Category: Terrorism

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Thought Crimes

“We are Arresting People for Talking About Things, Thinking About Things…” Federal Prosecutor in Alexandria, Virginia

There are days I cling to the idea that maybe I haven’t lost my mind– maybe it’s just a huge number of politicians, religious “leaders”, and police and military that have lost their minds.

In many cities in the U.S., any citizen can buy guns, camouflage, books on Marxism or Fascism, Timothy McVeigh’s autobiography, or the Turner Diaries, or American Psycho, or Mein Kampf, or the ranting and ravings of any of hundreds or thousands of fanatics or religious zealots. All with impunity.

But if you are Islamic. If you are Arabic or Asian…

Have you read this one?

The police admit that they are prosecuting these young Islamic men for nothing. They have committed no crimes. They have not planned or plotted or carried out a single terrorist act, or act of violence. The police actually seem proud of the fact that in today’s political climate they are now free to lock up people they frankly don’t like. Because, if there is no criteria that involves any factual evidence, any actual crimes, or any evidence of genuine intent, then we are allowing the police to choose people arbitrarily and lock them up. They do not choose white militarists. They don’t choose Dr. James Dobson or Al Gore or Barry Bonds. They choose these Arab youths.

They don’t choose members of the NRA, the IRA, or the Israeli army.

Not a single white militarist or survivalist or radical has even been charged in the U.S. since Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City killing over 167 people on April 19, 1995.

Do you think that that is because they have all disappeared?

In fact, we now know with certainty, from the FBI’s own statistics, that more people in the U.S. were killed by domestic terrorists than Islamic terrorists in the past decade.

Exact Quote, from Washington Post, June 8, 2006: “We’re arresting people for talking about things, thinking about things, training for things,” said Andrew McBride, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria. “I think you will see more of it as the government moves from a traditional criminal law model of post-event reaction to pre-event interdiction. But that’s where the civil liberties rubber meets the road.”

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Are you Scared Yet and Lucky George: More on Canadian Jihad

On the CBC tonight, members of the mosque where Qayyum Abdul Jamal sometimes led prayer services and taught reported that he made inflammatory and “extreme” comments. Among other things, he said that Canadian forces were in Afghanistan to rape Moslem women. He criticized any involvement with politics because most politics involves corruption. He thought movies and television were filled with sinful ideas and images.

He almost sounds like Dr. James Dobson.

What was missing from these several accounts of Jamal’s teachings was any mention of violence, or an advocacy of violence against Canadian targets.

It’s not unreasonable to believe that he wouldn’t make such statements in public. But it is also very striking that the CBC decided to broadcast this piece. Why is the CBC trying to help the prosecution? Where is journalistic objectivity? Where is even one astute reporter to point out that many extremely conservative Christians and right wing militia groups in the U.S. have been making similarly contemptible speeches for years, but we haven’t seen many of them rounded up? They have, for example, called critics of the Iraqi war “traitors”. They have called pro-choice activists “murderers”. They have had even harsher words for rock musicians and film-makers.

One of the pieces of evidence against the seventeen “terrorists” is their participation in training exercises held in wilderness areas north of Toronto, allegedly with real bullets.

In California, there is a valley where gun enthusiasts can legally shoot off as many guns as frequently as they wish. In fact, the range is polluted with tens of thousands of casings– and beer cans and fast food wrappers. They can also go to rifle-ranges in almost any city in America, and they can carry the loaded gun, concealed, to and from the range in most states.

Ah– but they aren’t threatening to actually go out and kill anyone. Maybe. Or is it just that we assume that white people carrying loaded weapons around are okay, even if a few white people do end up committing murders, whereas Moslems doing the same thing are presumed to be terrorists.

Did the U.S. make any effort to infiltrate and control militia groups in the U.S. after Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing?

The hype and hysteria about this case is unbelievable.

The saddest part is that even the reporters who occasionally toss in a phrase like “of course, they haven’t been convicted” act as if overwhelming proof has been offered that there was a real plot and that these suspects were actually intending to carry it out.

