José Bové Detained at JFK, Deported
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[How hard can it be to include the diacritical marks in a
name like José Bové?--DC]
*****
French Activist Detained at JFK, Deported
By VERENA DOBNIK
NEW YORK -- An anti-globalization activist who was sent back
to France after arriving at an airport here accused the U.S.
government Thursday of conspiring against his cause and
trying to protect big business.
Jose Bove, best known for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant
in France in 1999, arrived Wednesday at John F. Kennedy
International Airport, planning to speak at an event
sponsored by Cornell University, but was denied entry by
customs officials.
Bove was not eligible to enter the U.S. under a visa waiver
program, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman
Janet Rapaport said. She said she could not discuss why.
The program allows residents of 27 countries, including
France, to travel to the U.S. for tourism or business for up
to 90 days without getting a visa, according to the
Department of State Web site.
Bove, 52, had planned to attend a gathering of farmers,
labor advocates and academics in Manhattan Thursday and
Friday, participating in such forums as "Fighting the
Commodification of Food" and "The Struggle Against Monsanto
in Europe."
U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto grows genetically modified
soy, a key ingredient in many packaged foods. The U.S.
accounts for more than half of all biotech crops grown
worldwide.
"This is an international struggle," Bove said in a
telephone interview Thursday from his farm in southern
France. "The American government is fed up with this fight
because such companies are losing a lot of money."
He spoke last year at Yale University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, he said.
"The fact that they don't want me to come in now is a new
way for the Bush administration to build coalitions against
us," he said.
Bove was not alone in his suspicions.
"Evidently, the Bush administration is behind this
decision," said George Naylor, president of the National
Family Farm Coalition. "No one would think of fearing Jose's
presence in this country except multinational corporations
with a profit motive."
White House officials did not immediately respond to
requests for comment.
The activist said he will speak Friday at the Manhattan
event from France via speaker phone.
Last November, Bove was sentenced to four months in prison
for destroying a field of genetically modified corn planted
by an American seed company in southern France in July 2004.
He also participated in protests during the World Trade
Organization meetings held in December in Hong Kong, where
he was briefly detained after arriving but allowed to enter
following an intervention by the French consul general.
He shot to fame in 1999 after leading a group of protesters
who dismantled a McDonald's restaurant under construction in
Millau, near his sheep farm.
Associated Press Writer Tim McCahill contributed to this report.
*****
Activist French farmer Bove denied entry to US
Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:43 AM GMT
By Christian Wiessner
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- French farmer Jose Bove, a prominent
protester against globalization and junk food, said on
Thursday he was denied entry to the United States and
speculated large corporations were behind the move.
Bove told Reuters he arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy
International Airport with a valid U.S. entry visa on
Wednesday afternoon but was detained for several hours and
returned to Paris.
"They took my passport from me and said 'You're not allowed
to come in for all the things you've done over the years,
for speaking out,'" Bove said from France in a telephone
interview.
Bove had been scheduled to speak Thursday and Friday in New
York at an international conference on globalization and
labor. Organizers of the conference of academics and trade
unionists included Cornell University's Global Labor Institute.
A French foreign ministry spokesman said Bove made a
"mistake in understanding" when he responded to a question
on an immigration form by saying he did not have a criminal
record. Bove thought the question referred only to the U.S.
justice system, the spokesman said.
Janet Rapaport, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border
Protection in New York, confirmed Bove was refused entry but
declined to specify why.
"The burden is on the visitor to prove that he or she is
admissible. In this case, Mr. Bove did not meet that
requirement," Rapaport said without elaborating.
Bove said he was surprised at being turned back because he
has visited the United States several times, most recently
in 2005.
The Frenchman rose to fame in the late 1990s for denouncing
agricultural free trade and genetically modified food, and
spent six weeks in jail in early 2003 for smashing up a
McDonald's restaurant. He was sentenced to four months in
prison in November for destroying a field of genetically
modified corn in southern France.
Sean Sweeney, director of Cornell's labor institute, told
the conference's opening session in reference to Bove's
entry denial, "This speaks volumes about where the United
States is in terms of free speech."
Bove was to deliver an address titled "The Struggle Against
Monsanto in Europe." U.S.-based Monsanto Co. is a major
manufacturer of genetically modified seeds.
When asked why he felt he was denied entry to the United
States, Bove told Reuters, "I think the big companies that
want globalization do not want discussions that are not in
favor of globalization and free trade."
Later, he told the conference via telephone, "It was very
clear that they wanted to tell me that I was not allowed to
come inside the U.S. to make links with people in the U.S.
who are fighting against globalization."
In December, Hong Kong denied Bove entry to attend a World
Trade Organization meeting.
*****
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"Don't just question authority,
Don't forget to question me."
-- Jello Biafra
Michael Price
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> [How hard can it be to include the diacritical marks in a
> name like José Bové?--DC]
>
> *****
>
> French Activist Detained at JFK, Deported
> By VERENA DOBNIK
>
> NEW YORK -- An anti-globalization activist who was sent back
> to France after arriving at an airport here accused the U.S.
> government Thursday of conspiring against his cause and
> trying to protect big business.
>
> Jose Bove, best known for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant
> in France in 1999, arrived Wednesday at John F. Kennedy
> International Airport, planning to speak at an event
> sponsored by Cornell University, but was denied entry by
> customs officials.
>
> Bove was not eligible to enter the U.S. under a visa waiver
> program, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman
> Janet Rapaport said. She said she could not discuss why.
>
gain*
are not welcome in the US? I mean what is controversial about
forbidding
a political felon from entering the country?
* Except on behalf of governments of course?
Curly Surmudgeon
What is a "political felon?" Is this a real crime or something you've
made up?
Are you familiar with the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? "Give us
your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
America _needs_ more shit-stirrers. With corporate-owned media afraid to
print the truth, a government unable to tell the truth, and constant
violations of our laws by the very people elected to represent us, I
believe that a few shit-stirrers would be a very good thing indeed.
-- Regards, Curly
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beware the American Taliban
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Posted via NewsDemon.com - Premium Uncensored Newsgroup Service
------->>>>>>http://www.NewsDemon.com<<<<<<------
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Dan Clore
> * Except on behalf of governments of course?
Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles
and Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73
people. So it seems that there must be more to the story
than a little property damage.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
Michael Price
A person who commits felonies from political conviction.
> Is this a real crime or something you've
> made up?
Ransacking a place is a real crime.
>
> Are you familiar with the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? "Give us
> your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
It does not however go on to say "even if they like breaking things
that
do not belong to them for political gain.".
> America _needs_ more shit-stirrers.
Possibly, but I doubt you need more people who destroy private
property to
entrench politically corrupt subsidies to lawless interest groups. In
any case
the US is allowed to exclude criminals under it's laws. It's hardly a
mystery
why it does so.
> With corporate-owned media afraid to
> print the truth, a government unable to tell the truth, and constant
> violations of our laws by the very people elected to represent us, I
> believe that a few shit-stirrers would be a very good thing indeed.
>
And what makes you think that someone with a history of crime for
the purpose of preserving government largess to his minority group will
tell the truth?
Michael Price
Read the footnote, I said "except on behalf of governments of
course". It is
clearly horrible that they let Carriles and Bosch in, but that doesn't
mean they
should let every reprobate in.
Stan de SD
"Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
news:43EC7690...@columbia-center.org...
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> [How hard can it be to include the diacritical marks in a
> name like José Bové?--DC]
>
> *****
>
> French Activist Detained at JFK, Deported
> By VERENA DOBNIK
>
> NEW YORK -- An anti-globalization activist who was sent back
> to France after arriving at an airport here accused the U.S.
> government Thursday of conspiring against his cause and
> trying to protect big business.
>
> Jose Bove, best known for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant
> in France in 1999, arrived Wednesday at John F. Kennedy
> International Airport, planning to speak at an event
> sponsored by Cornell University, but was denied entry by
> customs officials.
Glad to see that we're finally stopping criminals from entering the country.
Now let's see if we can make that a trend, especially with our southern
border.
> Bove was not eligible to enter the U.S. under a visa waiver
> program, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman
> Janet Rapaport said. She said she could not discuss why.
The fact that he's a violent criminal should be plainly obvious.
> Bove, 52, had planned to attend a gathering of farmers,
> labor advocates and academics in Manhattan Thursday and
> Friday, participating in such forums as "Fighting the
> Commodification of Food" and "The Struggle Against Monsanto
> in Europe."
There are plenty of kooks already on the streets of Manhattans - the locals
won't bemoan the absence of another one.
> U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto grows genetically modified
> soy, a key ingredient in many packaged foods. The U.S.
> accounts for more than half of all biotech crops grown
> worldwide.
Glad to hear we are still #1 in some useful and beneficial technology.
> "This is an international struggle," Bove said in a
> telephone interview
Spoken like a typical commie.
> Thursday from his farm in southern
> France. "The American government is fed up with this fight
> because such companies are losing a lot of money."
Then what's the worry? Companies tend to drop products when they can't make
any money marketing them.
> "The fact that they don't want me to come in now is a new
> way for the Bush administration to build coalitions against
> us," he said.
No, it shows that the system eventually catches up, albeit slowly.
> "Evidently, the Bush administration is behind this
> decision," said George Naylor, president of the National
> Family Farm Coalition. "No one would think of fearing Jose's
> presence in this country except multinational corporations
> with a profit motive."
How about people who franchise, work, or patronize McDonalds?
> Last November, Bove was sentenced to four months in prison
> for destroying a field of genetically modified corn planted
> by an American seed company in southern France in July 2004.
What happened? Did he escape, or did they let his ass our early after being
everyone's cell-bitch for the night?
> NEW YORK (Reuters) -- French farmer Jose Bove, a prominent
> protester against globalization and junk food, said on
> Thursday he was denied entry to the United States and
> speculated large corporations were behind the move.
Whether they did or not was irrelevant. He's a convicted violent criminal,
and the US had the right to refuse him entry.
> "They took my passport from me and said 'You're not allowed
> to come in for all the things you've done over the years,
> for speaking out,'" Bove said from France in a telephone
> interview.
Funny how engaging in criminal activities eventually comes back to you.
> A French foreign ministry spokesman said Bove made a
> "mistake in understanding" when he responded to a question
> on an immigration form by saying he did not have a criminal
> record.
You mean he lied, right?
> "The burden is on the visitor to prove that he or she is
> admissible. In this case, Mr. Bove did not meet that
> requirement," Rapaport said without elaborating.
Apparently not.
> Sean Sweeney, director of Cornell's labor institute, told
> the conference's opening session in reference to Bove's
> entry denial, "This speaks volumes about where the United
> States is in terms of free speech."
Uh, Bove wasn't barred for free speech. He was barred for being a violent
criminal.
> When asked why he felt he was denied entry to the United
> States, Bove told Reuters, "I think the big companies that
> want globalization do not want discussions that are not in
> favor of globalization and free trade."
Loser can't admit he's a criminal, right?
> Later, he told the conference via telephone, "It was very
> clear that they wanted to tell me that I was not allowed to
> come inside the U.S. to make links with people in the U.S.
> who are fighting against globalization."
>
> In December, Hong Kong denied Bove entry to attend a World
> Trade Organization meeting.
Hmm, seems they don't like criminals either.
Stan de SD
"Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1139757567.5...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
>> Is this a real crime or something you've
>> made up?
> Ransacking a place is a real crime.
Something that Danny and Curly haven't been able to figure out.
brique
Yeah, but they are patriotic thrusting executiver types and have their uses
to further foreign policy objectives, whereas the chap in question had
trashed a building site (the Macdonalds had not actually been completed) and
flattened a few acres of corn. Such major criminal acts firmly place him and
his confederates in the top echolon of global terrorism and we must be
thankful that the USA finally realised the potential harm he could cause and
kicked him back to France. Sadly, they don't seem to have noticed his
dubious qualities on his previous visits to the Land of the Free and perhaps
a full enquiry should be made regarding these potential fatal security
lapses which so threatened the safety and security of the American people.
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
news:11397918...@damia.uk.clara.net...
He damaged property that wasn't his w/o the owner's consent, which is
vandalism. How would you like it if I came over to your home and started
busting up your shit for "political" reasons?
James A. Donald
On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:29:13 -0800, Dan Clore
> Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
According to a show trial court.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
zuBOc2YxpnvIas6YdrC0AWUdRKM5aiNmCvVCiELd
4o7Ni4Mk7m+YwIB9QFrQGAJ/lWf5tgoe+tjMQAikf
constan...@gmail.com
James A. Donald wrote:
> --
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:29:13 -0800, Dan Clore
> > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
>
> According to a show trial court.
If Carriles and Bosch were accused of terrorism against the US or
Israel, leftists would be championing their cause. In fact leftists are
dead set against every aspect of the war on terrorism as they have made
clear time and time again for example just now in the case of Jose
Bove, and they bring up Bosch and Carriles not hoping to further
advance the war on terrorism (by adding two more accused terrorists to
the list of accused terrorists) but hoping to undermine the war on
terrorism (by using those guys to accuse the US of hypocrisy, double
standards, whatever).
Leftists want to bring people like Jose Bove with a demonstrated record
of violence into the US, in the hopes that they will commit violence on
American soil against Americans. Leftists bring up the matter of Posada
and Carriles in this context in order to further the leftist cause of
bringing violent criminals like Jose Bove into the US. When leftists
bring up Bosch and Carriles in the current context, their purpose is to
liberate and empower terrorists.
Libertarians, some of them anyway, are against the war on terrorism
because they consider the loss of liberty involved to be a greater evil
than the terrorism that is being fought. Leftists are against the war
on terrorism because they want terrorists to succeed.
constan...@gmail.com
Thank you for your honesty. As you here admit, leftists want to
liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals precisely
because they are violent criminals, precisely because leftists expect
and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir the shit", as you
say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts against Americans.
If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
Curly Surmudgeon
Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In fact
each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
Further, you ignored the opening question. This is precisely the common,
deceitful, practice of the lunatics now in office, deny and lie, change
the subject to anything but that at hand.
> If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
> interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
If, if, if. What crime has he committed? To this point neither the
origial author nor yourself have shown any evidence that a crime was
committed. Even that is insufficient to keep many out. Alexander
Solitzen(sp?) was a "criminal" and "felon" in the U.S.S.R., would you have
kept him out too?
>> With corporate-owned media afraid to
>> print the truth, a government unable to tell the truth, and constant
>> violations of our laws by the very people elected to represent us, I
>> believe that a few shit-stirrers would be a very good thing indeed.
Read the above carefully.
James A. Donald
On 16 Feb 2006 19:51:24 -0800, constan...@gmail.com wrote:
> If Carriles and Bosch were accused of terrorism against the US or
> want to bring people like Jose Bove with a demonstrated record of
> violence into the US, in the hopes that they will commit violence on
>
> Libertarians, some of them anyway, are against the war on terrorism
> because they consider the loss of liberty involved to be a greater
> evil than the terrorism that is being fought. Leftists are against
> the war on terrorism because they want terrorists to succeed.
In the Vietnam war, commies and libertarians were allied as long as
conscription lasted. When conscription ended, the fundamental
difference in aims became apparent.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
H31fwSqYIsz4/ccOd0/onDG77uUX73lDhqZWIHUX
4FQK4A5e1WIIgfPJDl8/PdhQhB2VUawcVkX4CwS3S
James A. Donald
constantinopoli wrote:
> > As you here admit, leftists want to
> > liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals
> > precisely because they are violent criminals, precisely because
> > leftists expect and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir
> > the shit", as you say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts
> > against Americans.
Curly Surmudgeon
> Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In
> fact each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
José Bové "stirred shit" by breaking stuff and threatening people in
France. You expect and desire him to "stir shit" in the US
> Further, you ignored the opening question. This is precisely the
> common, deceitful, practice of the lunatics now in office, deny and
> lie, change the subject to anything but that at hand.
Your opening question was rhetorical. No one expects rhetorical
questions to be answered.
Furthermore, José Bové is not "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breath free", but the wealthy and powerful trying to
curtail other people's freedom. If he actually was the poor, you
would spit on him as you do the actual poor.
Constantinople:
> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly
> > so interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
Curly Surmudgeon
> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to
imprison him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of
violence, when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence
followed.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
9atI1/xLl1TGXVNUKCEIOEGj1IwrtYPZVemOcHgN
47I3raigAvQKn1vinu2WxQpdNtjPxGj2MYo8q88q9
Michael Price
> --
> On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:29:13 -0800, Dan Clore
> > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
>
> According to a show trial court.
>
going to refuse to extradite people to every country that has less than
sterling judical systems? Given that he's committed offenses in
America I don't see why they can't throw him out. If you really want
to go overboard to give him a fair trial (something you don't seem
nearly so fussed about with the Guantanamo detainees) then some sort of
court to establish a prima facie case in America is possible.
Curly Surmudgeon
> --
> constantinopoli wrote:
>> > As you here admit, leftists want to
>> > liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals
>> > precisely because they are violent criminals, precisely because
>> > leftists expect and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir
>> > the shit", as you say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts
>> > against Americans.
>
> Curly Surmudgeon
>> Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In
>> fact each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
>
> José Bové "stirred shit" by breaking stuff and threatening people in
> France.
Ahem... That statement was put to constantinopoli, not you, who should
be answering.
> You expect and desire him to "stir shit" in the US
Same statement to you, do misrepresent my thoughts or words. Either speak
for your self or stfu. If you have a question then phrase it as one.
>> Further, you ignored the opening question. This is precisely the
>> common, deceitful, practice of the lunatics now in office, deny and
>> lie, change the subject to anything but that at hand.
>
> Your opening question was rhetorical. No one expects rhetorical
> questions to be answered.
Again, do not mischaracterize my words.
> Furthermore, José Bové is not "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses
> yearning to breath free", but the wealthy and powerful trying to curtail
> other people's freedom. If he actually was the poor, you would spit on
> him as you do the actual poor.
Please provide some evidence for this, that is new information.
> Constantinople:
>> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
>> > interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
>
> Curly Surmudgeon
>> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
>
> Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to imprison
> him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of violence,
> when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence followed.
Which of those are felonies? Are there any convictions or is this
innuendo?
James A. Donald
Dan Clore
> > > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
James A. Donald:
> > According to a show trial court.
"Michael Price
> Well that's the sort of court they have in that country. Are we
> going to refuse to extradite people to every country that has less
> than sterling judical systems? Given that he's committed offenses
> in America I don't see why they can't throw him out. If you really
> want to go overboard to give him a fair trial (something you don't
> seem nearly so fussed about with the Guantanamo detainees) then some
> sort of court to establish a prima facie case in America is
> possible.
Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield. I was fussed
when Padilla was detained at an airport, and subsequently denied
trial.
Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me apply one
standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to kill people like
me, and a considerably higher standard to those suspected of trying to
kill enemies of people like me.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
ERkFL2N75XZI8UOqqmgC54rxNacLyGlamXgNuCMN
4dQGtiw2Bcw5htNpql6f+3fD38e7eFkVBcfHCpldB
James A. Donald
Curly Surmudgeon
> > > If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
James A. Donald
> > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to
> > imprison him, they were successfully deterred for a time by
> > threats of violence, when they eventually snatched him, threats of
> > violence followed.
Curly Surmudgeon
> Which of those are felonies? Are there any convictions or is this
> innuendo?
All of those are felonies in America - don't know what they call them
in France. He has done time in prison for some of that stuff in
France so presumably they convicted him, though French trials tend to
be notoriously swift and one sided. But irrespective of whether one
takes French trials seriously (I do not) there is no doubt of his
guilt - he loudly announced he was going to do this stuff, he loudly
announced he had done it, and he has loudly announced he is going to
do more of it.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Zn2hrUTybTUgqu213CiTf8BVgUuXuZEpjzGvv8X6
4ahvgNU8DtUoYgebqEXLBeNctFzsIJxD0n6cwujIK
G*rd*n
> >> > As you here admit, leftists want to
> >> > liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals
> >> > precisely because they are violent criminals, precisely because
> >> > leftists expect and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir
> >> > the shit", as you say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts
> >> > against Americans.
Curly Surmudgeon
> >> Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In
> >> fact each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
James A. Donald wrote:
> > José Bové "stirred shit" by breaking stuff and threatening people in
> > France.
> Ahem... That statement was put to constantinopoli, not you, who should
> be answering.
I think we can assume they are in communication.
constan...@gmail.com
You see conspiracies everywhere.
Curly Surmudgeon
> --
> Curly Surmudgeon
>> > > If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
>
> James A. Donald
>> > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
>> > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to
>> > imprison him, they were successfully deterred for a time by
>> > threats of violence, when they eventually snatched him, threats of
>> > violence followed.
>
> Curly Surmudgeon
>> Which of those are felonies? Are there any convictions or is this
>> innuendo?
>
> All of those are felonies in America - don't know what they call them
> in France. He has done time in prison for some of that stuff in
> France so presumably they convicted him, though French trials tend to
> be notoriously swift and one sided. But irrespective of whether one
> takes French trials seriously (I do not) there is no doubt of his
> guilt - he loudly announced he was going to do this stuff, he loudly
> announced he had done it, and he has loudly announced he is going to
> do more of it.
So you have no clue whether the man was convicted of a felony yet feel
compelled to assert that constantinopoli's unsubstantiated opinion is
fact? If you don't know with any certainty, or cannot support your own
opinion, it would be better to remain silent than to issue unsupported
proclamations.
Curly Surmudgeon
Is that your total response?
James A. Donald
Curly Surmudgeon
> > > > > If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
James A. Donald
> > > > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops,
> > > > threatened assorted people with physical violence. When
> > > > police sought to imprison him, they were successfully deterred
> > > > for a time by threats of violence, when they eventually
> > > > snatched him, threats of violence followed.
Curly Surmudgeon
> >> Which of those are felonies? Are there any convictions or is
> >> this innuendo?
James A. Donald
> > All of those are felonies in America - don't know what they call
> > them in France. He has done time in prison for some of that stuff
> > in France so presumably they convicted him, though French trials
> > tend to be notoriously swift and one sided. But irrespective of
> > whether one takes French trials seriously (I do not) there is no
> > doubt of his guilt - he loudly announced he was going to do this
> > stuff, he loudly announced he had done it, and he has loudly
> > announced he is going to do more of it.
Curly Surmudgeon
> So you have no clue whether the man was convicted of a felony
He was convicted in France of stuff that is a felony in America,
announced in France that he did stuff that is a felony in America, and
has announced his intent to do more stuff that is a felony in America.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
qIqP5Kl9zyTg+AXg82OeWqp8OD0V4IrwrbFExhG7
4qym8hCuopWiv9/9ICwo8o3k8+MO9dKumFxq0tlOB
brique
Curly Surmudgeon <cu...@curlysurmudgeon.com> wrote in message
news:43f63995$0$5489$b9f6...@news.newsdemon.com...
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:00:01 +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> > --
> > constantinopoli wrote:
> >> > As you here admit, leftists want to
> >> > liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals
> >> > precisely because they are violent criminals, precisely because
> >> > leftists expect and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir
> >> > the shit", as you say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts
> >> > against Americans.
> >
> > Curly Surmudgeon
> >> Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In
> >> fact each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
> >
> > José Bové "stirred shit" by breaking stuff and threatening people in
> > France.
>
> Ahem... That statement was put to constantinopoli, not you, who should
> be answering.
An interesting switch in tactics from the gruesome two-some, usually it is
James that makes the dumbass reply and Constance who rushes in to confuse
matters.
Don't bother, boys, this way round doesn't work any better.
ng
> > You expect and desire him to "stir shit" in the US
>
> Same statement to you, do misrepresent my thoughts or words. Either speak
> for your self or stfu. If you have a question then phrase it as one.
>
> >> Further, you ignored the opening question. This is precisely the
> >> common, deceitful, practice of the lunatics now in office, deny and
> >> lie, change the subject to anything but that at hand.
> >
> > Your opening question was rhetorical. No one expects rhetorical
> > questions to be answered.
>
> Again, do not mischaracterize my words.
>
> > Furthermore, José Bové is not "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses
> > yearning to breath free", but the wealthy and powerful trying to curtail
> > other people's freedom. If he actually was the poor, you would spit on
> > him as you do the actual poor.
>
> Please provide some evidence for this, that is new information.
José Bové is a peasant farmer, not uncommon in France which has
traditionally supported the small scale farm and local producer.
If he was a Chilean peasant farmer he would be a hero. If Argentinian he
would be canonised.
>
> > Constantinople:
> >> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
> >> > interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
> >
> > Curly Surmudgeon
> >> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
> >
> > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to imprison
> > him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of violence,
> > when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence followed.
José Bové, together with others, disrupted a building site which was going
to become a MacDonalds. José Bové, with others, flattened four acres of GM
crops at a research center run by Monsanto.
Neither action is generally classified as a 'terrorist act', unless one
considers that as the owners of the damaged items were multi-national
corporations, that fact alone is sufficient to raise the level of
misdemeanour to one of 'terrorism'.
As for resisiting attempts to restrain him, or deny him liberty, that does
not constitute 'terrorism' either.
brique
But then he would have nothing to say at all.....
constan...@gmail.com
If it were to turn out that Bove was after all innocent, then his
standing as a hero of the left would be a fraud, since he achieved his
fame and status through his (alleged) criminal acts.
Michael Price
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:00:01 +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> > --
> > constantinopoli wrote:
> >> > As you here admit, leftists want to
> >> > liberate and empower and bring into the US violent criminals
> >> > precisely because they are violent criminals, precisely because
> >> > leftists expect and pray that they will commit violent acts. "Stir
> >> > the shit", as you say. Or as others say, commit terrorist acts
> >> > against Americans.
> >
> > Curly Surmudgeon
> >> Do not put your mistaken words and preconceptions into my mouth. In
> >> fact each and every statement in your paragraph above is in error.
> >
> > France.
>
> Ahem... That statement was put to constantinopoli, not you, who should
> be answering.
Nevertheless you made it and you should be held to your words.
>
> > You expect and desire him to "stir shit" in the US
>
> Same statement to you, do misrepresent my thoughts or words.
He did not. You said originally " America _needs_ more
shit-stirrers." which
everyone took to mean that José Bové is a shit stirrer that america
needs. If
this impression is wrong then the context in which you brought it up is
strange.
In any case if you wanted to correct the impression then you had the
opportunity.
> Either speak for your self or stfu.
You stfu or be held to your words. You expected and desired José
Bové to "stir
shit" or your statement makes no sense in the context you made it.
> If you have a question then phrase it as one.
Well he didn't. He merely clarified what you said. If he was wrong
in any way
please tell us how.
>
> >> Further, you ignored the opening question. This is precisely the
> >> common, deceitful, practice of the lunatics now in office, deny and
> >> lie, change the subject to anything but that at hand.
> >
> > Your opening question was rhetorical. No one expects rhetorical
> > questions to be answered.
>
> Again, do not mischaracterize my words.
>
> > Furthermore, José Bové is not "the tired, the poor, the huddled masses
> > yearning to breath free", but the wealthy and powerful trying to curtail
> > other people's freedom. If he actually was the poor, you would spit on
> > him as you do the actual poor.
>
> Please provide some evidence for this, that is new information.
The information that José Bové is not poor is fairly obvious from
the fact
that he owns a farm and is able to take time off from working it to
violate the
rights of others. The fact that he is powerful is clear from the fact
that he's
not locked up despite his criminality. As for spitting on the poor,
what else
do you call it when you want this guy let in while thousands of poor
honest
men risk their lives on the border.
>
> > Constantinople:
> >> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
> >> > interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
> >
> > Curly Surmudgeon
> >> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
> >
> > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to imprison
> > him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of violence,
> > when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence followed.
>
> Which of those are felonies?
Well the threats of violence sound like felonies to me and the
destruction of
other people's crops definitely are.
> Are there any convictions or is this innuendo?
>
Are you saying that you supported this man without bothering to find
out if
he was a felon? That's your philosophy of immigration, don't bother to
find out
whether someone is a felon who uses destruction and threats of violence
before
supporting his visa application? Perhaps you better think this through
again.
Michael Price
Learn to read, "He has done time in prison for some of that stuff
[things
they call felons in America] in France so presumably they convicted
him,".
So unless you have some evidence that the entire French legal system
was suspended for him we have a very good clue as to whether he was
convicted of a felony.
> If you don't know with any certainty, or cannot support your own
> opinion, it would be better to remain silent than to issue unsupported
> proclamations.
>
> -- Regards, Curly
Yes it would be better if you were silent in those circumstances.
Michael Price
> --
> Dan Clore
> > > > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > > > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > According to a show trial court.
>
> "Michael Price
> > Well that's the sort of court they have in that country. Are we
> > going to refuse to extradite people to every country that has less
> > than sterling judical systems? Given that he's committed offenses
> > in America I don't see why they can't throw him out. If you really
> > want to go overboard to give him a fair trial (something you don't
> > seem nearly so fussed about with the Guantanamo detainees) then some
> > sort of court to establish a prima facie case in America is
> > possible.
>
> Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
No James most of them weren't.
> I was fussed
> when Padilla was detained at an airport, and subsequently denied
> trial.
>
> Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me apply one
> standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to kill people like
> me, and a considerably higher standard to those suspected of trying to
> kill enemies of people like me.
Well I'm not. In fact if anything I want a higher standard of
evidence applied
to those suspected of trying to kill people like me. Applying low
standards of
evidence historically has not lead to less killing. In fact in the
Soviet Union
they applied standards of evidence lower than anywhere else and killing
wasn't
exactly rare. Similiarly in Central and South America the police
imposed very
low standards of evidence before beating or killing people. It didn't
exactly stop
left wing violence.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
"Michael Price"
> No James most of them weren't.
So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us his
story.
James A. Donald:
> > Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me apply
> > one standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to kill
> > people like me, and a considerably higher standard to those
> > suspected of trying to kill enemies of people like me.
"Michael Price"
> Well I'm not. In fact if anything I want a higher standard of
> evidence applied to those suspected of trying to kill people like
> me. Applying low standards of evidence historically has not lead to
> less killing. In fact in the Soviet Union they applied standards of
> evidence lower than anywhere else and killing wasn't exactly rare.
In the Soviet Union, the charges were typically "wrecking",
"speculation", "hoarding", etc - in other words practicing capitalism.
Since pretty much everyone was in fact guilty of those "crimes", the
problem was not low standards of evidence, Rather the problem was an
ideology that interpreted capitalism as an evil conspiracy centrally
run by a sinister and secretive cabal.
> Similiarly in Central and South America the police imposed very low
> standards of evidence before beating or killing people. It didn't
> exactly stop left wing violence.
It did in fact stop left wing violence for the most part once the
Soviet Union fell - the evil centrally run conspiracy in Latin America
was for the most part real, and fell apart when their headquarters
fell, whereas the evil centrally run conspiracy pursued by the KGB was
a delusion.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
3JM+eDTFUi2IbLZEKvtQmE/2MxdAM/WkkrzC8VGB
47B66jpqpRjUpKXWJLyGU6TRnUuLnPXCmWOoiM7P0
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
Yes, we know that by the standards of dictators he would be praised - he's a
loser who has to use destruction of other's property to get his way.
> > > Constantinople:
> > >> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
> > >> > interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
> > >
> > > Curly Surmudgeon
> > >> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
> > >
> > > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> > > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to
imprison
> > > him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of
violence,
> > > when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence followed.
>
> José Bové, together with others, disrupted a building site which was going
> to become a MacDonalds. José Bové, with others, flattened four acres of GM
> crops at a research center run by Monsanto.
You mean he's a vandal and a criminal, right?
> Neither action is generally classified as a 'terrorist act', unless one
> considers that as the owners of the damaged items were multi-national
> corporations,
So you're telling us that violence and intimidation are OK if they are
against groups you don't like, right? Asshole.
Michael Price
> --
> James A. Donald:
> > > Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > No James most of them weren't.
>
> So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us his
> story.
Almost all of them. The majority of people in Gitmo were rounded up
by
Afghanis and Pakistanis for rewards.
A specific example is David Hicks, who was never on a battlefield.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me apply
> > > one standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to kill
> > > people like me, and a considerably higher standard to those
> > > suspected of trying to kill enemies of people like me.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > Well I'm not. In fact if anything I want a higher standard of
> > evidence applied to those suspected of trying to kill people like
> > me. Applying low standards of evidence historically has not lead to
> > less killing. In fact in the Soviet Union they applied standards of
> > evidence lower than anywhere else and killing wasn't exactly rare.
>
> In the Soviet Union, the charges were typically "wrecking",
> "speculation", "hoarding", etc - in other words practicing capitalism.
> Since pretty much everyone was in fact guilty of those "crimes", the
> problem was not low standards of evidence,
What nobody got picked for plotting violent counterrevolution?
> Rather the problem was an ideology that interpreted capitalism as
> an evil conspiracy centrally run by a sinister and secretive cabal.
>
> > Similiarly in Central and South America the police imposed very low
> > standards of evidence before beating or killing people. It didn't
> > exactly stop left wing violence.
>
> It did in fact stop left wing violence for the most part once the
> Soviet Union fell
Who cares? Whether the their that kills me wants to take my wallet
or
everyone's hardly matters as my blood runs into some Santiago street
drain.
Michael Price
If by "traditionally supported" you mean supported by habitual State
violence
against those that never did any harm, then yes that's true.
> If he was a Chilean peasant farmer he would be a hero. If Argentinian he
> would be canonised.
If he were a Chilean or Argentinian peasant farmer his income would
come from consensual trade with people who wanted what he produced. As
a French "peasant" his income comes from the State, from legalised
banditry.
>
> >
> > > Constantinople:
> > >> > If this man were innocent of wrongdoing, you would not be nearly so
> > >> > interested in him, nearly so eager to get him into the US.
> > >
> > > Curly Surmudgeon
> > >> If, if, if. What crime has he committed?
> > >
> > > Destroyed a McDonalds, destroyed other people's crops, threatened
> > > assorted people with physical violence. When police sought to imprison
> > > him, they were successfully deterred for a time by threats of violence,
> > > when they eventually snatched him, threats of violence followed.
>
> José Bové, together with others, disrupted a building site which was going
> to become a MacDonalds. José Bové, with others, flattened four acres of GM
> crops at a research center run by Monsanto.
> Neither action is generally classified as a 'terrorist act', unless one
> considers that as the owners of the damaged items were multi-national
> corporations, that fact alone is sufficient to raise the level of
> misdemeanour to one of 'terrorism'.
The threats of violence if he was stopped from committing more
politically
motivated crimes qualify as terrorism.
> As for resisiting attempts to restrain him, or deny him liberty, that does
> not constitute 'terrorism' either.
>
No, attempts to imprison criminals usually don't.
G*rd*n
>>> Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
> "Michael Price"
>> No James most of them weren't.
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
> So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us his
> story.
> ...
Isn't that a bit cynical? Part of the nature of
the exercise is to conceal the names and deeds of
those held there.
brique
G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:dt7te4$pq$1...@reader2.panix.com...
Well James, you are an idiot. Even the Pentagon doesn't try to pretend that
all the detainees were 'captured' on the 'battlefield'. The majority have
been detained by Pakistani security forces in Pakistan. Some even managed to
get themselves 'captured' on the well-known 'battlefields' of The Gambia
and Morocco where they were attacking the US Army.....oh, hang on... well,
where they would have been attacking the US Army if the US Army had actually
been there 'liberating' a 'battlefield' for them to be 'combatants' on, no
doubt.
Some names, none of whom were 'captured on a battlefield' but all of whom
are currently detained in Guatanamo:
Benyam Mohammed : detained in Morocco, transferred to Kabul then to
Guantanamo.
Shaker Aamer : detained Pakistan, transferred to Kabul, then to Guatanamo.
Bisher Al-Rawi : detained in The Gambia, transferred to Guatanamo.
Jamal El-Banna : detained in The Gambia, transferred to Guatanamo
Ahmad Errachidi : detained in Pakistan, transferred to Guatanamo.
But you want their stories too.... here's one.... from the FBI's own
files...
http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/052505/
Apparently the going 'bounty' for handing over these 'terrorists' is $5,000
for a'Taliban' and $20,000 for an 'Al-Queda'.... just give a name, any name
will do, think of some-one you dont particularily like, to the Pakistani
Security and hey presto, nice crisp dollar bills will be yours. No big
surprise that around 75% of the Guantanamo detainess were 'captured' on the
'battlefields' of Pakistan, eh?
Michael Price
outlines but couldn't be bothered to look up the details. After all we
both know that James knows that his contention isn't true, so why
should I both correcting him?
Michael Price
> > > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
> >
>
> dead set against every aspect of the war on terrorism as they have made
> clear time and time again for example just now in the case of Jose
> Bove, and they bring up Bosch and Carriles not hoping to further
> advance the war on terrorism (by adding two more accused terrorists to
> the list of accused terrorists) but hoping to undermine the war on
> terrorism (by using those guys to accuse the US of hypocrisy, double
> standards, whatever).
