08/22/07 – Corbett Edge O’Meara – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9, 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And my guest today is a lawyer from Detroit.
I figure all these bogus terrorism trials in the news, we ought to get up to date on what's going on.
We had a case after September 11th, the four arrested in Detroit, and our guest is Corbett Edge O'Meara.
He was a lawyer for a witness in the case of the Detroit Four.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, how are you?
Just fine.
Good, good.
Glad to have you on here.
And now, your client was or is a guy named Omar Shoshani, is that right?
Yeah.
Omar Shoshani was a guy who, in the weeks after, and a month after 9-11, had the misfortune of being engaged in a fraud where he was attempting to use bad checks to purchase soybean futures in Indonesia, which then he would make money on and be able to buy the bad checks back.
And all he was was a kind of common garden variety forger, but he had the misfortune of having an Arabic name.
And when he was arrested at the airport trying to bring these checks back because they didn't work, and he was arrested in Detroit, he was branded a terrorist.
And then John Ashcroft went on TV and said that they had coughed a terrorist who was attempting to smuggle funds out of the country to fund Al Qaeda, when really it was just some guy who had some checks that somebody had whipped up on their computer or happened to have an Arabic name.
That was the connection to Al Qaeda, huh?
No, he didn't have anything back.
Actually, at different times, accused him of being a Chechen general and a recruiter for the Chechen Islamic militia and things like that, which he wasn't.
And that guy actually existed.
The guy they were accusing him of being actually existed, and it wasn't Mr. Shoshani, who isn't even an Arab.
He's of Chechen descent, but he's not even a Middle Easterner.
And in any event, he ultimately, after branding him a terrorist, and they raided his house, and a treasury agent wrote on a calendar in his house something like, die Islamic scum or something like that, and terrorizing his family.
Ultimately, the government came to the conclusion that he, in fact, wasn't a terrorist and was just a guy who possessed some checks that somebody could have whipped up on their computer, and as a result of that, they were willing to let him get probation.
But while he's awaiting, and he gets out of jail, and while he's awaiting his sentence of probation, this other trial is going on with these four people who were falsely accused of terrorism, all of whom have been completely exonerated of all terrorism charges now.
And the U.S. Attorney who's involved in that case was being investigated and prosecuted by a special prosecutor, not by the actual Attorney General.
But he shared a cell with the snitch, the liar, who was accusing these four guys in order to lessen his own sentence, who had manufactured this entire false story of terrorism for these four guys who were accused of terrorism.
Now, let me stop you right there for a second.
First of all, where was this jail cell, and I thought I had read that they had cells next to each other and talked through the cell.
Yeah, they were actually both in administrative segregation because they were terrorists.
They were Arabs, basically, but they were in administrative segregation in the Milan Detention Center, so they were next door to each other across the hall from each other.
But that's like the local county there in Detroit?
Now, Milan is a rural county where they have a federal detention facility.
It's about 50 miles from Detroit.
And so, Yusuf Mimza, who was the snitch in the terrorism case, who manufactured the entire fake terrorism case with the absolutely conscious complicity, I would believe, of the prosecutor who withheld evidence and was acting as a tool of the Bush administration as they attempted to whip the country into a frenzy so that the war against Iraq would be justified and make them believe that there are terrorists around every corner and we need to give up all of our civil liberties in order to fight these imaginary demons.
I'll tell you what, let's get back to that.
I want to ask you about Covertino and his relationship with the headquarters in D.C. and with the administration and so forth, and for that matter, about all the fear mongering and liberty taking, too.
Let's make sure to get back to those questions later in the interview there.
Well, in terms of this four years later having any lasting meaning, as we recognize now what a horrible idea going into Iraq was and how much we've destabilized that already very unstable region of the world and how much more people hate America now than they ever did before and how much we've suffered, how much we haven't accomplished the actual goals that we were supposedly seeking to accomplish by going into Iraq, people should look back on the absolutely bogus justifications and the bogus media events that were created in order to justify that.
And this trial of these four non-terrorists and the persecution of Omar Shoshani, these guys, the four supposed terrorists, they all spent about 18 months to two years, I believe, incarcerated while they're trying to deal with these cases.
