

“The fact that they didn’t have an opportunity to carry [the plot] out should not be a benefit,” Fitzpatrick said, according to The Associated Press.

“But for the intervention of the FBI, at some point in the future,” the U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler agreed, these men “would have killed people.”

Yesterday, the three brothers again professed their innocence.

The Camden, New Jersey jury of eight women and four men, all sequestered, decided after about 38 hours of deliberation that the five men, accused of plotting to attack the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey, were not guilty of actually attempting murder — given that they hadn’t actually tried to hurt anybody — but they were guilty of thinking about it. By talking to two paid undercover FBI informants, themselves shady characters with strong incentives to encourage the defendants to turn their military fantasies into reality, the young men were transformed into felons who now could face life in prison.

As I wrote in connection with this trial last week, there are serious problems with indicting a group of men for conspiracy based on statements they made to informants who appear to have been goading them on. While the fact that they purchased weapons was obviously a legitimate concern, that it was an informant who arranged for the transaction and made it all possible suggests the crime couldn’t have happened without him. Technically, they can still be guilty of conspiracy if they were predisposed to commit the crime, even without the informant’s intervention. But do we want to be prosecuting people purely for their predispositions? And how do you actually prove a predisposition, anyway?

“Today it’s hard for jurors to listen to people who are angry with Americans mouth rhetoric which might be quite nasty, for them to look at it objectively and say, they have these views, but they weren’t going to be committing violent acts unless induced or persuaded to do so,” Sam Schmidt, a defense attorney who’s represented defendants in terrorism case, told me last week.

You can hardly blame the jurors for taking that view. After all, the stakes are high: if they chose not to convict and one of these people committed a violent act at some point in the future, it would be hard for those jurors to sleep at night.

Then again, the stakes are high in another way: if all those other people holding anti-American views out there see the US putting Muslims in prison essentially for their unpalatable political views — as it must have looked to the families of the defendants that wailed in the courtroom yesterday — that only adds fuel to their fire.

“There are terrorists, but not my son. They know they are not guilty,” Faten Shnewer, the mother of lead defendant Mohamad Shnewer, told the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, adding that it’s “because they are Muslims, that’s it.”

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

TWI’s Daphne Eviatar cited the trial in a piece last week about the U.S. government’s use of plants and paid informants in such terrorism cases. You can read it here.

Disappointingly, obvious puns were largely absent from the headlines in the major news outlets. Even the wordplay-prone New York Post resorted to a prosaic, if a bit cryptic, title — Kim in Health Mystery. Here’s what the fourth estate had to say:

Kim Had Surgery After Stroke, South Koreans Say (The New York Times)

North Korean Leader’s Illness Not Critical, Official in Seoul Says (Washington Post)

N.Korea denies Kim Jong Il health ‘conspiracies’ (CNN.com)

Kim in Health Mystery (New York Post)

North Korea’s Kim Jong Il may be gravely ill (Los Angeles Times)

Pyongyang Faults Report that Kim is Seriously Ill (The Wall Street Journal)

South Korea says North Korea’s leader believed to be recovering from stroke (Chicago Tribune)

An entrance to Fort Huachuca (Flickr: GoBot)

Sierra Vista, Ariz.–In February, when a 35-count federal indictment was filed against three-term Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and conspiracy in connection with his misuse of 2002 campaign funds and the sale of a business associate’s land, he was co-chairman of Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in Arizona. The indictment generated a flurry of negative press nationwide for the Republican presidential nominee because of Renzi’s close ties to the McCain campaign. The congressman’s trial is set to begin in March in Tucson.

Renzi is accused of demanding that an investment group seeking his help on a congressional land exchange buy property near an Army based in Southeastern Arizona owned by his business partner, James W. Sandlin. The investment group bought Sandlin’s land in 2005, generating a $3.5 million windfall, and Sandlin allegedly funneled more than $770,000 back to Renzi. The congressman, 50, and his defense team have declined to comment on the charges.

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) (U.S. Congress)

McCain said in February he didn’t know enough about the indictment to comment, and he has continued to express fondness for Renzi. McCain, however, was drawn into the periphery of the case in May, when it was learned that the FBI had interviewed at least one member of his staff and requested his Senate office turn over documents related to federal land exchanges.

McCain’s connections with Renzi at the time the congressman was accused of committing the crimes are deep and complex.

McCain played a pivotal role in passing Renzi’s most important legislation — the 2003 Fort Huachuca Preservation amendment. The amendment, attached by Renzi to a House defense appropriations bill, angered environmental groups because it exempted Fort Huachuca, a military installation, from the Endangered Species Act and and groups say it threatens the ecology of the nearby San Pedro River. McCain backed Renzi’s rider despite criticism from congressional watchdog groups and others that Renzi had a conflict of interest because the amendment would benefit his father’s company, which had significant business at the Army base.

The rider, which was supported by the Army, eliminated the threat that Fort Huachuca would be downsized or closed — which could have hurt the the Southeast Arizona economy and local real estate values, including Sandlin’s property.

