Overreach

These two stories, seemingly unrelated, struck me this morning.

First, we have a CIA unable to get their man.

OSLO -- Two months after he helped kidnap a Muslim cleric in Italy, records show, an undercover CIA officer boarded a flight to Norway on another secret mission. Two other U.S. spies followed a few weeks later and checked into the same hotel.

Shortly after the agents arrived in the spring of 2003, an Islamic militant living in Oslo known as Mullah Krekar received a warning from an anonymous Norwegian official, according to Krekar's lawyer. The message: Krekar, then head of a Kurdish insurgent group, was a CIA target and should watch his back.

The spies left Norway by the end of the summer, according to records of their travels compiled by European investigators. If the CIA was planning to abduct Krekar, like other Islamic radicals it had secretly apprehended in Europe after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, those plans were quietly abandoned.

But it would not be the first or last time that the U.S. government had sought to push Krekar out of Norway. For more than a decade, the Kurdish cleric had enjoyed protection in the Nordic country as a political refugee, even as he frequently slipped back into his homeland in northern Iraq to lead an armed separatist movement called Ansar al-Islam, which has carried out attacks on civilians and U.S. troops.

The case shows how the United States has struggled to deal with Islamic militants who are allowed to live freely in Europe despite being labeled serious security risks. Others have included radical clerics in London and supporters of the Hamburg cell responsible for the Sept. 11 hijackings.

But the pursuit of Krekar also demonstrates how U.S. tactics in confronting those militants have sometimes backfired, giving ammunition to critics who accuse the Bush administration of skirting the law or relying on questionable evidence.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, what should be a simple case of murder has turned into, yes, "a Federal case."

Somewhere on Staten Island after dark, a Nissan Maxima parks in front of a housing project. Rap music plays on the car stereo. Two men looking to buy a Tec-9 assault pistol, a powerful, erratic weapon best suited for spraying bullets across a crowd, are joined by two men who call themselves Rated R and J-Dot. No deal is struck. The customers are found shot in the back of the head at close range, robbed of their car.

The case could have unfolded many different ways, depending on the availability of witnesses, investigative resources, prosecutorial muscle and public scrutiny, perhaps ending with a state court trial sending the killer to prison for life.

But in the trial of Ronell Wilson, in progress before a jury in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, those circumstances were joined by one crucial distinction: The victims, the men seeking to buy the gun, turned out to be undercover police officers.

That important fact has helped transform an ordinary murder trial into a federal racketeering prosecution with a lineup of cooperating witnesses, rows of photographs to document a criminal organization, and three assistant United States attorneys and a special agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sharing courtroom work.

But oddly, after years of pretrial maneuvers, the fact that the victims were detectives is irrelevant to all 10 charges in the case, including the five that carry the death penalty. Legally speaking, it does not matter at all.

Before the trial began, a key witness changed his account, prompting prosecutors to drop charges that Mr. Wilson knew his victims were detectives and killed them to obstruct law enforcement. Now, prosecutors have to rely on proving their other theory of the murders, charges that require demonstration of an organized criminal enterprise.

It is not easy going.

In the first week of hearings, young men testifying in exchange for positive letters to their sentencing judges have described small-time drug sales, street fights and muggings — not exactly Mafia material.

In both cases, it seems that the Federal Government is more intent on controlling the rendering of justice than on actually achieving it. In Norway, an accused terrorist remains free because of our insistence on sending him to countries where torture is permitted, antithetical to Norwegian law. In Brooklyn, the article doesn't say it, but I'd be surprised if the Federal demand for more death penalty cases isn't behind this. In both cases Federal overreach hasn't done much to make us safer or to convict murderers.