DOJball

It has been argued - and I do argue - that the Department of Justice under John Burntfarm is perhaps the most politicized agency in surely the most politicized US administration of modern times if not our whole history. Consider, for the latest example, the sharp questions that the folks at LiberalOasis raise about the nature and timing of the announcement of the indictment against Somali immigrant Nuradin Abdi on a charge of providing material support to terrorists.

Why, for example, was the press conference announcing the indictment held on Monday when the charges were handed up by the Grand Jury the previous Thursday if not to avoid interfering with the adulatory coverage of Reagan's funeral?

And why the refusal to offer specifics of the alleged plot? Could it be that those details would make it seem somehow less threatening? LO quotes ABCNews as saying

[i]nvestigators believe the alleged plot to blow up a Columbus shopping mall was in the earliest stages.

They said no bomb-making materials have been found, and admit they don't have evidence to prove Abdi went for training in Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, AP says that prosecutors say no specific mall was targeted and according to the New York Times, law enforcement officials

said the plot was still under investigation, but they cautioned that it appeared not to have advanced beyond the discussion stage. The officials expressed doubt that Mr. Abdi had the financial, organizational or technical skills to carry out an attack.

As a result, LiberalOasis wonders aloud if the intent is "fearmongering by swing state."

Certainly, the current DOJ has more than once had politics drive policy. Paul Krugman has more on this in his June 15 column, including how the DOJ

invoked the rarely used "state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. [Sibel] Edmonds from providing evidence [to the 9/11 Commission]. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to

in testimony before Congress in 2002, when she described serious deficiencies in the FBI's counterintelligence operations. (Senator Charles Grassley had said people within the FBI had corroborated Edmonds' testimony.)

For my part, I was reminded of the case of William Krar, who was arrested in December along with his common-law wife in Tyler, Texas. They were in possession of a completed cyanide bomb capable of killing everyone in a large office building, plus about 100 more conventional explosives, bomb components, and chemical agents, along with evidence this was all part of a well-developed plot. But when the arrests came, no big deal was made about it to the media even though it was apparently the biggest domestic terrorism investigation since Oklahoma City. John Cinderfarm appeared at no press conferences, there were no screaming headlines, no push to make it news. There were press releases, yes, but it was treated almost as routine news. As was noted at the time, if you weren't from east Texas you likely knew nothing about it.

Why the difference? What other than politics, the politics of fear and xenophobia, could drive the DOJ to make Abdi's "discussions" a headline across the country while Klar's ready-to-go cyanide bomb remained in the shadows?

Now, if the Ohio case was an example of foiling a real terror plot, good, excellent, hooray for the investigators, and indeed would provide further proof of an assertion I made less than four months after 9/11:

Patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined.

But then we're back to the timing. If you've got Abdi nailed, if you know what's going down, why not wait a while, let it develop, get more information on him, his co-conspirators, see where they're getting their supplies, see what contacts they make, why not get more information, which is what you're always claiming you don't have enough of, before you make your move? What was the rush to grab someone for a "plot" that was just talk and for which he lacked the ability? Was it indeed just because they figured Bush needed some "good news" in the form of an arrest, especially in the wake of the terrorism report debacle?

Back on January 11, writing about the Klar case, I noted that when challenged about the differing PR treatments given such as Klar versus, for example, Jose Padilla, the DOJ will insist that it is not ignoring domestic terrorism.

But that misses the point. I have no trouble believing that the law enforcement professionals in the DOJ take their jobs seriously and are not ignoring domestic terrorism. Every case of supposed laxity in tracking our native-born wackos can be matched by a slip-up in keeping tabs on some foreign plotter. I realize that's a kind of backhanded defense, saying they've been equally inefficient in both areas, but it does say they haven't been focusing on one to the exclusion of the other.

But again, that's not the point. The point is the political purposes to which the cases are put by the top layers of the department, the shouting about one and the whispering about the other, the nativist and racist fears exploited to advance an agenda. That's the issue that cases such as this raise, that's the issue that we have to face.

And even Nuradin Abdi being guilty as charged does not change that.