By GENE JOHNSON AP Legal Affairs Writer
SEATTLE — Prosecutors are seeking yet another sentencing for would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam — this time without credit for helping to convict a fellow terrorist.
Ressam, who was captured in Port Angeles in December 1999, was sentenced for the second time last week to 22 years in prison for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium. Prosecutors say that isn’t long enough, and the guideline range is 65 years to life.
In a motion made public Tuesday, the U.S. attorney’s office asked to withdraw a document prosecutors filed several years ago acknowledging that Ressam cooperated with investigators. They say that motion, which provided part of the basis for the lenient sentence, is no longer valid because Ressam told the judge last week he wanted to take back every statement he made to the government, including his testimony against a coconspirator.
The government’s motion does not explicitly ask for another sentencing, but First Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett made clear in an interview Tuesday that was the goal.
Case law indicates that a judge can reconsider a sentence within seven days if that sentence was illegal or if new facts come to light. The withdrawal of the so-called “substantial assistance” motion, if allowed by the judge, might meet that criteria.
At the very least, attempting to withdraw the motion could help the Justice Department if it appeals Ressam’s sentence as unreasonable, by showing it exhausted all avenues at the trial court.
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour is unlikely to go along, however. He said at the resentencing that he considered Ressam’s cooperation to be breathtaking while it lasted, and noted that information Ressam provided helped prevent the mishandling and detonation of a shoe bomb that Richard Reid tried to light aboard an American Airlines flight in October 2001 — cooperation that can’t be “taken back.”
Failing to grant Ressam some leniency would discourage other terrorists from cooperating in the future, the judge said.
U.S. Customs inspectors in Port Angeles arrested Ressam as he drove a rented car packed with explosives off the MV Coho ferry from Victoria on Dec. 14, 1999.
The ensuing scare prompted Seattle officials to cancel some millennium celebrations at the Space Needle, though investigators determined Ressam’s target was a terminal at the Los Angeles airport, busy with holiday travel.
A jury convicted Ressam in 2001 of nine offenses, including an act of international terrorism, smuggling explosives and presenting a false passport. Hoping to avoid a life sentence, he began cooperating with international terrorism investigators, telling them about training camps he had attended in Afghanistan and al-Qaida’s use of safe-houses, among other things.
Ressam also provided testimony against two co-conspirators, helping to convict them. But prosecutors say one of those co-conspirators, Mokhtar Haouari, is likely to seek a new trial given that Ressam recanted his statements.
Ressam quit talking with investigators by early 2003. His lawyers insisted that long periods in solitary confinement had taken their toll on his mental state; prosecutors argued that Ressam’s newfound reticence came because they would not agree to recommend a sentence of less than 27 years.
Coughenour first sentenced Ressam in 2005, but that was vacated by an appeals court, which asked the judge to conduct a new hearing and better explain his rationale for the 22-year sentence. That new hearing was held Dec. 3.
Without Ressam’s continued help, the Justice Department was forced to drop charges filed in New York against two other alleged co-conspirators, including Abu Doha, described as a top al-Qaida recruiter with direct ties to Osama bin Laden. Abu Doha was released from custody in London after the U.S. dropped the charges; he is currently fighting deportation to Algeria.