Peculiarly, some of the members of this group are charged with belonging to a terrorist organization, while it is admitted that they had no connection to Al Qaeda. By inference, it seems they had no connection to any outside terrorist organization at all. In this case, the government appears to be saying they are guilty of belonging to a group of which they are guilty of belonging to. I’m trying to figure out if the government is really that stupid– okay, I hear a chorus of people saying, no, no, they can’t be– or if there is some angle on this that makes sense. How do you prove in court that they belonged to a terrorist organization? By showing that they were intending to act like a terrorist organization. But then you will have to show that they actually were plotting to commit terrorist acts. If you have proof of that, then you don’t need the charge that they belonged to a terrorist organization. You could simply charge them with conspiracy.

I suspect that when the dust settles, we will hear about some young, emotional Moslem men who said stupid things and dreamed of joining the battle against the decadent culture in which they lived, but didn’t actually have any definite plans for attacking anything or anyone.

I suspect we’ll find out that the ammonium nitrate for the bomb was not only provided by the RCMP, but may even have been suggested.

Someone says to me, how can you say that before all the facts are in? I say, you’re right. People shouldn’t make those kinds of hysterical charges until they know more facts about what actually is going on.

Just as public officials should stop congratulating themselves and each other on having stopped a terrorist attack when they have yet to prove that any such attack was really being planned.

Lucky George W. Bush! Why? Because this story has pushed the real story onto the back pages for a day or two, which is, that the political and military situation in Iraq looks worse, and worse, and worse. A comment from a woman in Baghdad: It’s as if they are just killing each other for sake of killing now…

The media coverage of the arrest of the 17 “terrorists” has been nauseating. Even the CBC, that alleged bastion of liberalism, seems to feel compelled to tour around Toronto showing its audience video of what a reporter thinks would be logical targets for a terrorist attack, including the CN tower, CSIS headquarters, and the Air Canada Centre– without any evidence that the “terrorists” thought this. None at all. Even the police haven’t leaked that information yet.

If you were a lackey of Stephen Harper’s and you wanted to scare citizens of Toronto as much as possible, you could not have scripted a more compelling presentation.

The CBC’s treatment of this story is worse than bad.  It is disgusting.

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Entrapment

Years ago, the police would sometimes attack prostitution by sending a female officer out on the streets to solicit customers. She would approach a man who looked interested and offer him sex for money. If he said “okay”, she arrested him.

Eventually, courts began to dismiss these cases because of something called “entrapment”. The judge was not convinced that the suspect would have committed the crime had the police not proposed it to him.

That’s not fair, because the police can be selective about who they propose crimes to, and what kind of crimes they propose. What if the police targeted a convention of Baptist ministers? It’s not silly to imagine that they could easily round up a dozen or so suspects even from that pre-selected group.

For the same reason, if it is true– I don’t know if it is or not– that an undercover police officer offered to obtain the ammonium nitrate for the “terrorists”, there should be a serious problem with the case.

There should be.

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Canadian Jihad

Well, well, it finally happened in Canada. Seventeen “terrorists” arrested in Toronto. And how do you react when you read and hear in the news that seventeen “terrorists” have been arrested in Toronto? Are you frightened? Let’s make a sure a few other key phrases get tossed into the mix: explosives. plotting. video. rented cars. travel. targets. And so on. Let’s make sure public officials act as if there is no such thing as the presumption of innocence. Let’s not have a single public official or reporter say, “maybe we should wait until the evidence is presented before we judge the importance of this raid”.

I haven’t heard the word “informant” come up yet, but it almost certainly will. And when it does, you will almost certainly see that the informant was on the hook for some kind of offence– usually immigration or check fraud or something– and is now “helping” the police. The only help he can provide, of course, is to identify terrorists. You don’t get rewarded for telling the police that you know some people who aren’t up to anything at all, that just talk big and boast, and say stupid things, and have foolish fantasies about joining God’s holy army.  [Update 2022: I was correct.  An informant was rewarded by the police for befriending the men and suggesting Jihad to them.]

You will almost certainly also see the evidence of foolishness and alienation among some Islamic adherents. Maybe boasting. Maybe naiveté.

