Hey Al-Qaeda , "We're going to sue you and put you in jail!"

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If there is one sure way to roll back any gains the US has made in the War on Terror over the past eight years, it would be to shift the focus from military and intelligence gathering, to a crime fighting stance. That is exactly the position the Obama DOJ appears to be taking:

Justice Dept. Under Obama Is Preparing for Doctrinal Shift in Policies of Bush Years

By NEIL A. LEWIS

Published: February 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department, probably more than any other agency here, is bracing for a broad doctrinal shift in policies from those of the Bush administration, department lawyers and Obama administration officials say.

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Eric H. Holder Jr., whom the Senate is expected to confirm on Monday as the nation’s 82nd attorney general, plans to take the oath of office that evening to demonstrate a quick start, which will include overseeing the creation of a new detention policy for terrorism suspects.

Mr. Holder will have to contend with that and other issues rapidly. Lawyers inside and outside the department say he will face crushing time constraints. Chief among them is a pledge by President Obama to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. Mr. Holder and a department task force must find a solution to the question of what to do with the remaining prisoners there and any apprehended in the future.

“This will be a sea change of what went on before,” said an Obama administration lawyer, noting that the principal authority over detention policies will move from the Defense Department under the Bush administration to the Justice Department.

Under Mr. Obama’s recent executive order, the Justice Department will be required to review the files of the 245 detainees at Guantánamo and draw up a proposal on their fate that will fulfill the pledge to close the facility.

“The idea that it has to be closed within a year will drive the timing of many things,” said the Obama administration lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Mr. Holder had not yet taken office.

Mr. Holder will also have to make several quick decisions because of court-imposed deadlines. And he will have to do so with many of the senior positions in the department not yet filled.

The department has to decide by next month whether it will reverse course from the Bush administration, which had repeatedly invoked the so-called state secrets doctrine to shut down legal challenges to several lawsuits dealing with national security. Officials also face a February deadline on whether to extend habeas corpus rights to detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

“I can’t imagine a more challenging time to come in as attorney general,” said Walter Dellinger, a legal scholar who was an acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. “The number of legal issues left behind to be resolved is really staggering.”

In the Justice Department, there is considerable restiveness as employees await new direction. The civil rights division, which had been reshaped in a conservative direction under President George W. Bush, is ripe for sharp change, administration officials said.

“Many of us cannot wait for the changes,” said one career lawyer in the division, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the atmosphere.

The lawyer said there were expectations that the division would be restored to its historic role of largely enforcing prohibitions against racial and ethnic discrimination. Under the Bush administration, the division significantly diminished its involvement in those areas and shifted resources to fighting instances of religious discrimination.

Several Bush political appointees in the civil rights division have recently resigned. But some of the Bush policies were enforced with alacrity by nonpolitical career lawyers who saw their careers flourish. “A lot of us are waiting to see what happens to them now,” the lawyer said.

The shift is expected to be more stark than that of a transition from one party to another. It may resemble the start of the Reagan administration, with its promise of wide philosophical change to be put into effect by a cadre of enthusiastic outsiders and academics, whose views on how to run the department have simmered after years of watching from the outside.

The case dealing with the state secrets doctrine, which allows the government to rebuff lawsuits by invoking national security concerns, involves al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. A federal trial judge in San Francisco ruled that the government could not invoke the doctrine to block a lawsuit by al-Haramain, which has asserted that the government illegally listened in on its conversations.

The Bush administration used the doctrine to block more than two dozen lawsuits. In timing that was a bit of a surprise, the Justice Department lawyers who have handled the lawsuit filed a motion with the court an hour before Inauguration Day that held to the same position.

Some Obama administration figures regarded the filing before midnight on Jan. 19 as a rear-guard action to make it more difficult to reverse course.

The Justice Department has to file a new brief by Feb. 13. Jon B. Eisenberg, who represents al-Haramain, said the schedule meant that “Holder and company have to decide pretty quickly if they want to keep opposing this case with the state secrets doctrine.”

The case also provides an opportunity to have a court assess the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program.

The Justice Department under Mr. Holder would also have to take a stand soon in a case involving four former Guantánamo detainees who sued former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others for damages they say they had suffered as a result of torture and religious persecution at the facility. In December, the Supreme Court revived the lawsuit and asked a federal appeals court to revisit its earlier action in dismissing the suit in light of the justices’ ruling that Guantánamo prisoners could challenge their detentions in federal court.

The Supreme Court also granted the Justice Department a 30-day delay, until March 23, to say where it stood in the case of Ali al-Marri. The Bush administration has made the far-reaching claim that it may indefinitely hold Mr. Marri, an American citizen, on suspicion of terrorism in a military brig without charging him with a crime.

