I was reading this article from the BBC that talked about “American Taliban” Adam Yahiye Gadahn. The most interesting part of the article was that it mentioned that he was wanted by the FBI for… wait for it… TREASON!
Whoa. Treason? Really? TREASON? The guy is definitely a wannabe, but he is a high profile (if not exactly useful) propaganda tool for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but has anything he actually done something that warrants being charged with treason?
Article III, section 3 of the Constitution defines treason as:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The “giving them aid and comfort” is probably the most obvious part, because everyone has seen these videos so the two witness part has been satisfied. Anyway, the guy would probably proudly confess to everything, but real and imagined, if for no other reason than to boost his own mystique.
It’s the “enemies of the United States” part I find interesting. Yes, the Taliban and al Qaeda want to, and have done, us harm; but so does every other terrorist organization. People have been rightfully convicted of crimes for giving aid (usually in terms of money or money laundering) to known terrorist groups, but these crimes have always been more more narrow than the Crime Of All Crimes™. Whatever happened to “giving material support to an known terrorist organization?”
“Enemies of the United States” and the “levying war against them” makes it pretty clear that traitor is someone who has sided with a foreign state or with an domestic rebellion. Al Qaeda isn’t either. Al Qaeda is a bunch of criminal thugs, and promoting them as some sort of supervillains is giving them too much credit. While they maybe an “ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world,” they’re not Cobra. They don’t have tanks, or jet planes, or battle android troopers, or a Pyramid of Darkness, or a radioactive crystal, heavy water, and space meteor powered teleporter. Hell! They don’t even have matching outfits, which, ironically, the White House has been all too happy to point out.
This whole thing reeks of an over zealous prosecutor getting a grand jury somewhere to rubber stamp whatever he put up. Just like the prosecutor that got an indictment for “manufacturing a weapon of mass destruction” against a meth lab
When I was on a federal grand jury, we got a “terrorism” case out of St Louis. A guy called police I believe, saying that he had planted “cell phone bombs” around the Gateway Arch, which as you may know is federal property. You probably didn’t hear about this terrorist threat because it turned out that there were no bombs.
This man was mentally ill, and had a history of making terrorist threats to FBI. In a previous instance, he said he was going to bomb airliners flying out of DFI. The FBI investigated, and the US attorney in Dallas decided not to bring charges, because he was obviously deranged, and was just run of the mill crazy that makes threats. I believe his reasoning was that he wanted to get deported back home.
However this wasn’t good enough for one of the assistant US attorneys out of Belleville. He wanted to bring an indictment for – and I’m not exaggerating – “threatening the use of a weapon of mass destruction within the United States.” I asked the attorney if there was something less than “weapon of mass destruction” like whatever the standard bomb threat crime was. His response, “well a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ is defined as ‘a device than can cause mass casualties’ and who’s to say how powerful these bombs would have been if they really existed.”
And you want to know what happened? The crazy man was indicted. Why? He comited a crime, and the jury thought that this way he’d get the help he needed.
So what happened? Thankfully, a jury acquitted him, which makes me feel a lot better. Since that summer when he was indicted I had reöccuring thoughts of this mentally ill man beeing doomed to a life of constant stress in a maximum security federal prison. And you know what always bothered the me the most about the indictment, probably always will?
It was unanimous.
