Ex-Gitmo detainee arrested on terror ties
Asif Shahzad ASSOCIATED PRESS
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan A terrorism suspect recently detained in Pakistan is the same Swedish national once held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, police said Monday. He and others in his group were reportedly trying to join al Qaeda in the country's lawless tribal areas.
The development appeared to underscore the difficulty with predicting the path that detainees at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will take upon their release, with the Pentagon having acknowledged that a small but notable percentage of one-time inmates have joined, or rejoined, militant groups.
Dera Ghazi Khan police Chief Mohammad Rizwan told the Associated Press that authorities made the identification after interrogating the man, Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali. A copy of his Swedish passport obtained by the AP showed that his face matched that of previously published photos of the man held at Guantanamo.
"I do confirm that he is the same person. He is a very dangerous man," Chief Rizwan said.
Ghezali was arrested on the outskirts of Dera Ghazi Khan, a southern Pakistani town, on Aug. 28 along with a group of foreigners including seven Turks and three other Swedes who lacked proper immigration stamps.
A Swedish man with the same name was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and held for two years at Guantanamo. The United States released him in 2004.
Ghezali -- born in Sweden to a Finnish mother and Algerian father -- was reportedly part of a group of 156 suspected al Qaeda fighters arrested in 2001 by Pakistani authorities while fleeing Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains. Ghezali, who is believed to be 30 years old, has denied ties to al Qaeda and said he was in the region only to learn more about Islam.
The other Swedes arrested were identified as Munir Awad and Safia Benaouda and a young boy who was apparently their son, according to a police report obtained by the AP through the Interior Ministry.
Benaouda and Awad are the same names of two people who also have been in the news before.
A Swede named Safia Benaouda, then 17, was held by Ethiopian authorities after being taken into custody along the Somalia-Kenya border in 2007. She told a Swedish newspaper that she was interrogated for weeks by white foreigners and asked about extremism in Sweden. A man named Munir Awad was identified as her fiance.
The Benaouda who was held in Ethiopia is the daughter of Helena Benaouda, chairwoman of the Swedish Muslim Council.
In Sweden, where the arrests have made headlines, Helena Benaouda told the tabloid Expressen over the weekend that she had not been able to reach her daughter, whom she thought was in Saudi Arabia.
"She is supposed to be in Mecca to celebrate Ramadan. But now I haven't been able to reach her by telephone, and as a mother and grandmother I am now very worried," she was quoted as saying. "If it turns out that this is my daughter, I will obviously seek an explanation to this."
Showing posts with label Gitmo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gitmo. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Trained Murderers Treated Poorly, We're Shocked to Learn
Do you know what a muscle hijacker is? That's a young Muslim male, not necessarily that big, but bulked up from weightlifting, who's equipped with special training from Al Qaeda, a dull ache for his 72 virgins, and a boxcutter. And he’s perfectly at home with the idea of slicing the throat of a 120 lb. female flight attendant so that the terrified passengers hostage to him, and to his maniac partners in the cockpit, don’t do anything stupid the last few minutes before they’re incinerated:
After al-Qahtani missed his big chance on 9/11, he skeedadled to Afghanistan to make jihad there, and got himself arrested in December 2001 and sent to Gitmo.
While there, he was identified as the “last member” of the 20-man hijacking team sent to attack us on 9/11. Al-Qahtani admitted he’d met bin Laden several times, had received terrorist training at AQ camps, could identify top AQ leaders, and had been sent by KSM to be a part of the 9/11 attack. Of absolutely no surprise to anyone, intelligence officials wanted to know everything he knew, and did what they could to get him in a talking mood. America still didn't know if we were going to get hit again.
At the New York Times, Reuters, the AP, and the Washington Post, they don’t like to use the term “muscle hijacker” when they describe al-Qahtani. They prefer “detainee,” maybe because it starts with a “D” and sounds more like “defendant,” as in, you have the right to remain silent.
