Criminal defense attorneys have long objected to “experts” produced at trials by the Justice Department who often seem to closely follow trial theories rather than scientific or forensic data. I have handled cases where experts used by the Justice Department gave almost laughable testimony filled with errors in national security cases but courts continue to admit their testimony. This week, one such expert, FBI Special Agent Steven Kimball, fell apart on the stand when confronted with clearly conclusions over basic and easily ascertainable facts.
Tsarnaev’s defence attorney Miriam Conrad for example noted that the FBI identified a picture sent on the twitter account of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a picture of Mecca. This led to this exchange:
Conrad: “You said the picture [that forms the background of the second account] was a picture of Mecca.”
Kimbell: “Yes, to the best of my knowledge.”
Conrad: “Did you bother to look at a picture of Mecca?”
Kimbell: “No.”
Conrad: “Would it surprise you to learn that it is a picture of Grozny?”
Unfortunately, he might not be surprised at all given the loose standards imposed on such expert testimony.
Kimball was also forced to admit that highly incriminating tweets isolated by the Justice Department were actually quotes from pop songs, including a tweet referring to “I shall die young.” Kimball said that he was unaware that these were quotes from songs. Kimball admitted that he did not even click on some links in tweets cited by the government as incriminating. One of the links would have taken the reader to a song with the line “I shall die young.”
Kimball was also confronted by the fact that the FBI had isolated lines that were actually jokes form Comedy Central and various comedians. One could of course forgive an FBI agent for having a limited knowledge of humor sites. However, Kimball also misidentified a quote as having been made by the al Qaida-affiliated cleric Anwar al-Awlaki when it was really a quote from the Qu’ran.
Among the other examples was the highly incriminating use of the term “mad cooked” in tweets that was raised by Kimball. Kimball admitted on cross examination that he was entirely ignorant of the fact that this slang means “high” after he tried to guess that it might mean “Crazy.”
In the end, it was the testimony that seemed cooked. It was a great cross examination by Conrad, but it is unfortunately not unique.
The exaggeration of such evidence reflects the real issue at trial — death. The defense has already admitted that Tsarnaev carried out the attack. The issue is only the penalty and whether a single juror can be convinced that Tsarnaev was under the influence of his older, more radical brother. The misrepresentation of this evidence was intended to portray Tsarnaev as a dedicated terrorist and extremist like his brother. Instead, it seriously undermined the credibility of the prosecution before the jury in what was an extremely strong case for the death penalty.
Source: Guardian
And Pogo, no one needs my encouragement to point out your genocidal tendencies, it’s heartening to see so many folks here seeing what I’ve seen in you for quite sometime now. The ‘scum’ always comes to the surface eventually.
Pogo, you blather on and on about ad hominem attacks on you, yet you seem to have no compunction about using them on others. Must I point out your hypocrisy? You’re getting beat up enough ( rightfully so) already, I don’t want to pile on.
@Inga (Annie) and Pogo
“Pogo, you blather on and on about ad hominem attacks on you, yet you seem to have no compunction about using them on others.”
For example, Pogo, you apparently have no compunctions whatsoever about condemning to death in large numbers, as judge, jury, and executioner, those you consider Islamic enemies of Western Civilization, but you’re sorely troubled by anyone’s calling attention to certain patterns of thinking on your part, clearly based on your own explicit words.
Should you perhaps attend to that beam in your eye before you grasp at splinters in the eyes of your non-warmongering interlocutors?
@Ken
At bottom, I’ll suggest, this is why authoritarians, those whose primary raison d’etre is to control others, love war: “No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Warmongers are authoritarians. War is their collective wet dream, and because of its seminal importance, I want to return to the psychology of authoritarianism in another post.
Indeed, and this is why I suggested that Pogo’s embrace of “strong man” street lynching and his dismissal of courts and institutional justice were fascistic at heart. This is the sort of ‘muscular’ nationalistic chauvanism and contempt for “weak” due process and rule of law that Mussolini used in the 1920’s to considerable effect.
The totalitarian and absolutist nature of his arguments could also have come right out of anything you read from Robespierre or St Just. The assumption that he must use genocidal methods based on his notional and ethnocentric understanding of culture and religion is honstly terrifying.
