From Reuters:

The U.S. government on Friday appealed the 22-year prison term for “millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam, saying that the Algerian convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport deserved a longer sentence because he “plotted to kill hundreds of innocent Americans.”

This is reassuring, to say the least. Imagine if Mohammed Atta had been caught in advance of 9/11, with all the plans for that atrocity, and had been sentenced to just 22 years in jail?

The appeal of the sentence is also an apt rejoinder to the judge who handed down that sentence on July 27th, while making remarks including the following:

“We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel,” he said Wednesday. “The message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.”

By imposing a 22-year sentence on a committed fanatic who would like to commit mass murder against Americans - and was busy trying to do just that when he was caught - Judge John Coughenour ironically helped make the case that we should deal with this kind of foreign enemy by means of military tribunals and, where necessary, firing squads.

Ahmed Ressam was at one time cooperating with prosecutors in return for a more lenient sentence. That cooperation ended, however, and it has to be assumed that he has retreated to the ideology that drove him in the first place. He may have gambled that just by cooperating temporarily he could win the sympathy of the judge, over the objections of the prosecutors. In that he would have been right.

The “message to the world” that Judge Coughenour referred to ought to be this: if you are caught trying to execute a plan of mass murder against Americans, then you will never see the light of day again.

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