Can't Change Stripes

It isn't much of a surprise that imprisoned terrorists at a SuperMax facility in Colorado were communicating with terrorists on the outside and never stopped advocating terrorism. These particular terrorists happened to be among those represented by former New York lawyer, Lynne Stewart, who was convicted for violating an agreement with the federal government not to pass conversations to third parties.

So the men were sent to America's most secure federal prisons, eventually ending up at Supermax in Colorado, supposedly unable to do further harm.

Or so we thought. Letters and articles obtained by NBC News show that while behind bars, the 1993 bombers continued their terrorist activities. They wrote letters to other suspected terrorists and brazenly praised Osama bin Laden in Arabic newspapers.

According to confidential Spanish court documents obtained by NBC, at least 14 letters went back and forth between the World Trade Center bombers and a Spanish terror cell.

What is surprising is that the federal government did nothing to stop the communications as soon as they became aware of this. Terrorists will trade tactics, receive encouragement and solicit advice on how to act and behave.

This is a colossal failure on the part of the Justice Department to underestimate the lengths to which these terrorists would go to initiate terrorist attacks around the world and domestically. We have no idea what else was spawned by this group of convicted terrorists, but we must demand that these individuals do not have any contact with the outside world that even hints at the possibility of terrorism.