Sharing Classified Information Sounds Swell On Paper

Posted on September 19, 2006

On Face the Nation, Lindsey Grahem had the following to say on providing classified information to terrorist defendents where we have that “but” word again:

I’m all for protecting classified information from being unfairly disclosed, but you cannot have a trial and call it an American trial, have a Geneva Convention trial where the person goes to jail and never saw what the jury saw.

Have we had any experience in the past with situations like this? Andrew McCarthy, lead prosecutor against one of the World Trade Center bombers, wrote an article for Commentary Magazine in 2004 discussing how sensitive information can fall into the wrong hands if turned over to terrorists on trial:

“In 1995, just before trying the blind sheik (Omar Abdel Rahman) and eleven others, I duly complied with discovery law by writing a letter to the defense counsel listing 200 names of people who might be alleged as unindicted co-conspirators-i.e., people who were on the government’s radar screen but whom there was insufficient evidence to charge. Six years later, my letter turned up as evidence in the trial of those who bombed our embassies in Africa. It seems that, within days of my having sent it, the letter had found its way to Sudan and was in the hands of bin Laden (who was on the list), having been fetched for him by an al-Qaeda operative who had gotten it from one of its associates.”

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One Response to “Sharing Classified Information Sounds Swell On Paper”

RegularRons on September 19th, 2006 2:53 pm

Jay…take a look at what the AC;U is doing out in AZ to people who believe in School choice, not the communist board houses that they are…

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/09/19/aclu-sues-to-limit-educational-liberty-in-az/