Sweetheart Deal for a Terrorist by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online

Sweetheart Deal for a Terrorist by Andrew C. McCarthy on National Review Online: "So why wasn’t al-Marri charged with major terrorism offenses? The conduct to which he admitted, coupled with what the government says it was in a position to prove, would clearly have supported multiple life counts, the appropriate sentence for a would-be mass murderer, a key operative of a ruthless network with which the United States is currently at war. Not only was al-Marri charged with only two material-support counts and permitted to plead guilty to only one of them; the New York Times reports that the Justice Department nearly let him plead out to less than that—portraying Holder as sternly holding out for “at least a 15-year sentence.” Yet, even that is not true: The sentence will at most be 15 years, and Holder has expressly agreed that al-Marri may argue to the judge that he should receive a lighter sentence, as little as the time he has already served.

The terrorism cases of the 1990s would have been a lot shorter if we had been willing to plead them out on the cheap. Under the “Thornburgh Memo,” however, the Justice Department’s standard approach to all cases was to charge the most severe readily-provable offense, and in terrorism cases—given the added national-security threat involved—the practice was to throw the book at defendants, to make certain they were taken out of commission permanently, or as close to permanently as the statutes allowed. If defendants wanted to plead guilty, they were told these were the terms for pleading guilty—and if they wanted to fight it out, we would see them in court for trial.

The Obama administration has already outright released, with no trial, Binyam Mohammed, an al-Qaeda operative who, like al-Marri, was assigned by KSM to carry out mass-murder attacks in the United States after 9/11. Now, al-Marri has been given a plea agreement that grossly undersells the grave seriousness of his war crimes. If Holder’s objective was to demonstrate that George W. Bush was wrong to detain al-Marri as an enemy combatant and that the criminal-justice system “works,” this sweetheart deal suggests the opposite.

Jihadists were not impressed by our strategy of fighting them in the courtroom through the 1990s. But at least they knew the few of them we managed to apprehend and indict got slammed. I wonder what they’re thinking now."