There is no war on terrorism. US policy is not primarily or even
significantly
carried out to prevent terrorist attacks or destroy terrorist personel,
infrastructure
or capacity. If it were then the US would become increasingly hostile
to, for
instance, Indonesia for sponsoring the terrorist killing of two of it's
citizens
and for covert miltitary support for various "muslim" bombing
campaigns. It does
not. It would also end the war on drugs to defund something like 90%
of
terrorism's budget, it does not. It would make damn sure that Sistani
never got
elected to dog-catcher, let alone President of Iraq, it does not. Face
it there is
no war on terror, it's a furphy, a cypher, a figment of the fevered
imaginations of
those who believe themselves fighting it, a collective delusion, a
rampant, virilent
and vicious meme without any basis in reality and finally it's just not
there. As
for using these guys to accuse the US of hypocrisy, double standards
etc. well
they are a government, what do you expect them to do all day?
>
> Leftists want to bring people like Jose Bove with a demonstrated record
> of violence into the US, in the hopes that they will commit violence on
> American soil against Americans. Leftists bring up the matter of Posada
> and Carriles in this context in order to further the leftist cause of
> bringing violent criminals like Jose Bove into the US. When leftists
> bring up Bosch and Carriles in the current context, their purpose is to
> liberate and empower terrorists.
Michael Price
> "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> news:43EC7690...@columbia-center.org...
> > News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
> >
> > [How hard can it be to include the diacritical marks in a
> > name like José Bové?--DC]
> >
> > *****
> >
> > French Activist Detained at JFK, Deported
> > By VERENA DOBNIK
> >
> > NEW YORK -- An anti-globalization activist who was sent back
> > to France after arriving at an airport here accused the U.S.
> > government Thursday of conspiring against his cause and
> > trying to protect big business.
> >
> > Jose Bove, best known for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant
> > in France in 1999, arrived Wednesday at John F. Kennedy
> > International Airport, planning to speak at an event
> > sponsored by Cornell University, but was denied entry by
> > customs officials.
>
> Glad to see that we're finally stopping criminals from entering the country.
A pity you didn't start when Bush was out of the country.
> Now let's see if we can make that a trend, especially with our southern
> border.
>
> > Bove was not eligible to enter the U.S. under a visa waiver
> > program, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman
> > Janet Rapaport said. She said she could not discuss why.
>
> The fact that he's a violent criminal should be plainly obvious.
>
> > Bove, 52, had planned to attend a gathering of farmers,
> > labor advocates and academics in Manhattan Thursday and
> > Friday, participating in such forums as "Fighting the
> > Commodification of Food" and "The Struggle Against Monsanto
> > in Europe."
>
> There are plenty of kooks already on the streets of Manhattans - the locals
> won't bemoan the absence of another one.
Are you kidding? Anyone who would participate in a "Fighting the
Commodification of Food" is a far bigger kook than the tinfoil hat
crowd. I mean food's been a commodity since about 5,000 BC by
my reckoning, so you'd have to be far beyond the usual nutter to think
you need to or can fight it's commodification.
>
> > U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto grows genetically modified
> > soy, a key ingredient in many packaged foods. The U.S.
> > accounts for more than half of all biotech crops grown
> > worldwide.
>
> Glad to hear we are still #1 in some useful and beneficial technology.
>
> > "This is an international struggle," Bove said in a
> > telephone interview
>
> Spoken like a typical commie.
>
> > Thursday from his farm in southern
> > France. "The American government is fed up with this fight
> > because such companies are losing a lot of money."
>
> Then what's the worry? Companies tend to drop products when they can't make
> any money marketing them.
>
> > "The fact that they don't want me to come in now is a new
> > way for the Bush administration to build coalitions against
> > us," he said.
>
> No, it shows that the system eventually catches up, albeit slowly.
>
> > "Evidently, the Bush administration is behind this
> > decision," said George Naylor, president of the National
> > Family Farm Coalition. "No one would think of fearing Jose's
> > presence in this country except multinational corporations
> > with a profit motive."
>
> How about people who franchise, work, or patronize McDonalds?
>
> > Last November, Bove was sentenced to four months in prison
> > for destroying a field of genetically modified corn planted
> > by an American seed company in southern France in July 2004.
>
> What happened? Did he escape, or did they let his ass our early after being
> everyone's cell-bitch for the night?
>
> > NEW YORK (Reuters) -- French farmer Jose Bove, a prominent
> > protester against globalization and junk food, said on
> > Thursday he was denied entry to the United States and
> > speculated large corporations were behind the move.
>
> Whether they did or not was irrelevant. He's a convicted violent criminal,
> and the US had the right to refuse him entry.
>
> > "They took my passport from me and said 'You're not allowed
> > to come in for all the things you've done over the years,
> > for speaking out,'" Bove said from France in a telephone
> > interview.
>
> Funny how engaging in criminal activities eventually comes back to you.
>
Funny too how the immigration officials allegedly told him it was for
"speaking out" and not for vandalism or other criminal behaviour.
Usually
the servants of the State tow the official line when excluding people.
> > A French foreign ministry spokesman said Bove made a
> > "mistake in understanding" when he responded to a question
> > on an immigration form by saying he did not have a criminal
> > record.
>
> You mean he lied, right?
>
> > "The burden is on the visitor to prove that he or she is
> > admissible. In this case, Mr. Bove did not meet that
> > requirement," Rapaport said without elaborating.
>
> Apparently not.
>
> > Sean Sweeney, director of Cornell's labor institute, told
> > the conference's opening session in reference to Bove's
> > entry denial, "This speaks volumes about where the United
> > States is in terms of free speech."
>
> Uh, Bove wasn't barred for free speech. He was barred for being a violent
> criminal.
>
> > When asked why he felt he was denied entry to the United
> > States, Bove told Reuters, "I think the big companies that
> > want globalization do not want discussions that are not in
> > favor of globalization and free trade."
>
> Loser can't admit he's a criminal, right?
>
> > Later, he told the conference via telephone, "It was very
> > clear that they wanted to tell me that I was not allowed to
> > come inside the U.S. to make links with people in the U.S.
> > who are fighting against globalization."
> >
> > In December, Hong Kong denied Bove entry to attend a World
> > Trade Organization meeting.
>
> Hmm, seems they don't like criminals either.
Curly Surmudgeon
And not a one of the denyers have posted any evidence, only assertions.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother.
-- Regards, Curly
constan...@gmail.com
Michael Price wrote:
> constan...@gmail.com wrote:
> > James A. Donald wrote:
> > > --
> > > On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:29:13 -0800, Dan Clore
> > > > Well, the U.S. harbors terrorists like Louis Posada Carriles and
> > > > Orlando Bosch, who bombed an airplane, killing 73 people.
> > >
> > > According to a show trial court.
> >
> > If Carriles and Bosch were accused of terrorism against the US or
> > Israel, leftists would be championing their cause. In fact leftists are
> > dead set against every aspect of the war on terrorism as they have made
> > clear time and time again for example just now in the case of Jose
> > Bove, and they bring up Bosch and Carriles not hoping to further
> > advance the war on terrorism (by adding two more accused terrorists to
> > the list of accused terrorists) but hoping to undermine the war on
> > terrorism (by using those guys to accuse the US of hypocrisy, double
> > standards, whatever).
>
> There is no war on terrorism.
An exaggeration.
> US policy is not primarily or even
> significantly
> carried out to prevent terrorist attacks or destroy terrorist personel,
> infrastructure
> or capacity. If it were then the US would become increasingly hostile
> to, for
> instance, Indonesia for sponsoring the terrorist killing of two of it's
> citizens
> and for covert miltitary support for various "muslim" bombing
> campaigns. It does
> not.
Everything that the government does is impure and compromised and in
conflict with other things the government is doing (like in this case
the war on drugs) and in conflict with various commitments (like
ongoing relationships with foreign governments). It doesn't mean the
government's not doing it or is not trying to do it given the
constraints.
I'm not a supporter of the government's war on terror. I'd be happier
if the government stopped everything, pulled back all its troops, and
in fact I'd be happier with open borders and airline security left
entirely up to the whim of the airlines (with, however, zero legal
protection against lawsuits if an airline's plane is hijacked and used
in a terrorist attack). I think the harm of stopping innocent traffic
outweighs the benefit of stopping terrorists.
But neither do I go so far as to think the government is not engaged in
a war on terror. I'm not impressed by the fact that the government
isn't doing what you might recommend or what I might recommend.
Michael Price
The litmus test is Indonesia. If you're at war with muslim
terrorists
instead of simply using the excuse you'd have nothing to do with the
TNI.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > > > Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
"Michael Price"
> > > No James most of them weren't.
James A. Donald:
> > So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us
> > his
> > story.
"Michael Price"
> Almost all of them. The majority of people in Gitmo were rounded
> up
> by Afghanis and Pakistanis for rewards. A specific example is David
> Hicks, who was never on a battlefield.
David Hicks prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim al-Austraili"
According to the US government he was on the battlefield rather
regularly, and was captured in a fairly famous battle that was
extensively reported from both sides of the war.
According to the US government:
# in November 1999 Hicks traveled to Pakistan, where he
joined the paramilitary Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army
of the Faithful).
# Hicks trained for two months at a Lashkar-e-Toiba camp in
Pakistan, where he received weapons training, and that during
2000 he served with a Lashkar-e-Toiba group near the
Pakistan-Kashmir.
# in January 2001 Hicks traveled to Afghanistan, then under
the control of the Taliban regime, where he presented a letter
of introduction from Lashkar-e-Toiba to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,
a senior al-Qaeda member, and was given the alias "Mohammed
Dawood".
# he was sent to al-Qaeda's al-Farouq training camp outside
Kandahar, where he trained for eight weeks, receiving further
weapons training as well as training with land mines and
explosives.
# he did a further seven-week course at al-Farouq, during
which he studied marksmanship, ambush, camouflage and
intelligence techniques.
# at Osama bin Laden's request, Hicks translated some al-Qaeda
training materials from Arabic into English.
# in June 2001, on the instructions of Mohammed Atef, an
al-Qaeda military commander, Hicks went to another training
camp at Tarnak Farm, where he studied "urban tactics,"
including the use of assault and sniper rifles, rappelling,
kidnapping and assassination techniques.
# in August Hicks went to Kabul, where he studied information
collection and intelligence, as well as Islamic theology
including the doctrines of jihad and martyrdom as understood
through al-Qaeda's Islamist interpretation of Islam.
# in September 2001 Hicks traveled to Pakistan and was there
at the time of the September 11 attacks on the United States,
which he saw on television.
he returned to Afghanistan in anticipation of the attack by
the United States and its allies on the Taliban regime, which
was sheltering Osama bin Laden.
# on returning to Kabul, Hicks was assigned by Mohammed Atef
to the defence of Kandahar, and that he joined a group of
mixed al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters at Kandahar airport.
# at the end of October, however, Hicks and his party
traveled north to join in the fighting against the forces of
the U.S. and its allies.
# after arriving in Konduz on 9 November 2001, he joined a
group which included John Walker Lindh (the "American
Taliban"). This group was engaged in combat against Coalition
forces, and during this fighting he was captured by Coalition
The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured while
fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of terror
and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent that
they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the capture
of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at the
time.
In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
government's account of his activities, and their account of his
capture.
James A. Donald:
> > > > Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me
> > > > apply one standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to
> > > > kill people like me, and a considerably higher standard to
> > > > those suspected of trying to kill enemies of people like me.
"Michael Price"
> > > Well I'm not. In fact if anything I want a higher standard of
> > > evidence applied to those suspected of trying to kill people
> > > like me. Applying low standards of evidence historically has
> > > not lead to less killing. In fact in the Soviet Union they
> > > applied standards of evidence lower than anywhere else and
> > > killing wasn't exactly rare.
James A. Donald:
> > In the Soviet Union, the charges were typically "wrecking",
> > "speculation", "hoarding", etc - in other words practicing
> > capitalism. Since pretty much everyone was in fact guilty of those
> > "crimes", the problem was not low standards of evidence,
"Michael Price"
> What nobody got picked for plotting violent counterrevolution?
Some people were charged with plotting violent revolution, but this
was fairly exceptional.
Usually someone would be charged with "wrecking" or somesuch (which
they were usually actually guilty of) and then tortured into
confessing that they engaged in wrecking because Trotsky told them to
do it. (The vast right wing conspiracy) They would also be tortured
into naming their co-conspirators. Of course though the "wrecking"
was real, their co-conspirators did not exist, nor were they acting on
Trotsky's instructions. Sometimes the process would be repeated with
the alleged co-conspirators, but obviously this process would have
eventually resulted in everyone in the entire soviet union being
arrested, so usually they checked out the alleged co conspirators
first for evidence that they too were actually guilty of "wrecking" or
whatever. (As they usually were)
If one's world view is that socialism would work find barring
deliberate malice, the interrogators found plenty of evidence proving
what they wished to believe. Wherever socialism failed, they would
find someone responsible, and make him say he acted with evil intent,
as part of the vast conspiracy - observe G*rd*n's post upthread "You
can assume they are in communication".
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
kfkgLjDMso+KdbBm1rDwpFBaDpkAbV+HE7ggZX9V
4z9lu+xiPGda17I43wZ2xNxtxK0FQzfVlTaT9GcVH
Michael Price
anything
about this guy at all you know he's served time for destruction of
private property
and that his agenda is government coercion in favour of him and people
like him.
So why defend him?
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> >>> Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
"Michael Price"
> >> No James most of them weren't.
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
> > So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us
> > his story.
G*rd*n
> Isn't that a bit cynical? Part of the nature of the exercise is to
> conceal the names and deeds of those held there.
Everyone in Gautanamo has been named, and the US version of his deeds
and capture made public.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
3StIbqH00nmxkIIqoc+tOEcM19hFh6OJTdthRzqL
4U6aENtTIWqsUo5jM4vnQr0tUvRhSoTxvRr9dCZPR
Michael Price
By served you mean what exactly? He didn't go anywere near any
fighting.
Hicks was nowhere near a battleground when he was captured because
they didn't trust him to fight, and they were right. There is zero
indication
that he ever hurt anyone.
> The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured while
> fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of terror
> and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent that
> they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
> true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
>
Hardly.
> The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
> al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the capture
> of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at the
> time.
So because there was a battle somewhere in the same region the
US story has to be true?
>
> In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
> Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
> finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
> government's account of his activities, and their account of his
> capture.
Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > > > Furthermore, I am perfectly comfortable when people like me
> > > > > apply one standard of evidence to those suspected of trying to
> > > > > kill people like me, and a considerably higher standard to
> > > > > those suspected of trying to kill enemies of people like me.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > > > Well I'm not. In fact if anything I want a higher standard of
> > > > evidence applied to those suspected of trying to kill people
> > > > like me. Applying low standards of evidence historically has
> > > > not lead to less killing. In fact in the Soviet Union they
> > > > applied standards of evidence lower than anywhere else and
> > > > killing wasn't exactly rare.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > In the Soviet Union, the charges were typically "wrecking",
> > > "speculation", "hoarding", etc - in other words practicing
> > > capitalism. Since pretty much everyone was in fact guilty of those
> > > "crimes", the problem was not low standards of evidence,
>
> "Michael Price"
> > What nobody got picked for plotting violent counterrevolution?
>
> Some people were charged with plotting violent revolution, but this
> was fairly exceptional.
Nevertheless it happened.
>
> Usually someone would be charged with "wrecking" or somesuch (which
> they were usually actually guilty of)
Well no, "wrecking" was practically nonexistant. Something had to be
made up to explain why the cornicopia of goods wasn't flowing as fast
as it was claimed it would. The only "wreckers" were the central
planners.
Stan de SD
"Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1140314426....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> James A. Donald wrote:
> > --
>
Whether he actually fired a rifle or not doesn't mean shit. He was clearly
in the service of an army of enemy combatants, was well aware of what they
were doing, and supported it. Amazing what type of idiotic contortions
leftoids such as yourself go through to avoid dealing with reality.
> > The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured while
> > fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of terror
> > and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent that
> > they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
> > true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
> >
> Hardly.
Just because you say so? You're either igorant, gullible, or have a huge
fucking chip on your shoulder - which one is it?
> > The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
> > al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the capture
> > of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at the
> > time.
>
> So because there was a battle somewhere in the same region the
> US story has to be true?
So your reasoning is what? Everything that the US says must be false, but
every claim of innocence by some Islamofascist-sympathizing nut-cake is the
gospel truth?
> > In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
> > Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
> > finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
> > government's account of his activities, and their account of his
> > capture.
>
> Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought.
Doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if he actually picked up a weapon
or not. If you're actively supporting an enemy war effort as a member of
their armed organization, you're technically a "combatant" as far as the
Geneva Accords and the UCMJ are concerned.
> > and then tortured into
> > confessing that they engaged in wrecking because Trotsky told them to
> > do it. (The vast right wing conspiracy) They would also be tortured
> > into naming their co-conspirators. Of course though the "wrecking"
> > was real, their co-conspirators did not exist, nor were they acting on
> > Trotsky's instructions. Sometimes the process would be repeated with
> > the alleged co-conspirators, but obviously this process would have
> > eventually resulted in everyone in the entire soviet union being
> > arrested, so usually they checked out the alleged co conspirators
> > first for evidence that they too were actually guilty of "wrecking" or
> > whatever. (As they usually were)
> >
> > If one's world view is that socialism would work find barring
> > deliberate malice, the interrogators found plenty of evidence proving
> > what they wished to believe. Wherever socialism failed, they would
> > find someone responsible, and make him say he acted with evil intent,
> > as part of the vast conspiracy - observe G*rd*n's post upthread "You
> > can assume they are in communication".
Precisely because left-wing types such as G*r*n think that "good intentions"
(however they define them) alone are the key to economic success.
James A. Donald
On 18 Feb 2006 17:33:35 -0800, "Michael Price" <nini...@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> The litmus test is Indonesia. If you're at war with muslim
> terrorists instead of simply using the excuse you'd have nothing to
> do with the TNI.
The government of Indonesia, like the government of Saudi Arabia,
walks on both sides of the street and talks out of both sides of its
mouth on terror. To the extent that the democratically elected
Indonesian government actually does assist in the war on terror,
investigates, pursues, and imprisons terrorists, it is necessary for
the west to engage with it, cooperate with it, and support it. To the
extent that it supports the terrorists, it is necessary to for the
west to threaten it, harass it, and make war upon it. The governments
of the west are doing both these things at once, both supporting the
Indonesian armed forces, and also threatening the Indonesian armed
forces and from time to time engaging in warlike acts against them.
