Word: pleas
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...much has gone according to plan for the 20th hijacker over the past year. First, on September 11, Zacarias Moussaoui missed his flight into the glorious afterlife imagined by al-Qaeda's suicide terrorists. Now a U.S. judge won't even accept his guilty plea...
...most defiant statements were simply overruled by the judge. "I'm guilty," said the prisoner, now eager to prove his terrorist credentials. ''I am member of al-Qaeda. I pledge bayat (a loyalty oath) to Osama bin Laden.'' But Judge Leonie Brinkema overruled him, entering a not-guilty plea and telling him to go away and think about the consequences of his choice...
What does John Walker Lindh's plea bargain - in which the America Taliban plead guilty to two of the 10 charges brought against him by the U.S. government, a deal that brings up to 20 years in prison without parole - mean for other American citizens accused of links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda...
...thing, it might give prosecutors more incentive to cut deals. No public trial means no messy public disclosures of information the government considers sensitive. "The government sees they don't have to spill the beans if they take a plea bargain," says Douglas Cassel, director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University and an attorney specializing in international human rights...
...greater impact in the plea bargain may be to demonstrate that the U.S. legal system does work as a weapon in the war on terror. The Bush administration got the strong sentence it wanted, and it avoided the use of secret military tribunals with have come under harsh criticism at home and abroad. If nothing else, the successful use of the civilian court system in Lindh's case is something of a public relations triumph, and one that might influence whether Hamdi and Padilla are tried in civilian or military courts. It's easier to fight a war when...