AAG Eric Holder: The Activist Attorney General

Written by Jordan SekulowcloseAuthor: jordansekulow Name: Jordan Sekulow
Email: jordansekulow@gmail.com
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About: Jordan Sekulow is the Director of International Operations at the American Center for Law and Justice and co-host of nationally syndicated radio show Jay Sekulow Live.See Authors Posts (2) on November 23, 2009

Article by Jordan Sekulow and Sam Nunberg

In March of 2003, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) sat in a holding room after being captured by the Pakistani Military.  While he was extremely tepid around the Pakistanis for fear of their methods of interrogation, the self proclaimed mastermind of 9/11 and beheader of Daniel Pearl knew that the Pakistanis would eventually transfer him into the custody of the FBI.

As the Al-Qaeda manual reads, he knew that once the FBI detained him, the US Constitution and the domestic mandate of the FBI requires that he be given an attorney and a fast and speedy trial. After all, that is exactly what happened during the Clinton Administration’s prosecution of KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.  Soon the door opened and an American walked into the room.  As George Tenet has repeatedly stated, KSM immediately said that he would not talk to the American and demanded an attorney once he arrived in New York City.  The CIA agent replied to KSM that he was in for a big surprise as the Bush Administration had properly characterized the atrocity of 9/11 and Islamic Extremism as a whole as an act of war and would treat KSM as an unlawful enemy combatant. In a sharp contrast, AG Eric Holder, with the approval of President Obama, has now awarded KSM his lawyer, his day in court and the full protection of the US Constitution.

Yet while Holder’s decision should infuriate us all, it also should come as no surprise.  His continued record of transnationalist legal activism makes any card holding member of the ACLU blush and is illustrative of the drastic difference between the Republican and Democrat mindset on prosecuting terrorism.  While Fox News has covered the radical group of Czars that Obama has appointed, the public has frankly been left in the dark about the radical leftist that controls the Justice Department. A simple run through of Holder’s record as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration for three years and his first 10 months in the Obama Administration clearly shows that America is best served with Holder submitting his resignation effective yesterday.

Holder’s term as Deputy Attorney General is most notorious for the infamous and highly questionable 2001 pardon of Marc Rich in which Holder usurped regular DOJ procedure and delivered the pardon to Pres. Clinton without going through the proper vetting.  Even more nefarious, according to the DOJ’s own guidelines, no pardon can be granted until five years after completion of a sentence in a criminal case. Yet Rich never had a trial as he stayed in Switzerland after being indicted by then US Attorney Rudolph Guiliani.  This was preceded by the 1999 pardon of 16 FALN terrorists who set off 120 bombs across America in which Holder commented in his AG confirmation hearing earlier this year that he does not regret authorizing, unlike the Rich pardon.

Holder also unabashedly defended the 2000 DOJ decision to take Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint from his relative’s house and return the young boy to Castro’s Cuba despite not having a court order to enforce the custody position that Holder used to support the Clinton Administration’s decision.

Further foreshadowing Holder’s inept and dangerous soft mentality on terrorism, then Deputy Attorney General Holder negotiated for Scotland to prosecute the Libyan Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbaset al-Magrahi.  Surely the United States could have argued for jurisdiction over the matter, and demanded that the suspect be transferred into American custody for murdering over 190 Americans on Pan Am Flight103 in 1988.  Yet Holder, as Scotland Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has detailed in testimony, resisted having al-Megrahi transferred into American custody.  While a Scotland jury found al-Megrahi guilty in 2001, earlier this past August the Lockerbie Bomber was greeted to cheers on a Libyan tarmac after Scotland ‘compassionately released’ the convicted killer. MacAskill found AG Holder’s arguments against his decision ironic considering his past actions as Deputy Attorney General.

Of course with his impeccable record of far left failures and questionable actions as Deputy Attorney General, Obama quickly nominated Holder to be his chief law enforcement officer.  In ten short months, Holder the Attorney General has quickly outpaced Holder the Deputy Attorney as being one of the most hopeless and radical attorneys to ever wield the discretion of the DOJ on the American people.  By mid-April, Holder’s Justice Department had released over 100 pages of confidential documents written during the Bush Administration that described both the methods and legal rationale for the enhanced interrogation methods used on high level Al-Qaeda members such KSM.  This was not only an intelligence coup for Al-Qaeda and other Islamic Extremists but also major world competitors such as Iran, Russia and China.

While Obama repeatedly stated that he did not want to investigate the brave interrogators of the CIA who worked the sessions against KSM which served as the substance of a substantial part of the 9/11 Report, Holder authorized a prosecutor this past August to reexamine cases of alleged abuse. This discretionary decision was ordered by Holder despite the fact that these cases were all investigated in the past by the DOJ’s own career prosecutors during the Bush term and even lead to one conviction.

Yet in sharp prosecutorial contrast, Holder quietly quashed an ongoing pay-for-play corruption investigation of New Mexico governor, and former Obama commerce secretary nominee, Bill Richardson despite the fact that the investigation was lead by an independent U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a grand jury.  This was also a reversal of Justice Department protocols which call for local control of corruption cases.  Combined with Holder’s decision to drop the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for the infamous Pennsylvania polling center incident, AG Holder clearly displays an ad-hoc, illogical on the whim legal malfeasance which characterizes the liberal legal activist.  While Holder called Americans “a nation of cowards” in racial relations, it seems Holder the Attorney General cowers to the left, its cronies and the propensity of ideologues that mirrors tyrants in using the power of their office to prosecute political enemies.

After KSM was finally broken during the CIA interrogation by the methods which Holder claims do not work, he told his interrogators that his original 9/11 plan involved hijacking a total of ten airplanes.  This even more grandiose version called for nine planes to hit all the targets of 9/11 as well as both the CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and the state of Washington. KSM would next land the tenth plane in a US airport and after killing all the adult male passengers on board, he would alert the media and deliver a speech excoriating U.S. support of Israel and the Philippines. Bin Laden nixed the grand scale of KSM’s plan but agreed to finance and materially support a less complex terrorist attack without the plane for the media KSM media spectacle.

However, Holder’s decision to prosecute KSM less than a mile from Ground Zero has sadly and inexcusably provided KSM both with attorney he demanded from the CIA as well as the opportunity to continuously deliver his speech and fatwas in a New York Federal Courtroom.  If this is what the current DOJ would submit as KSM “finally fac(ing) justice,” then it can only be because Eric Holder is the Activist Attorney General.

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Jordan Sekulow is the Director of International Operations at the American Center for Law and Justice and co-host of nationally syndicated radio show Jay Sekulow Live.

Sam Nunberg is a Deputy Director of Government Affairs at the American Center for Law & Justice and is based in the New York ACLJ office

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