Map of Arizona

After first saying he was opposed to Renzi’s rider because of the exemption from the Endangered Species Act, McCain ultimately backed the amendment with minor revisions, despite Renzi’s appearance of a conflict of interest. The decision has come back to haunt McCain because it seems to undercut his self-professed goal of steering clear of legislation designed to benefit special interests, as well as his credentials as an environmentalist. “I have carefully avoided situations that might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office,” McCain wrote in his memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.”

There is no evidence to suggest that McCain was aware of Renzi’s alleged criminal conspiracy with Sandlin. But the former Vietnam POW brushed aside editorials in Arizona’s major daily newspapers opposed to Renzi’s rider and ignored protests by environmental groups in front of his Tucson office when he decided to support Renzi’s amendment.

Renzi’s Motives Questioned

Chief among the questions raised was why the then-freshman congressman was pushing so hard to prevent the fort’s closure when the Army base was not in his congressional district. At the time, critics suggested that Renzi’s real motive was to benefit his family’s financial interests. Renzi’s father, the late Maj. Gen. Eugene Renzi, who died in February , was a senior executive with ManTech International, a military intelligence contractor. The company had more than $1.5 billion in current and future contracts at Fort Huachuca, and ManTech’s employees were Renzi’s single largest contributor in his 2002 congressional race — which Renzi won by only 3 percentage points.

Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project, a Ralph Nader organization, told Phoenix New Times in September 2003 that Renzi was jeopardizing his credibility in Congress by supporting legislation that could benefit his father’s company. “Doing such things can cause huge political black eyes,” Ruskin said, “even if they are not explicitly a violation of House ethics rules,”

Despite the mounting criticism nationally throughout the fall of 2003, McCain backed Renzi’s legislation, something of a reversal for the senator. In 2002, he did little publicly to support a nearly identical measure introduced by 12-term congressman Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz), whose district includes Fort Huachuca. McCain’s support was key to passage of Renzi’s amendment because the senator was the ranking Republican on the Senate-House Armed Services conference committee dealing with the legislation.

In so doing, McCain ignored his own admonition to the Senate in 2001, when he urged colleagues to refrain from injecting local politics into federal legislation by seeking to protect military bases in their home states from the coming round of base realignments and closings.

McCain apparently ignored other background aspects of Renzi’s amendment. For example, a routine search of congressional and Arizona public records would have revealed the extent of Renzi’s and Sandlin’s relationship. The two had become business partners in August 2001, when Sandlin bought a stake in Renzi’s real-estate development company, Renzi Investments, Inc., which owned land near Kingman, Ariz.

The Indictment

According to the indictment, Sandlin wrote $220,000 in corporate checks to Renzi in 2002. Renzi used most of the money to finance his 2002 congressional campaign, the indictment alleges, to which Sandlin and his wife were among the first contributors, each giving $2,000 in March 2002. While McCain or his staff would not have known about Sandlin’s checks to Renzi, Sandlin’s and his wife’s campaign contributions were public record. (McCain’s presidential and senatorial staffs did not respond to written questions submitted by The Washington Independent on whether McCain was aware in 2003 of the two men’s business relationship.)

Sandlin had been a major real-estate investor near Fort Huachuca and along the nearby San Pedro River, since the mid-1990s. In early 2000, Sandlin paid $960,000 for 460 acres, the site of an alfalfa farm, less than a half-mile from the river. The land became part of a larger environmental controversy over whether groundwater pumping was draining the San Pedro River.

Pro-growth activists worried that Fort Huachuca might be downsized, or closed, because it was fueling rapid population growth in an area entirely dependent on groundwater. The increase in groundwater pumping was threatening to destroy the nation’s only riparian conservation area along the San Pedro River. But downsizing, or closing, the fort might also throw the southeast Arizona economy into recession.

In early 2002, Fort Huachuca began discussions with Sandlin to buy his 460 acres (alfalfa is a water-intensive crop) as part of the Army’s effort to reduce groundwater pumping. But Sandlin rejected the Army’s offer as too low, and negotiations broke off in 2004. The Army and McCain’s Senate staff did not comment on whether the Army alerted McCain in 2003 that it was seeking to purchase Sandlin’s land at the same time the military was lobbying McCain to back Renzi’s rider.

After the Army negotiations broke off, in 2005 Renzi pressured a private investment group to buy the parcel from Sandlin, which it did for $4.5 million. Renzi promised the investors, who included former Interior Sec. Bruce Babbitt, that he would include the property in a bill to swap the alfalfa field for federal land elsewhere in Arizona.Renzi dropped the exchange bill after word spread in Washington that Renzi was giving favorable treatment to a business associate.

In backing Renzi’s amendment, McCain asserted that the fort and the San Pedro River could coexist. But environmental critics didn’t agree, saying that the amendment would doom the river and give the green light to Fort Huachuca to expand. “We thought what Renzi did was outrageous, and that he did indeed have some serious conflicts,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club. “The legislation smelled bad; it was bad; and McCain coming in and helping make it happen was inappropriate.”

