Time to Shake Down the Sheik

Now that radical Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman has finally been taken into custody, perhaps the comedy of errors has come to an end.

The farce began in 1990, when the American Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan issued the blind cleric a visa, somehow overlooking the fact that Rahman was on the United States "watch list"--American intelligence had already marked him as a suspected terrorist.

The joke continued, as this cartoon character--a pudgy, infantile man in a red hat that made him look like a blind, suntanned Santa Claus in shades--gained nationwide notoriety as the spiritual counselor to the World Trade Center bombers. Yet the sheik remained free in the wake of the bombing, even though, aside from his circumstantial involvement with the bombers, he was an illegal alien.

And how could anyone believe this story anything but a farce when Sheik Rahman wound up on newspaper covers and the nightly news once again, this time for his connection with a cell of terrorists plotting to wreak havoc on New York City on July 4?

Rahman had his associates tell the press that the extensive coverage had worn him out and that he needed to get away from it all--and attorney general Janet Reno must have agreed, as she stopped Federal authorities from arresting the sheik at last.

The Attorney General, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department had reached the nirvana of farce--that is, their utter incompetence started to spawn conspiracy theories. "Rahman must be an informant, or else he'd been in jail by now," the Oliver Stone fans began to say.

The government is lucky to have such people; they take every outrageous government blunder as evidence of a brilliant covert strategy. In the case of Sheik Rahman, the government had no strategy, covert, overt or otherwise.

Now that Sheik Rahman is in custody, the joke could be over. Or, if the government continues its blundering, Rahman's incarceration could signal the beginning of the third act of this already overlong comedy. There is no doubt that the case has such potential. Though Rahman is wanted in Egypt for inciting a violent anti-government demonstration, the Egyptians haven't seemed eager to take him back.

The United States hasn't seemed so eager to hold on to him either. It's not surprising. Whatever country prosecutes Rahman faces the wrath of his flock, a scruffy bunch of unemployed illegal aliens and aspiring terrorists.

Though these jihad-warriors play for the Sudan, the minor leagues of Islamic fundamentalist state-sponsored terrorism (considering the country's recent descent into barbarism, perhaps the metaphor of an expansion team rings truer), they still can cause a lot of trouble, as evidenced by the Trade Center bombing.

For Egypt, already wracked by fundamentalist terror, the threat is even more menacing. That's why the Egyptian government repeatedly maintained that it wants nothing to do with the sheik.

But Secretary of State Warren M Christopher made it abundantly clear that the U.S. was not about to do Egypt's dirty work for it. In an elegantly staged buck passing he had Ambassador Robert Pelletreau inform the Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa that since Rahman was not charged with a crime in the United States he could voluntarily leave the U.S. at any time in favor of a sympathetic third country such as the Sudan. Only a formal extradition request could keep him behind bars for the moment.

Checkmate.

Faced with that possibility, the Egyptians had no choice but to demand his extradition. The extradition process involves both the Justice and State Departments, which means that their are plenty of opportunities for a screw-up. But the extended time frame also means that the Unites States could change its position and do the right thing.

Don't give in to terrorists. Don't coddle the sheik. Charge him with conspiracy. The United States may not be the world's policeman, but it must at the very least police its own turf.

Benjamin J. Heller, who accepts that action may be taken as the result of this piece, is working this summer at CBS's "Street Stories."

In the case of Sheik Rahman, the government had no strategy, covert, overt or otherwise.