Federal terrorism cases have been filed in 36 states and Washington, DC.
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He fired his first lawyer and called him a coward for jockeying for a plea deal. He drew the wrath of a federal judge by relentlessly trying to defend himself and in the process disclosing secret and sensitive government information. Barry Bujol Jr., the Texan accused of plotting to help al-Qaida, has been a thorn in the side of U.S. efforts to prosecute him, but it so far has done little to help him.
The towering former student at Prairie View A&M University has been in a high-security downtown Houston lockup since after he was arrested on the terror charge last June. Meanwhile, his roller-coaster case has gone nowhere, at least in public. Some proceedings were sealed.
The American-born Muslim and former Baptist aggravated matters when he angered the judge by asking that charges be dropped due to an allegedly improper and overzealous prosecution. Mailed from his jail cell, his request to the judge disclosed information apparently deemed sensitive to the government’s terror investigation. It was immediately ordered sealed.
In fact, U.S. District Judge David Hittner was so irritated by Bujol’s relentless intervention that he issued a court order barring him from filing any motions, saying that if he continued to do so, they would be returned unopened. Read the rest of this entry »
Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad insists he is an Islamic radical, has confessed to killing an Army soldier and wounding another at a Little Rock recruiting station two years ago, and wants to be tried on terrorism charges in federal court.
But in an unusual twist, state prosecutors, with the blessing of the federal government, are treating him like a common American criminal and trying him in state court next week on capital murder charges.
Either way, Muhammad could become the first person sentenced to death in the U.S. for an act of terrorism — even if that is not the charge — since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
by Stephen Lendman
By now, the familiar storyline sounds more like a film plot than criminal indictment, especially when Muslims are involved, and the most recent case repeats the same scenario used last December.Then it involved Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, accused of plotting to attack an armed forces recruiting center. An undercover FBI agent lawlessly entrapped him, supplying an inert bomb, then stopping him after he allegedly tried to detonate it by remote control. A previous article discussed him, accessed through the following link.
In fact, like dozens of others, he was maliciously ensnared by an FBI orchestrated sting operation, entrapping him to declare another war on terror victory. Innocence or guilt doesn’t matter, just the illusion that America is now safer when, in fact, each conviction assures greater insecurity, leaving many to wonder who’s next. Read the rest of this entry »
The United States’ top attorney Eric Holder says sting operations are necessary in the so-called war on terror. He made the comment in a speech to a Muslim rights group.
Peter Finn and Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post
June 24
A 2008 Supreme Court ruling allowing those held at Guantanamo Bay to challenge their detention was followed by an initial round of district court rulings that ordered the release of dozens of suspected militants after the government’s evidence was found wanting.
The appeals court has not only reversed judgments against the government but also compelled the lower courts to assess evidence in a manner that is much more sympathetic to government arguments. In one ruling, the appellate judges said that lower courts should consider that “two unreliable pieces of information may corroborate each other.”
The Justice Department has decided not to file criminal charges in the vast majority of cases involving the CIA’s former interrogation, detention and kidnapping program.
In a statement to CIA employees on his last day as director, Leon E. Panetta said Thursday that after an examination of more than 100 instances in which the agency allegedly had contact with terrorism detainees, Assistant U.S. Atty. John Durham decided that further investigation was warranted in just two cases. Each of those cases resulted in a death.
Manadel al-Jamadi's widow and son hold a photograph of torturer Sabrina Harman smiling over his frozen corpse.
Panetta, who is to be sworn in as Defense secretary Friday, did not disclose specifics about those cases, but it has been widely reported that one involves Manadel Jamadi, who died in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after he was beaten while being questioned in a shower by a CIA interrogator.
“Both cases were previously reviewed by career federal prosecutors who subsequently declined prosecution,” Panetta said.
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who announced the CIA investigations in August 2009, followed Panetta’s announcement with a statement that confirmed the decision but did not explain it. Beyond the two detainee deaths, “the department has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted,” Holder said.