Western governments engaged in the war on terror pursue a dual policy
on Indonesia, because Indonesia pursues a dual policy on terror.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
4FMyJ7B5U+tlDt7j0XTLD2MxrmDIqLljxCXmdhgI
4UKJvlheB9hkfJVn4lv6hrqaQqd7XzasVO/HXhItU
Michael Price
It's hardly clear that he was doing anything but trying to find a way
to run.
> Amazing what type of idiotic contortions
> leftoids such as yourself go through to avoid dealing with reality.
>
It's amazing what type of idiotic contortions morons like you will go
to
to avoid admitting that you're wrong and that not only "leftoids" say
so.
> > > The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured while
> > > fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of terror
> > > and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent that
> > > they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
> > > true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
> > >
> > Hardly.
>
> Just because you say so?
No just because the source is the US government, and therefore
unreliable.
> You're either igorant, gullible, or have a huge
> fucking chip on your shoulder - which one is it?
>
The facts are that there is no evidence that Hicks was ever fought.
So why
is he being held as an enemy combatant?
> > > The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
> > > al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the capture
> > > of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at the
> > > time.
> >
> > So because there was a battle somewhere in the same region the
> > US story has to be true?
>
> So your reasoning is what? Everything that the US says must be false, but
> every claim of innocence by some Islamofascist-sympathizing nut-cake is the
> gospel truth?
No my reasoning is that James's spurious connecting of the Lindh and
Hicks
is bullshit.
>
> > > In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
> > > Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
> > > finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
> > > government's account of his activities, and their account of his
> > > capture.
> >
> > Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought.
>
> Doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if he actually picked up a weapon
> or not. If you're actively supporting an enemy war effort as a member of
> their armed organization, you're technically a "combatant" as far as the
> Geneva Accords and the UCMJ are concerned.
>
But there's no evidence that he ever did. Deal with it.
Michael Price
Oh please. It's been literally years since Western nations shot at
Indonesian
troops and then it was on the border of West Timor. This incident in
no way
either convinced them to stop supporting terrorism or remove their
ability to do
so. Since then the TNI has backed at least one terrorist attack that
killed 2
Americans and yet is getting military aid. Face it War on Terror?
Never happened.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > > > > > Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
"Michael Price"
> > > > > No James most of them weren't.
James A. Donald:
> > > > So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and
> > > > tell us his
> > > > story.
"Michael Price"
> > > A specific example is David Hicks, who was never on a
> > > battlefield.
James A. Donald:
> > David Hicks prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim al-Austraili"
> >
> > According to the US government he was on the battlefield rather
> > regularly, and was captured in a fairly famous battle that was
> > extensively reported from both sides of the war.
"Michael Price"
> By served you mean what exactly? He didn't go anywere near any
> fighting.
There was a battle, resulting a big bunch of prisoners. He was in
that bunch. That is not proof to peacetime standards, but in war,
that is as good as you are likely to get.
> Hicks was nowhere near a battleground when he was captured because
> they didn't trust him to fight, and they were right.
Well that is what you say, but the US government says the other, that
he was part of the big batch of prisoners caught on the battlefield.
As to who is telling the truth - well "Abu Muslim al-Austraili"
himself tells us he went to Afghanistan to end "Western Jewish
Domination" and establish Sharia law over the entire world, so let us
just lock him up and throw away the key.
> There is zero indication that he ever hurt anyone.
He is accused of trying very hard to hurt people, and if we take his
own statements seriously, he was engaged in Jihad against "Western
Jewish domination" and went to Afghanistan for the purpose of pursing
that jihad.
> Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought
When you capture someone on the battlefield, it is hard to say whether
that particular person fought. One can, however, be pretty sure he
was there to fight - so let us detain him as a POW until the war on
terror ends - which may be quite some time.
James A. Donald:
> > > > In the Soviet Union, the charges were typically "wrecking",
> > > > "speculation", "hoarding", etc - in other words practicing
> > > > capitalism. Since pretty much everyone was in fact guilty of
> > > > those "crimes", the problem was not low standards of evidence,
"Michael Price"
> Well no, "wrecking" was practically nonexistant.
"Wrecking" is deviating from the plan, or pursuing an interpretation
of the plan that turns out to conflict with someone else's
interpretation of the plan. It was therefore universal and
omnipresent, a necessary and unavoidable part of socialism, which
results in all those subject to the power of socialists necessarily
and unavoidably committing acts that result in them being defined as
criminals and capitalists, for the plan can never be wrong, therefore
when everything goes to hell, the planned must be wrong. (A similar
situation occurred in Informix shortly before their stock crashed.
But Informix could only fire its best people, while socialists are apt
to execute them.)
The central planning committee benevolently commands that everything
shall be lovely. By and by, it becomes apparent that everything is
not lovely, that in fact everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
The central planning committee is deeply shocked and outraged by this
terrible outcome. Evidently its commands have not been obeyed! It
then benevolently sends for the secret police to detect and punish the
disobedient in order to accomplish its benevolent plan for making
everything lovely.
> Something had to be made up to explain why the cornicopia of goods
> wasn't flowing as fast as it was claimed it would. The only
> "wreckers" were the central planners.
Well of course that was true, yet there were in fact people who had
not obeyed the central plan, sometimes because the plan was unclear,
or self contradictory, or indeed entirely incoherent, sometimes
because the plan was not in fact practical. The planner would
overcommit resources, each resource being assigned numerous goals,
each of which had priority over all the others, and then tell people
to work it out between themselves, delegating the details to the
workers soviets. Chaos and fingerpointing ensued, giving them plenty
of guilty people to arrest.
Necessarily the plan takes the form of commanding certain
accomplishments, accomplishments that seem to plausibly achievable,
rather than a detailed blueprint of how to accomplish them.
Inevitably, many of these are not in fact accomplished, and each
failure causes other failures.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
vxcZIBmzMgGtJgB9IzfkdfpsqxDc7aLQf39h/T6K
444ZvqGi0mfQA/qn5a2opeG7WpyasFnTQvdcFC+Et
Stan de SD
You mean when it looked like he might actually be caught, right?
> > Amazing what type of idiotic contortions
> > leftoids such as yourself go through to avoid dealing with reality.
> >
> It's amazing what type of idiotic contortions
Michael want a cracker?
> > > > The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured
while
> > > > fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of
terror
> > > > and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent
that
> > > > they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
> > > > true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
> > > >
> > > Hardly.
> >
> > Just because you say so?
>
> No just because the source is the US government, and therefore
> unreliable.
Your standard for everything - and I suppose that your buds the Taliban and
al-Qaeda would never lie, right?
You're a fucking kook, Mike. How long has it been since you fell on your
head again?
> > You're either igorant, gullible, or have a huge
> > fucking chip on your shoulder - which one is it?
> >
> The facts are that there is no evidence that Hicks was ever fought.
> So why is he being held as an enemy combatant?
Because he was a willing member of their organization. The guy who plans the
robbery and drives the getaway car is just as guilty as the one who walks in
the bank with the gun in his hand and the stocking cap on his head -
something you refuse to acknowledge.
> > > > The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
> > > > al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the
capture
> > > > of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at
the
> > > > time.
> > >
> > > So because there was a battle somewhere in the same region the
> > > US story has to be true?
> >
> > So your reasoning is what? Everything that the US says must be false,
but
> > every claim of innocence by some Islamofascist-sympathizing nut-cake is
the
> > gospel truth?
>
> No my reasoning is that James's spurious connecting of the Lindh and
> Hicks is bullshit.
My reasoning is that James has done a lot more to substantiate his POV than
you have yours. All you do is foam and flail...
> > > > In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
> > > > Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
> > > > finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
> > > > government's account of his activities, and their account of his
> > > > capture.
> > >
> > > Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought.
> >
> > Doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if he actually picked up a
weapon
> > or not. If you're actively supporting an enemy war effort as a member of
> > their armed organization, you're technically a "combatant" as far as the
> > Geneva Accords and the UCMJ are concerned.
> >
> But there's no evidence that he ever did. Deal with it.
Once again, for Clueless Mike - it doesn't make a bit of difference whether
he picked up a gun or not. He was a willing member of their organization,
trained with them, aided, abetteed, and otherwise supported their cause.
You're not real bright about what "complicity" and "conspiracy" mean in real
life...
James A. Donald
"Michael Price"
> > > The litmus test is Indonesia. If you're at war with muslim
> > > terrorists instead of simply using the excuse you'd have nothing
> > > to do with the TNI.
James A. Donald:
> > The government of Indonesia, like the government of Saudi Arabia,
> > walks on both sides of the street and talks out of both sides of
> > its mouth on terror. To the extent that the democratically elected
> > Indonesian government actually does assist in the war on terror,
> > investigates, pursues, and imprisons terrorists, it is necessary
> > for the west to engage with it, cooperate with it, and support it.
> > To the extent that it supports the terrorists, it is necessary to
> > for the west to threaten it, harass it, and make war upon it. The
> > governments of the west are doing both these things at once, both
> > supporting the Indonesian armed forces, and also threatening the
> > Indonesian armed forces and from time to time engaging in warlike
> > acts against them. Western governments engaged in the war on
> > terror pursue a dual policy on Indonesia, because Indonesia
> > pursues a dual policy on terror.
"Michael Price"
> Oh please. It's been literally years since Western nations shot at
> Indonesian troops
A little under four years, which does not seem so very long ago to me.
> and then it was on the border of West Timor.
There were several such incidents near the border. How many do you
want? Last time around it got rather close to war. You seem to
object fairly strongly to war in Iraq. What would you say if the west
went to war against Indonesia?
Your argument sounds rather the like the standard anti american
criticism: If anything bad happens anywhere in the world, it is
America's fault for intervening - oops, America did not intervene? OK,
it is America's fault for not intervening. Thus America was at fault
in Bosnia for intervening, and in Rwanda for not intervening.
> This incident in no way either convinced them to stop supporting
> terrorism or remove their ability to do so.
They continue to support terrorism, and continue to oppose terrorism.
Arguably their behavior has improved substantially
> Since then the TNI has backed at least one terrorist attack that
> killed 2 Americans and yet is getting military aid.
The indonesians have been acquitted in this incident before an
American federal grand jury. I grant you they are still soft on
terror, but they are not that soft.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
UcG6qLnw8S0a2WRIvrMDjQafyiV52IOagEDDRlxq
4t0pkHbjXai8w6Rn/mAB9rrWMcU9eIQArxp6CjGm7
Stan de SD
"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:g02gv1toohlgtu3ip...@4ax.com...
> Your argument sounds rather the like the standard anti american
> criticism: If anything bad happens anywhere in the world, it is
> America's fault for intervening - oops, America did not intervene? OK,
> it is America's fault for not intervening. Thus America was at fault
> in Bosnia for intervening, and in Rwanda for not intervening.
That's our Michael - a card-carrying member of the blame-America kook
contingency. The comments below explain him quite nicely...
===============================================
(following courtesy of Jim Alder:)
In 2003 a sociologist from Rutgers University named Ted Goertzel
wrote a paper in which he offered some insight into the psyche
of the left. Interesting reading:
In the 1970s, Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter
administered Thematic Apperception Tests to a large sample of
"new left" radicals (Roots of Radicalism, 1982). They found that
activists were characterized by weakened self-esteem, injured
narcissism and paranoid tendencies. They were preoccupied with
power and attracted to radical ideologies that offered clear and
unambiguous answers to their questions. . . .
The unwillingness to offer alternatives reveals a lack of
self-confidence and self-esteem. If they offered their own
policy ideas they would be vulnerable to criticism. They would
run the risk that their ideas would fail, or would not seem
persuasive to others. This is especially difficult for anti-
capitalists after the fall of the Soviet Union. It has also been
difficult in the war against terrorism because Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden are such unsympathetic figures.
Psychologically, it is easier to blame America for not finding a
solution than it is to put one's own ideas on the line.
===============================================
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > > > after arriving in Konduz on 9 November 2001, he [David Hicks,
> > > > who prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim al-Austraili"] joined a
> > > > Taliban"). This group was engaged in combat against Coalition
> > > > forces, and during this fighting he was captured by Coalition
Michael Price
> > > Hicks was nowhere near a battleground when he was captured
> > > because they didn't trust him to fight, and they were right.
> > > There is zero indication that he ever hurt anyone.
Stan de SD
> > Whether he actually fired a rifle or not doesn't mean shit. He was
> > clearly in the service of an army of enemy combatants, was well
> > aware of what they were doing, and supported it.
Michael Price
> It's hardly clear that he was doing anything but trying to find a
> way to run.
If he was trying to find a way to run he would have headed away from
Afghanistan when he saw the two towers fall, instead of heading into
Afghanistan.
He intended to make war on "Jews and the West", whether he actually
managed to or not.
Not to make war on "America". Not "Jews". To make war on "Jews and
the West" - which necessarily includes making war on the land of his
birth, whose protection he now seeks - Australia. Should he be
released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia - to make war upon
it.
He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried there,
never to see his homeland again.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
aVqg51eGTvsb2HM/lTg95xXrwup7ryTr4Q/F8RMe
4afxvc1h8iWx0cK39Qh0SANlP4UQYw8BedHgJpzTh
brique
But then the same should also apply to you James. You too seek the downfall
of western civilisation, the end of 'democracy', the destruction of the USA,
don't you?
After all, isn't that what any 'anarchist' desires, regardless of what form
of social organisation they desire to see replace the current forms?
If you were asked the standard immigration questions concerning your beliefs
regarding the US State and political system, shouldn't your honest answers
put you in Guantanamo?
constan...@gmail.com
If someone seeks the end of slavery, does he therefore seek the
downfall of Western civilization? Short answer: no.
Similarly for what anarchists seek.
> After all, isn't that what any 'anarchist' desires, regardless of what form
> of social organisation they desire to see replace the current forms?
> If you were asked the standard immigration questions concerning your beliefs
> regarding the US State and political system, shouldn't your honest answers
> put you in Guantanamo?
No. For one thing, it wasn't by answering questionnaires that the
inmates of Guantanamo got there.
brique
<constan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140345522.0...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
What's up, James lost his voice again? Short answer, yes, normal service is
resumed, James spouts his usual shit and Constant Constance gets to do the
clean-up routine. Don't you ever get bored? Wouldn't you really like to be
your own voice?
>
> Similarly for what anarchists seek.
if, as he claims, James is an anarchist, it certainly does mean seeking the
overthrow of western democracy, which makes him a terrorist and thus liable
to the same treatment he finds so laudable when dished out to others. I
trust he will be happy.
>
> > After all, isn't that what any 'anarchist' desires, regardless of what
form
> > of social organisation they desire to see replace the current forms?
> > If you were asked the standard immigration questions concerning your
beliefs
> > regarding the US State and political system, shouldn't your honest
answers
> > put you in Guantanamo?
>
> No. For one thing, it wasn't by answering questionnaires that the
> inmates of Guantanamo got there.
Nope, the majority were 'sold' by the Northern alliance to Pakistani
security who then handed them over to the USA. The USA, ignorant as ever
about events outside their own limited horizons, wouldn't know a Taliban
from a Khandahar road-sweeper, or an Al-Queda operative from a Punjabi
punka-wallah but seem happy to pay thousands of dollars anyway to anyone who
claims they can. And what do they get for their money, prisoners who deny
being terrorists, as most are plainly not any such thing, but never mind,
their denial becomes the proof after all, a terrorist would deny it,
wouldn't they? But then, so would some-one who is not a terrorist, and the
US view is that those who deny it longest are probably the most dangerous
terrorists of all. Kafka would be proud, if he could stop laughing long
enough.
The saddest thought of all is that it will not be long before such 'logic'
extends into the rest of the US legal system, as such matters generally do.
Some black youths have committed murder, therefore lock them all up, just in
case one of them is such a killer.
Everyone commits a parking violation at some point, so why not fine everyone
now and save time and expense processing all that paperwork later?
And James ? Well, he argues for an end to democracy, he may well be one of
those kooks like McVie or those other militia types, he has protested about
government actions towards such people, let's lock him up as well, just in
case he is such a person, it could save lives! Couldn't it?
>
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
news:114034062...@eunomia.uk.clara.net...
Based on your incoherency as seen in Usenet, shouldn't your honest answers
put you in a home for the mentally challenged? Like a primate, you seem to
have learned the motions of putting words together by rote, but the ability
to convey some coherent idea is still beyond your grasp.
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
So you think we're hanging on to people and spending millions to keep them
locked down when they have nothing to do with the conflict? Like a typical
Lefty Liberal, your accusations aren't even based on logic - you're just
offering up anything that sounds momentarily plausible in your feeble mind,
throwing it against the wall, and hoping it will stick.
constan...@gmail.com
Of all the stupid criticisms you could make of someone, that has to be
one of the most mind-numbinbly stupid criticisms. You are criticizing
me for replying to a post that was not in reply to me. And yet you do
the same thing all the time. Everyone does. If people did not reply to
posts that did not reply to them, then every Usenet thread would have
exactly two participants, which is evidently not the case.
Stan de SD
<constan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140380811....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
In case you haven't noticed, brique is a bit of an intellectual lightweight.
Michael Price
Americans.
> > > Amazing what type of idiotic contortions
> > > leftoids such as yourself go through to avoid dealing with reality.
> > >
> > It's amazing what type of idiotic contortions
>
> Michael want a cracker?
>
Well there's an intelligent comment.
> > > > > The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured
> while
> > > > > fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of
> terror
> > > > > and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent
> that
> > > > > they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story is
> > > > > true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
> > > > >
> > > > Hardly.
> > >
> > > Just because you say so?
> >
> > No just because the source is the US government, and therefore
> > unreliable.
>
> Your standard for everything - and I suppose that your buds the Taliban and
> al-Qaeda would never lie, right?
>
Fuck off asshole, when have I ever indicated anything but contempt
for either?
> You're a fucking kook, Mike. How long has it been since you fell on your
> head again?
Because I don't believe anything the proven liars of the US military
say I'm a kook?
That's rich coming from you.
>
> > > You're either igorant, gullible, or have a huge
> > > fucking chip on your shoulder - which one is it?
> > >
> > The facts are that there is no evidence that Hicks was ever fought.
> > So why is he being held as an enemy combatant?
>
> Because he was a willing member of their organization.
That's not being a combatant, even if he was still willing when the
war
started and all evidence says he wasn't.
> The guy who plans the
> robbery and drives the getaway car is just as guilty as the one who walks in
> the bank with the gun in his hand and the stocking cap on his head -
> something you refuse to acknowledge.
>
But he neither planned nor executed any plans against the invading
forces,
that's what you refuse to acknowledge. Of course if he did then
they're welcome
to try him. Strange they don't..