The reports yesterday, originating with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, describe how a “top Bush administration official. . . concluded” that the U.S. military tortured al-Qahtani. (“Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official”).
The official, Susan J. Crawford, is a retired judge appointed to review Guanantamo cases for prosecution.
The stories are misleading. Read them carefully enough and you can piece together that everything the interrogators did was legal at the time. Nor is it Crawford’s assignment either to act as a factfinder on issues of detainee treatment, nor to issue legal findings on what is or isn’t torture. (Andrew McCarthy explains this much better than I could here.)
Look at these stories and see how they try to lead the reader. Whaaa!, al Qahtani is only a “detainee” (not a fighter trained to slaughter innocent civilians). Whaaaa! Al Qahtani has been subjected to “degrading and abusive” interrogation (after it was learned he was inside with UBL and KSM only months after 9/11). Whaaaa!, he was told that his mother and sisters were “whores.” (He was trained to cut the throats of flight attendants and passengers). Whaaaa!, he was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head during interrogation. Whaaaa!, he was scared with a dog. He was even “hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.”
Okay, I admit it. That’s pretty tough stuff.
Until you remember that the record also shows the heart rates of 3,000 victims of al Qahtani's friends dropped to zero beats per minute on the morning of 9/11.
I'd hate like hell to think cops were treating defendants this way. But I have no problem at all with out military and intelligence warriors getting busy with these sworn enemies of life.
Even Crawford gets this, though she’s too confused to know the difference between war and law enforcement:
"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "
According to KSM, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] Abu Turab even had the trainees butcher a sheep and a camel with a knife to prepare to use knives during theMohammed al-Qahtani is a muscle hijacker. And he was anxious to do his part to slaughter a Barbara Olson, or a Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, and to make Todd Beamer or Jeremy Glick’s wives into widows. Al-Qahtani was the twentieth 9/11 hijacker, and the only thing that kept him from doing his part that day was an immigration agent who spotted him as hinky and sent him back to Dubai.
hijackings. The recruits learned to focus on storming the cockpit at the earliest opportunity when the doors first opened, and to worry about seizing control over the rest of the plane later. The operatives were taught about other kinds of attack as well, such as truck bombing, so that they would not be able to disclose the exact nature of their operation if they were caught. According to KSM, the muscle did not learn the full details-including the plan to hijack planes and fly them into buildings-before reaching the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report, Ch. 7.3.
After al-Qahtani missed his big chance on 9/11, he skeedadled to Afghanistan to make jihad there, and got himself arrested in December 2001 and sent to Gitmo.
While there, he was identified as the “last member” of the 20-man hijacking team sent to attack us on 9/11. Al-Qahtani admitted he’d met bin Laden several times, had received terrorist training at AQ camps, could identify top AQ leaders, and had been sent by KSM to be a part of the 9/11 attack. Of absolutely no surprise to anyone, intelligence officials wanted to know everything he knew, and did what they could to get him in a talking mood. America still didn't know if we were going to get hit again.
At the New York Times, Reuters, the AP, and the Washington Post, they don’t like to use the term “muscle hijacker” when they describe al-Qahtani. They prefer “detainee,” maybe because it starts with a “D” and sounds more like “defendant,” as in, you have the right to remain silent.
The reports yesterday, originating with Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, describe how a “top Bush administration official. . . concluded” that the U.S. military tortured al-Qahtani. (“Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official”).
The official, Susan J. Crawford, is a retired judge appointed to review Guanantamo cases for prosecution.
The stories are misleading. Read them carefully enough and you can piece together that everything the interrogators did was legal at the time. Nor is it Crawford’s assignment either to act as a factfinder on issues of detainee treatment, nor to issue legal findings on what is or isn’t torture. (Andrew McCarthy explains this much better than I could here.)
