Prosecuting terrorism in New York

Cet article reproduit le témoignage d’une juge de New York sur les procès menés contre les auteurs de l’attentat du World Trade Center du 26 février 1993 et sur l’action de la "Joint Terrorist Task Force" créée il y a vingt ans par le FBI et la police new-yorkaise.

Mary Jo White, « Prosecuting terrorism in New York », Middle East Quarterly(2001,Spring) vol.8 n°2, p.11-18.

Prosecuting Terrorism in New York (extract)

My topic concerns the international terrorism prosecutions of the Southern District of New York United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) and New York’s Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF); I also wish to say a little about my perspective on the very complex problem of international terrorism in today’s world. I speak not as a scholar, a philosopher, or overarching policy-maker, but (more narrowly) as a prosecutor.

The Joint Terrorist Task Force

The Joint Terrorist Task Force celebrated its 20th anniversary of the founding by the FBI and the New York Police Department (NYPD). The celebration was held (very appropriately) at the World Trade Center (WTC), the site of the February 1993 terrorist bombing. With that bombing, international terrorism became an unwelcome domestic reality in New York and the United States.

As it happened, at the time of the World Trade Center bombing, I was the interim United States attorney in Brooklyn, in the Eastern District of New York. But about two weeks later, I was nominated to become the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York where I had served as an assistant United States attorney from 1978-1981. The WTC case thus became one of my earliest and highest priorities. Little did I know that international terrorism cases would remain so prominent as a top priority throughout my tenure as United States attorney and result (so far) in four major international terrorism trials with two more to be held next year, including the trial involving the East African embassy bombings that took place in August 1998.

Before I go on, let me say a few words of tribute to the JTTF. The FBI and NYPD formed the JTTF in May 1980 to address a rash of unsolved bombings that occurred all over the city-at banks, missions to the United Nations, businesses, and under cars-bombings being carried out primarily by domestic terrorist organizations operating in the United States (the Puerto Rican FALN group, various Croatian groups, an anti-Castro Cuban terrorist group called Omega 7 - an investigation I handled as an assistant United States attorney.)

The JTTF was created in response to this pressing law enforcement crisis. It was founded on the belief that interagency cooperation is essential to effectively tackle terrorism because the complex crime of terrorism cuts across agency lines and must transcend agency rivalries. The JTTF now includes, in addition to the FBI and NYPD, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the (INS), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the New York State Police, the U.S. State Department, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority Police, the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the Amtrak Police, the Suffolk County Police Department, the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Police, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. For twenty years, the JTTF has been a huge success story, measured both in terms of arrests and convictions of terrorists that the public knows about and (even more important) in the mostly unseen work of the JTTF in detecting and preventing terrorist acts that do not result in prosecutions or publicity. In my opinion, members of the JTTF are true heroes of the city.

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