IPT: Washington Post Puts Target on Prosecutor's Back
US News | Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 8:35:03 am PDT
The Washington Post, once again, is on the wrong side of the battle to expose jihadis in the United States: Washington Post Reporter Puts Target on Prosecutor’s Back.
Many have chronicled the odd relationship between the Western media and the forces of radical Islam, perhaps the starkest incident being the refusal of almost the entire mainstream media to publish the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, even as a wake of destruction and series of violent threats were unleashed by religiously motivated mobs as a result.
While fear of threats and reprisals were clearly a motivating factor in that case, there are other instances where the motivation is slightly harder to divine. A recent case in point is Washington Post reporter Jerry Markon. In an article titled “Relentless Terrorism Prosecutor Faces Accusations of His Own,” Markon has carelessly bought in to an Islamist propaganda campaign against one of America’s finest and bravest prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg of the Eastern District of Virginia.
Markon trots out the complaints of a convicted terrorist operative and a coterie of his defense lawyers that Kromberg’s actions are somehow driven by religious bias rather than a desire - and a duty - to hold criminals accountable for their actions. The result of Markon’s “reporting” is to put a target on Kromberg’s back and to scare off government lawyers from taking similar cases targeting criminal radical Islamists - lest reporters from major newspapers accuse them of religious bigotry and stymie future career prospects or higher government appointments.
Success breeds contempt, and Kromberg’s track record, which includes not just locking up Islamic terrorists, but other major criminals like FBI spy Robert Hanssen and United Way CEO William Aramony, speaks for itself. But let’s look at Markon’s vacuous treatment of one of the terrorism prosecutions:
“Kromberg’s highest-profile case since joining the office’s new terrorism unit after Sept. 11 was what prosecutors called the ‘Virginia jihad network,’ 11 Muslim men convicted on such charges as preparing for holy war by, among other things, playing paintball. Justice officials hailed it as a classic post-Sept. 11 case of prevention, but civil libertarians and some Muslims said it targeted Muslim men.”Markon’s fixation on the paintball aspect is nothing more than an attempt to belittle the significance of what happened. Of the 11 defendants, six pled guilty and three were found guilty of terrorist related charges. Most had, in addition to, yes, training in Northern Virginia with paintball guns, also trained at Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) camps in Pakistan for the purpose of joining the Taliban to fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. LeT was designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group in 2001 after its violent takeover of the Indian parliament.