Look at these stories and see how they try to lead the reader. Whaaa!, al Qahtani is only a “detainee” (not a fighter trained to slaughter innocent civilians). Whaaaa! Al Qahtani has been subjected to “degrading and abusive” interrogation (after it was learned he was inside with UBL and KSM only months after 9/11). Whaaaa!, he was told that his mother and sisters were “whores.” (He was trained to cut the throats of flight attendants and passengers). Whaaaa!, he was forced to wear a bra and had a thong placed on his head during interrogation. Whaaaa!, he was scared with a dog. He was even “hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.”
Okay, I admit it. That’s pretty tough stuff.
Until you remember that the record also shows the heart rates of 3,000 victims of al Qahtani's friends dropped to zero beats per minute on the morning of 9/11.
I'd hate like hell to think cops were treating defendants this way. But I have no problem at all with out military and intelligence warriors getting busy with these sworn enemies of life.
Even Crawford gets this, though she’s too confused to know the difference between war and law enforcement:
"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "
Sunday, November 30, 2008
As the Table Turns
It’s been my view that the anti-anti-terrorist movement amongst liberals since 2001 had little to do with principled stands on civil liberty or pacifism, but was driven by sheer vindictiveness against George W. Bush for having the nerve to beat Al Gore in 2000. Ever since then, more important for Democrats than the security and success of the nation was preventing the success of the hated Bush.
I went so far as to believe that the Democrats were perfectly willing to see us lose a war, or lose American lives in a terror attack because intelligence operations were compromised or obstructed--or otherwise allow harm to the country, if those things contributed to sabotage the Bush administration. I believed it, in part, because I watched it happening in front of my very eyes.
It is probably the most cynical opinion I’ve ever held. And it’s turning out to be absolutely true.
The proof of it is demonstrated in the Left’s sudden discovery, since Election Day, that Islamic terrorists are a threat to the country. Of course, the only thing that’s changed in the Islamic war against the West since November 4th is who’s turn it is to lead the fight. It's not as if we've just had another 9/11-type attack (thanks to George W. Bush).
But until Obama was elected the Left consistently treated Islamic terrorism as, at best, a marginal criminal matter whose root causes can be blamed on American racism, imperialism, and unwillingness to adopt the Kyoto Treaty, or, at worst, something made up by Cheney-Bush at a barbecue in Crawford, Texas.
Regardless, at no time has it been taken seriously by liberals.
(Asking “Why haven’t we caught bin Laden yet?” is not taking it seriously. That was only meant as a jibe at Bush. They said the same thing until Bush caught Saddam, and when Bush did they promptly went about-face and said catching Saddam didn't make any difference. No one who understands this battle believes that bin Laden’s head on a pole on international TV will end global Islamic jihadist attacks. And if he’s captured alive, no one on the Left will let him face justice without whimpering that his rights are being violated.)
Anyway, I see where Michelle Malkin has tapped into some of this, too, in her recent comments about the incoming administration’s sudden maturity on the subject of Gitmo:
Playing Games at Gitmo
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang.
By Michelle Malkin
The human-rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility’s “cultural adviser,” their brains have not been “stimulated” enough. So this Thanksgiving, America is drawing up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the “notoriously Spartan” detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English-language lessons, and “Game Boy-like” electronic devices.
Next up: Wii Fi, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine, and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized.
On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren’t the only ones playing games at Gitmo. Some top legal advisers and supporters of Barack Obama, whose name detainees chanted on election night, are now rethinking the president-elect’s absolutist campaign position on shutting the center down and flooding our mainland courts with every last enemy combatant designee. Yes, reality bites. And Democrats must now grapple with the very real possibility that an Obama administration could potentially release a Gitmo denizen who would turn around and commit mass terrorist acts on American soil or abroad.
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office — and they haven’t even taken office yet.
While Obama paid lip service to the “Close the Gitmo gulag!” agenda on 60 Minutes over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information — information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption.