It might have been a little bit less for some of them.
Omar Shoshani wound up spending over five years in administrative segregation, not because he was a terrorist, but because he had the gall to cross the drop in Bert Convertino and the George Bush in their effort to whip the country into a frenzy and paint any Europe they can find as a terrorist.
I had clients at the time who, I had a client who, he drove a truck and his brother-in-law, his ex-wife had kidnapped their children, taken them to Yemen, his brother-in-law calls up, and he's involved in a custody dispute, his brother-in-law calls up the FBI and says, my brother-in-law, who I have a long history, if you want to just check at any court where I'm a part of this, I have a long history of animosity with this person and I am engaged in a legal battle with him and him with my sister, he's a terrorist.
Twenty-five cars descend on this guy's truck.
They go on TV labeling him a terrorist because they find maps in his truck.
He's a truck driver.
Of course he has maps.
He's on the front page of the Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, national media, branding him a terrorist.
There was no evidence whatsoever except for this brother-in-law's completely unsubstantiated statement.
And I got his charges dismissed at the preliminary exam, but had I not done that, he would have sat in jail for two years awaiting charges while John Ashcroft could go on TV about catching terrorists that are there around every corner.
Right, well, and I guess you're lucky that they didn't just abduct your client and turn him over to the Navy to be tortured.
They could have done that.
He wasn't a United States citizen and I suppose he could have been some sort of, and who knows how many people that's happened to.
And he's a guy.
He ran an ice cream shop.
His family had an ice cream shop.
He drove a truck.
He was the least harm, the most harmless person that I've encountered in my life.
Well, I think it is important, and you brought this up a couple of times now, too, in terms of both of your clients, neither of whom had the slightest thing.
I mean, never even mind the phony Detroit case, which we're working our way towards here, but your two clients, the witness in the Detroit case and this other guy with the truck driver.
In both cases, you have the government going on TV and saying, oh, we know he's Al Qaeda.
We know he's a Chechen fighter.
We know that this guy, you know, the purpose of his money, it was an Al Qaeda connection, et cetera, and they're outright lying.
I mean, if this is a local murder case or whatever and the prosecutors go on TV and make all kinds of false assertions about the evidence against you before your trial starts, the judge will at least move you to the other part of the state or something, right?
I mean, that's not fair.
Shouldn't John Ashcroft, isn't that like in violation of the law or something, for him to come out and make all these assertions and then it comes out later that they had absolutely no evidence of ties to Al Qaeda or what have you?
Well, if I go and do that, if I go and say some guy walking down the street is a terrorist, he can sue me, but you can't sue John Ashcroft.
He's held to no, you know, there's no accountability at all for him.
And you're right, he poisoned, I mean, when, because of these false allegations, which the government absolutely knew were untrue, by the time Omar Shoshani, the client with the check, shows up at the Bureau of Prisons to start serving his entirely unjust 72-month sentence for possessing these checks, where if he hadn't had the temerity to question the government's case, he probably would have gotten probation or a year in jail at the most.
If by the time he gets there, because of these totally unsubstantiated and totally uncorroborated and totally false allegations that he is a terrorist, the Bureau of Prisons believes it.
And the Bureau of Prisons puts him in administrative segregation so that he spends a very large percentage of the time he spends in prison, he spends in the hole.
Locked down 23 hours a day all by himself, never seeing another person.
Now what do you call that again?
Administrative segregation?
That's isolation.
That's isolation, basically throwing you in the hole.
Yeah, it's to keep you away, it's to keep him from, I mean, they could say it's to protect him because he's a terrorist and the loyal Americans in prison would hurt him, but he never had any problem, when he was let out of it, he never had any problems with other inmates.
It was entirely to punish him and to, you know, also keep him from infecting and radicalizing all the other inmates there who are all going to become members of al-Qaeda and people with Arabic names are allowed to walk around in the prisons.
But in any event, he, and I actually only have a few more minutes, he, Mimsah tells him, Yousuf Mimsah tells him that basically I'm full of crap.