The one thing I expect you will never see in connection with this case is real evidence of an actual plot. There have been numerous arrests and even convictions in the U.S. Most of them are the result of dubious testimony by small-time losers with Arabic or middle-eastern names who were on the hook for relative minor offenses, were threatened with severe prison sentences, and chose to cut a deal. In some cases the evidence used was so incredibly preposterous, it is hard not to laugh at it (like the video allegedly showing garbage bins at Disney World, which, authorities concluded, was an obvious attempt to find a location for a bomb.) They were given powerful incentives to exaggerate, distort, and misrepresent what they heard the others do or say. Frightened juries convicted these men on evidence which, if applied to a white Christian man charged with a felony, would be laughed out of court.

I’m sure we’ll see things that the authorities will tell us indicate a definite– or “real” in the words of police chief Blair– plot to do something. A map. A sketch. An address written in a book. What we probably won’t see is anything resembling an actual specific plan for a particular date and location with a particular method.

They got the words “ammonia nitrate” out there in a hurry. The police claim that they have confiscated three tons of it– more than was used in the Oklahoma City bombings. I’m betting that sooner or later we will hear that the “terrorists” did not actually have possession of the stuff. Then perhaps that they didn’t actually order it, and that it wasn’t actually three tons, and maybe that they were actually only talking about ordering, and that was in a foreign language, so we’re not even sure if he wasn’t just ordering fertilizer for his lawn, after all.

Or, we may discover that the “informant” is the one who suggested and even ordered the nitrate.

The most important thing to know about these arrests might be that they occurred shortly after Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day took office. The goal of this government will be to keep the public frightened and on edge so that they feel the need for a tough, authoritarian prime minister, who is eager to abridge civil liberties and privacy rights, but whose real agenda is probably to restructure the Canadian economy so that it benefits the wealthy and punishes the poor.

Just my guess– the police probably were prevented from doing raids like this earlier by the Liberal government which just didn’t get all hysterical quite as readily as Stockwell Day and Harper do. Well, that era is now over, God help us.

A fragment from unholywars.org:

The FBI affidavit also says agents found two CD-ROMs in the lining of Sadequee’s suitcase when he was leaving the United States. One disc contained pornography and the other was encrypted with a code the FBI was unable to crack, according to the affidavit. It also says Sadequee had maps of the Washington area with the discs.

Ehsanul Sadequee was arrested in Bangladesh by government security forces and illegally flown to the U.S., and is alleged to have been in Toronto organizing jihad with the alleged Toronto “terrorists”. It is possible that he became a suspect after posting a video to the internet.

The video had a building in it.

The building could become a target for terrorists.

Now, if a white, American, protestant had posted a similar video… like Timothy McVeigh, you mean?

Signs that another “terrorist” round up didn’t actually round up any terrorists:

  • no actual evidence of any assembled explosives or any actions – no bodies, no victims, no broken in buildings, no possession of actual explosives
  • lots of hearsay evidence from individuals threatened with incarceration for other unrelated crimes
  • no actual charges of committing any actual terrorist acts are laid
  • the alleged terrorists are charged with multiple counts of the most serious offenses even remotely plausible. BUT, once threatened with horrendous sentences for those crimes, they are bullied into pleading guilty to much lesser offenses.

Oh ho, Bill– so you want the police to wait until they actually commit a terrorist act before they are arrested?  You mean, the police shouldn’t have to wait for an actual burglary, or assault, or murder to happen before they arrest someone for burglary, assault, or murder?  As they do now?

No. Nobody has to wait until the actual act of terrorism is committed. It would be quite sufficient to prove that there was an actual conspiracy and real intent.

When we lock someone up, for example, because they were allegedly planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch, I’d like to know if the suspect actually thought he could do it, if the police thought he thought he could do it, and if anyone with common sense wondered aloud or to himself if any sane person would really plan such a thing?

I would like to be assured that we do not arrest everyone who ever says “I could kill you”.

Mayor David Miller, during an interview on the CBC, bizarrely compared the arrests of the “terrorists” to the arrests of bank robbers, and stated that the police don’t wait until a robbery has taken place before they arrest the robbers.