Listen to relentless Bush critic David Cole, who told the New York Times last week: “You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone.” Added Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution: “I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things.”
Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to The Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, “Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.”
Next thing you know, they’ll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees — funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.
Next thing you know, they’ll rediscover the facts that detainees have systematically lied and exaggerated stories about mistreatment at Gitmo, and that interrogators and military personnel have bent over backward to accommodate their personal and religious needs and wants.
Next thing you know, they’ll start reminding us that dozens of former Gitmo detainees have been released and recaptured on the battlefield while committing acts of terrorism.
Funny, when President Bush and his homeland-security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media and the left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended the administration’s counterterrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a “tyrant.” And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was labeled a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.
Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of “regaining America’s moral stature in the world,” as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al-Qaeda killers don’t strike on American ground again.
Viva la Hope and Change!
#
I went so far as to believe that the Democrats were perfectly willing to see us lose a war, or lose American lives in a terror attack because intelligence operations were compromised or obstructed--or otherwise allow harm to the country, if those things contributed to sabotage the Bush administration. I believed it, in part, because I watched it happening in front of my very eyes.
It is probably the most cynical opinion I’ve ever held. And it’s turning out to be absolutely true.
The proof of it is demonstrated in the Left’s sudden discovery, since Election Day, that Islamic terrorists are a threat to the country. Of course, the only thing that’s changed in the Islamic war against the West since November 4th is who’s turn it is to lead the fight. It's not as if we've just had another 9/11-type attack (thanks to George W. Bush).
But until Obama was elected the Left consistently treated Islamic terrorism as, at best, a marginal criminal matter whose root causes can be blamed on American racism, imperialism, and unwillingness to adopt the Kyoto Treaty, or, at worst, something made up by Cheney-Bush at a barbecue in Crawford, Texas.
Regardless, at no time has it been taken seriously by liberals.
(Asking “Why haven’t we caught bin Laden yet?” is not taking it seriously. That was only meant as a jibe at Bush. They said the same thing until Bush caught Saddam, and when Bush did they promptly went about-face and said catching Saddam didn't make any difference. No one who understands this battle believes that bin Laden’s head on a pole on international TV will end global Islamic jihadist attacks. And if he’s captured alive, no one on the Left will let him face justice without whimpering that his rights are being violated.)
Anyway, I see where Michelle Malkin has tapped into some of this, too, in her recent comments about the incoming administration’s sudden maturity on the subject of Gitmo:
Playing Games at Gitmo
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang.
By Michelle Malkin
The human-rights crowd is right: Life is hard for a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The deprivation is unspeakable. According to the facility’s “cultural adviser,” their brains have not been “stimulated” enough. So this Thanksgiving, America is drawing up plans to provide the 250 or so suspected jihadists at the “notoriously Spartan” detention camp with basic sustenance including, as reported by the Miami Herald, movie nights, art classes, English-language lessons, and “Game Boy-like” electronic devices.
Next up: Wii Fi, Guitar Hero, Sudoku, People magazine, and macrame. Anything less would be uncivilized.
On a deadly serious note, the detainees aren’t the only ones playing games at Gitmo. Some top legal advisers and supporters of Barack Obama, whose name detainees chanted on election night, are now rethinking the president-elect’s absolutist campaign position on shutting the center down and flooding our mainland courts with every last enemy combatant designee. Yes, reality bites. And Democrats must now grapple with the very real possibility that an Obama administration could potentially release a Gitmo denizen who would turn around and commit mass terrorist acts on American soil or abroad.
Nothing clarifies the mind like a jihadi boomerang. Never before have an administration and its followers matured so quickly in office — and they haven’t even taken office yet.
While Obama paid lip service to the “Close the Gitmo gulag!” agenda on 60 Minutes over the weekend, his kitchen cabinet is proceeding more pragmatically. Believe it or not, the Obama crowd is now contemplating a preventive detention law and an alternative judicial system for the most sensitive national security cases involving the most highly classified information — information that has no place being aired in the civilian courts for public consumption.