Yousuf Mimsah says I'm full of crap, I'm just lying on these guys, these terrorists, to prove, to help myself because I'm in trouble and I'm going to lie and everybody wants a terrorist, these poor guys are terrorists.
And Omar tells the government this and the government as a result of this takes away his plea bargain and takes away his commitment to a lesser sentence as a result of his willingness to accept responsibility for his actions.
And as a result of that, he gets 72 months in jail, he's actually out now, he's in Detroit, he served I think about 48 months and then he spent time in a halfway house.
He did actually testify at the trial and some of the individuals were acquitted and the rest were exonerated after the trial but he paid with five years of his life for being willing to testify at that trial.
And he's quite bitter about it, he did break the law, he's not the most sympathetic individual in the world but if I, with the name Corbett Edge O'Mara and Tailskin decide I'm going to print up some checks on my computer and fly to Indonesia and try to cash them, I'm probably going to get probation.
And he would have gotten that even after the false allegations of terrorism had he not crossed Bert Convertino essentially.
An individual who's now, who knows, he's suing the government too and who knows how vigorously they're actually going to pursue him because who knows what he knows and who knows how far it goes.
Because he was deputized and authorized to engage in the activities that he engaged in by very high members of the Bush administration.
He wasn't acting as a, I know the person who was U.S. Attorney in Detroit at the time and he quit shortly thereafter and I think part of that was because his authority was usurped by the people in Washington who were doing things that he would not countenance.
Interesting.
Alright, well let me stop you there.
We need to recap a little bit of this and then I want to parse a little bit of it too.
I'm talking with Corbett Edge O'Mara.
He's a lawyer from Detroit and he represented a guy named Omar Shoshani who was basically accused of some low level document fraud, financial fraud.
The kind of thing that as you just heard him say, he or I would get probation for at most a year in jail or something like that.
They accused him of being a terrorist for a long time before they finally got over that and they made a plea agreement with him that they would give him a shortened amount of time if he would help point at other witnesses.
Then while he's in jail, he shares or he's on the same cell block in the cell next door with Yusuf Mimza who was the star witness in the Detroit sleeper cell case and while he's in jail there with Mimza, Mimza tells him that he doesn't know whether these guys are terrorists or not but he wants revenge against them because one of them at least had ripped him off in one of their fraud deals or something and so he wanted revenge.
He told this guy, gave advice to my guest's client that listen, just tell the FBI whatever they want to hear and you can get out of here.
It's a great strategy and so what happened though was when my guest's client, Omar Shoshani, attempted to tell the defense and the court that hey, listen, your star witness in this other case admitted to me that he's completely full of it.
Then they tried to, well and did, they screwed him out of his plea deal which I don't know if that's illegal or not.
I know that it should be.
I know it sounds like criminal behavior there.
So I want to get into the specifics of that, Mr. O'Meara, if I can here.
In terms of the plea deal, I read now what they did was they added qualifications and said they wanted him to take a polygraph.
Is that the same thing as actually revoking his plea deal or is that just being sneaky and within the law?
He agreed to take a polygraph as to his cooperation in the check case.
He was unwilling to take a polygraph as to his interaction with Yusef Minza as a result of his unwillingness to, because a polygraph, I mean it was Burt Comberts, he was polygraphing and it was going to be an interrogation where they sought to break him down and help their case.
The environment, he did not want to take it.
I didn't think he had an obligation to take it and as a result of not taking it, they revoked his plea bargain.
That was the excuse they used to revoke his plea bargain which had a cooperation reward built into it and as a result of that, he didn't get a motion for downward departure which would have allowed the judge to go below the sentencing guidelines at the time.
As a result of that, the judge had the sentence within the sentencing guidelines and even at the low end of the sentencing guidelines, my recollection is 72 months in prison which required that he do about five years.
So you told your client Omar Shoshani that, hey listen, if you insist on telling this story about their star witness being a liar, you're going to lose your plea deal and he was willing and knowingly gave up his plea deal and did extra years in prison in order to tell the truth at the trial of the Detroit Four.
Is that the case?
