With Fewer Terror Trials, Manhattan Court Quiets Down
The courtroom was packed. Sketch artists were in place. Journalists and other spectators squeezed into seats. Marshals kept a watchful eye.
The place was Federal District Court in Manhattan, where a Pakistani neuroscientist was to be arraigned on criminal charges on Tuesday. Government officials have said that the scientist, Aafia Siddiqui, was a Qaeda operative.
But that day, as it turned out, most in the crowd were apparently interested in seeing another defendant, John A. Gotti, whose murder conspiracy case was being called first. When Mr. Gotti’s hearing ended, spectators began to stream out of court.
If the scene at first suggested another era, the 1990s, when a number of major international terrorism prosecutions ended up in New York and drew widespread attention, the more muted hearing for Ms. Siddiqui this week underscored the reality that New York has largely lost its title as the terrorism-trial capital.
Indeed, that title is now held by another forum, run by the military, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where the trial of Osama bin Laden’s former driver came to an end this week.
But there was once a time — before Sept. 11, 2001 — when the federal court in Lower Manhattan was the center of the action.
There were trials stemming from the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and in the bombings of two American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 10 years ago, Aug. 7, 1998. There were also trials in the foiled plots to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and other landmarks in New York City; and to blast apart as many as a dozen American commercial airliners as they flew over the Pacific Ocean.
Among those convicted were terrorists like Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman; and later, several Qaeda operatives, including Wadih el-Hage, who prosecutors said was a close aide to Mr. bin Laden.
While not all of the cases involved New York City-based terrorism, there were logical reasons to try the defendants in Manhattan.
The airliner plot was linked to Mr. Yousef, who was behind the first trade center attack; and the embassy bombings were carried out by Al Qaeda, which federal prosecutors in Manhattan had been investigating.
After 9/11, the federal government indicted Zacarias Moussaoui, in the attacks, in federal court in Alexandria, Va., where jurors were considered to be more pro-death penalty than in New York. The jury there gave Mr. Moussaoui a life sentence. Other high-level suspects ended up in the military-run system.
“The bottom line is that they are just not being brought here anymore,” said Anthony L. Ricco, a lawyer who represented defendants in two 1990s trials and also in one of the few cases tried after 2001.
Mr. Ricco said he believed that the fact that a federal jury in Manhattan did not impose the death penalty on two bombers convicted in the 1998 embassy attacks influenced government officials in deciding to charge Mr. Moussaoui in Virginia.
To be sure, there have been terrorism prosecutions in Manhattan federal court since the 9/11 attacks, including a number in which defendants were charged with providing support to Al Qaeda. But the era of large trials growing out of the blockbuster attacks that characterized the 1990s cases seems to have moved on.
Prosecutors have not explained why they charged Ms. Siddiqui in Manhattan, given the accusation against her: that she tried to kill F.B.I. agents and military personnel in Afghanistan.
Her name did surface in one of the recent terrorism trials in Manhattan, suggesting that the authorities had an interest in her before her recent arrest.
After her arraignment this week, Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers, Elizabeth M. Fink and Elaine Whitfield Sharp, held a press conference in which they declared her innocence and made clear that they intended to fight her case outside the courthouse as well as inside.
Such a highly public strategy also recalled the approach taken by some lawyers in the 1990s trials.
“We’re going to bring whatever we can to the court here — and the court of public opinion,” Ms. Fink declared.
The decision to prosecute Ms. Siddiqui in New York spurred discussion this week among some terrorism experts about the significance of the move.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former assistant United States attorney who helped to prosecute the landmarks bomb plot, said the Siddiqui case demonstrated that “we’re actually starting to get to a place where we’re developing some coherent principles about which cases ought to go into which system.”
But Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer who has handled terrorism cases in federal court and at Guantánamo Bay, disagreed, saying the case underscored how arbitrary the decisions had become.
“What are the distinguishing criteria?” he asked. “Why does one end up as a criminal defendant and another as an enemy combatant?”
Government officials had linked Ms. Siddiqui, who studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to terrorists before her recent arrest.
In 2004, the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, described her as “an Al Qaeda operative and facilitator.”
But the charges filed this week were more narrowly drawn. A complaint says that as she was about to be questioned in an Afghan police station last month, she picked up an M-4 rifle and fired twice in the direction of an American soldier who was part of a team of F.B.I. agents and military personnel who had come to interrogate her.
None of the Americans in the police station were hurt; another soldier fired at her with a pistol, wounding her in the torso.
So what might have been a potentially complex terrorism matter turned into a more straightforward case, Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said.
“You’ve got someone, a wanted Al Qaeda operative, who materializes in an Afghan police station, grabs a weapon, and tries to shoot U.S. officers,” Professor Hoffman said, summarizing the government’s claim.
“There’s no intelligence data that needs to be introduced, no sources and methods that need to be risked” in the relatively open forum of the Manhattan federal courthouse, Professor Hoffman said. “It’s a good old-fashioned crime; it’s the equivalent of a 1920s gangster with a tommy gun.”
August 10th, 2008 | Category: Bagram, Children, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Grey Lady of Bagram, Trial
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