One of my favorite quotes from St Just after the Vendee massacres and the bloodbath of Lyons is “Republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it”.
Tell me that doesn’t encapsulate much of what Pogo has argued here?
From my own thesis:
The bloodshed in Lyon was scarcely less robust as Committee representatives set about their business with bureaucratic efficiency. Joseph Fouche’, an acquaintance of Robespierre, and Collot d’Herbois, a sometime actor, enacted a grim repression that was only exceeded by the Vendean affair. Homes were searched, decrees read and judgments pronounced. On one day, 32 heads were collected in only 25 minutes. The drainage ditch leading from the scaffold overran with blood to the point that citizen complaints led to additional executions being carried out as in the Vendee’: by bayonet, musket fire and even groups chained together and obliterated by grapeshot from cannons. Excusing this affair, as always, came easily to Robespierre: “No, their memory [of Jacobin representative Chalier and others arrested by the Federalists in Lyon] must be avenged and those monsters unmasked and exterminated.” Maximalist language of extermination meant that the ‘normal’ rules of the conduct of warfare simply no longer applied, and that the need for social virtue and renewal dictated that the people and their representatives must use every tool at hand to cleanse away enemies.
This is what Pogo argues in favor of, whether he actually realizes it or not.
If a group says, “We’re at war with the West” who am I to argue with them?
Pogo:
Well, thank goodness the CIA has a better grasp of geopolitics. If none of them thought radical Islam was at war with the West, they wouldn’t bother to thwart all those terrorist plots. And why are we, anemically, trying to interfere with Iran getting nukes. I mean, I know they keep saying, “Death to America!” and they repeatedly claim they’re going to bomb us and Israel the first chance they get, it’s all a GOP plot to paint the ME in a bad light.
That’s why I liked KC McFarland’s idea to put a huge bounty on the heads of ISIS every time they commit violence, kidnapping, or murder. They’d either cut it out or get wiped out.
The only way the Ottoman Empire put a lid on warfare that lasted thousands of years was with an iron fist. The ME and parts of Africa always seem to be simmering over.
I think a reasonable and defensible argument is to say, “No, we are not at war and should conduct this by civil/criminal rule.”
But no, what I get is repeated logical fallacies (straw man, ad hominem, appeal to authority, Godwinning, and conclusory statements.
Depressing, mostly because it is a certainty that they all went to college.
” for those enamored of war, of being interminable”
First straw man.
“that any behavior whatsoever to eradicate the Islamic evildoers is justified, including gunning them down in any country’s streets if they are suspected of being that enemy.”
Second straw man.
“Warmongers are authoritarians. War is their collective wet dream”
Third straw man.
Did you go and borrow Inga’s Big Book of Logical Fallacies again?
Oh, and Dzhokhar is in his 20s, so he’s not a kid.
JMRJ:
“And I don’t mean to preach but the implication of your point that then he doesn’t “earn” the death penalty unless he “does it again” is fatuous. I haven’t suggested that such an act shouldn’t be punished at all, or that the perpetrator should ever be free again.”
I actually do understand that you do not want murderers to go unpunished, because you mentioned life imprisonment before.
You confirmed that regardless of the severity of the crime, it is repeat offense that would justify the death penalty in your mind.
Everyone has to arrive at their own opinion about the death penalty. For some it is never warranted, others under specific circumstances.
“the psychology of authoritarianism”
Oh, you’re one of those.
Yet Obama is a true authoritarian, whose primary raison d’etre, like Hillary and -to a lesser extent Bush- is to control others, and I detest his/their actions.
How can that be?
” 1) Westerners are totally innocent victims of the Islamic jihadists,”
No one ever anywhere made this argument.
” Western Civilization are “at war” with radical Islam”
No, the reverse is true. Radical Islam is at war with Western Civilization and much of the rest of the world to boot.
The distinction is important.
” for those enamored of war, of being interminable (Pogo’s “long-war”) at least until another compelling casis belli can be identified.”
Conclusory. No evidence has been suggested that I support or made any argument thereto.
Inadmissible.
@AnneMarie Dickey
“I can’t tell if you [Pogo] are trolling or if you actually are as obtuse as the plain sense of your written statements.”
