U.S. Justice Department argues for tougher sentence for Ressam
The judge who sentenced Ahmed Ressam to 22 years in prison should be ordered to impose a stiffer sentence on the man who planned to blow up holiday travelers at Los Angeles International Airport, a Justice Department lawyer argued Monday.
U.S. Attorney John McKay, in the unusual appeal, said U.S. District Judge John Coughenour had abused his discretion, failed to justify the sentence and misused Ressam's sentencing to criticize U.S. policy about having terrorism suspects held indefinitely or tried before secretive military tribunals.
"These are reversible errors," McKay told a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals convened in Seattle. If the sentence stands, Ressam "will be released in 15 years, leaving him, if he chooses, to rejoin his al-Qaida comrades when he is 54 years old," McKay said.
Ressam's attorney, Federal Public Defender Thomas Hillier, when questioned by Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, agreed that Coughenour needs to justify the length of the 22-year sentence to comply with case law and sentencing guidelines.
"We can't tell why he picked that number," Rymer said.
It will be many months before the case is decided. The U.S. Supreme Court last week agreed to hear two cases, about sentencing discretion, that may affect the circuit court's decision.
Ressam was arrested Dec. 14, 1999, in Port Angeles as he drove off a ferry from Victoria, B.C., in a rental car packed with explosives. The Algerian refugee later admitted he had been recruited by al-Qaida and trained at Osama bin Laden's terrorism camps in Afghanistan.
He was convicted in April 2001 of nine federal felonies, including conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism. A month later, he began to cooperate with law enforcement.
Ressam identified at least 130 members of terrorism cells, testified in two terrorism trials and cooperated with the governments of Canada, England, France, Germany and Italy.
At one point, both prosecutors and the defense said that Ressam's sentence should be considerably lighter because of his help, and agreed to a 27-year sentence. However, Ressam's cooperation faltered in 2003 and ended by 2005. His lawyers and a government psychiatrist concluded that years in solitary confinement and repeated interrogations caused him to suffer a mental breakdown.
Last year, prosecutors argued for a 35-year sentence, saying it accounted for his cooperation but also for his failing to live up to his agreement.
Prosecutors said they had to dismiss indictments against two alleged terrorists whose cases were built on Ressam's testimony: Abu Doha, a British citizen reported to be an al-Qaida recruiter, and Samir Ait Mohamed, a Canadian who allegedly had planned to detonate a gas truck in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal.
Defense attorneys argued for a 12 ½-year sentence, saying Ressam's information had been nearly invaluable.
When he sentenced Ressam, Coughenour ripped the Bush administration for holding suspected terrorists without trial or trying them before secret tribunals.
"I would like to convey the message that our system works," Coughenour said of the Ressam case. "We did not need to use a secret military tribunal or detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant, or deny him the right to counsel."
The judge's remarks and the 22-year sentence infuriated some prosecutors and law-enforcement officials.
At Monday's hearing, McKay argued that the appellate court should send a message back to Coughenour: that his statements were out of line.
Ressam's lawyers also asked the appeals court to reverse one of Ressam's five explosives-related convictions. That conviction, for possessing explosives while committing another felony, resulted in a mandatory 10-year sentence.
An Algerian convicted of plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport at the turn of the millennium has written a letter to the judge who sentenced him to 22 years in prison, and his lawyers fear it could hurt his chances of winning an appeal.
Few details were provided in court filings this week about the letter, written in Arabic by Ahmed Ressam. The filings indicate that U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour had it translated and placed it under seal, but the judge's office refused to say Wednesday whether he had read it. Its content was not disclosed.
Ressam's lawyers have asked Coughenour not to read it, for fear of tainting the case.
Ressam and federal prosecutors have appealed aspects of his 2005 sentence to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has indicated it may send the case back to Coughenour. Prosecutors say 22 years was too lenient a punishment.
One of Ressam's lawyers, Thomas Hillier, declined to say Wednesday how he learned of the letter.