Well, ask yourself: if the police were told that a man was planning a robbery of a downtown bank, would they arrest him?  Almost certainly not.  Now, if he had a gun, and the gun was illegal, and a map of the bank, and gang of co-conspirators, and got into his car, and drove to the bank— yes, then they might arrest him at the front door and they would have good evidence to convict him.

But if he had merely written down on a scrap of paper the name that was the same as the name of a man who had once robbed a bank in different town?

What if an underground officer befriended the man and engaged him in conversation and said something like, “gee, wouldn’t it be great if we robbed a bank and got lots of money” and the man said, “sure would”, should he be arrested and charged with conspiracy?

Think about that.

When was the last time you read about a man or woman in Canada being convicted of planning a bank robbery, or belonging to an organization that planned bank robberies, or providing material support to an organization that supported bank robberies? On the contrary, it is a cornerstone of our legal system that to lock someone up in jail, you have to prove that they actually committed or attempted to commit  a crime– not that they thought about or planned to commit one.

We don’t usually arrest people for thinking about murdering someone, and then go– “look– he has a knife!” You think that’s only because we almost never hear about someone “planning” to murder someone? On the contrary, we do. In fact, the police will tell you that they quite regularly deal with estranged husbands who have threatened to kill their wives. They do it all the time. We don’t arrest them all and lock them all up indefinitely because we recognize that the vast majority of these men don’t seriously intend to carry out that threat. Even if a man enters a woman’s house and threatens her, he can only be charged with uttering threats, and that crime is treated far less seriously than the crime of actually assaulting or murdering a person.

 

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Monuments to Victim Vanity

The strange, strange sacred and immutable right of families of 9/11 victims to spend an unlimited amount of public money on an obscenely tasteless monument: does anybody have the guts to say, enough is enough? They are now discussing a $1 billion dollar monument to the victims of 9/11, at the site of the former World Trade Centre. Did you know that the monument to all 55,000 dead soldiers from the Viet Nam War cost a “mere” $7 million? For that $7 million, those families received one of the most graceful, respectful, and amazing monuments ever built.

(Then the veterans jumped in and erected a more traditional monument right next to it to spoil the effect. Damn you– we are not ashamed of our war!)

Where will all this money go? Probably to middle-men, agents, lawyers, and contractors. Oh– there will be about $500 for a “vehicle security” gadget. I can’t imagine what that will be. Is it because they think more 9/11 hijackers are going to come over and destroy the memorial?

Will families of dead soldiers from Viet Nam please organize themselves? It’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon and demand your share. You should probably get a $10 billion dollar monument, and it should be right in front of the White House and it should be at least 2000 feet tall.

I’m sorry, but as sympathetic as I am to the families of the victims, it’s hard to not see this all as an insult to their memories.

But not all of them. I’m sure some of the families believe, as I do, that this entire exercise has turned into a tawdry, tacky joke and someone should stick a fork in it.

Now here’s my insanely great solution to the entire debacle: they should build a quiet, humble, small memorial at the base of the towers, and then donate the $990 million left over to fund “freedom schools” in Arabic countries that teach, for free, science, geography, music, literature, and math to earnest young Arab boys and girls.

Some of the families of the victims will say: such a small memorial would be an insult to the memories of our loved ones. Well, think about that. The memorial is not about them– it’s about you.

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Another Hapless Victim of the “War” on Terror

Another “suspected terrorist” gets his. Or doesn’t.

American juries seem a little less mad than American prosecutors. If you read the story above, a reasonable person might conclude that the FBI had lost its mind… or that it was under enormous pressure to produce a conviction, any conviction, of anybody– as long as their name sounds something like Osama Awadallah— Arabic!

The FBI successfully demonstrated that Osama Awadallah had written the name Khalid in a school notebook even though he denied– after 20 days of solitary confinement– that he knew anybody named Khalid. Khalid is Khalid al-Midhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers. Well, well, case closed then, don’t you think?

