This from Bobby Chesney, through his invaluable National Security Law List-Serve.

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* United States v. Amawi (N.D. Ohio June 13, 2007)

Jury convictions in a significant Ohio terrorism prosecution under § 956(a) last Friday. Not sure why this one didn’t make more headlines. From the press release:

A federal jury in the Northern District of Ohio has convicted three Ohio residents, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, 28, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, 45, and Wassim I. Mazloum, 27, of conspiring to commit terrorist acts against Americans overseas, including U.S. military personnel in Iraq, and other terrorism-related violations.

…

In February 2007, Amawi, El-Hindi, and Mazloum were charged in a superseding indictment with conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States, including U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Amawi and El-Hindi were also charged individually with distributing information regarding the manufacture or use of explosives, including suicide bomb vests and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Three additional counts in the superseding indictment were severed before trial and were not considered by this jury.

Today, the jury convicted the defendants on all counts. Amawi, a citizen of Jordan and the United States, and El Hindi, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Jordan, were each convicted of one count of conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States, one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and two counts of distributing information on explosives. Mazloum, a U.S. legal permanent resident from Lebanon, was convicted of one count of conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States and one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

At trial, the government proved that all three defendants engaged in a conspiracy, beginning sometime prior to June 2004, to kill or maim persons outside the United States, including U.S. armed forces personnel in Iraq. As part of the conspiracy, the defendants conducted firearms training and accessed and copied instructions in the construction and use of explosives – including IEDs and suicide bomb vests. In addition, the defendants conspired to recruit others to participate in jihad training; researched and solicited funding sources for such training; and proposed sites for training in firearms, explosives and hand-to-hand combat to prospective recruits.

The government also proved that all defendants conspired to provide material support and resources, including personnel, money, explosives and laptop computers, to terrorists, including a co-conspirator in the Middle East, who had requested such materials for use against U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. For example, among other activities, Amawi communicated with a contact in the Middle East on chemical explosives and traveled to Jordan in August 2005 with laptop computers intended for delivery for mujahideen “brothers” whom he learned were preparing to cross into Iraq.

The government also proved that Amawi knowingly distributed to others a guide describing the step-by-step process for manufacturing chemical explosive compounds, as well as a video entitled, “Martyrdom Operation Vest Preparation,” which described the step-by-step construction and use of a suicide bomb vest. Amawi distributed these materials with the intent that they be used for training others to commit a crime of violence, including the killing of U.S. nationals overseas.

The government further proved that El-Hindi knowingly distributed a slide show demonstrating the preparation and use of IEDs against apparent U.S. military vehicles and personnel, as well as the video entitled “Martyrdom Operation Vest Preparation.” El-Hindi distributed these materials with the intent that they be used for training others to commit a crime of violence, including the killing of U.S. nationals overseas.

…

“This case demonstrates the stark reality of home grown terrorism. If a plot like this can be developed in Toledo, OH, it can happen anywhere. With radical extremists in our midst, the FBI works day and night with our law enforcement and intelligence partners to pursue suspected terrorists and their supporters,” said C. Frank Figliuzzi, Special Agent in Charge, Cleveland Division, FBI.

The maximum statutory penalties for the offenses on which the defendants were convicted include: life imprisonment for conspiracy to kill or maim persons outside the United States; 20 years imprisonment for distributing information regarding explosives (each count); and 15 years imprisonment for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

Marc Lynch at Abu Ardvaark points out the current issue of Perspectives on Politics (the POP in question), which features a roundtable discussion of the not-so-new-anymore U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24, or COIN FM. The Review Symposium, entitled "The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis",  features comments from Jeffrey C. Isaac, Stephen Biddle, Stathis N. Kalyvas, Wendy Brown, and Douglas A. Ollivant. Must go read.

It’s an organizing world, yes it is… Kingsley Dennis, at the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University, highlighted this creepy bit of technology, “directional virtual fencing”, in the CeMoRe blog:

1. CeMoRe blog noted the report, as indicated above.

2. CeMoRe sourced the report to Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, a pretty interesting looking tech blog in its own right.

3. The RPTT write-up sourced the original research paper on wired bovines to the Rangeland Journal (no kidding).

I can’t figure whether this should be featured in the Annals of Improbable Research, Wired, Tales From the Crypt, or what…

Here’s a challenge: read the report, then go read Noah Shachtman’s and Sharon Weinberger’s reports on brain-machine interfaces (here, here, here). Then read these related research articles on neutrality in cyberspace and  prosecution of thought crime… anyone feeling queasy yet?

Some interesting follow-up to Daniel Drezner’s paper "Public Intellectuals 2.0", which I noted here a little while ago. See Barry Gewen’s comment in the New York Times on it, Gewen’s citation of an earlier Russell Jacoby essay on the same subject in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Drezner’s response to Gewen. Some flavor:

Gewen:

Drezner’s impulse is to be inclusive: if you’ve written a serious book that has attracted a modicum of general attention, you seem to qualify as a public intellectual. I would be more restrictive, and I’d go back to the original New York Intellectuals for guidance.

