Italian authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 people they claim are agents “linked to the CIA”. The suspects are accused of abducting an Islamic cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt for interrogation.
Category Archives: State Oppression
UN officials seek Guantánamo Bay visit
GENEVA — U.N. human rights investigators, citing “persistent and credible” reports of torture at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, urged the United States on Thursday to allow them to check conditions there.
The failure of the United States to respond to requests since early 2002 is leading the experts to conclude Washington has something to hide at the Cuban base, said Manfred Nowak, a specialist on torture and a professor of human rights law in Vienna, Austria. “At a certain point, you have to take well-founded allegations as proven in the absence of a clear explanation by the government,” Nowak said.
The lynching of a Lodi family
In less than a week of recklessness reporting, the Bay Area media has destroyed a humble Pakistani family and three other men. The carnage was unbelievable. In a frenzy race for the ratings, the media descended to Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento, in search of the “terrorist cell” they learned about in a federal criminal complaint. Everybody took at face value the veracity of an FBI affidavit and the most imaginative headlines started to come out of the editor’s brains. The San Francisco Chronicle, northern California biggest paper, went along with the FBI version with astonishing words, quotes and statements: terror cell, training with al-Qaida, how to kill Americans, terrorism inquiry to spread, number of people committed to al-Qaida have been operating in and around Lodi, to carry out his jihadi mission, targets include hospitals and food stores, and could have poisoned the ice cream.
San Francisco Bay Indymedia, 23 June 2005
See also “FBI ‘witch-hunt’ in Lodi, California”, Not In Our Name, 23 June 2005
Clinton urges Guantánamo closure
Former US President Bill Clinton has become the latest and most prominent American figure to say Guantánamo should be “closed down or cleaned up”. Interviewed by the Financial Times, he said it was time to put an end to the flow of abuse reports from the prison.
No terrorism charges against ‘California jihadists’
“Terrorism charges have not been brought against the Hayats. Instead, both men are accused of making false statements about the training camps when they were first questioned by federal agents. Upon further questioning, the Feds say, Hamid Hayat eventually gave a detailed account of his time in the camp. Lawyers for both men said they did not believe their clients were involved in any terrorist activity (the Feds have until June 21 to bring formal charges). Hamid’s cousin Ismail laughs at the idea of his relative planning a terror strike. ‘This guy didn’t know how to build anything’, he says. ‘Any time something broke, he would call me to fix it’.”
The arrest of “California jihadists” Hamid and Umer Hayat analysed by Newsweek.
Questions, bitterness and exile for Queens girl in terror case
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Slumped at the edge of the bed she would have to share with four relatives that night, the 16-year-old girl from Queens looked stunned.
On the hot, dusty road from the airport, she had watched rickshaws surge past women sweeping the streets, bone-thin in their bright saris. Now, in a language she barely understood, unfamiliar aunts and uncles lamented her fate: to be forced to leave the United States, her home since kindergarten, because the F.B.I. had mysteriously identified her as a potential suicide bomber.
“I feel like I’m on a different planet,” the girl, Tashnuba Hayder, said. “It just hit me. How everything happened – it’s like, ‘Oh, my God’.”
The story of how it happened – how Tashnuba, the pious, headstrong daughter of Muslim immigrants living in a neighborhood of tidy lawns and American flags, was labeled an imminent threat to national security – is still shrouded in government secrecy. After nearly seven weeks in detention, she was released in May on the condition that she leave the country immediately. Only immigration charges were brought against her and another 16-year-old New York girl, who was detained and released. Federal officials will not discuss the matter.
Babar Ahmad – an unsuitable case for extradition
An unsuitable case for extradition
The argument that Babar Ahmad is a terrorist who should be handed over to the United States is highly suspect. Solomon Hughes reports.
Tribune, 17 June 2005
Home Secretary Charles Clarke must now decide whether to extradite British computer worker Babar Ahmad to the United States by July 15. Connecticut’s district attorney says Ahmad used a website to raise money for Chechen terrorists and the Taliban. On May 17, Judge Timothy Workman ruled the extradition was in order, passing it to Clarke for a decision. However, in his judgement, Workman said: “This is a difficult and troubling case. The defendant is a British subject who is alleged to have committed offences which, if the evidence were available, could have been prosecuted in this country.”
But while Ahmad has been arrested and investigated by British police, he has never been prosecuted in Britain. The Americans claim jurisdiction only because the “Azzam.Com” website in question had a US Internet service provider. Otherwise, all the offences they allege took place in Tooting.