"Mr. Ressam is not a citizen of this country, does not speak our language and has suffered difficult confinement for a substantial period of time," Hillier wrote in court documents. "His letter may have been sent without fully appreciating the inappropriateness of contacting the court ex parte. The government has no right to take advantage of Mr. Ressam without the shield of counsel."
Ressam started cooperating with authorities after his conviction, which helped win him a lesser sentence. But he eventually stopped cooperating, infuriating prosecutors who then had to drop charges against two suspected co-conspirators.
Federal prosecutors argued in documents filed Tuesday that the judge should be allowed to read the letter because it might say Ressam wants new lawyers or wishes to resume cooperating.
"It is for Mr. Ressam to determine whether he wishes to file a matter with the court or whether he wishes to withdraw it, not counsel on his behalf," prosecutors wrote.
Ressam was convicted in 2001 of terrorism and explosives charges for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Customs agents in Port Angeles caught him with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999, a scare that prompted cancellation of millennium celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle.
Convicted millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam has recanted testimony that has been helping to detain a fellow Algerian as an enemy combatant in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In a letter to U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, Ressam wrote that a Montreal friend, Hassan Zemiri, had nothing to do with plans to detonate bombs at Los Angeles International Airport over the New Year's holiday in 1999.
"It is not right or just to accuse somebody of something not true," Ressam wrote.
Ressam, 39, had testified at the 2001 trial of his co-conspirator, Mohktar Haouari, that Zemiri had aided in the plot.
Zemiri was captured in Afghanistan after an American airstrike in late 2001 near the caves of Tora Bora along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, said his lawyer, Jim Dorsey of Minneapolis.
Dorsey said Zemiri was in Montreal in 1999 and knew Ressam, who had returned from Osama bin Laden's terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan. News broke in May 2001 that Ressam was cooperating with federal agents. Within weeks, Zemiri and his wife, a Canadian citizen, fled to Afghanistan, his lawyer said.
Zemiri is one of 529 people being held as enemy combatants at the U.S. military base in Cuba. Ressam's testimony about Zemiri's Montreal activities is the basis for Zemiri's five-year incarceration, his lawyer said.
Dorsey was unaware that Ressam had written the letter aiding his client until contacted by The Seattle Times on Wednesday. Dorsey said the letter was "great [but] you just don't know how much good it will do." He referred to the shifting legal status of the detainees as the "through-the-looking-glass weirdness down in Guantánamo."
Ressam sent Coughenour the letter, written in Arabic, in November. The judge ordered the letter translated but then withheld the original and the translation from the court file.
On Tuesday, The Times, through its attorney, asked the judge to file the letter and its translation in the court file. He did so on Wednesday.
According to the translation, Ressam denied that Zemiri "had provided aid and support for the operation I was about to carry out. This is not right, it is false."
Ressam said his initial account about Zemiri was given while "I was in shock and had a severe psychological disorder" after his April 2001 conviction on nine counts, including conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism.
Customs agents in Port Angeles caught Ressam with explosives in his rental car in December 1999.
Facing a lifetime in prison, Ressam agreed to cooperate and began providing information on his cohorts and others.
He testified only once: at the New York trial of Haouari, a member of Ressam's terrorist cell in Montreal.
After two years of interrogation and a nervous breakdown, Ressam stopped cooperating in 2003. As a result, federal prosecutors said, they had to dismiss indictments against two alleged terrorists: Samir Ait Mohamed, who Ressam had said once planned to detonate a gasoline truck in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal; and Abu Doha, an alleged al-Qaida recruiter in London.
In testimony, Ressam has acknowledged that Zemiri gave him $3,500 and a video camera to use to make himself look like a tourist.
But Ressam testified that he never gave Zemiri details of his plans to bomb holiday travelers at the Los Angeles airport.
"He knew that you were going to commit a terrorist act, yes or no?" a prosecutor asked.
"A job in America, yes," Ressam replied.
In the recently released letter, Ressam said he had asked his lawyers a year ago to help him contact the FBI or prosecutors about changing his testimony. The lawyers said they would contact Zemiri's lawyers, Ressam wrote. "But recently, I have been having problems with my attorneys and I don't trust them or their promises anymore," Ressam wrote.