  Drezner:

Here’s the bias: in the past, when literary critics traversed into the fields of social science, they were seen as public intellectuals. Why, when social scientists return the favor – like Tyler Cowen, Richard Posner or Gary Becker – are they viewed as arrivistes and/or methodological imperialists?

 

As part of Opinio Juris’ insta-symposium on the Boumediene Case, University of Virigina Professor of History Paul Halliday has submitted an intriguing essay on the uses of history and analogy. Halliday, who researches "how law accommodates new political ideas and social practices," critiques some of the analytical logic in the case:

Chief Justice Roberts is right: Guantanamo is “unique.” [p2] But can that which is unique be analogized? If not, why work by analogy? Yet this is what the justices have generally sought in the past. They ask, what case can I find that looks like today’s? Simple answer? None. To ask this question of the past is to seek what is not there: the present. Approaching the past this way means missing the chance to develop the kind of historical analysis that might help us think our way into the problems we confront today.

In the past, I’ve had to work against my own outsider’s prejudice that legal research and analysis is rigid and mechanical, less open to conceptual innovation than are other fields and disciplines of inquiry. That’s not entirely fair, but as Halliday points out, there are law-relevant issues that can be fruitfully dealt with through alternative scholarly lenses and approaches. Conversely, historians and historical practice have also been unfairly criticized – for being deficient in theoretical grounding, unable or unwilling to extract generalizeables from historical narrative, and getting hung up on the contingency of facts as they’re presently understood. Problems of "uniqueness" are endemic in historical practice (it’s a huge theme in Holocaust and genocide historiography), which isn’t to say they’re overplayed or irrelevant – as Halliday rightfully suggests.

Halliday’s essay is particularly interesting for some of the historical data he’s excavated on jurisdictional exceptionalism:

Even with over 11,000 people using habeas corpus in the 300 years before 1789, no case can provide the strict analogy the justices seek. That said, many come close: “prisoners at war” in the 1690s; Frenchmen and Indians in Bengal; writs used across centuries in a host of “jurisdictionally quirky” [Roberts, p28] settings from Berwick to both Bostons, and in Barbados and beyond. So what? Looking for a case is to overlook how serious historical explanation might better inform contemporary legal thinking.

This is what really got my attention. With everyone thinking of insurgent sanctuaries as territorially contiguous rear bases and terrorist havens as inaccessible mountain warrens or training camps in Waziristan, legal scholars have been exploring the broader problem set of refuge, safety, and sovereignty – from political questions of jus ad bellum to strategic and tactical application of jus in bello. This is a rich field of current thought, and it far outstrips anything available in other disciplinary literatures. The guerrilla model has primacy right now, as it should; the immediacy of security threats requires that it be so. But for holistic treatments of the problem, the sort that attempt to understand the history of the concept and they way it informs contemporary thought and practice, legal and law-oriented research is leading edge.

Historical practice as pattern recognition: 

What we find in thousands of cases across thousands of miles are patterns revealing principles about habeas corpus. Recovering such principles through historical analysis provides us with ways of thinking not only about the past, but about our present, ways that may surprise and help us—regardless of our partisan or jurisprudential commitments—because they bring us into our questions from unanticipated points of entry.

Consider three principles Justice Kennedy identifies out of the past:

1) habeas corpus rests on a theory of power, not a theory of liberty [p10],
2) it was “an adaptable remedy” [p50],
3) by which “liberty and security can be reconciled.” [p70]

That habeas rests on monarchical power, not proto-liberal ideas, may sound disturbing. But ideas about the prerogative, taken up by royal justices around 1600, built the legal refuge to which later ideas about liberty could resort for safety. A prerogative writ made a legal unity of otherwise quirky places. Place was not the point in habeas litigation. People were: the king, his officers, and their accountability to the king, through his justices, for their detention of his subjects, both “natural” and “local.”

There’s more, and I don’t do justice to Halliday’s specific work on habeus corpus or the full essence of his piece, which gets into important points on the adaptability of law and reconciliation of liberty and security. I thought it was important to point out Halliday’s distinction between place and person, especially after this week in the news.

In practice, we’ve seen the problems that come up when trying to decipher militant network architectures absent sufficient geolocational data. Places can exist in the absence of people. But people don’t exist in the absence of place. Everyone’s located somewhere, and that somewhere is always, always a physical space. The wrong people can, all too often, find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our challenge is pinning the right people, the one’s we’re looking for – whether it’s bin Laden himself or fugitive Balkans war crimes suspects –  to the right location at an exploitable moment in time.