Judge Workman added: “I have no doubt that the many and complex issues that have arisen in this case will need to be explored by the High Court which can review the decision.
The judge emphasised that he did not consider the evidence against Ahmad, who faces extradition under extradition laws introduced by David Blunkett after September 11. As Judge Workman made clear, under Blunkett’s law: “The need for the United States Government to provide prima facie evidence to support the charges has been removed.”
The judge also noted that Blunkett’s extradition law contains “no reciprocal benefit to this country”. While the law comes from a treaty between the US and Britain, the British cannot extradite US citizens in the same way, without evidence being tested in court. The extradition law is a one-way street because of what Judge Workman called “the failure to ratify the treaty by the United States.”
Under the law, the judge could not consider the evidence and instead looked carefully at American guarantees that they would not send Ahmad to Guantanamo Bay, put him before a “military commission”, “render” him to another country or apply the death penalty. The judge made clear that Guantanamo Bay or other options under US “Military Order Number One” were “inhuman and degrading”, but accepted guarantees from the American Embassy that this would not happen.
The US evidence, untested in the British courts, tries to show that Ahmad did more than run Islamist websites and actually funded terrorists. Yet, an American man, who is supposedly Ahmad’s co-conspirator according to the US case, was recently invited to dinner with President George Bush.
Arrests in Lodi raise fears of profiling and entrapment
On June 16th, a federal grand jury indicted Umer Hayat, a Lodi ice cream truck driver, and his son Hamid on charges they lied to FBI agents. The two men were arrested on June 5th and accused of lying during interrogation about a trip Hamid took to Pakistan. The FBI gave the media a far more damaging version of the affidavit against Umer and Hamid Hayat than was finally given to a court in Sacramento.
The affidavit filed Thursday June 9th did not contain any of the sensational material from earlier in the week which said the son’s “potential terrorist targets included hospitals and groceries, and contained names of key individuals and statements about the international origins of ‘hundreds’ of participants in alleged Al Qaeda terrorist training camps in Pakistan.”
In response to the leaked FBI accusations Hamid Hayat’s attorney stated, “my client and his son are only charged with one thing, and that is making a false statement. Though there are very alarming statements in the complaint concerning terrorist organizations … it’s important to note that my client is not charged with being involved in terrorist acts. He has been painted with the brush of being a terrorist and he’s not even charged with it.”
Attorneys say they will challenge the government on this discrepancy, which they see as a deliberate move by the FBI to prejudice the case against their clients.
Che admirer assists Islamist terrorists shock
Front Page Magazine witch-hunts radical lawyer Michael Ratner:
“Since 9/11, Ratner and his comrades have attempted to extend undeserved ‘civil rights’ on Islamist murderers with notable success. On this front, Ratner and the Legal Left have dealt America its few setbacks in the War on Terror. One year ago the U.S. suffered its first major loss in this war, a strategic and propaganda defeat, related to America’s abilities to imprison and interrogate enemies that it captures. Abu Ghraib was a huge propaganda victory, both for Islamists, who used it to ‘justify’ their violent attacks, and for fifth column leftists, who made use of the media’s saturation coverage to portray the U.S. as the world’s biggest oppressor….
“Now, as our memories of 9/11 continue to fade into the past, Michael Ratner has opened another battle against the War on Terror – at Guantanamo Bay. Never mind that almost all of the prisoners at Guantanamo were picked up by U.S. forces doing battle for the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, or that many of them are, in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld words, ‘the worst of the worst’. Never mind that al-Qaeda members and close associates of Osama bin Laden fill their ranks, or that they’re trained to fabricate tales of abuse to erode their enemy’s morale. Although most of them are violent religious fanatics, and although they’ve been treated better than any captured combatants in world history, Michael Ratner and his lawyers want to provide them the chance to trumpet their ‘grievances’ to a sympathetic press, exploit legal loopholes, and ultimately return to the battlefield.”
And, worse still, he’s an admirer of Che Guevara!
The politics and discourse of humiliation
“By regularly dehumanizing Muslims and demonstrating contempt towards the cornerstone of the Islamic belief system – the Qur’an – the US has given credibility to all those in the Muslim world who believe that Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ is another Western crusade against Islam. It also gives America’s so-called ‘friendly dictators’ in the Middle East a green light to continue to abuse their own citizens.”
Kareem M. Kamel analyses the background to Guantánamo.