Real World Complications From the Jihad Lexicon Business
By Jeffrey Breinholt
Bill West's post (immediately below) hits on something I started worrying about today as I thought more about the practical implications of the State Department's decision to forbid government employees from publicly using the terms jihad and mujaheddin. Plenty of post-9/11 indictments contain these words. They are also in the names of terrorist organizations. How is this going to work where the government employee is a prosecutor or FBI agent responsible for describing a defendant's words?
I first became aware of the terms from the news reports of the 1993 WTC attack and the trial of Sheik Rahman in the New York Landmarks case a few years later. I joined the Justice Department’s Terrorism Section in 1997, and soon found myself reading FBI reports frequently containing these words. If the State Department’s edict applies to the Justice Department (which it purports to, though I have doubts it will apply this far), it is going to complicate efforts to redress terrorism in American courts.
Anyone who doubts this should read Andrew McCarthy’s excellent book, Wilfull Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, which will soon be released by Encounter Books, about his prosecution of the Sheik Rahman case. If Justice Department and FBI personnel find that they are in a trick bag because of the State Department’s decision, I hope they will contact Bill, Andrew, me, or any law enforcement friend now on the outside, so we can shed some sunlight on this problem.
The views in this article are not those of the Department of Justice.
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