The announcements mean that no CIA officer will face prosecution in connection with interrogations that the agency’s inspector general and a Justice Department official under former President George W. Bush concluded had exceeded what lawyers had authorized.
For example, a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report concluded that the way the CIA practiced waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, was harsher than Bush administration lawyers had envisioned in the memos they wrote signing off on it. The memos were later criticized as badly reasoned, and many lawyers believe waterboarding was never legal.
Three detainees, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, were waterboarded. Obama administration officials, and an investigation by Senate Democrats, have concluded the techniques yielded no real intelligence value, though former Bush administration officials hotly disagree.
Panetta praised the decision not to file charges in most cases, as did Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee.
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who succeeds Panetta as CIA director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that “it is time to take the rear-view mirrors off the bus with respect to certain actions out there.”
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union:
“While we welcome the announcement that the Justice Department will conduct a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two prisoners in CIA custody, it is difficult to understand the prosecutor’s conclusion that only those two deaths warrant further investigation. For a period of several years, and with the approval of the Bush administration’s most senior officials, the CIA operated an interrogation program that subjected prisoners to unimaginable cruelty and violated both international and domestic law. The narrow investigation that Attorney General Holder announced today is not proportionate to the scale and scope of the wrongdoing.”
Jun 24, 2011
It ends up that something called “Cold Cell” torture was the most widely used torture
technique used by the United States in the fight against terrorism. Government operatives “praised” hypothermic torture as the most effective of all the techniques they employed.
When the less redacted previously released torture documents were made available to the public, the new revelations revealed how wide spread hypothermic torture was utilized, in
many facilities it was used every night, all night long, and all year round. Apparently, hypothermic torture produced the largest amount of actionable intelligence, it produced it
“consistently,” and it worked in the shortest amount of time. Water boarding it ends up,
was the least used. The eeriest was something called the “box.”
With the “box” a captive would be folded up and locked into a box the size of a foot locker. No air or light could get in. After two days of sheer panic in the box, what emerged was a psychological vegetable.
The United States finally described cold cell torture they used on Private Manning, the Army soldier that leaked national secrets to WikiLeaks. The US Military brigs, both in Charleston andQuantico, have entire wings of temperature controlled hypothermic torture chambers.
At night Private Manning was stripped naked and locked onto a cold metal slab. The air conditioning units blew 45 degree air into the cell at great speed. Private Manning curled into the fetal position and shook violently all night long. There was no way to sleep when the body sustains that level of pain. The constant shivering causes severe pain after a while. That level of pain lasted all night long. During the day Private Manning was allowed to dress and sleep, but the nights were reserved for punishing torture.
Cageprisoners releases its report, Too Blunt for Just Outcomes, today in order to highlight the disproportionate way in which theUS judiciary is carrying out sentencing in federal cases.
Although there are real areas of concern in relation to due process and procedural impropriety, the focus of this report is on the sentencing guidelines that are used in cases involving Muslims. Even where the convictions against a Muslim suspect bear only a very peripheral relation to terrorism, a terrorism enhancement is being applied which dramatically increases the number of years to be served by the defendant.
The report shows a number of examples of the widespread way in which the sentencing guidelines are being used in order to criminalise Muslims and indeed increase the fear and stigma surrounding terrorism within the Muslim community.Guantanamomay well be the symbol of arbitrary detention and removal of due process, however, theUSmainland requires much work before it can lay claim to a fair, open and justice system for all.
Cageprisoners Executive Director, Asim Qureshi, said of these releases,
“With so much attention on the abuses of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, it is sometimes easy to be sidetracked from the serious violations of human rights taking place on the US mainland. This report provides a glimpse into the way in which the US government has sought to manipulate its own legal system, in order to detain Muslims as suspected terrorists.”
The report shows a number of examples of the widespread way in which the sentencing guidelines are being used in order to criminalise Muslims.
You can download the full report here
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