Please permit me to facilitate your understanding of Pogo’s reasoning, which is based on the premise that he and all the other members of Western Civilization are “at war” with radical Islam. Now, everybody knows that war can be, shall we say, unpleasant, but as Pogo says, it’s “better than defeat.”
Once the premise of “We are at war” is accepted, it logically follows that any behavior whatsoever to eradicate the Islamic evildoers is justified, including gunning them down in any country’s streets if they are suspected of being that enemy.
For many people, and not just for Pogo, “War” is a magical word which, when invoked, automatically exculpates a multitude of sins, including mass murder.
His obtuseness, if you want to call it that (destrudo is probably more to the point), isn’t attributable to illogicality on his part, so much as to his acceptance of the related premises that 1) Westerners are totally innocent victims of the Islamic jihadists, and 2) war in the service of the eradication of the latter, rather than treating them as criminals, is nothing other than commonsensical.
Now, if this war on non-state terrorists kills even hundreds of thousands of innocent people as it has in Iraq, and God only knows how many in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen for examples, why that’s just one of the costs of taking care of business, even if (or is it because?) it creates ever more enemies to be made war on.
And here we come around to a corollary of the major premise of the need for a “war” on terrorism, which is that war is ennobling to those who wage it. And war on a tactic, terrorism, has the added advantage, for those enamored of war, of being interminable (Pogo’s “long-war”) at least until another compelling casis belli can be identified.
As for those not so enamored of it, however, consider the truth value of what the Founding Father James Madison had to say about it:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2010/10/james-madison-on-war-and-liberty.html
At bottom, I’ll suggest, this is why authoritarians, those whose primary raison d’etre is to control others, love war: “No nation could reserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Warmongers are authoritarians. War is their collective wet dream, and because of its seminal importance, I want to return to the psychology of authoritarianism in another post.
“…both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution? ”
Wonderful. And what have you learned about winning a war?
Sherman: “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
@Ken…
I advise you avoid reading about the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, WW1, WW2, Korea, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq wars, which were all fought using that selfsame idea.”
He does seem sure of himself there. I wonder what his qualifications are?
I suppose I shouldn’t mention that I have a degree in history as well as geology, with an emphasis on both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution? (My thesis was on Robespierre and the Jacobins institutionalizing violence before and during the Terror)
Also, for anybody in North Carolina, the Guilford Courthouse Battle re-enactment will be this weekend in Greensboro. I will be marching forth with the 2nd NC Continental Regt to mix it up with the Brits once again. Come by and see us.
“Genocidal trolls …German soldiers”
Please read Prof. Turley’s Civility Rules.
“seriously heretical ideas regarding Christianity”
My quote above was from the organization “Catholic Answers” which “is one of the nation’s largest lay-run apostolates of Catholic apologetics and evangelization.
Catholic Answers operates with the permission of the Diocese of San Diego. It is listed in the current edition of The Official Catholic Directory, the authoritative listing of U.S. Catholic organizations, priests, and bishops.”
Thus, not heretical at all, but within Church dogma.
PAUL S.
What would YOU call Ruby Ridge?
Bill McWilliams – you have been waving the false flag meme a lot, so I want your definition on this one. Then we can go on to the others.
dickeyae, well said.
There is no crime that justifies a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder in the name of the state and its people.
@Ken
Those who aren’t jihadists, however, may want to visit or revisit that rather authoritative advice:
Genocidal trolls named after Walt Kelly characters aside, Americans do seem enamored with a couple of seriously heretical ideas regarding Christianity…first and foremost the whole “Prosperity Gospel” idea, but the America=Christian=exceptionalism=we iz the bestest evuh! attitude is scripturally indefensible…and particularly common throughout history (German soldiers in WW I had “Gott Mitt Uns” inscribed on their belt buckles, if that gives you any clue)
@Ken Rogers
Christianity is not a pacifist religion.
Inalienable….:
“First of all the American public is composed of idiots,thanks to government schools, and the main stream media.”
**************
American schools produced more Nobel Prize-winners than the rest of the world put together. And in physiology and medicine, the U.S. produced fully twice as many Nobel laureates as all other countries combined. But do carry on, I enjoy a good shipwreck.
dickaye
The idea is that since the Germans were at war WITH Jews… that counts as precedence.
Oh please, do go on…