Just desserts

THE POOR OLD Immigration and Naturalization Service can't buy a positive news story these days. First it sent postmortem green cards to the Sept. 11 hijackers. And now this: San Francisco lawyers with the Center for Justice and Accountability celebrated an epic victory April 29, a $140 million verdict against a Bosnian war criminal living in the United States. Check out the last part of that sentence. Apparently Nikola Vukovic, who carved up his victims with knives when not beating them with bats and ushering them into concentration camps, convinced the INS he deserved political asylum.

"As a perpetrator of human rights abuses he should not be eligible for asylum," says Joshua Sondheimer, litigation director for the center, which is dedicated to suing war criminals and torturers. "We'd like to see the federal government prosecute people [like Vukovic] for fraud."

Attention INS: it's never too late to make amends. Vukovic bailed on the court proceedings against him and is thought to be still living somewhere in the country – though you might want to keep an eye on the border. (A.C. Thompson)

Snitch central

The case filed by prosecutors against John Walker Lindh is a creepy read. And that's not just because Lindh, a.k.a. the Marin Taliban, is alleged to have spent time hanging out with Osama bin Laden. What makes the indictment and attached affidavits seriously chilling is the federal government's copious use of unnamed confidential sources.

Essentially you have a squad of secret agents and as many as 13 anonymous snitches lined up against a confused 21-year-old from Marin. Writers love to use the cliché "Kafkaesque" to describe situations like this, but really I can't think of a better word. Except maybe "unconstitutional" (see amendment number six).

Lindh's attorneys ripped prosecutors last week for refusing to disclose any details about the 13 informants – all reputed Taliban or al-Qaeda members doing time in the lockup at the Guantánamo naval station – who've provided testimony about the defendant. So far the defense hasn't been able to learn anything about these people – whether they've been beaten or tortured, what their motivations for talking are, whether they've been paid, etc. The feds, Lindh's lawyers wrote in court documents, are seeking to shield "exculpatory" evidence from the defense.

Then there's "CS-1," a secret agent whose testimony is key to the case. CS-1 and CIA agent John Michael Spann were interviewing Lindh, court documents say, at a Taliban prison camp in Afghanistan shortly before revolting prisoners killed Spann. What this mysterious CS-1 says about Lindh's role in Spann's death could make or break the case for the government.

"This is really scary," veteran San Francisco defense lawyer Stuart Hanlon says. "The whole basis of our legal system is confronting witnesses against you. What the federal government is trying to do is create a situation where you don't have that right."

Of course, Lindh isn't the first person to get this kind of treatment. Since the war on drugs heated up some 20 years ago, prosecutors – in federal and state courts – have grown increasingly reliant on confidential informants. A 1995 study by the National Law Journal found that federal law enforcers used confidential informants in at least 92 percent of their cases; that number was up from 46 percent in 1980.

Local attorneys say they deal with informants all the time. "I've had situations in the past where the police have made up informants, where there was no real informant," San Francisco public defender-elect Jeff Adachi says. "Actually I have a case right now where that's a big question." (Thompson)