> > > > > The battle in which the US claims to have captured "Abu Muslim
> > > > > al-Austraili" really did happen, and really did result in the
> capture
> > > > > of a huge number of al-Qaeda operatives, as both sides reported at
> the
> > > > > time.
> > > >
> > > > So because there was a battle somewhere in the same region the
> > > > US story has to be true?
> > >
> > > So your reasoning is what? Everything that the US says must be false,
> but
> > > every claim of innocence by some Islamofascist-sympathizing nut-cake is
> the
> > > gospel truth?
> >
> > No my reasoning is that James's spurious connecting of the Lindh and
> > Hicks is bullshit.
>
> My reasoning is that James has done a lot more to substantiate his POV than
> you have yours. All you do is foam and flail...
>
What he's pointed out that there was a battle where Lindh was taken
prisoner
and therefore Hicks who was obviously not lot of prisoners must have
fought?
You're the flailer.
> > > > > In Hicks letters to home he said that his training in Pakistan and
> > > > > Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is
> > > > > finished, so we live under Muslim law again" - which supports the US
> > > > > government's account of his activities, and their account of his
> > > > > capture.
> > > >
> > > > Their account of his capture doesn't say that he ever fought.
> > >
> > > Doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if he actually picked up a
> weapon
> > > or not. If you're actively supporting an enemy war effort as a member of
> > > their armed organization, you're technically a "combatant" as far as the
> > > Geneva Accords and the UCMJ are concerned.
> > >
> > But there's no evidence that he ever did. Deal with it.
>
> Once again, for Clueless Mike - it doesn't make a bit of difference whether
> he picked up a gun or not. He was a willing member of their organization,
> trained with them, aided, abetteed, and otherwise supported their cause.
>
What did he do that abetted them? Training with them clearly doesn't
help
them, actually it hinders them as it takes resources from them that so
far have
done them no good.
> You're not real bright about what "complicity" and "conspiracy" mean in real
> life...
You're not real bright in general. Conspiracy would require an act
to advance
the illegal purpose and fighting in another countries civil war is not
illegal, therefore
training to do it isn't either.
Michael Price
> --
> James A. Donald:
> > > > > after arriving in Konduz on 9 November 2001, he [David Hicks,
> > > > > who prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim al-Austraili"] joined a
> > > > > group which included John Walker Lindh (the "American
> > > > > Taliban"). This group was engaged in combat against Coalition
> > > > > forces, and during this fighting he was captured by Coalition
>
> Michael Price
> > > > Hicks was nowhere near a battleground when he was captured
> > > > because they didn't trust him to fight, and they were right.
> > > > There is zero indication that he ever hurt anyone.
>
> Stan de SD
> > > Whether he actually fired a rifle or not doesn't mean shit. He was
> > > clearly in the service of an army of enemy combatants, was well
> > > aware of what they were doing, and supported it.
>
> Michael Price
> > It's hardly clear that he was doing anything but trying to find a
> > way to run.
>
> If he was trying to find a way to run he would have headed away from
> Afghanistan when he saw the two towers fall, instead of heading into
> Afghanistan.
Actaully he was already there and had been for months. Since you
clearly want to just keep making stuff up I give up. Believe what
suits
your dreams of American hegemoney.
>
> He intended to make war on "Jews and the West", whether he actually
> managed to or not.
>
> Not to make war on "America". Not "Jews". To make war on "Jews and
> the West" - which necessarily includes making war on the land of his
> birth, whose protection he now seeks - Australia.
Actually he seeks the protection of Britain because our Prime
Minister
has no idea what it means to look after the rights of our citizens to a
fair trial.
> Should he be
> released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia - to make war upon
> it.
>
> He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried there,
> never to see his homeland again.
>
So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
brique
<constan...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1140380811....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Well, in a sense you may be right, but your track record as the Prime
Apologist for Wonderful World of Jamesian Idiocies has become so
predictable, it's laughable.
You reply to replies made to yet another of James dumbass proclamations
whilst he sits in, presumably wounded, silence that, yet again, no-one
understands his brilliant analyisis and penetrating logic. This is probably
because his proclamations lack any brilliance, analysis, penetration or
logic, but they do at least have the dubious merit of being consistently
idiotic, one of the advantages in copy/pasting from his increasingly limited
repetoire of responses.
Give it up, Constance, let James defend his own stupidities in his own
words, and you can get around to having some original thoughts of your own
instead of forever running around with a mop and bucket cleaning up after
his.
>
Stan de SD
He had a big clue shortly after 9/11 that his little group of merry men was
involved in a fight against the US. If he came walking out of the mountains
on 9/12 or 9/13 and sought asylum or refugee statues, his story might have
some credibility. As it is, he was clearly in the enemy camp "literally and
figuratively" when he was captured 2 months later. So what other lame
excuses do you wish to manufacture for this obvious loser?
> > > > Amazing what type of idiotic contortions
> > > > leftoids such as yourself go through to avoid dealing with reality.
> > >
> > > It's amazing what type of idiotic contortions
> >
> > Michael want a cracker?
> >
> Well there's an intelligent comment.
If the shoe fits...
> > > > > > The group of which John Walker Lindh was a member *was* captured
> > while
> > > > > > fighting against coalition forces - I recall the usual fans of
> > terror
> > > > > > and torture posting that they were winning, when it was apparent
> > that
> > > > > > they were losing. Since that part of the US government's story
is
> > > > > > true, it seems likely that all the rest is also true.
> > > > > >
> > > > > Hardly.
> > > >
> > > > Just because you say so?
> > >
> > > No just because the source is the US government, and therefore
> > > unreliable.
> >
> > Your standard for everything - and I suppose that your buds the Taliban
and
> > al-Qaeda would never lie, right?
> >
> Fuck off asshole, when have I ever indicated anything but contempt
> for either?
I see you're losing your argument again, Michael.
> > You're a fucking kook, Mike. How long has it been since you fell on your
> > head again?
>
> Because I don't believe anything the proven liars of the US military
> say I'm a kook?
So everything you hear from the US military is a lie? What's your chip,
Michael? You get a dishonorable discharge or what?
> > > > You're either igorant, gullible, or have a huge
> > > > fucking chip on your shoulder - which one is it?
> > > >
> > > The facts are that there is no evidence that Hicks was ever fought.
> > > So why is he being held as an enemy combatant?
> >
> > Because he was a willing member of their organization.
>
> That's not being a combatant, even if he was still willing when the
> war started and all evidence says he wasn't.
No, the evidence states he WAS - and you don't need to be caught with your
hands on a gun to be detained as a combatant. When you're a member of an
enemy belligerent force, it doesn't matter whether your job description was
a sniper, radio operator, truck mechanic, or cooking falafel and hummus for
the troops. You SHOULD know THAT much, if you were ever in the US military
as you previously claimed - or maybe you made that up too?
> > The guy who plans the
> > robbery and drives the getaway car is just as guilty as the one who
walks in
> > the bank with the gun in his hand and the stocking cap on his head -
> > something you refuse to acknowledge.
> >
> But he neither planned nor executed any plans against the invading
> forces, that's what you refuse to acknowledge.
Once again, it doesn't make a difference. The fact that he was a willing
conscript in an enemy army is all that matters.
> Of course if he did then they're welcome to try him. Strange they don't..
Strange that for somebody who tried to puff up his own military
credentials/experience by ridiculing someone else for the particular job he
performed, you don't know much about the UCMJ or the Geneva Accords. For
starters, POW's and detainees not only do not need to be given a trial, but
should NOT be, unless charged with a specific criminal offense. Secondly,
those detainees who ARE charged with criminal offense are tried under the
military laws of the detaining country, which would be again the UCMJ.
Therefore, your analogy with "due process" in the civilian criminal court
system is simply not applicable.
You're playing evasion games again. Once more, he was caught in the service
of an army that was fighting the US.
That's merely your speculation, and still it's not relevant to the argument
at hand.
> > You're not real bright about what "complicity" and "conspiracy" mean in
real
> > life...
>
> You're not real bright in general. Conspiracy would require an act
> to advance the illegal purpose and fighting in another countries civil
> war is not illegal, therefore training to do it isn't either.
Taking up arms in the service of another country is equivalent to renouncing
one's citizenship, so he loses whatever "rights" you would infer to him as a
US citizen. If you don't believe me, try reading the section entitled LOSS
OF CITIZENSHIP, Section (3) of your US passport, if you have one. At that
point, he's an enemy combatant, and one not entitled to any special
treatment given that his army (the Taliban) did not recognize, or abide by,
the Geneva Accords.
Now, kindly tell me what other matters regarding "acts of war" that you do
not understand, and I will do my best to enlighten you...
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
The only one here who is "laughable" is the one who is so incapable of
engaging in reasonable discussion in that he's spending his time insulting
someone who isn't here to defend himself - and that would be you, loser. :O|
Dan Clore
> James A. Donald wrote:
>>Dan Clore
>>"Michael Price
>>
>>> Well that's the sort of court they have in that country. Are we
>>>going to refuse to extradite people to every country that has less
>>>than sterling judical systems? Given that he's committed offenses
>>>in America I don't see why they can't throw him out. If you really
>>>want to go overboard to give him a fair trial (something you don't
>>>seem nearly so fussed about with the Guantanamo detainees) then some
>>>sort of court to establish a prima facie case in America is
>>>possible.
>>
>>Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
>
A gruesome amount of detail proving the point:
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
*****
Empty Evidence
By Corine Hegland
National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006
"If you think of the people down there, these are people,
all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're
terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers,
[Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers,
probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 27, 2005
Some of the men Rumsfeld described -- the terrorists, the
trainers, the financiers, and the battlefield captures --
are indeed at Guantanamo. But National Journal's detailed
review of government files on 132 prisoners who have asked
the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily
censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review
Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, didn't
turn up very many of them. Most of the "enemy combatants"
held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not
the worst of the worst of the terrorist world.
Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the
United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were
innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot
soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And
some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in
Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the
evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the
Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-,
third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on
admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or
worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom
have been proved to be liars.
Thomas Wilner, a partner at the Washington law firm Shearman
and Stearling who is representing six Kuwaitis at
Guantanamo, summarized the evidence against them: "Bullshit
hearsay. . . . The information in some cases is, at best,
hearsay allegations [obtained] long after capture."
One thing about these detainees is very clear:
Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them
were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield.
They came into American custody from third parties, mostly
from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a
dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.
Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One
prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations
against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than
10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The
veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a
Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in
Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review
Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that
the tribunal record said he did.
Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal
representative," one of the U.S. military officers -- not
lawyers -- who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate
the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked
at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and
found that just one man -- the aforementioned accuser -- had
placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had
placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had
even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled
the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused
60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every
detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp.
None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the
accuser said he saw them at the camp.
The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.
Guilt by Wristwatch
"It's the Salem witchcraft trials," said Marc Falkoff of
Covington and Burling's New York City office, who represents
17 Yemenis, several of them fingered -- falsely, according
to Falkoff -- by different accusers. "You get one guy to
start making accusations, and whether it's believable or not
doesn't matter." Front-line military interrogators might
know that the accusations are false, but their superiors
reading the files later do not.
The government has given Falkoff access to the complete
files for 16 of his clients. Of those men, he says, "you
bring them into any court of law right now, and a judge is
going to release them. It doesn't matter what the standard
of review is going to be -- I'm not even talking about guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt."
At least eight prisoners at Guantanamo are there even though
they are no longer designated as enemy combatants. One
perplexed attorney, whose client does not want public
attention, learned that the man was no longer considered an
enemy combatant only by reading a footnote in a Justice
Department motion asking a federal judge to put a slew of
habeas corpus cases on hold. The attorney doesn't know why
the man is still in Cuba.
"The people you've been going up against in court have been
saying he's the worst of the worst, Osama's right-hand man,"
said Anant Raut, an attorney with the Washington firm of
Weil, Gotshal, & Manges. "Then you go in there, and it's a
guy who is as confused as you are as to why he is there."
Raut has one client, a Saudi, who is classified as an enemy
combatant largely because he spent a couple of weeks on a
Taliban bean farm. The man says the Taliban imprisoned him
there because they thought he was a Saudi government spy.
National Journal could review only the unclassified parts of
detainee files, consisting of memos, a summary of the
evidence, and a transcript of the Combatant Status Review
Tribunal proceeding. But federal courts ordered the Defense
Department to give the volunteer lawyers the classified
evidence by which their clients were found to be enemy
combatants. The lawyers cannot discuss specifics of that
evidence, but they uniformly say that nothing additional is
there, just details and sourcing relating to the
unclassified evidence.
"There is no smoking gun," said John Chandler, a partner in
the Atlanta office of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. One of
his Guantanamo clients, picked up in Pakistan, is designated
an enemy combatant in part because he once traveled on a bus
with wounded Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan. The prisoner
denies it, saying it was only a public bus. But then there's
the prisoner's Casio watch. According to the Defense
Department files, his watch is similar to another Casio
model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda has used for
making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored
Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine other
detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk
stands around the world and is worn by one National Journal
reporter. The primary difference between Chandler's client's
watch and the Casio in question is that the detainee's model
hasn't been manufactured for years, according to the U.S.
military officer who was his personal representative at the
tribunal.
Guilt by Association
Baher Azmy of Seton Hall Law School represents Murat Kurnaz,
a Turk who is at Guantanamo. "The government has no case
against him," Azmy says. Kurnaz was plucked off a bus in
Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a
suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's
tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be
the referenced suicide bomber. In March, Kurnaz's file was
accidentally, and briefly, declassified: According to the
Washington Post
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3868-2005Mar26.html
], it consisted of memos from domestic and foreign
intelligence sources stating that Kurnaz posed no threat.
The file, however, contained one anonymous memo
contradicting the rest and claiming he was connected to Al
Qaeda. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's
case as evidence of the lack of due process in the
Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had
ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on the
single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Julia Tarver Mason, a partner with Paul, Weiss, a firm based
in New York City, represents a number of detainees,
including a Saudi -- an amputee -- whom Afghanistan's
Northern Alliance turned over to the Americans. The alliance
had taken him from a hospital. She says that the classified
evidence against the men she represents has "details, but no
meat." The evidence might say, for example, that somebody
said someone was a member of an aid group, and that aid
group has been known to have some links to Al Qaeda, Mason
says. "It's all 12 steps removed."
George Brent Mickum, a partner with Washington law firm
Keller and Heckman, represents two British residents held at
Guantanamo. "I can tell you what's not there," Mickum said
of the classified evidence against his clients. "What's not
there is any evidence that any of my clients was associated
with Al Qaeda in any way." The men were arrested on a
business trip to Gambia. According to press reports, British
intelligence suspected at the time that the two men intended
to establish a terrorist training facility there. But today,
the accusation against both men is only that they were
associated with Abu Qatada, a radical but popular London
cleric who is now in prison in Britain.
Neither man denies the friendship with Qatada: One of the
detainees, Bisher al-Rawi, says he served as a liaison
between Qatada and British intelligence at the request of
the MI-5 domestic intelligence agency. The tribunal for the
other man, Jamil el-Banna, met four times before deciding
that he was an enemy combatant. Even so, el-Banna's personal
representative, who had access to the classified files,
objected. The British government was well aware of
el-Banna's actions on British soil, the officer wrote, and
the record is "insufficient to show [the detainee] should be
classified as an enemy combatant for his actions in Gambia."
To Protect the Soldiers
If many of the men held at Guantanamo were not caught in
battle, and have not been tied directly to hostilities
against the United States, why are they there?
The lawyers representing Guantanamo prisoners say the
evidence against their clients is weak, indirect, and often
based on lies from other detainees. Defense Department
documents suggest they are right.
"I think the standards for sending someone to Guantanamo in
2002 and early 2003 were not as high as they should have
been," said Mark Jacobson, who was an assistant for detainee
policy in Rumsfeld's office from November 2002 through
August 2003. When National Journal described some of the men
in this story to Jacobson, he said he suspected that there
was more information that was not referenced in the
classified or the declassified files. But if the files were
accurate, he said, "then it's reasonable and likely" that
those men were in the batches taken to Guantanamo early on
in 2002.
The filtering process for deciding who was sent to
Guantanamo wasn't perfect, Jacobson said, nor should it have
been. To protect U.S. soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan
it was better to err on the side of caution and to send
more, rather than fewer, men to Guantanamo. "If it's the
other way around, then you're doing it wrong."
But nuance didn't exactly survive the air convoys to Cuba.
The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were
terrorists. They were the most dangerous, best-trained,
vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said.
They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw
through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being
flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But the CIA didn't see it that way. By the fall of 2002, it
was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10
percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist
operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the
agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004.
Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best, he
said, who were "going to know absolutely nothing about
terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for
information about how they learned to fight, which could
help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies.
But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at
Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism
than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one
of these guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack,"
questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer,
Scheuer said.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at
Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were
getting frustrated with how little the detainees were
saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave
interrogators more license.
The questions to the detainees about 9/11 and Al Qaeda and
about each other were so constant, so repetitive, so
oppressive that some prisoners, out of exasperation or
fatigue or fear, just gave in and said, sure, I'm a
terrorist. False confessions and false accusations are
rampant, according to the lawyers and the Defense Department
records.
One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially
long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm a
terrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic
statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as
evidence against him: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist"
reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so
outraged that they sought out the detainee's personal
representative to explain it to him that the statement was
not a confession.
A Yemeni, whom somebody fingered as a bin Laden bodyguard,
finally said in exasperation during one long interrogation,
"OK, I saw bin Laden five times: Three times on Al Jazeera
and twice on Yemeni news." And now his "admission" appears
in his enemy combatant's file: "Detainee admitted to knowing
Osama bin Laden."
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the
International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian
group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious
confidential report to the White House charging that the
entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of
prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on
their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary
confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions,"
according to a Defense report leaked to the New York Times.
The report called the operations "tantamount to torture."
Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe,
humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo
that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism."
Wrong Questions, Wrong People
The one question nobody seemed to ask at Guantanamo was
whether they were asking the right questions of the right
people in the first place. After all, despite the rhetoric,
most of the men at Guantanamo, or at least the 132 with
court records and the 314 with redacted transcripts, came
into American custody by way of third parties who had their
own motivations for turning people in, including paybacks
and payoffs.
In Afghanistan, from late 2001 through the early months of
2003, local and tribal informers played on America's naivete
by reporting their enemies as Qaeda members, according to a
former intelligence operative there. The Americans, upon
investigating, would find that a man did have weapons and
assume that he was, indeed, Al Qaeda. "They wouldn't know
the factions," the operative said, "and they wouldn't think,
'This is Afghanistan. Of course he has weapons.'"