He felt he had an obligation to tell the truth and to not let these people be sent to prison for the rest of their life, which is what the government was attempting to do regardless of the cost to him personally.
Did the jury, were they allowed to know the information that this guy was losing his plea deal by testifying?
Because I read in the press that when he got up there and said this stuff that they rolled their eyes and treated him like a chump.
And here's this guy who's saying, fine, lock me up for four years for telling the truth then.
The jury was not made aware of that and I actually have great respect for the attorneys who were involved in the terrorism trial.
I would have handled the examination and cross-examination of Mr. Shoshani differently than they did.
Now, did you advise him, don't do this, keep your mouth shut and get out of here?
I told him what the consequences would be, but I left the decision up to him.
I told him that it was, I mean, I told him, you cross the government in their most publicized prosecution of the year, if not the decade, it's going to have negative consequences for you.
I don't think he ever anticipated the consequences would be as significant.
I was very surprised that Judge Edmonds, who was the judge in his case, let the government get away with what they did.
And I think in retrospect, when she realized the sort of prosecutorial misconduct that had been involved in that case, she probably had some second thoughts about how she bought in hook, line and sinker to Bert Convertino's theory of who Omar Shoshani was and how he should be dealt with.
I think he probably has had some moments of, or ought to probably have had some moments of self-criticism over who she believed, because she definitely believed that Mr. Shoshani was a liar and was a terrorist and was withholding information because that's what Bert Convertino told her.
And he intervened, he and the prosecutors in that case intervened in his sentencing with Judge Edmonds in order to ensure that he get a more significant penalty.
Oh man, I'd like to say that this is all unbelievable, like something out of coffee or whatever, but unfortunately it's completely believable.
It sounds right out of the daily headlines, especially this week.
This guy, the U.S. Attorney, Eric Strauss, is that the guy that was a friend of yours?
You knew him?
No, I trusted him and I feel that he was circumvented by people, he ultimately became head of the anti-terrorism unit after Bert Convertino.
When an anti-terrorism unit was formed, he became head of that after Bert Convertino was excised from the office.
But at the time he was definitely being controlled by, he's not the person making the decisions and I think he made decisions, he was forced to take positions he would not have taken on his own as a result of people more powerful than him in the different generals' office influencing him.
I trusted him and actually I do trust him as still, but I believe that he was the tool that violated an agreement he had with Mr. Shoshani and was sold a bill of goods and took a position, I'm sure he was just following orders, but they were orders I'm sure he regrets at this time.
Now the federal prosecutor in this case, Covertino, well you're a lawyer, is this guy not a criminal?
It sounds like, besides just withholding evidence here and there.
He is certainly under criminal investigation, I understand that he is under criminal investigation at this time.
In my opinion, if he knowingly withheld information in a capital case, that would certainly make him somebody who the law ought to inflict punishment upon.
Well what about just his involvement in terms of you and your client and all the lengths he went to to keep your client's testimony out of the courtroom?
It's bad to cross the man, he's the man and I think in my case they did what the law allowed them to do.
They were within the law.
They were bad motives and I think they did it in abrogation of their obligations to behave in an ethical manner and to put forth an honest case and prosecute people in an honest manner.
And I don't know whether or not Bert Convertino or other members of the Attorney General's office knew that they were being misled and were intentionally misleading the American people, but whether or not they did it knowingly or willfully blindly, they did it and we suffer and young men and women die every day as a result in part of the actions they took for.
Yeah, well I'd say I accept that this was a big part of lying us into war even though there wasn't any kind of direct connection.
It was part of that atmosphere of fear.
I'm very grateful that you gave me an opportunity to vent because I don't get this opportunity very much anymore.
And this was a mystery in my life and my life seemed to make some sense in terms of how I practice law, but I actually need to go practice law at this moment.
I'm very grateful that you had me on and I'd be happy to talk to you again at some point.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I probably will be calling back to follow up on a couple of these.
Thank you very much for your time.
Everybody go.
Thank you, sir.
Keep up the good work.
Bye bye.
Everybody, Corbett Edge O'Meara, the lawyer for Omar Shoshani.