New Year’s Military-style: A Look Back

by Cathy Scott

Just before New Year’s Eve 2003, something extraordinary happened in three popular partying spots: The arm of the law came down and ordered that information on everyone visiting those respective cities be handed over to the FBI. It was a true Big Brother moment, all in the name of Homeland Security.

The three cities -- Washington, D.C., New York and Las Vegas – were pointed out as possible target cities for terrorist strikes. As history would show, it never happened, but that didn’t stop the frenzy that it might happen. The New York Times' story about the high alert, issued December 21, 2004, read: "Military helicopters and sharpshooters joined fireworks and noisemakers on Wednesday in welcoming the New Year in the nation's largest celebrations."

Then-Las Vegas Sheriff Bill Young told PBS’s “FRONTLINE” producers, “We have 300,000 to 400,000 people on the streets on Las Vegas Boulevard [the Las Vegas Strip] in front of all these beautiful hotels, waiting for the clock to strike midnight and all the fireworks to go off. And that was what the intelligence information indicated, that that was, you know, the type of area or venue that they were going to try to target.”

“Here was the real dilemma,” Young continued. “Do we cancel our New Year's Eve celebration in Las Vegas? That was the question being placed on me.”

So the answer was to hand over the names of everybody staying in town. That meant hotel records, airline records, rental car records, gift shop records and casino records.

People swarmed into Las Vegas anyway to welcome in 2004.

Sheriff Young seemed to justify the heavy scrutiny over his city's guests, telling PBS, “People that come to Vegas, the only time they're not on video is when they're in their room or they're in a public restroom. They don't have them in those. But the hallways, the elevators, the gaming area -- we've taken that to a level that has, I think, surpassed any place in the United States.”

But the high alerts weren’t the only time guests of Las Vegas have unknowingly had their personal information handed over to law enforcement. For years, insiders at Vegas hotels have reported that when someone registers at a hotel or even a small motel, and the hotel desk clerk takes the guest's driver’s license, he then walks behind the lobby where you can’t see him. That’s when he makes a Xerox copy that is later handed over, in a stack of driver’s licenses, to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The police, in turn, run the licenses see if there are any outstanding arrest warrants.

Early on, when I was covering the police beat for the Las Vegas Sun, I wondered how, when someone had just arrived in town and wasn’t pulled over for a traffic violation, the cops knew that particular person had an outstanding warrant. I’d see it several times a week in police reports. Or a news release would state that so-and-so was arrested soon after arriving in Las Vegas because he or she was a fugitive from justice.

Once I learned that hotel personnel regularly Xeroxed driver’s licenses of registered hotel guests and handed them over to the cops, then I knew. The police would run the names, then, voila, up would pop the miscreants–an easy collar for police.

That’s the dirty secret most people who come to Las Vegas don’t know about. It’s not just that people are being watched via surveillance cameras in cabs, restaurants, hotels and casinos, but their driver’s license info may be passed on to the authorities as well.

As Gary Peck, director with the American Civil Liberties Nevada office, told PBS in reference to the December 2003 terrorist scare, '"Trust us. We're the government. And if you're not up to no good, why should you care?' That's not the way our system works. We are a country that is founded on a set of principles relating to individual freedom, including our privacy, our right to be left alone by the government."

Well said, Gary Peck.

Such law enforcement scrutiny for New Year’s Eve hasn’t happened since 2003 turned into 2004–at least not that we know of.

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Terrorists on Trial

by Diane Dimond

So, the so-called 9/11 Gang of Five will go on trial in a federal court as opposed to before a military commission. The bottom line question then has to be: Are you ready for the possibility that Khalid Sheik Mohammed or any of his fellow collaborators might walk free on a sly defense attorney’s manipulation of our system?

Don’t think it couldn’t happen?

Millionaire Robert Durst walked free even after he admitted to killing a neighbor and cutting up his body. In my opinion O.J. Simpson got a free pass too after taking the lives of his ex-wife, Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. I could cite other cases in which juries, again in my opinion, did not come to the right conclusion. Take it from me it happens.

As you sit reading this column there are American lawyers preparing and strategizing how to secure the freedom of Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd Al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmad Al-Hawsawi, and Waleed Bin Attash. This, after Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) has repeatedly proclaimed he was the mastermind who planned the attacks onAmerica that claimed nearly 3000 lives that horrible day in September 2001. KSM gleefully brags about hating and murdering Americans. His followers, some of whom will be in court with him, do the same. This is what they live for – to kill us – and to go down in history as martyrs.

Let me be perfectly clear about why I think these trials should have been conducted in a military court: September 11, 2001 was not the beginning of some temporary crime wave. What happened at the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and over the skies of Pennsylvania wasn’t just a criminal act – it was an act of war. Don’t be fooled just because these terrorists don’t wear proper military uniforms. These men, who will go on trial in New York soon, aren’t mere criminals. They are enemy combatants and should be treated as the soldiers they are.

Being brought before a civilian court these men will be afforded all the rights and privileges they excoriate America for. The fact that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (read that: water boarding) was used on some of them as our agents tried to extract vital information will be used as a reason to try to toss out crucial evidence. Their long detention in secret locations and then at Guantanamo Bay will surely be highlighted as their defense attorneys try to play the “poor-them” card. And it goes without saying these defendants will try to use our open justice system as a platform to spew their warped sense of how the world should be. Even with the most diligent judge at the helm there will most likely be anti-American outbursts in the courtroom. Their free-of-charge American lawyers, will stage-manage the system toward mistrial by demanding classified information be released to “prove their case.”

America will bend over backward and spend multiple millions of dollars to demonstrate we can stage a secure and fair trial for even our most vilified enemies. We’ll hire the accused the best available lawyers and some believe this will show the rest of the world we are virtuous people. But guess what? The radical Muslim world will still call us “The Great Satan” and worse.

I have to wonder how any American defense attorney could feel comfortable taking such a case so I called my friend Mickey Sherman who wrote a book entitled, “How Can You Defend Those People?” As a defense lawyer Sherman firmly believes every human being deserves good representation in court no matter what they’ve done. But even he admitted to me he would never agree to go to court with these terror loving jihadists. He called the Gang of Five “the defendants we love to hate.” Sherman believes any lawyer that takes one of the terrorist cases will be vilified and do permanent damage to both their professional and personal life.

Defense Attorney Ron Kuby, never a man to shy away from representing controversial figures (he practiced with the late William Kuntsler), calls the whole trial process into question. “KSM has been standing before a military commission admitting he did it, saying he wants the government to kill him. The government wants to kill him. The mockery comes,” according to Kuby (photo left), “because the military commission didn’t accept the guilty plea in the first place…the trial becomes a long form of assisted suicide.”

In the end the defendants will likely be glad to admit in civilian court what they did and say they are ready to die. The question then becomes what does the court do? Does it give the terrorists what they want most in life – death? Or are they sentenced to what I see as their worst nightmare – life – in an American maximum security prison?

I say give them life.

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