DC court finds Gitmo detainee properly held

SNIPPET: "On Thursday, April 2, a federal judge ruled that Guantánamo detainee Hedi Hammamy is being held for good reasons. Judge Richard Leon of the DC District Court found the US government’s evidence was sufficient to show that Hammamy supported al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Hammamy, who is also known as Abdul Haddi bin Hadiddi in the US government’s unclassified Guantánamo files, was arrested by Pakistani authorities in April 2002 and transferred to Guantánamo months later. Government prosecutors demonstrated that Hammamy’s passport was recovered in a cave in the Tora Bora Mountains, which were the main fallback zone for fleeing al Qaeda and Taliban forces after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Judge Leon concluded that Hammamy offered no plausible explanation for how his paperwork ended up there. Prosecutors also argued that Hammamy took part in the battle of Tora Bora.

Hammamy’s story does not begin at Tora Bora, but instead years earlier in North Africa and Italy. At the time of his capture by Pakistani authorities, Hammamy was wanted by at least two other governments for his role in international terrorism.

The US government’s prosecutors relied on evidence gathered by Italian authorities, who investigated Hammamy’s terrorist ties in the 1990s. Italian officials charged Hammamy with participating in a prolific terrorist network that, among other plots, targeted the 1998 World Cup tournament in France. Hammamy is also wanted by the Tunisian government for his alleged role in al Qaeda’s web there.

According to the unclassified files produced at Guantánamo, a warrant for Hammamy’s arrest was first issued in Italy in June 1998, the same month the World Cup tournament began.

Along with his brother, Hammamy was suspected of belonging to an al Qaeda network that operates out of Northern Africa and stretches across all of Europe. In the late 1990s, the keystone of that network was the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (better known by an acronym of its French name, the "GIA")."

Heres an @ss holes thoughts

Leonard Pitts
MIAMI HERALD

Updated: 04/07/09 9:37 AM

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Our story so far: In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, hundreds of men identified as members of al-Qaida were captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There, they were subjected to sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, dehydration, extreme temperatures, waterboarding, being chained to the floor for hours in their own waste and other so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques even as the president was assuring the world that we don’t torture because we are America and America doesn’t do that sort of thing.

The president was, of course, lying. And having thus sold our national honor, you might wonder what we received in exchange.

The answer: nothing.

At least, not if the case of one Abu Zubaida is in any way representative. According to a March 29 report in the Washington Post, U. S. officials were convinced they had themselves a real, live al-Qaida leader in Zubaida, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. Under pressure from the Bush White House to get something out of him, they resorted to waterboarding and other coercive measures.

Out came a flood of names and plots and details. Security was tightened, millions were spent chasing it all down and all of it was for nothing. Every investigation launched as a result of Abu Zubaida’s revelations fizzled. It turned out that, far from being an al-Qaida leader, he was a mid-level associate. The Post says most of the information he gave that proved in any way useful came during ordinary interrogation. The things he said while being tortured were apparently just to make the pain stop.

The Post report is but the latest in a litany of revelations all suggesting the same thing: that in the wake of Sept. 11, a frightened nation betrayed one of its core principles — the rule of law — for the fool’s gold of security. We tortured and then rationalized with stark illogic. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that when this debate was at its zenith, proponents, including columnist Cal Thomas, Congressman Tom Tancredo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, defended torture by pointing out how well it seems to work for counterterrorism expert Jack Bauer. One wondered sometimes if they were aware that Jack Bauer is a character on a TV show, “24.”

And it occurs to me that if we’re going to use TV characters to frame this debate, “M-A-S-H” might be a better choice. Our Bush-era policy on torture, after all, suggests nothing so much as a White House run by Frank Burns, the supercilious super patriot who saw enemies of America’s goodness behind every mess hall and latrine and chased them with a spectacular zealotry unimpinged by logic, common sense or simple decency.

Burns was, of course, a caricature of the Red Scare America of the 1950s where forces of paranoia and fear led by Sen. Joe McCarthy fought supposed “commie” infiltration by surveilling, blacklisting, haranguing and harassing countless innocent Americans, ruining their livelihoods and lives while doing little harm to any actual communists. And if, 20 years later, that mindset had become a recognizable comic “type” played for laughs, that doesn’t mean the nation’s capacity to again lose its mind to fear and paranoia had lessened in the slightest.

That is what we are learning here, as revelations of Bush-era excesses continue to drip like water upon the stone of public conscience. People came out of the McCarthy era marveling at how easily fear and paranoia had stampeded us into surrendering principles that are supposed to define us. Mark my words: We will look back on this era the same wa

Funny the nut from the Miami paper mentioned M.A.S.H. ...

From the LA Times, mentions M.A.S.H. actor's trip to support the Sandinista regime in the 80s :
"So, true to form, the radical [Marge Tabankin] was ready for a radical change. She looked around and realized that she had the biggest number of friends living in Los Angeles--Hayden and Fonda, actors Mike Farrell [of M.A.S.H.] and Shelley Fabares, liberal guru Stanley Sheinbaum, producer Norman Lear."
(snip)
As Mike Farrell, Tabankin's closest friend on the West Coast, maintains...
(snip)
Tabankin is also that rarity in leftist politics--a serious activist with a sense of humor. A case in point, Mike Farrell recalls, was a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua they made together in 1982 where they were surrounded by "Americans who were more full of the revolution than the Sandinistas. And after a while, we'd heard so much rhetoric that at one point Margie looked at me and said, ' This is enough to turn you into a right-winger.' "

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