It appears that the FBI was convinced that something sinister was afoot: here was a man who had actually talked to two of the hijackers. Osama admitted that. He had known two of the hijackers 18 months before 9/11. But he only recalled the name of one of them. But Osama wrote in his notebook this: “One of the quietest people I have met is Nawaf. Another one, his name is Khalid.” Khalid was the name of the other hijacker. Seize him.

In the grand jury room, Osama was handcuffed to his chair, though there was not a shred of evidence to indicate that he was anything other than exactly what he claimed he was: a Jordanian college student who had remarked on quiet Khalid.

In the four years since his case began, Osama has been taking courses at San Diego State University.

No matter how many cases like this I read about, I never fail to be stunned at the absolutely shocking indifference of the American public and its political leaders to these cases of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, harassment, and intimidation, by government officials— and then the inevitable bizarre admission that even the prosecution doesn’t believe the suspect is a terrorist, or has committed any serious crimes. Yet the prosecution in this case had a fanatical determination to prosecute Osama and apply a sentence of ridiculous severity. They would like to lock the man up for five years because he denied– then later remembered– that he did know a quiet man know Khalid.

Osama was locked up in solitary confinement for 20 days, before his appearance before the Grand Jury. Yes, this is how we treat a man who is suspected merely of lying about whether he had met one of the hijackers. The prosecution was determined to convict him of perjury– why? To prove that they were men?

You have to understand that by the time the case has progressed this far, the prosecution MUST obtain a conviction to prove that Osama really deserved to have been treated so badly by the prosecution. And to show that we, and not they, the prosecutors, have lost all sense of perspective.

If a jury finds him not guilty, it might as well fire the prosecutors as well, because it is also saying that they have made a monumentally idiotic assessment of how the taxpayer’s money should be spent.

There are some sane people in America. A Judge Shira Scheindlin dismissed the charges. An appeals court reinstated the charges, so sanity did not prevail. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal then accused Judge Scheindlin of unspeakable crimes against the security and safety and oil supplies of the United States of America, may God Bless Her!

I did not see a dollar figure to tell you how much the United States Government was spending to prosecute a man for not fully disclosing all of his social contacts.

There are people serving less time than that for arson or assault or rape or bribing the same idiotic congressmen who passed the very laws under which Osama is being prosecuted.

Is it possible to reach any conclusion but that the man is being persecuted for being Arabic?

Will a point in time come when Americans ever become ashamed these farces?

The government must be shocked at having a judge not roll over in the face of their authoritarian strategies– they demanded that the case be heard by another judge. The Appeals Court said: the government doesn’t always get to win.

One of the gripes the prosecutors held against Scheindlin was an article she wrote which apparently supported the idea that judges should defend individual liberties.

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Big Brother is Here, Now

This may well be one of the most chilling stories that I have read in a long time. Your leaders– they of the mighty speeches lauding our history of freedom and liberty and democracy– are enthusiastically spying on you, without warrants, without judges, without congress.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing what every citizen of the United States should be doing. It is asserting the right of any individual to not have his private conversations intercepted by his government without just cause.

The Bush administration, as is well known, has asserted that it has the right to spy on anyone whenever they damn well feel like it without the slightest degree of oversight. All they have to do is say aloud to themselves, three times, “we are at war, we are at war, we are war”. Astonishingly, we are then at war. If we are at war, then national security trumps all.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Gonzales responded: “Obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they’re going to prosecute those violations.”

That’s hilarious– Mr. Gonzales doesn’t mean he’s going to check into the “laws that have been violated” of course– because the Bush administration has clearly violated laws in the holding of prisoners and domestic spying and the use of rendition.

There is not even a the need, apparently, to persuade congress that something like a “war” exists and that the U.S. is in it.

The Bush administration even now is considering whether to prosecute the press for publishing secrets about the government’s illegal domestic spying activities. Yes, up is down and down is up. The Supreme Court, stacked with Republican appointees, has never been more receptive.

The True Post Modernist: George Bush

As many people have remarked, Bush’s actions here are at odds with true conservatism, which views government with suspicion, and seeks restrictions on it’s ability to interfere with peoples’ lives.

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Entrapment

And another…

Would Hamid Hayat have been convicted of providing material support to terrorists if his name had been Albert Smith and his race been Caucasian?