Listen to relentless Bush critic David Cole, who told the New York Times last week: “You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone.” Added Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution: “I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things.”
Moreover, Obama transition team members have suggested to The Wall Street Journal that despite his campaign season CIA-bashing, “Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.”
Next thing you know, they’ll start arguing that the world has been fooled by years of sob-story propaganda about the Gitmo detainees — funded by Kuwaiti government-subsidized lawyers who cast them all as innocent potato farmers and schmucks dazed and confused on battlefields.
Next thing you know, they’ll rediscover the facts that detainees have systematically lied and exaggerated stories about mistreatment at Gitmo, and that interrogators and military personnel have bent over backward to accommodate their personal and religious needs and wants.
Next thing you know, they’ll start reminding us that dozens of former Gitmo detainees have been released and recaptured on the battlefield while committing acts of terrorism.
Funny, when President Bush and his homeland-security team realized these very realities seven years ago, they were branded terrorists and hounded relentlessly by Congress, the media and the left. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey eloquently defended the administration’s counterterrorism policies at the Federalist Society before he collapsed, he was heckled as a “tyrant.” And when I wrote my second book expounding on this very thesis, I was labeled a racist and fascist whose ideas exploring the proper balance between security and civil liberties had no place in public discourse.
Now, at long last, some liberals have realized that the sacred goal of “regaining America’s moral stature in the world,” as Obama put it, may be less important than ensuring that al-Qaeda killers don’t strike on American ground again.
Viva la Hope and Change!
#
Health Care That's Truly Universal
From Ann Coulter's Thursday column:
Far from being sodomized and tortured by U.S. forces -- as Obama's base has wailed for the past seven years -- the innocent scholars and philanthropists being held at Guantanamo have been given expensive, high-tech medical procedures at taxpayer expense. If we're not careful, multitudes of Muslims will be going to fight Americans in Afghanistan just so they can go to Guantanamo and get proper treatment for attention deficit disorder and erectile dysfunction.
After being captured fighting with Taliban forces against Americans in 2001, Abdullah Massoud was sent to Guantanamo, where the one-legged terrorist was fitted with a special prosthetic leg, at a cost of $50,000-$75,000 to the U.S. taxpayer. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, Massoud would now be able to park his car bomb in a handicapped parking space!
. . . .Upon his release in March 2004, Massoud hippity-hopped back to Afghanistan and quickly resumed his war against the U.S. Aided by his new artificial leg, just months later, in October 2004, Massoud masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan working on the Gomal Zam Dam project.
This proved, to me at least, that people with disabilities can do anything they put their minds to. Way to go, you plucky extremist!
Read the rest of "Terrorists' Restless Leg Syndrome".
Far from being sodomized and tortured by U.S. forces -- as Obama's base has wailed for the past seven years -- the innocent scholars and philanthropists being held at Guantanamo have been given expensive, high-tech medical procedures at taxpayer expense. If we're not careful, multitudes of Muslims will be going to fight Americans in Afghanistan just so they can go to Guantanamo and get proper treatment for attention deficit disorder and erectile dysfunction.
After being captured fighting with Taliban forces against Americans in 2001, Abdullah Massoud was sent to Guantanamo, where the one-legged terrorist was fitted with a special prosthetic leg, at a cost of $50,000-$75,000 to the U.S. taxpayer. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, Massoud would now be able to park his car bomb in a handicapped parking space!
. . . .Upon his release in March 2004, Massoud hippity-hopped back to Afghanistan and quickly resumed his war against the U.S. Aided by his new artificial leg, just months later, in October 2004, Massoud masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan working on the Gomal Zam Dam project.
This proved, to me at least, that people with disabilities can do anything they put their minds to. Way to go, you plucky extremist!
Read the rest of "Terrorists' Restless Leg Syndrome".
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