Ignorance of local politics might explain how, for example,
an Arabic-speaking Iraqi Shiite ended up at Guantanamo
accused of serving as the regional intelligence director for
the Pashto-speaking Sunni Taliban.
Some of the men at Guantanamo came from targeted,
U.S.-guided raids in Pakistani cities, and the cases against
those men tend to be fairly strong. But the largest single
group at Guantanamo Bay today consists of men caught in
indiscriminate sweeps for Arabs in Pakistan. Once arrested,
these men passed through several captors before being given
to the U.S. military. Some of the men say they were arrested
after asking for help getting to their embassies; a few say
the Pakistanis asked them for bribes to avoid being turned
over to America.
Others assert that they were sold for bounties, a charge
substantiated in 2004 when Sami Yousafzai, a Newsweek
reporter then stringing for ABC's "20/20," visited the
Pakistani village where five Kuwaiti detainees were
captured. The locals remembered the men. They had arrived
with a larger group of a hundred refugees a few weeks after
Qaeda fighters had passed through. The villagers said they
had offered the group shelter and food, but somebody in the
village sold out the guests. Pretty soon, bright lights came
swooping down from the skies. "Helicopters . . . were
announcing through loud speakers: 'Where is Arab? Where is
Arab?' And, 'Please, you get $1,000 for one Arab,'" one
resident told Yousafzai.
"The one thing we were never clear of was where they came
from," Scheuer said of the Guantanamo detainees. "DOD picked
them up somewhere." When National Journal told Scheuer that
the largest group came from Pakistani custody, he chuckled.
"Then they were probably people the Pakistanis thought were
dangerous to Pakistan," he said. "We absolutely got the
wrong people."
The sweeps in Pakistan did pick up a few Qaeda members, but
most of them were low level. People familiar with Pakistani
politics agree that in the chaos of the war, simple foot
soldiers or innocent bystanders were more likely to wind up
in American custody than were senior operatives. "It was
helter-skelter, and it was perfectly possible innocents were
arrested, while a lot of guilty guys knew how to evade
[capture] and had the means to do so," said Husain Haqqani,
an adviser to three former Pakistani prime ministers who now
teaches international relations at Boston University.
Tribes in the border region and operatives in Pakistan's
intelligence service were historically sympathetic to Al
Qaeda and the Taliban. Almost certainly, they aided senior
Qaeda and Taliban members fleeing Afghanistan. At the same
time, Islamabad was eager to strengthen its new alliance
with Washington. The Americans wanted prisoners, and nobody
was looking too closely at who those prisoners were.
Add a healthy dollop of cash spread around by both hunters
and prey, and a U.S. military bureaucracy dedicated to
protecting Americans against a threat from an unfamiliar
corner of the world, and you have an unsettling formula for
determining who got caught and who got away. It was
"win-win," Haqqani said. "The Americans get their prisoners,
Pakistanis get their praise, the guy who captures the
prisoners gets his reward, and Al Qaeda gets its escape."
*****
Guantanamo's Grip
By Corine Hegland, National Journal
National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006
You may have seen an image of Detainee 032. He came to
Guantanamo Bay early on, a slender 18-year-old Yemeni among
the anonymous men who knelt, dressed in orange, for the
photographs viewed around the world. He was there on January
27, 2002, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took four
senators to see the "most dangerous, best-trained, vicious
killers on the face of the earth." He was there two days
later, when President Bush proudly declared in his State of
the Union address that the "terrorists who once occupied
Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay," and he was
there one week later when Bush firmly and finally ruled out
prisoner-of-war status for any of the men held at Guantanamo.
Like many of the men who came handcuffed to Cuba, Detainee
032 has never been accused of fighting against America. He
fell into U.S custody far away from any battlefield. But
today, after four years of interrogations and
investigations, he is still an "enemy combatant," even
though he was never an enemy or a combatant. He is something
else: something that might be dangerous or might not. But
he's securely in our custody, and raise your hand if you
want to be responsible for releasing the man who next flies
an airplane into a skyscraper.
In some other world, one where the earth still turned west
to east instead of inside out as it did on September 11,
2001, Detainee 032 would be finishing college this year,
like his brother, father, and uncle before him. In this
world, he's beginning his fifth year in prison, with neither
charges nor freedom in sight.
"No Court, Justice, Or Judge . . . "
David Remes, a veteran litigator at the Washington law firm
Covington and Burling, spotted the first sign of trouble
over his morning coffee on November 8 last year. He was
reading a Washington Post story about the Supreme Court's
decision to accept a challenge to the military commissions
that had been set up to decide the fate of a handful of
Guantanamo detainees. The military lawyers defending the men
had sued the government, arguing that the proposed
proceedings fell outside any military, criminal, civil,
constitutional, or international law that they had ever
heard of. Turning to the jump page of the Post story, Remes
saw an unexpected item in the penultimate paragraph, a
report that Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., hoped to "add
language to the Defense authorization bill that would
eliminate habeas rights for detainees captured during the
terrorism fight, to halt 'the never-ending litigation that
is coming from Guantanamo.'"
Outside of the Ten Commandments, laws don't come much more
primal than habeas corpus. It's an ancient bulwark against
imprisonment without charge; the medieval Latin phrase,
roughly translated, means "You have the body." Bringing a
habeas petition forces the jailer to explain why he's
holding the petitioner. Habeas corpus predates even the
Magna Carta of 1215. The right is enshrined in the U.S.
Constitution, and on June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court said
it extended to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Upon reading of Graham's intention, Remes, who has 17 habeas
petitions in court on behalf of Guantanamo prisoners --
including one for Detainee 032 -- fired off an e-mail to the
500-plus lawyers volunteering their services for the
detainees. The lawyers started asking around: "Does anybody
know anything about this?"
It was the first any of them had heard of Graham's proposal.
"We're not lobbyists, we're litigators," one lawyer later
moaned, recounting the ensuing panic. They had spent a year
and a half duking it out in court with the Bush
administration's attorneys, slowly forcing the executive
branch to explain why it was holding individual men -- 132
such explanations so far. Two federal judges had split over
the habeas petitions. One declared that the men had a right
to court; a second said they did not and granted the
government's motion to dismiss the cases. Everybody was
waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
to speak about the conflicting decisions, and whatever the
appeals court ruled would likely head to the Supreme Court.
The lawyers had simply never considered any role in this
dispute for the third branch of government, Congress. It was
as though they were playing checkers and winning -- only to
discover that the game was chess.
The attorneys scrambled into a full-court press, calling
their senators, writing editorials for local and national
papers, walking the halls of Congress. But it was already
too late. A week later, Congress passed the Defense
authorization bill, including the amendment, which had been
somewhat modified by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. President Bush
signed the bill into law on December 30, and on January 6
the Justice Department began asking judges to dismiss the cases.
But the game is not over yet. The Graham amendment leaves
detainees one avenue of judicial appeal. They can challenge
the process by which they were designated "enemy combatants"
before the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., although the
court's jurisdiction stops when the men are removed from
Guantanamo Bay. The appeals court typically takes months, if
not years, to work through a case. Furthermore, a narrow
interpretation of the amendment means that the men might be
able to challenge only the process -- the dotting of i's and
the crossing of t's -- not the underlying facts.
More promising for the advocates, the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which has coordinated the pro bono
detainee effort since 2002, filed habeas petitions on behalf
of every remaining man at Guantanamo before Bush signed the
bill. The lawyers intend to argue that the legislation can't
strip courts of their ability to hear pending cases, a
position bolstered somewhat by Levin's contention that the
bill was never intended to affect those pending petitions.
The amendment's language, though, is stark: "No court,
justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or
consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by
or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of
Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
Law Of War
Most of the lawyers who represent the detainees say they
volunteered their services because of a gut impulse about
the importance of due process; they didn't spend a lot of
time musing about why due process exists. Their prospective
clients, they thought, were probably terrorists, the
infamous "worst of the worst." They may have killed
Americans in Afghanistan; they may have helped to kill
Americans in America. Still, even terrorists are entitled to
their day in court. Lawyers don't take kindly to being told
that their skills aren't needed.
"These are people picked up off the battlefield in
Afghanistan. They weren't wearing uniforms, they weren't
state-sponsored, but they were there to kill," President
Bush said last June, after Amnesty International criticized
Guantanamo as the "gulag of our times."
But a battlefield implies stark lines of separation: Here,
I'm trying to kill you. There, you're trying to kill me.
Battlefield justice is swift, proximity implies culpability,
and buzzing bullets brush aside legal niceties. The farther
you move from the bullets, however, the grayer and messier
the lines become. If the law of war surrounds the
battlefield, and you know what to do with men who are
captured with guns in hand, then consider this: More than
3,000 Taliban fighters surrendered to Gen. Rashid Dostum, a
U.S. ally in the anti-Taliban coalition, at Konduz,
Afghanistan, in November 2001. The agreed-upon surrender
terms were that Afghan nationals would be allowed to put
down their weapons and go home but that any foreign fighters
would be placed in U.N. custody. Instead, Dostum, acting in
accordance with his historical disregard for human life,
locked them all into airtight container trucks. Some
sympathetic Afghan drivers punched holes in the trucks and
passed water to the prisoners when the general's men weren't
looking, a crime for which one driver was brutally beaten,
they later told Newsweek. When the trucks finally arrived at
the Sheberghan prison in northwest Afghanistan, dead bodies
spilled out. How many of the men died isn't clear: Nobody
has exhumed their mass grave, although both the United
Nations and the Physicians for Human Rights have identified
its location as only a few minutes from the prison.
Some of the men who survived that convoy are at Guantanamo,
and clearly, they were captured on a battlefield. But if
proximity implies culpability, how do you justify the
detention of so many others in Cuba who were arrested far
from any Afghanistan front? How about the aid worker
sleeping at home in Karachi, Pakistan? How about the men
arrested in Sarajevo and sent by the Americans to Guantanamo
even though they were clutching their
exoneration-from-terrorism papers issued by the judge who
had reviewed their cases? How about miscellaneous Arabs --
some fighters, some not -- who together with other refugees
passed through Afghanistan's borders as war arrived? How
about two British Muslims arrested as they stepped off a
plane in Gambia? How about a hypothetical little old lady in
Switzerland who writes checks to a charity, not knowing it's
a terrorist front, but who a government lawyer nevertheless
conceded in court could be properly termed an enemy
combatant? The law of war has come far in a century of
genocides and massacres and nuclear bombs. But has it come
so far that when Al Qaeda made the entire world a
battlefield, all of the world's population fell under the
law of war?
As the U.S. government started putting its cards on the
table, explaining why the men described above, and others
like them, were still behind bars, the habeas lawyers
started to ponder more deeply what happens to justice --
even in a wartime setting -- when you strip away due process
and the presumption of innocence.
The government told the lawyers that their clients were all
well-trained liars. But as the lawyers read the files, they
started to wonder whether they were facing an impossible
paradox: After all, if a well-trained liar looks like an
innocent man, what does an innocent man look like, if not a
well-trained liar?
Detainee 032
Back before everything happened, before the world came
unhinged, Detainee 032 was a boy of 16 living in Yemen with
his mother, his father, his four sisters, and his five
brothers. His name was Farouq Ali Ahmed, and he studied
Islamic law in high school.
One day, the boy made a solemn vow before God: If it was
God's will that Farouq commit the Koran to memory, more than
6,000 verses in all, he would spend a year, before he went
off to college, teaching the holy texts, in Afghanistan. A
man who did this thing, he'd been told, would be rewarded by
God.
Any number of young men in those years set off for
Afghanistan with their heads full of God. The land of the
Hindu Kush mountains was a broken Islamic nation, in
desperate need of succor. Some tales say that the Taliban
rose to power after young ethnic Pashtuns executed an Afghan
warlord for raping two young girls; others say a single
young boy was the victim. Regardless, the men from the
eastern mountains had rallied under the name of the Taliban,
"the students of the book," and they promised stability and
a return of piety in a country sick to death of two decades
of war. Fighting continued in the north, with the Northern
Alliance and the Taliban trading atrocities as they traded
ground, but the land under the Taliban's control remained
stable, if barbaric.
World governments shunned the Taliban, which gained
diplomatic recognition from only three countries --
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -- but
conservative and radical imams throughout the Islamic world
exhorted followers to help their Afghan brothers defend
Islam against those who would destroy it: the Tajiks,
Uzbeks, and apostate Shiite Hazara of the Northern Alliance.
Osama bin Laden came early on; his Arab fighters helped the
Taliban soldiers and trained new arrivals.
Nearly all of the foreigners who came to Afghanistan for
jihad came to fight not the United States but the Northern
Alliance. Some put in a few months of fighting in the north
before returning home, their Islamic duty done; some stayed
longer. One man in Guantanamo, asked whether he was a member
of Al Qaeda, replied simply, "I do not know. I am an Arab
fighter."
Others didn't go to Afghanistan to fight but to help in
other ways, or just to work and live. The Arabs in
Afghanistan, according to Barnett Rubin of New York
University, who has studied the country since the 1980s when
the United States funded the mujahedeen fighting the
Soviets, weren't all jihadist fighters, any more than all
Westerners in Afghanistan at the time were CIA operatives --
although many in both groups properly fell under those
assumptions. "Arabs went there for a lot of reasons," Rubin
said. "There were humanitarian organizations, religious
missions, and adventure-seekers." A Christian nonprofit
group, Save the Children, had workers providing schooling
and medical care. Muslim organizations ran clinics and
schools and dispensed what aid they could; U.N. workers
provided daily bread for more than 3 million people.
And some Arab men went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran in
an Islamic land where few could read the word of God.
Such was Allah's will that in the spring of 2001, Farouq,
then 17, set off for Afghanistan. He took a little room in a
big house in Kabul and began teaching 7- and 8-year-olds,
gathering four or five of them together and reciting Allah's
words until the children had them memorized. It wasn't easy
work. The Koran is always taught in Farouq's native
language, Arabic, which the Afghan children didn't
understand, and Farouq didn't speak their language. But he
had made an oath to Allah. After a few months, he moved to
the city of Khost, where he continued to teach out of a
mosque until the Taliban fell and the cities were no longer
safe for Arabs. One day, his host told him that if he stayed
any longer, his life would be in danger. He had left his
passport in Kabul for safekeeping, but he was told there was
no time to get it back. He was taken to Pakistan, where
Afghans have long sought haven from their never-ending wars.
Once across the border, Farouq encountered the Pakistani
military. "One of the soldiers pointed a weapon toward me,"
Farouq told his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The
Defense Department established the tribunals after the
Supreme Court ruled that the detainees could challenge their
imprisonment. "The Pakistani officer took me and said, don't
be mad at him, we are Muslim, we will take care of you. He
asked me about my parents. He said, you are a kid, you are
going to the Yemen Embassy, and you shouldn't have any
problems getting back to Yemen. After that, they took me to
a jail, and there were lots of people. They put handcuffs on
our hands."
Farouq spent time in two Pakistani prisons before the
government handed him over to American forces in
Afghanistan. As a foreigner without a passport, he met the
U.S. criteria for Guantanamo, and he was quickly whisked
onto a plane headed for the sunny Caribbean jail that most
military people refer to simply as "The Bay." In the chaos
of post-9/11 Afghanistan, military leaders say, there wasn't
time for much consideration of anomalies like Farouq. The
United States was pulling Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis,
Chinese into detention centers, some tens of thousands in
all. U.S. intelligence agents weren't able to debrief every
prisoner; just keeping them secure was difficult, as Afghans
gathered outside temporary holding facilities and clamored
for blood. They had never much liked the foreigners, whose
idea of Islamic law was sometimes harsher than even the
Taliban's.
Incentives
But Cuba wasn't much less chaotic. Interpreters were scarce;
facilities were rudimentary, with buckets for drinking and
urinating. Background information about anything --
detainees, Islam, Al Qaeda -- was hard to come by. The
American military officers had been ordered to set up a
prison at Guantanamo practically overnight. Intelligence
agents there were asked mainly to certify, in short order,
that the president "had reason to believe" that each
shackled man was involved in terrorism. The agents rapidly
reported back, according to New York Times accounts of that
time, that they didn't have enough information to do even that.
"If we had any information, many times [the detainees] had
multiple identities and multiple passports," recalled Army
Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who headed the interrogation
effort at Guantanamo through November 2002.
So the interrogators started asking routine questions of all
the prisoners; many of the sessions were documented in FBI
memos released to the American Civil Liberties Union under a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year: Where are you
from? Why were you in Afghanistan? What do you think of
jihad, of Osama bin Laden? When did you hear about 9/11?
What do the detainees talk about? What do you know of
attacks planned on the United States? Have you heard
whispers about attacking the Guantanamo guards? Do you know
any of the other detainees? More than 24,000 interrogations
have now taken place among the 800 men who have been held at
The Bay.
The prisoners were shown photographs, too, large books
containing mug shots of all the men held at Guantanamo: Do
you recognize any of these men? Can you tell me about them?
If a man talked, if he cooperated, he received rewards:
tobacco, a game of chess, a milk shake, free time in a room
with movies and books, the chance to have a countryman put
into the neighboring cell to ease the loneliness, a promise
of a return home. Simply attending a Qaeda training camp
before 9/11, an FBI interrogator told a detainee, "did not
constitute a crime." Just talk to us, was the interrogators'
refrain.
But many of the men wouldn't talk, according to Dunlavey.
Citing the so-called "Manchester document," a Qaeda training
manual discovered in England that advises captured jihadists
to lie about their identity, stick to a cover story, and
claim torture, Dunlavey said: "They followed it to a 'T.'"
The Americans came up with inducements for those who
wouldn't talk: A prisoner could be chained in a strobe-lit
room with Metallica or Britney Spears playing at full
volume; interrogated for 16 hours straight; awakened every
few hours for a move to a new cell; questioned while
shivering in full-blast air conditioning; stroked by a woman
who whispered that his situation was hopeless. In July of
last year, the Defense Department released a report on
allegations of abuse at Guantanamo Bay: All of the above
tactics were used, and were acceptable at the time,
according to the report. Other tactics deemed unacceptable
were also used, according to the report, FBI memos, and the
International Committee of the Red Cross.
For one special prisoner who wouldn't talk, interrogators
employed further inducements. Detainee 063, a Saudi, had
stubbornly claimed that he had gone to Afghanistan merely
for love of falconry. By July 2002, the FBI knew that in
August 2001 he had flown from a foreign country to Orlando,
where a customs agent turned him away while a cohort,
Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, waited for him
outside. On August 8, 2002, Detainee 063 was moved into an
"isolation facility," where he stayed for the next 160 days,
his cell continually flooded with light, his only human
contact with interrogators and guards. He was questioned for
18 to 20 hours a day for 48 out of 54 straight days; he was
threatened with a menacing dog; he was forced to wear a bra
while thong panties were placed upon his head; he was
leashed and ordered to perform dog tricks; he was stripped
naked in front of women; he was taunted that his sister and
mother were whores and that he was gay. Most of these
techniques would later show up in Iraq, at Abu Ghraib prison.