No. Not a chance.

An FBI fink claimed that Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant had been in Lodi, California. The FBI found that that was not true, but there were other Arabic-looking people in Lodi. Hamid Hayat and his father barely spoke English and were not provided with lawyers when they were interviewed after the FBI fink, Naseem Khan, pointed them out. Look– those guys look Arabic. The FBI provided the leading questions; nature provided the appropriate racial characteristics. An American jury decided that the FBI would not be prosecuting these men for no reason and convicted the son, largely on the basis of an alleged confession that he had traveled to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp.

Amazingly, the government seems to have no obligation to prove anything anymore. It did not offer any proof that Hamid Hayat had ever been to a training camp in Pakistan.

The government did not provide any proof that Hayat had actually taken a single action that would indicate preparation or planning of a terrorist act. It doesn’t matter. He’s Arabic.

Case closed.

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Where is the so-called liberal media on this? You would think this story would be on the covers of all the so-called liberal magazines and newspapers.

Are you people nuts?  Read this, from the New York Times, April 26, 2006:

Mr. Siraj talked about the economic damage that would be caused by stranding Staten Island without the bridges, and seemed pleased that he had recruited Mr. Elshafay, who he indicated was the actual author of the alleged plan.

Sound sinister?  You bet.  Consider this though– Mr. Elshafay is an informant for the New York City Police “intelligence” department, who received over $100,000 for hanging around some bookstores looking for “extremists”.  He befriended the pathetic Mr. Siraj and secretly recorded conversations with him.

Mr. Siraj hates America– no doubt about it– but it was Mr. Eshafay who brought up all kinds of exciting ides about building nuclear bombs or blowing up various bridges in New York.

Now, you’re a young, gullible, foreign-born Moslem.  Some lunatic befriends you and you end up driving around town in his car.  He starts talking about how evil America is and how great it would be to blow up some bridges.  I don’t know what you say exactly, but I know that if I was on a jury, I would think long and hard before coming to the conclusion that you were, by yourself, a threat to America.

Mr. Siraj did not actually take any steps– none at all– towards realizing his brilliant plan.  Not a single step.  Not one.

Mr. Elshafay is the actual author of the plan.  So the U.S. government has “informants” going around, hanging around with impressionable and misguided young Arabs, and saying, “hey, wanna blow up the Brooklyn Bridge?  Whaddya think– I could get a bomb.  Do you hate America or what,
huh?”  And when these pathetic and gullible young hostile Arabs say, “yeah, wouldn’t that be something.  I hate America” we arrest them and lock them up for terrorism.  What kind of whacked out country is this?  This is George Bush’s  America.

The bottom line is that there is not the slightest shred of evidence that Mr. Siraj, on his own, was up to anything other than minding his mosque and tending a bookstore.

Did he hate America?  Yes.  So let’s drop the pretense of looking for actual terrorists and just arrest everybody who hates America.  We are building a very large pool of candidates…

NY Times on Hamid Hayat Case

More Comments on Civil Liberties

More on Hamid Hayat

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Tyranny

The Bush administration has been diligently addressing some very important issues. Recently, articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times showed that the government was holding detainees illegally in foreign countries where they are tortured for information, and that the government was eavesdropping on telephone conversations without a warrant.

In a right-side up world, the government would now be arresting and charging those responsible for these criminal acts. If they were authorized by officials in the White House, they would have resigned and would be facing indictments. If the President himself authorized them, he would be facing impeachment.

Not this government. This government is arresting and charging those who told you that your government is breaking the law and that it is spying on you and torturing people.

It is totally weird that the mainstream press, and the Democrats, are not screaming bloody murder. The Bush administration has undertaken activities that are literally stunning in the depth and breadth of their violations of human rights and democratic principles. But, in a world that could only have been envisioned by Josef Goebbels

In my darker moments, the only conclusion I can draw is that all those flag-waving, patriotic, gun-toting Americans who sit there idly watching TV and not caring about these actions do not deserve democracy. In fact, they are no longer entitled to democracy. You have approved and accepted and embraced tyranny. Your government showed you a bogey man and said “boo” and you cried and wet your pants and said, please, oh please, stop them, I’ll let you do anything, I surrender all of my rights. It was that easy.