His lawyer, federal public defender Thomas Hillier, said Wednesday that he believes Ressam's continued isolation at the federal supermax prison in Colorado has led to the distrust.
"The truth is, we will fight even harder for him now," Hillier said.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A federal appeals court vacated a 22-year prison sentence on Tuesday against "millennium bomber" Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco ruled that one of the counts against Ressam should be reversed and thus a district court should resentence him to reflect this change.
Ressam was sentenced in 2005 for conspiracy to commit an international terrorist act, explosives smuggling and other criminal counts. Prosecutors had sought a 35-year term.
SEATTLE (AP) -- Federal prosecutors want another chance to seek a stiffer prison term for a man convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the turn of the millennium.
In a Friday filing, interim U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sullivan of Seattle asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the case of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian whose 22-year prison sentence was thrown out in January.
Ressam was arrested near the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999 after customs agents found 124 pounds of explosives in the trunk of his car as he disembarked from a ferry at Port Angeles, Washington.
Prosecutors said he was intent on bombing the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium. The arrest raised fears of terrorism attacks and prompted the cancellation of New Year's celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle.
Ressam was sentenced to 22 years in prison after being convicted of all nine charges. Federal prosecutors, who were seeking a longer sentence, appealed to the 9th Circuit.
But in January, a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appeals court reversed Ressam's conviction on one of the charges and sent the case back to a lower court to issue a new sentence. The panel also asked the lower court to explain the rationale behind the 22-year term.
The U.S. attorney's office is now seeking a new hearing on the sentence, in front of 15 of the 9th Circuit judges.
If the court agrees to take up the case, the government could renew its arguments for a longer sentence, U.S. attorney's office spokeswoman Emily Langlie said Friday.
"It's always been the government's intention that at any resentencing, we would ask for 35 years," Langlie said.
Defense attorney Thomas Hillier II did not immediately return a phone message left at his office Friday evening. After January's ruling, he said the decision could help combat the government's argument that the original sentence was too lenient.
In overturning the single conviction in January, two of the three appellate judges said Ressam was improperly convicted of carrying an explosive while committing a felony: lying on a customs form.
The government failed to show the "explosives somehow aided or emboldened" him to provide a false name at the border because he had not intended to detonate explosives at the border when he was arrested weeks before January 1, 2000, Judge Pamela Rymer wrote for the majority.
After his conviction in 2001, Ressam began cooperating with authorities in hopes of winning a reduced sentence. He faced a maximum of 65 years in prison. But Ressam's cooperation came to a halt by early 2003, resulting in charges being dropped against two alleged coconspirators.
OTTAWA — The controversial system of security certificates used to detain non-citizen terrorism suspects has suffered another blow as a key witness against Adil Charkaoui recanted his allegations.
The so-called Millennium bomber, Ahmed Ressam, wrote in a letter to the newspaper Le Journal de Montréal that he made false allegations against Mr. Charkaoui because he was suffering “psychological problems and great pressure.”
The letter appears to weaken the government case against Mr. Charkaoui, who was released under strict bail conditions in February, 2005, after 21 months of detention. His lawyers said it raises new questions about the way the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's spy service, builds security-certificate cases.
The letter means doubts have been cast over the credibility of allegations of all three people who had tied Mr. Charkaoui to an Afghan terrorist training camp. Their allegations are in the publicly released portion of the evidence that CSIS used to support the security certificate.
“This letter is important to me because it confirms what I have been saying since the beginning,” Mr. Charkaoui said in a telephone interview from his Montreal home. He said he will ask his lawyers to try to use the letter to have all his bail conditions lifted, and perhaps eventually to have the case against him dropped.
Mr. Charkaoui's lawyer, Dominique Larochelle, said the letter illustrates the danger of using the allegations of detained suspects — she called Mr. Ressam an “unreliable jailhouse snitch” — who have been interrogated in murky circumstances and cannot be cross-examined.
But a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Melissa Leclerc, said that the government has reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals who are the subject of security certificates pose a risk to national security. She said she would not comment on Mr. Charkaoui's case, but said the evidence against him “comes from many sources.”