By late November 2002, an FBI agent wrote, Detainee 063,
Mohamed al-Kahtani, was "evidencing behavior consistent with
extreme psychological trauma (talking to nonexistent people,
reporting hearing voices, cowering in a corner of his cell
covered with a sheet for hours on end.)"
Think about it. Whether you know something or not, whether
you did something or not, you know what the interrogators
want you to say. You know what another has said about you,
because that is the information being presented to you. Was
it the truth? Was it a lie? Did you simply have the bad luck
to be the mug shot under a finger when another inmate wanted
to end the endless questions?
You've been told that the truth will set you free, but while
interrogators come and go, you don't know anyone from your
home country who has been released. Say one thing, and you
might have a cigarette and a night's sleep. Say nothing, and
you might spend the night shackled to the floor with
Metallica ringing in your ears. Stay neutral, and it's more
endless days of monotony, washing on command, exercising on
command, eating on command, losing your mattress and blanket
if you argue with the men in command.
What would you do?
Farouq's Review
On September 27, 2004, Detainee 032, Farouq Ali Ahmed,
presented his case to Combatant Status Review Tribunal
Number 8. He came alone except for a U.S. military officer,
his designated "personal representative." Rules forbid
detainees from having attorneys at the tribunal proceedings,
although a practicing lawyer of the Judge Advocate General's
Corps, the military's legal service, generally presents the
government's case.
Farouq stood accused of being associated with the Taliban
and of having been a member of Al Qaeda. The government's
case cited the following:
# Detainee admitted to giving his passport to a person known
by him to be a member of the Taliban.
# Detainee admitted to lodging at an official Taliban
residence in Kabul, with a Taliban representative he met in
Quetta, Pakistan.
# Detainee was observed carrying an AK-47 and wearing
fatigues at Osama bin Laden's private airport in Kandahar,
Afghanistan.
# Detainee was captured by Pakistani forces as part of an
organized group of 30 mujahedeen after the fall of Tora Bora.
The first two assertions, pointing toward Farouq's
association with the Taliban, came from his own
interrogations, when he said he wasn't sure, but, yes, the
man who took him to Kabul and the men in the house where he
stayed were probably members of the Taliban. The last two
charges, suggesting that he was associated with Al Qaeda,
Farouq flatly denied. He insisted that he was never at an
airport, that he never carried a gun, and that he was
captured alone. It was hard for him to disprove the charges,
however: The details of the accusations were classified. He
wasn't allowed to see them, and he wasn't told where they
had come from.
The vote by the three-member tribunal was unanimous.
Detainee 032 was properly designated as an enemy combatant
because "he supported both Al Qaeda and Taliban forces
engaged in hostilities against the United States or its
coalition partners."
How could the officers on the tribunal vote otherwise?
Soldiers are soldiers, not judges. As soldiers, their lives
are on the line, they make hard battlefield decisions, and
they are trained to follow orders.
The orders given to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals
were as follows: The men coming before them had been
determined to be enemy combatants, "through multiple levels
of review by military officers and Officials of the
Department of Defense." The government's evidence in support
of "a determination that the detainee is an enemy combatant"
was subject to a rebuttable presumption that it was "genuine
and accurate" -- in other words, the government's case was
presumed to be true unless the detainee could prove
otherwise. The orders did not explain how a man could rebut
evidence if he wasn't allowed to know the details or source
of that evidence.
The officers serving on the tribunals were told that a
handful of prisoners released long before the tribunals
began had subsequently appeared in battle, one bragging of
how he had convinced the Americans that he was a goat
farmer. The officers' friends and colleagues in uniform were
dying every week in Iraq, every month in Afghanistan.
And many, many prisoners had said they had gone to
Afghanistan to teach the Koran. "That's part of the 'Big
Lie,'" Gen. Dunlavey said, when a reporter outlined Farouq's
case to him. How in the world, the general asked, can an
Arabic speaker teach the Koran to people who don't speak
Arabic? "That's like saying I'm going to memorize the Bible
in Hebrew, and then I'm going to the U.S. to teach it to the
common masses," Dunlavey said.
Many of the foreigners in Afghanistan said they came to
teach the Koran, the general continued, a claim he could
debunk by asking more questions, as any good commander
mindful of his men's lives would do. "I would ask
immediately, do you speak the language? No? How do you
communicate? Where was your supply of Korans? Where did you
learn to teach? There was no purpose, nothing that could be
verified, there was no backup on it."
But Muslims believe that the Koran is the direct word of
God, as uttered in Arabic by Muhammad, according to Akbar
Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American University.
Islam, unlike Christianity, is not based on accounts written
by disciples years after the prophet died. Muslims believe
that every word in the Koran came from Allah's lips to
Muhammad's ears. That's why every Muslim prays five times a
day in the same haunting Arabic syllables. That's why
Taliban textbooks, such as they were, were written in Dari
and Pashto -- except for the Koranic texts, which were in
Arabic. That's why the Koran is taught through recitation.
And that's why Muslims who don't understand another word of
Arabic memorize, in their entirety, the sounds of God in Arabic.
And that's why Farouq Ali Ahmed went to Afghanistan in the
spring of 2001, according to two individuals who reviewed
his entire file, including the classified sources and
details of the evidence against him.
Farouq's personal representative, an Army officer, was
disgusted with the tribunal's verdict. He took the unusual
step of submitting a written protest, a redacted version of
which was filed with Farouq's habeas proceedings.
The government's sole evidence that Farouq had been at bin
Laden's airport in Kandahar was the statement of another
detainee. The Army officer, a lieutenant colonel, had given
the tribunal an FBI memo indicating that the other detainee
had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni
detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen
the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could
not have been.
"I do feel with some certainty that [the accuser] has lied
about other detainees to receive preferable treatment and to
cause them problems while in custody," the lieutenant
colonel wrote. "Had the tribunal taken this evidence out as
unreliable, then the position we have taken is that a
teacher of the Koran (to the Taliban's children) is an enemy
combatant (partially because he slept under a Taliban roof.)"
What Have We Done?
Farouq's habeas attorneys are Covington and Burling's David
Remes and Marc Falkoff, a young associate who had abandoned
pursuit of a Ph.D. in literature because he found academia
"too political" but who brought 17 Guantanamo cases to the
prestigious firm. The lawyers provided National Journal with
the declassified versions of letters they wrote on behalf of
10 detainees, after viewing their classified files, to the
Administrative Review Board. After a Combatant Status Review
Tribunal designates a Guantanamo prisoner as an enemy
combatant, he goes before the review board, which decides
whether he should be released because he is no longer a
threat to America.
"Farouq is not now and never has been associated with Al
Qaeda," the letter from his attorneys read. "The only
evidence of such an association comes from a proven liar and
from another detainee who was abused and coerced into making
statements inculpating other men." The identity of the
"proven liar," the man also referred to in Farouq's personal
representative's memo, was redacted from the attorneys'
letter, but that of the "abused and coerced" detainee was
not: Detainee 063, Mohamed al-Kahtani. At some point after
facing a snarling dog, donning women's underwear, and
gibbering under a sheet, Kahtani had apparently pointed to a
mug shot of Farouq and said he was one of the 30 mujahedeen
intercepted at the border after the battle of Tora Bora.
The Covington and Burling lawyers flew to Yemen to meet with
Farouq's family, a step the Defense Department had not
taken. Farouq's account of how he came to Afghanistan, they
wrote to the board, was the truth.
Farouq wasn't the only one of the lawyers' clients fingered
by Kahtani. Remes and Falkoff cited Detainee 063 as a source
of the allegations against two of their other clients, as
well. In the cases of two clients, including Farouq, they
cited the same snitch identified in Farouq's personal
representative's memo as the source of allegations. On
behalf of another detainee, the lawyers identified yet
another snitch, who had reportedly told tales during
physically severe questioning in Afghanistan.
Falkoff and Remes, who looked into all of their clients'
stories in Yemen, maintain that none of them ever fought
against America or ever thought to fight against America.
The men's families, in contact with their loved ones only
through Red Cross letters passed through U.S. military
censors, had independently given the lawyers accounts of how
the men came to be in Afghanistan that matched the stories
later revealed in U.S. government files. There was the
medical assistant who had previously worked in his brother's
clinic in Yemen and went to Afghanistan to work in a
civilian clinic; the boy who went to Afghanistan to get
training to fight in Yemen's tribal wars; the four men who
were told that the Taliban was building a good Islamic
society and so went to defend their Muslim brothers against
the murderous warlords of the Northern Alliance; the man who
had imported medicine for a charity in Afghanistan whose
local outposts -- but not the one where he worked -- were
later linked to Al Qaeda. All the tales checked out, the two
lawyers say.
Sure, the men and their families could have worked out these
cover stories in advance. Or the stories could be true. It
doesn't matter. Once in Guantanamo, by virtue of having been
Arabs in Afghanistan (except for the man who was asleep at
home in Pakistan), the men became enemy combatants and so
found themselves beyond the reach of the American courts,
and even beyond the law of war, with its Geneva Convention
protections.
Four years later, they are still there. That's what happens
when a man is presumed guilty until proven innocent; when
associating with people who associate with bad people is
sufficient grounds for guilt; when hearsay statements,
whether offered from truth, coercion, or boredom, are taken
as genuine until proven otherwise; when being on the wrong
side of a local war when America enters the picture is proof
of fighting against America; when U.S. military commanders
charged with keeping us safe from harm are asked to sit in
judgment.
"Indeed, the evidence considered persuasive by the tribunal
is made up almost entirely of hearsay evidence recorded by
unidentified individuals with no firsthand knowledge of the
events they describe," wrote Cmdr. James Crisfield, a Navy
judge advocate general and the legal adviser to the
Combatant Status Review Tribunals, in response to one
tribunal decision. Crisfield scolded the tribunal for
rejecting a detainee's request that a witness be allowed to
present hearsay evidence. "There should not be a double
standard for the government's ability to present hearsay and
the detainee's ability to present hearsay evidence."
On October 21, 2005, Farouq went before the Administrative
Review Board, whose officers are charged with assessing
whether an enemy combatant still presents a threat to
America. As it happened, Farouq's attorneys were in
Guantanamo that day, but his request that they be allowed to
accompany him was denied.
The board told Farouq that a new piece of evidence had
turned up against him, he later told his lawyers. Somebody
had said, at some point in the past four years, that they
had heard the name "Farouq" over a walkie-talkie during the
battle of Tora Bora.
That may have happened. In fact, it probably did happen. The
name "Farouq" is as common in the Arab world as "George" is
in America. It's a first name, in fact, that is shared by
the foreign minister of Syria, the culture minister of
Egypt, the political director of the Palestinian Fatah
party, the major general in charge of earthquake relief in
Pakistan. And it is the last name of a top Qaeda operative
who had escaped from the Bagram air base in July 2005.
The Defense Department, following orders and procedures,
still considers Farouq Ali Ahmed, Detainee 032, a threat to
America. Two months after his review board, on December 18,
Farouq turned 22, passing his fourth straight birthday
behind bars in Guantanamo.
Who would do differently? Who would raise their hand to
release the man who might fly into the next skyscraper?
*****
Who Is at Guantanamo Bay
By Corine Hegland, National Journal
National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006
As a result of the habeas corpus petitions filed by
attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees, the Defense
Department has had to file court documents on 132 of the
enemy combatants, or just under a quarter of the prison's
population. National Journal undertook a detailed review of
the unclassified files to develop profiles of the 132 men.
NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314 prisoners who
pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review Tribunals
at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information provides a
picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in the war
on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S. military
prison on an island belonging to one of America's bitterest
enemies.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
President Bush issued a military order that authorized the
Defense Department to detain noncitizens suspected of having
ties with Al Qaeda or other terrorists. As a result,
hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" were rounded up and
taken to prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since early 2002,
lawyers working on a volunteer basis have filed papers with
U.S. courts asking the government to explain why it is
holding individual prisoners. These habeas corpus petitions
have forced disclosures by the Defense Department that shed
light on some of the details surrounding the estimated 500
prisoners currently in U.S. captivity.
The Defense Department declined a request to release
comparable statistics for all of the detainees held at
Guantanamo Bay.
The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a
majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans --
nor were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought
the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by
American troops at all. Most are from Arab countries, and
most were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.
Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group,
are -- like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National
Journal's accompanying story -- not accused of taking part
in hostilities against the United States or its coalition
partners. (The 75 include 10 detainees whom the U.S.
government "no longer" considers enemy combatants, although
at least eight of the 10 are still being held at
Guantanamo.) Typically, documents describe these men as
"associated" with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda -- sometimes
directly so, and sometimes through only weak or distant
connections. Several men worked for charities that had some
ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated with
the Taliban.
Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended
jihadist training camps before September 11, an accusation
admitted by some and denied by others. The U.S. government
says that some of the suspected jihadists trained in
Afghanistan, even though other records show that they had
not yet entered the country at the time of the training
camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of
being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan.
The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men
directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.
One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim,
admitted that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and
intended to hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a
Briton, is said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in
New York City. Both men were released to their home
governments in January 2005. Neither one is facing charges
at home.
The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing
torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was
watching him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but
has said it lacks sufficient information to press terrorism
charges against him. The British man was cleared after a few
hours of questioning in London.
The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo,
Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the
American Embassy there; the charge was investigated and
dismissed by a judge. The country's human-rights chamber
issued an order prohibiting the men from being taken out of
the country. The Americans seized them anyway.
The Defense Department accusations fall into only two
categories -- those who participated in hostilities and
those who did not. But the boundaries between the two
categories can be fuzzy. In the nonhostile category, for
example, is a suspected Qaeda financier picked up in
Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the other hand, are a few
men whose most direct link to hostilities appears to be
getting wounded by one of the thousands of American bombs
dropped on Afghanistan.
One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the
detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were
arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by
Pakistani forces in Pakistan.
At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the
border region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian
Afghan refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out
of the country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the
war. Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region
say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without
retrieving their passports and identification papers and
that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they
were taken to prison instead. Many of the men who detailed
their capture described being taken through one, two, or
three Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the
Americans.
Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in
Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders
between January and September 2002. The senior suspects
captured in these raids immediately disappeared into CIA
custody -- they are not at Guantanamo. But their lesser
companions, or others arrested in the same town on the same
night, were delivered to Cuba.
Also in this group are at least three men who were picked
off Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for
foreigners, and one man who says he answered a knock on the
door of the apartment next to his.
The 314 transcripts released to the Associated Press under a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit give similar results. The
314 men described there included 97 Afghans who were
arrested in Afghanistan. But they also included 211
foreigners, 152 of whom -- or more than 70 percent -- were
arrested outside of Afghanistan. And 145 of those men were
captured in Pakistan.
*****
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > He [David Hicks, who prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim
> > al-Austraili"] intended to make war on "Jews and the West",
> >
> > Not to make war on "America". Not "Jews". To make war on "Jews
> > and the West" - which necessarily includes making war on the land
> > of his birth, whose protection he now seeks - Australia. Should
> > he be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia - to make
> > war upon it.
> >
> > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried
> > there, never to see his homeland again.
"brique"
> But then the same should also apply to you James. You too seek the
> downfall of western civilisation, the end of 'democracy', the
> destruction of the USA, don't you?
Government is not western civilization, still less is it "the West".
Americans dominate the world not through the power of the state, but
through soft power, through their cultural influence and through their
superior skills in running enterprises. An America without the state
would result in Americans dominating more, not less.
> After all, isn't that what any 'anarchist' desires, regardless of
> what form of social organisation they desire to see replace the
> current forms?
Only totalitarians desire the destruction of the west. A lot of
totalitarians call themselves anarchists, precisely because their
ideology is as far from anarchism as it is possible to be. Chomsky is
a notorious example.
Chomsky: http://www.freespeech.org/evolution/cage.htm
: : Even if they're anarchists who regard the state as totally
: : illegitimate, as I do, they realize that it is necessary to
: : protect the public arena, which means state power. That's an
: : idea that's very hard for people up here [in North America] to
: : understand.
Yeah, he is right about it being very hard to understand.
> If you were asked the standard immigration questions concerning your
> beliefs regarding the US State and political system, shouldn't your
> honest answers put you in Guantanamo?
No one has been put in Gautanamo for answering honestly, and I was
asked the standard immigration questions, and nobody blinked. The
questions were not very probing.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
vjhaRmx8xoSyX1bpBWLN/+R6va35544SVRTmoo5G
4WHIW6ApIFi+nhcfendr4fc7ut3drrdAMxIFJ3g66
Dan Clore
> G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
> news:dt7te4$pq$1...@reader2.panix.com...
>>James A. Donald:
>>>>>Gauntanomo detainees were detained on the battlefield.
>>
>>>"Michael Price"
>>>
>>>> No James most of them weren't.
>>
>>James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
>>
>>>So who in Gautanamo was detained elsewhere? Name him, and tell us his
>>>story.
>>>...
>>
>>Isn't that a bit cynical? Part of the nature of
>>the exercise is to conceal the names and deeds of
>>those held there.
>>
> Well James, you are an idiot. Even the Pentagon doesn't try to pretend that
> all the detainees were 'captured' on the 'battlefield'. The majority have
> been detained by Pakistani security forces in Pakistan. Some even managed to
> get themselves 'captured' on the well-known 'battlefields' of The Gambia
> and Morocco where they were attacking the US Army.....oh, hang on... well,
> where they would have been attacking the US Army if the US Army had actually
> been there 'liberating' a 'battlefield' for them to be 'combatants' on, no
> doubt.
>
> Some names, none of whom were 'captured on a battlefield' but all of whom
> are currently detained in Guatanamo:
>
> Benyam Mohammed : detained in Morocco, transferred to Kabul then to
> Guantanamo.
>
> Shaker Aamer : detained Pakistan, transferred to Kabul, then to Guatanamo.
>
> Bisher Al-Rawi : detained in The Gambia, transferred to Guatanamo.
>
> Jamal El-Banna : detained in The Gambia, transferred to Guatanamo
>
> Ahmad Errachidi : detained in Pakistan, transferred to Guatanamo.
>
> But you want their stories too.... here's one.... from the FBI's own
> files...