I never would have believed it. I grew up watching the Watergate scandal unfold, convinced that when Americans become aware of malfeasance by their own government, they react with disgust, they tell the pollsters that the government has no support, which empowers the loyal opposition — who are presently themselves timorously cowering in the corner–to take decisive action. Sadly, I believe that most Americans don’t care about Bush’s dictatorial powers because the word “terrorist” has become, in his mind, synonymous with “Arabic”.

On Mary O. McCarthy.

If Mary O. McCarthy really is guilty of leaking information about the CIA’s illegal activities to the press, I hope some organization with guts announces that she will given a real “Medal of Freedom”.  She is someone who has made a genuine sacrifice on behalf of democracy and civil liberties.

Did you know:

CIA employees are all required to take a “lie detector test” every five years.

The world is indeed very topsy turvey.  Lie detectors don’t work.  They never have and they probably never will.  Doesn’t matter.  Porter Gross over at the CIA looks like a fine hunter of leakers.  That’s all that matters.  His bosses think he’s a bloodhound.   I cannot believe though that not a single CIA employee has yet taken his or her employer to court over the issue.  I repeat– check this with objective analysts if you doubt me– the polygraph does not work.  It never has.  It probably never will.  There is a good reason why results from a polygraph are not admissible in court.  And anybody under suspicion of anything who would agree to take a polygraph is a fool.

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Revenge is an Empty Motive

I had a choice of staying with these feelings or sort of nurturing them,” Bane said. “I tried to think of ways I could learn more. I felt the need for bridges of understanding with people who could do this kind of thing.” Bane eventually organized a Muslim-Christian dialogue in Delaware, where he now lives. Washington Post, April 20, 2006

Donald Bane is the father of Michael Andrew Bane, who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. He spoke at the sentencing phase of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. He spoke as a witness for the defense.

In America, such testimony is not permitted if it overtly asserts that the defendant should not be killed. I don’t fully grasp this concept. Now that I think about it, I suppose that the relatives of victims of 9/11 who testified for the prosecution couldn’t actually say, “we’d like to see Moussaoui die”. They could only say, look at how my life has been destroyed by this man. Draw your own conclusion. Why should this man be alive? So I suppose the witnesses called for the defense could say… well, what they did say?

The defense called Bane and a handful of other relatives of 9/11 victims to give quiet, dignified testimony to the effect that there are alternatives to vengeance, and alternatives to declaring that your life has been destroyed by a tragedy and is no longer worth living because the only thing that can give you satisfaction is to see someone– maybe anyone– die in retribution.

Bane said his life was worth living. He has even initiated some projects that he hopes will promote understanding and peace between Moslems and Christians.

A large number of family members of 9/11 are still angry, and they want to see someone die for the sins of Mohammed Atta and his co-conspirators. Since Atta and his friends are all already dead, Zacarias Moussaoui is the only prospective candidate.

But an execution doesn’t give any real satisfaction, and it doesn’t bring closure, and it doesn’t bring your loved one back. It just creates more people who wish their loved one could come back from the dead. Yes, even Zacarias Moussaoui has a mother. And even she knows he is a lunatic and that no civilized society would execute a lunatic, especially when he hasn’t actually committed any crimes.

Does that sound strange to you? It’s true: Zacarias Moussaoui has not committed any crimes– other than not registering his visa properly. Moussaoui has proclaimed that he wanted to be a 9/11 conspirator and even insists that he would like to be one in the future. We should wish that all our enemies could be so forthright. But if we hanged everyone who claimed to be responsible for sensational crimes, we’d have a busy hangman indeed.

So, when you consider George W. Bush and the military and the tendencies of conservatives to accuse liberals of being soft and weak and indecisive, and you consider that the school of vengeance sits weeping in the courtroom, confessing to everyone (in the mistaken belief that there is a point to it) that he or she is incapable of finding something in this world worth living for, other than revenge…. when you consider that Donald Bane seems like a perfectly decent human being…