Mr. Ressam, an Algerian-born Montrealer, was convicted of a 1999 plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport and sentenced to 22 years.
He was a prized informant for U.S. investigators after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — but he stopped talking in 2003, and last year he recanted allegations that Guantanamo Bay detainee Hassan Zemiri aided the millennium bomb plot.
In 2002, Mr. Ressam had alleged he saw Mr. Charkaoui at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in 1998. But the Journal de Montreal reported that Mr. Ressam wrote in a letter that this was untrue.
“What I said to the investigators ... was not true,” he wrote. “Because I was confronted with difficult psychological circumstances, I did not know what I was saying.”
Mr. Charkaoui, a Moroccan-born Montrealer, was detained in 2003 under a controversial section of Canada's immigration laws that allows the detention of potential national-security risks on evidence that is usually not disclosed to the immigrant.
Although some of the case against Mr. Charkaoui remains secret, the public portion of the evidence released in a court-approved summary shows that three people linked him to terror-camp training.
One, Nourreddine Nfia, now in jail in Morocco, later denied making allegations about Mr. Charkaoui.
And in 2004, the Federal Court of Canada rejected the statements of alleged terror-camp operator Abu Zubaydah because of reports he underwent coercive interrogation at a U.S. military detention centre in Guantanamo Bay. News reports indicated he was subjected to waterboarding, where detainees are made to feel like they are drowning.
The federal government is re-drafting the law governing security certificates after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the system did not build in enough safeguards. The court gave Parliament one year to revamp the system.
On Friday, the Federal Court of Canada loosened the conditions of house arrest for another man who is subject to a security certificate, Mohamed Harkat, 38, so he can stay outdoors longer in the evening.
Mr. Harkat spent nearly four years behind bars until last June when the court released him on bail with strict conditions.
In a decision Friday, the court loosened some of the restrictions so that he can remain outdoors in his yard until 11 p.m.
October 5, 2007 (AP) An appeals court ruling in the case of would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam could "significantly diminish" the government's ability to prosecute terrorists, the Justice Department wrote Thursday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.
Ressam, an Algerian national, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2005 after being convicted on nine counts for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around January 1, 2000. Customs agents in Port Angeles caught him with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The ensuing scare prompted the cancellation of New Year's celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle.
Early this year, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Ressam's conviction on one of the charges — carrying explosives during the commission of a felony, which carries a mandatory 10-year sentence. In a 2-1 decision, the court reasoned that the law required prosecutors to show the explosives were carried "in relation to" the felony, which in this case was lying on a Customs form.
The panel sent the case back to a lower court to issue a new sentence, and also asked the judge to explain the rationale behind the 22-year term, which prosecutors had challenged as too lenient.
The Justice Department disagreed with the dismissal of the charge and asked the 9th Circuit to hear the case again with 15 judges. The court declined, prompting Thursday's petition to the Supreme Court.
"The Court of Appeals has misconstrued (the law) in a way that conflicts with the decisions of other courts of appeals and could significantly diminish the statute's usefulness as a tool for combating terrorism-related offenses," the petition said. "Nothing in the text ... indicates that the explosives must have been carried 'in relation to' the underlying felony."
If allowed to stand, the Justice Department argued, the lower court's ruling is likely to be particularly significant in terrorism cases where a defendant is caught before a plan is put into action. In such cases, including Ressam's, it could be difficult or impossible to prove the connection between carrying the explosives and other felonies committed by the defendant.
Ressam's attorneys insist that the government's interpretation would lead to a nonsensical result: The law would punish the coincidental possession of explosives during a felony as harshly as the actual use of explosives during another felony.
"Congressional intent to impose such a harsh sentence would not be served by making it available simply because explosives are being carried at the time a wholly unrelated, nonviolent felony is committed," they wrote in their trial brief.
Ressam was convicted in 2001, then decided to tell investigators what he knew about al-Qaida in an effort to win a shorter sentence. His testimony helped convict one of his coconspirators, but his cooperation came to a halt by early 2003, forcing the government to dismiss cases against two of his alleged coconspirators, Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha.
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