>
> http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/052505/
>
> Apparently the going 'bounty' for handing over these 'terrorists' is $5,000
> for a'Taliban' and $20,000 for an 'Al-Queda'.... just give a name, any name
> will do, think of some-one you dont particularily like, to the Pakistani
> Security and hey presto, nice crisp dollar bills will be yours. No big
> surprise that around 75% of the Guantanamo detainess were 'captured' on the
> 'battlefields' of Pakistan, eh?
I also began a list of those caught elsewhere than
Afghanistan (note that the US government has kept as much
information as possible about the detainees secret, not even
releasing the names of most of them, much less the
circumstances of their capture or evidence of any guilt):
Bisher al-Rawi: Arrested in Gambia.
Jamil el-Banna: Arrested in Gambia.
Martin Mubanga. Arrested in Zambia. (Transferred through
extraordinary rendition; released without charge.)
Bensayem Belkacem: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Boudella el Hajj: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Lakmar Boudiene: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Sabir Mahfouz Lahmar: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Mustafa Ait Idir: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Mohamed Nechle: Algerian arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
(Earlier charged and found not guilty.)
Jamal Abdullah: Ugandan arrested in Pakistan.
Sami al Hajj: Sudanese arrested in Pakistan. (Aljazeera
cameraman.)
Farouk Ali Ahmed: Yemeni arrested in Pakistan.
Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari: Kuwaiti arrested
in Pakistan.
Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad Al Odah: Kuwaiti arrested in
Pakistan.
Abd Al Aziz Sayer Uwain Al Shammeri: Kuwaiti arrested in
Pakistan.
Jalal Salam Bin Amer: Yemeni arrested in Karachi, Pakistan.
Omar Deghayes: Libyan arrested in Pakistan.
Mehdi Muhammed Ghezali: Swede arrested in Pakistan.
Mamdouh Habib: Australian arrested in Pakistan. (Released.)
Murat Kurnaz: Turk arrested on a bus in Pakistan.
Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mar'i: Arrested at home in Karachi,
Pakistan.
Benyam Mohammed al Habashi: Arrested at Karachi airport.
Just a bare start--
But I suggest the regressive rightists have a look at a map
and see how close to the battlefields in Afghanistan Gambia,
Bosnia, and Zambia are.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
brique
> --
> James A. Donald:
> > > He [David Hicks, who prefers to be known as "Abu Muslim
> > > al-Austraili"] intended to make war on "Jews and the West",
> > > whether he actually managed to or not.
> > >
> > > Not to make war on "America". Not "Jews". To make war on "Jews
> > > and the West" - which necessarily includes making war on the land
> > > of his birth, whose protection he now seeks - Australia. Should
> > > he be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia - to make
> > > war upon it.
> > >
> > > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried
> > > there, never to see his homeland again.
>
> "brique"
> > But then the same should also apply to you James. You too seek the
> > downfall of western civilisation, the end of 'democracy', the
> > destruction of the USA, don't you?
>
> Government is not western civilization, still less is it "the West".
> Americans dominate the world not through the power of the state, but
> through soft power, through their cultural influence and through their
> superior skills in running enterprises. An America without the state
> would result in Americans dominating more, not less.
We are talking about the State definition of 'terrorism' which is what is
being used to detain those at Guatanamo. Most definitions used tend to
include the formualtion of 'desiring the overthrow of democracy' or
similar.
Which place both you and I firmly in the 'terrorist' camp, James.
As for 'western civilisation'.. come now, you contend that is an entity
seperate from State and economic relationships?
You somewhat naive assumption that an America without a State would dominate
more rather than less is fanciful in the extreme. I would suggest without
either the massive economic or military power controlled by that State,
american interests abroad would soon be shown the way home.
>
> > After all, isn't that what any 'anarchist' desires, regardless of
> > what form of social organisation they desire to see replace the
> > current forms?
>
(snipped snipe at Chomsky, quoted in relation to an irrelevant distraction,
which no doubt will now become the central theme of James and Constance's
further replies, along with reference to mass murder, totalitarian terror
and Stalins socks)
>
> > If you were asked the standard immigration questions concerning your
> > beliefs regarding the US State and political system, shouldn't your
> > honest answers put you in Guantanamo?
>
> No one has been put in Gautanamo for answering honestly, and I was
> asked the standard immigration questions, and nobody blinked. The
> questions were not very probing.
So, you did lie then.
Oh you naughty little terrorist!
James A. Donald
James A. Donald
> > Government is not western civilization, still less is it "the
> > West". Americans dominate the world not through the power of the
> > state, but through soft power, through their cultural influence
> > and through their superior skills in running enterprises. An
> > America without the state would result in Americans dominating
> > more, not less.
"brique"
> We are talking about the State definition of 'terrorism' which is
> what is being used to detain those at Guatanamo.
State or no state, terrorists must be dealt with. I suspect that if
the state was absent or weak, our methods would strikingly resemble
those employed by the Northern alliance.
> Most definitions used tend to include the formualtion of 'desiring
> the overthrow of democracy' or similar.
You live in a world of your own. Not one uses such a definition
except totalitarians, who have their own very peculiar definition of
democracy. Terrorists are defined by their method - terror - not
their objectives.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
n/Pb3AfnPyLtwcIoBf3Kqolf3mhrVC0lHkbCpvXc
4am5qiebYh7xvHpLVXn5Gs08BmcRWKxl0Yl0KPdbM
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > If he ["Abu Muslim al-Austraili" formerly known as David Hicks]
> > was trying to find a way to run he would have headed away from
> > Afghanistan when he saw the two towers fall, instead of heading
> > into Afghanistan.
"Michael Price"
> Actaully he was already there and had been for months.
He returned to Afghanistan upon seeing the two towers fall. At the
time the two towers fell, his contacts with his family came from
Pakistan.
His action is consistent with his declaration of intent to end the
domination of "Jews and the West" and enforce Sharia world wide. His
deeds fit his words.
James A. Donald:
> > Should he be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia -
> > to make war upon it.
> >
> > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried
> > there, never to see his homeland again.
"Michael Price"
> So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
This is war.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
yZqe2D+pDGW0V2LWyRZuJG9H1uaEPV+Iadfh3pWt
4SYKATJMruqb/SDPLaCulB8svJrAeddcImHeihsTZ
Animaminima
> > So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
James A. Donald wrote:
> This is war.
For fascists, it always is. Why don't you give up your pretenses?
brique
> --
> James A. Donald:
> > > If he ["Abu Muslim al-Austraili" formerly known as David Hicks]
> > > was trying to find a way to run he would have headed away from
> > > Afghanistan when he saw the two towers fall, instead of heading
> > > into Afghanistan.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > Actaully he was already there and had been for months.
>
> He returned to Afghanistan upon seeing the two towers fall. At the
> time the two towers fell, his contacts with his family came from
> Pakistan.
>
> His action is consistent with his declaration of intent to end the
> domination of "Jews and the West" and enforce Sharia world wide. His
> deeds fit his words.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > Should he be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia -
> > > to make war upon it.
> > >
> > > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be buried
> > > there, never to see his homeland again.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
>
> This is war.
Which excuses any and all conduct, negates the need for any moral values or
ethical actions and demands that bodies, and lots of them, be paraded for
the edification of the victors.
Hey ho, hasn't civilisation come a long way......
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > > > Should he ["Abu Muslim al-Austraili" formerly known as David
> > > > Hicks] be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia -
> > > >
> > > > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be
> > > > buried there, never to see his homeland again.
"Michael Price"
> > > So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
> >
> > This is war.
"brique"
> Which excuses any and all conduct, negates the need for any moral
> values or ethical actions and demands that bodies, and lots of them,
> be paraded for the edification of the victors.
Keeping an enemy of the west out of the west forever is markedly
different from blowing up a pizza parlor.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
pakXq21KjjH987qlpZJyXCqHrDbg4naodKuNstyB
41viDizQfpyQEGNqmISXDVvOcsj/864ODKSPC822g
Stan de SD
"Animaminima" <anima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1140451859....@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> "Michael Price"
> > > So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
>
> James A. Donald wrote:
> > This is war.
>
> For fascists, it always is.
You're referring to the Islamokooks, right?
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
No, but it adds another damn good reason why an unrepentant violent felon
with an anti-American attitude shouldn't be allowed into this country. Sorry
that people like you have no fucking common sense whatsoever, but we're not
obliged to court your favor. :O|
Stan de SD
> --
> James A. Donald:
> > > > > Should he ["Abu Muslim al-Austraili" formerly known as David
> > > > > Hicks] be released from Gitmo, he would return to Australia -
> > > > > to make war upon it.
> > > > >
> > > > > He should never return. He should stay in Gitmo, and be
> > > > > buried there, never to see his homeland again.
>
> "Michael Price"
> > > > So much for your belief in the right to a fair trial.
> > >
> > > This is war.
>
> "brique"
> > Which excuses any and all conduct, negates the need for any moral
> > values or ethical actions and demands that bodies, and lots of them,
> > be paraded for the edification of the victors.
>
> Keeping an enemy of the west out of the west forever is markedly
> different from blowing up a pizza parlor.
Isn't amazing how people who ostensibly hate western civilization take
offense when the inhabitants of such don't welcome them?
Curly Surmudgeon
You continue to make that allegation yet have failed to provide any proof
that he was ever convicted of a felony. That takes much of the strength
out of your arguements.
-- Regards, Curly
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beware the American Taliban
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stan de SD
"Curly Surmudgeon" <cu...@curlysurmudgeon.com> wrote in message
news:37KdnUzfbq3...@comcast.com...
You referring to Jose Bove or David Hicks? I was referring to Bove, but
given that Hicks made his allegiance to the other side, he can be legally
stripped of his citizenship and denied entry back to the US.
Curly Surmudgeon
I'm referring to the "violent felon" claim. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I have no problem with keeping real criminals out. My concern is the use
of bogus charges and convictions to keep out worthwhile people. People
who have been prosecuted or even convicted of crimes aren't necessarily
"criminals" but any meaningful sense of the word.
Language and definitions are important. Laws are often weapons used by an
authoritarian government against freedom loving citizens.
Stan de SD
Davis Hicks can be legally stripped of any of his citizenship and refused
entry to the US based on his actions. If you have a US passport, open it up
to page 4 and read sections (2) and (3) under the section LOSS OF
CITIZENSHIP.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:21:56 -0800, "Stan de SD"
> Davis Hicks can be legally stripped of any of his citizenship and
> refused entry to the US based on his actions. If you have a US
> passport, open it up to page 4 and read sections (2) and (3) under
> the section LOSS OF CITIZENSHIP.
Actually David Hicks is an Australian citizen, but the same rules
apply, as Al Quaeda also made war upon Australia.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hYe/JQr0gn+DDT46LuPJ0FztkOI/9k5VxIrq2sq7
4y/iqXfbK80LQqm7BhXgJGPbeBc0daL9Vd6DKKIwo
G*rd*n
> I'm referring to the "violent felon" claim. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
>
> I have no problem with keeping real criminals out. My concern is the use
> of bogus charges and convictions to keep out worthwhile people. People
> who have been prosecuted or even convicted of crimes aren't necessarily
> "criminals" but any meaningful sense of the word.
> ...
They are if you're a fan of the State. We have quite a few
of those around. Curiously some of them refer to themselves
as "anarchists".
Curly Surmudgeon
Isn't this thread entitled "José Bové"? I'm confused, who are you
calling a "violent felon" and where has he been convicted?
Curly Surmudgeon
I'd add "Patriot" too. By Bush's definition Paul Revere was a Terrorist.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:13:57 -0800, Curly Surmudgeon
> Isn't this thread entitled "José Bové"? I'm confused, who are you
> calling a "violent felon" and where has he been convicted?
José Bové is a violent french felon who was convicted in France for
his destructive anti American acts, and was unsurprisingly forbidden
to enter America.
David Hicks is the former name of Abu Muslim al-Austraili, an
Australian Muslim who has been wandering around the world making war,
(or attempting to make war, depending on who you believe) on "Jews and
the West", with the objective of imposing world wide Sharia. After
the two towers fell he re-entered Afghanistan to assist Al Quaeda.
He was captured on the battlefield according to the Americans, or
somewhere near the battlefield according his supporters, and is
currently imprisoned in Gitmo. His supporters argue he should be let
out, as there is no specific proof he was actually in battle against
American troops, and was probably never in battle against Australian
troops. He was however an active member of a military organization
that was and is making war against Americans and Australians, among
others. Unsurprisingly, the Australian government does not want him
back, and neither do I.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
XYldrbOaL/FhN89Q07ym1sVDmZGIuQBQ/X6UdwYO
4dtIGVU3YeIlR49vIBdDba4Jy1Gm87Vr7SOgN+VQz
constan...@gmail.com
For example you.
constan...@gmail.com
He means that "fascists" (i.e., non-leftists) consider the mass murder
and destruction of 9/11 to be war, whereas in contrast all
right-thinking people (i.e., leftists) consider mass murder and
destruction to be peace and consider production and trade to be war.
Take for example Bove, who brought peace to a McDonald's franchise by
destroying it, an action that all the leftists in this group hold him
in high esteem for (while simultaneously insisting that he is entirely
innocent of it, or else that McDonald's had it coming, or both).
brique
Of course this thread is about José Bové, about whom James and Constance
have spouted their usual idiocies, about which they have been which James
and Constance have been challeneged and thus why Constance and James are now
so desperate to mention anybody but José Bové. Get with the program, Curly!
brique
> --
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:13:57 -0800, Curly Surmudgeon
> > Isn't this thread entitled "José Bové"? I'm confused, who are you
> > calling a "violent felon" and where has he been convicted?
>
> José Bové is a violent french felon who was convicted in France for
> his destructive anti American acts, and was unsurprisingly forbidden
> to enter America.
>
> David Hicks is the former name of Abu Muslim al-Austraili, an
> Australian Muslim who has been wandering around the world making war,
> (or attempting to make war, depending on who you believe) on "Jews and
> the West", with the objective of imposing world wide Sharia. After
> the two towers fell he re-entered Afghanistan to assist Al Quaeda.
> He was captured on the battlefield according to the Americans, or
> somewhere near the battlefield according his supporters, and is
> currently imprisoned in Gitmo. His supporters argue he should be let
> out, as there is no specific proof he was actually in battle against
> American troops, and was probably never in battle against Australian
> troops. He was however an active member of a military organization
> that was and is making war against Americans and Australians, among
> others. Unsurprisingly, the Australian government does not want him
> back, and neither do I.
Three lines about the subject of the thread, which contain two inaccuracies
and one debatable description. Fourteen lines about some-one else entirely.
Way to go, James.
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
And those are exactly what?
> Fourteen lines about some-one else entirely.
> Way to go, James.
It's called "answering the question" - you should try it some time. :O|
Stan de SD
"brique" <briqu...@freeuk.c0m> wrote in message
And those idiocies are exactly what? Has Bove not been convicted of a crime?
Has he not shown a tendency to advocate violence against American companies?
Does America not have a right to keep out convicted criminals? Please
explain.
Stan de SD
> > ...
>
> cu...@curlysurmudgeon.com:
> > I'm referring to the "violent felon" claim. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> >
> > I have no problem with keeping real criminals out. My concern is the
use
> > of bogus charges and convictions to keep out worthwhile people. People
> > who have been prosecuted or even convicted of crimes aren't necessarily
> > "criminals" but any meaningful sense of the word.
>
I'm a fan of the State when it does one of the few things it has a
legitimate mandate to do - protect the public against violent, destructive
assholes such as yourself.
hc23hc
>
> I'm a fan of the State when it does one of the
a) beat up, deprive, maim and kill non-white people, especially women
b) wage illegal war, as long as it profits fascists and crooked Israeli
regimes
c) cut social programs, so as to harm the Poor unless it's me (Stain de
STD)
d) conscript everyone to die in the State's stupid corrupt wars
e) keep churning out policies so stupid, they make me (Stain) look
smart by comparison even if only for a microssecond or two at most.
f) make killing "lefty liberals" and black people (same thing) legal
.
.
.
constan...@gmail.com
Actually, threads tend to branch out and include topics not included in
the title. That's normal. Moreover it's rather obsessed of you to
mention "James and Constance" and "Constance and James" when the post
you're replying to is in reply to Stan de SD.
Moreover it was Michael Price who first mentioned David Hicks, bringing
him into the discussion. So the presence of Hicks is not because
"Constance and James are now ... desperate to mention anybody but Jose
Bove".
And Michael mentioned David Hicks in the context of Guantanamo, which
was brought up in the context of show trial courts, which was brought
up in the context of Dan Clore's post mentioning Carriles. Dan Clore
brought up Carriles because he was responding to Michael's point that
Jose Bove was not welcome in the US.
So it was in fact Dan Clore who first move the topic off Jose Bove, in
this particular sub-thread.
Not that you care. When you made your comments in the post that I am
replying to, you did not care whether they were true or false. You
didn't actually bother to check the history of the thread because this
wasn't about whether your comments were true or false, this is about
making up stuff that you can say about "Constance and James", who have
for whatever reason become an obsession of yours. You no more intended
your post to be taken as making a serious factual claim, than someone
who says, "I slept with your mother".
You don't know what it is to have a serious argument. Your idea of
having an argument is trying to say things that upset the people you've
identified as opponents, it doesn't matter whether it's the truth or
not.
You're not alone. Dan Clore does it, Gordon does it, though they're
more clever than you. You guys don't make serious arguments because you
don't have any.
Curly Surmudgeon
Normal? In rational conversation you start a new topic, or change the
topic title, when attacking someone not associated with the topic.
So, after all that, who are you calling a "felon" and do you have any
evidence to support that allegation? Slandering someone is pretty serious
and adding "felon" even moreso.
As I said upstream, laws are a weapon of government and often used against
those not in power to keep them supressed. Even if your target were a
"felon" I'd insist upon knowing hte circumstances before disallowing them
entry to the USA. Many famous and good people are "felons" such as Nelson
Mandella.
G*rd*n
cu...@curlysurmudgeon.com:
> > > I'm referring to the "violent felon" claim. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> > >
> > > I have no problem with keeping real criminals out. My concern is the use
> > > of bogus charges and convictions to keep out worthwhile people. People
> > > who have been prosecuted or even convicted of crimes aren't necessarily
> > > "criminals" but any meaningful sense of the word.
> > > ...
G*rd*n:
> > They are if you're a fan of the State. We have quite a few
> > of those around. Curiously some of them refer to themselves
> > as "anarchists".
constan...@gmail.com:
> For example you.
You have never been able to show that I am a fan of any
state, or the State in general. Your remark is vacuous
and one wonders why you bothered to draw attention to
yourself by making it, given your own frequently
expressed fandom -- something I myself hadn't bothered
to do.