The new administration is also supposed to decide by Feb. 20 what position to take on whether detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan should be allowed to challenge their detentions in federal court, as Guantánamo detainees can.

While the Justice Department has rapidly grown in recent decades to more than 110,000 employees, there are only about 150 spots for political appointees who will steer policy. Only about 21 have begun work. Several of the most senior of the political appointees require confirmation by the Senate, and Mr. Holder was the first to be considered.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/polit...rss&emc=rss

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A little more information on Terrorism and how to deal with it

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...mp;pagewanted=1

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That's right, we're puttin' our TOP professionals on the case, so watch out !

[TigerHeat 9]

That's right, we're puttin' our TOP professionals on the case, so watch out !

I'm sure the mullahs are sweating the coming RICO investigations.

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That's right, we're puttin' our TOP professionals on the case, so watch out !

I'm sure the mullahs are sweating the coming RICO investigations.

They’re even more scared of the dims pulling out articles Published: November 15, 1987 explaining how to deal with terrorists. Thanks arnaldoabru

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Based on his past, here's how Holder in Obama Administration is going to deal with terrorists; pardon them, for political payoffs in the future...

Eric Holder and the FALN

LEVEY: Eric Holder and the FALN

Why did he engineer Puerto Rican terrorist pardons?

Curt Levey

Friday, January 23, 2009

Attorney General-designate Eric Holder's confirmation has been delayed for a week to allow more time to question the nominee. We're willing to overlook Mr. Holder's role, during the Clinton administration, in both the pardon of international fugitive Marc Rich and the failure to appoint an independent counsel to investigate evidence of fund-raising abuses by Vice President Al Gore, despite recommendations to the contrary by FBI Director Louis Freeh and successive heads of the Department of Justice's campaign task force. We're even prepared to overlook Mr. Holder's apparently inaccurate 2001 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning his role in the Rich pardon. After all, he served as deputy attorney general for more than three years, which is long enough to be entitled to a few mistakes of judgment and memory.

What does trouble us and should trouble the American people, because it reflects a pattern likely to be repeated, is Mr. Holder's central role and the influence of racial politics in the 1999 pardon of 16 FALN (Armed Forces of Puerto Rican Nationalists) terrorists. Following the Los Angeles Times's Jan. 9 disclosure of new evidence concerning Holders' role, it is clear - in the words of the National Review's Andrew McCarthy - that "Holder ... engineer[ed] the shocking, politically driven pardons of 16 Puerto Rican separatists ... responsible for over 130 bombings and the murders of innocent Americans; terrorists who hadn't even applied for clemency or expressed a modicum of remorse (elementary prerequisites for pardon consideration under Justice Department standards)." At the urging of Puerto Rican activists and Puerto Rican members of Congress, Mr. Holder chose to ignore opposition to the pardons from the FBI, two United States Attorneys, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Fraternal Order of Police and victims of the FALN bombings.

In the face of political pressure and racial political correctness, even this chilling warning from an interagency counterterrorism task force was ignored: "Factors which increase the present threat from these groups [the FALN and Los Macheteros] include ... the impending release from prison of members of these groups jailed for prior violence." Kowtowing to racial politics is nothing new for politicians. But the attorney general is expected to be the nation's chief law-enforcement official and a key player in the war on terror, rather than a typical politician. In sum, Mr. Holder's engineering of the FALN pardons is worrisome precisely because it reflects the ongoing concern that, in a Democratic administration, political correctness and the politics of appealing to the Democratic base may get in the way of effective prosecution of the war on terror.

Holder's direct criticism of the war on terror only deepens our concern. Mr. McCarthy pointed that Mr. Holder denounced President Bush's anti-terrorist initiatives as "needlessly abusive and unlawful," complained that the President "denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants" and concluded that Bush's initiatives "made us less, rather than more, safe." Mr. Holder, who has called Guantanamo Bay "an international embarrassment," will be in charge of determining which enemy combatants should be released if he is confirmed as attorney general. There's plenty of room for debate about the conduct of the war on terror, but Mr. Holder seems to have already made up his mind, while ignoring the fact that President Bush's initiatives are largely responsible for preventing another attack on our nation.

Curt Levey is executive director of the Committee for Justice.

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That's right, we're puttin' our TOP professionals on the case, so watch out !

I'm sure the mullahs are sweating the coming RICO investigations.

They’re even more scared of the dims pulling out articles Published: November 15, 1987 explaining how to deal with terrorists. Thanks arnaldoabru

oops, I saw the top date feb 2, 2009 and thought it was a recent article.

Still good info

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That's right, we're puttin' our TOP professionals on the case, so watch out !

Junior is all business. He'll catch 'em. Trudy will handle the interrogations. Who needs waterboarding???

Dangle? He'll handle the media.