McCain’s support of Renzi’s amendment angered major environmental groups also because the exemption from the Endangered Species Act removed the fort’s responsibility to reduce ground water consumption by the surrounding civilian community. The exemption removed an important protection for the San Pedro River, home to the second most diverse array of mammals in the world after the Costa Rican cloud forests. McCain has called the San Pedro River a “national treasure,” and Congress, in 1986, protected the river’s upper 40 miles by including it in the nation’s first National Riparian Conservation Area under the management of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

In hailing congressional passage of Renzi’s amendment in 2003, McCain, ignoring harsh criticisms from environmental groups, said the measure would protect both Fort Huachuca and the river. “I hope this compromise will be a model proving that military, environmental and economic objectives can productively coexist,” McCain stated in a press release.

But a month later, without mentioning his support for the Renzi rider, McCain admitted that the San Pedro River was in serious peril saying in the Sierra Vista Herald that, “It’s not a matter of whether it will dry up, it is when it will dry up.”

Friends in High Places

Why did McCain defy his own his admonitions to avoid injecting local politics into federal legislation? Renzi’s connections with the White House may offer one answer. A source familiar with the federal criminal investigation of Renzi, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Renzi’s father was a “very close friend” of Vice President Dick Cheney through his work in the military intelligence community.

That friendship seems to have paid political dividends to Renzi. Both Cheney and President George W. Bush campaigned for Renzi during his 2002 campaign, with Bush making two appearances in Arizona. The White House’s support prompted the Republican National Campaign Committee to spend $2 million on attack ads against Renzi’s Democratic opponent, George Cordova. Renzi later condemned the ads that portrayed Cordova as a liar, cheat and a thief — telling the Arizona Daily Sun that he would seek to replace the GOP leaders who had authorized the ad campaign.

After Renzi’s amendment passed, the congressman took a direct swipe at critics who claimed that the Fort Huachuca Preservation amendment was intended to benefit his father’s business by aiding the base’s growth. “Opponents of this language overreached with a smear campaign that was baseless and malicious,” Renzi said in a Nov. 7, 2003, press release. “These slanderous attacks discredited their campaign and gave concerned parties pause over the true motivations behind their intended goals.”

A little more than four years later, a federal grand jury indictment lays out what Renzi’s motives allegedly were.

As for McCain’s embrace of a piece of legislation that had, at the least, an appearance of a conflict of interest for Renzi, it is a prime example of Congress failing to police itself, according to Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics.

“When members of Congress evaluate any policy or official action,” Ritsch said, “they should be open to the possibility that there might be conflict of interest inherent in it. They shouldn’t be green-lighting anything that is obviously a conflict of interest for the member who bought it to them.”

News of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav has eclipsed a series of police raids that took place in the Twin Cities over the weekend, in which FBI agents and local law enforcement detained six people on suspicion of conspiracy to riot at the Republican National Convention. The detainees have not been formally charged with any crime and their lawyers are in court on Monday, Labor Day, seeking their release. There were no similar pre-emptive arrests of protesters at the Democratic Convention in Denver last week.

The raids started Friday night in downtown St. Paul, with armed officers entering an anarchist headquarters, known as a “convergence space.” The occupants, who were ordered to lie on the floor, demanded to see a warrant — as heard on the audio on this not-very-revealing video.

Bob Fletcher, the Ramsey County sheriff, whose jurisdiction covers St. Paul, said the action was part of an investigation of the RNC Welcoming Committee. He was described the group as “a criminal enterprise made up of 35 self-described anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts before and during the Republican National Convention. These acts include tactics to blockade and disable delegate buses, breaching venue security and injuring police officers.”

No arrests were made.

On Saturday morning, FBI and local police raided a home in Minneapolis that houses an organization called Guns Not Bombs. Four people were detained on “probable cause” for conspiracy to riot.

The search warrant for the raid said police were looking for “assembled, improvised incendiary devices” and urine and feces, apparently to be used in protests. Fletcher said the urine had been seized. Lawyers for protesters said the material identified as “unidentified liquid” was actually gray water used to save water in an ecologically correct toilet. The officers did find 37 “caltrops” in the garage of the home, according to MnIndy’s Molly Priesmeyer who reviewed the police inventory of material seized in the raid. A caltrop is a nail-like device used to stop traffic or puncture wheels.

While some complained of rough tactics, at least one of the officers acted with decency, according to MnIndy. As a five-year-old boy was escorted from the home by police, he said he wanted his markers. An officer went in and came back out a few minutes later. “These are the only colors I could find,” he said. “Did I get the right stuff?”

On Saturday afternoon, police kicked in the door of another house in Minneapolis and detained three people on suspicion of conspiracy to riot.

On Sunday morning, The National Lawyers Guild said a total of six people had been detained but none had been formally charged. Police have 72 hours to charge detained suspects. Guild lawyers said they would seek judicial review on Monday of the “probable cause holds” used to detain the six activists.