(Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned on Tuesday that the death of any one of the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israel would be a “disaster” and could trigger a backlash that might slip out of control.
“It is very dangerous,” Abbas told Reuters on a day when the Red Cross urged Israel to transfer to hospital six detainees who it said were close to death after not eating for two months.
“If anybody dies today or tomorrow or after a week it would be a disaster and no one could control the situation,” Abbas said in an interview at his office in Ramallah. “I told the Israelis and the Americans if they do not find a solution for this hunger strike immediately, they will be committing a crime.”
Joining some who began fasting earlier, an estimated 1,600 Palestinian prisoners out of 4,800 launched a mass hunger strike on April 17 to protest against conditions in Israeli jails and to demand an end to solitary confinement and more family visits.
The prisoners include Islamists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as members of Abbas’s secular Fatah movement.
The fate of the hunger strikers has touched a raw nerve in the Palestinian territories with daily demonstrations in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip to support the protest.
Civilian lawyers argue that the military system is rigged to put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four codefendants to death. A prosecutor defends the process.
An artist’s rendering shows Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, talking to his attorney during a break in his military commission hearing at Guantanamo Bay. (Janet Hamlin, Miami Herald / May 5, 2012)
By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
U.S. NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The defense team for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, now formally charged with capital murder in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, on Sunday angrily called the military commission legal process a political “regime” set up to put him and his four accused collaborators to death.
David Nevin, Mohammed’s civilian attorney, said new rules imposed under the Obama administration barred the lawyers from discussing with their clients whether they were mistreated by U.S. authorities and, in the case of Mohammed, tortured after their arrests eight years ago.
“We are operating under a regime here,” Nevin said. “We are forbidden from talking to our clients about very important matters.
“And now the government wants to kill Mr. Mohammed. They want to extinguish the last eyewitness so he can never talk about his torture. They want the political cover so he’ll be convicted and executed.”
According to CIA accounts and other documents, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding 183 times at a classified CIA “black site” before he was moved to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
On Saturday, he and four Sept. 11 codefendants were formally arraigned on conspiracy, terrorism and murder charges. They deferred entering pleas of guilt or innocence, with the government planning to ultimately seek five death sentences. The trial is tentatively set to begin in May 2013.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor, said Sunday that the public should remember Sept. 11, 2001, and what happened that morning when nearly 3,000 people died at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington and a field in western Pennsylvania.
“The enemy force was sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal,” he said.
But Martins also vigorously defended the military tribunal process, saying it was fair to both sides.
Military commission hearings began last week against five men held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for conspiring in the 9/11 attacks. Other detainees, however, are held without charges and their legal right to challenge their detention remains blocked.
Last fall, when the federal appeals court in the District of Columbia ruled 2 to 1 against Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen, Judge David Tatel wrote in dissent that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command” that government must allow prisoners who aren’t Americans “meaningful” challenges to detention.
The majority, in a grossly unfair decision, said a government report leading to Mr. Latif’s detention must be assumed to be accurate under “a presumption of regularity,” unless there is “clear evidence to the contrary.”
The Supreme Court is expected soon to consider a request to review the case. It should promptly reverse the appellate decision, which eviscerates the justices’ 2008 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush that allowed Guantánamo prisoners to challenge the legality of their detention in federal court through habeas corpus petitions.
Now a version of the appeals court ruling with some previously redacted portions shows even more defects in Judge Janice Rogers Brown’s majority opinion. In addition to misstatements about rules of evidence, there is inexcusable disregard for critical facts.
An al Qaeda plot, hatched in Yemen, to blow up a commercial aircraft over United States air space was exposed by the CIA, but many questions remain unanswered.
Ali Soufan, former FBI counter terrorist agent and leading expert on al Qaeda in Yemen, appeared exclusively on Amanpour Tuesday. His unique insights help provide the story behind the story.
It begins with Fahd al-Quso, a Yemeni national and top leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula, a man with a five million dollar price tag on his head.
“We first identified Fahd al-Quoso,” said Soufan, “as being a member of the (al Qaeda) cell that conducted the USS Cole attack (in 2000). We were able to arrest him and interrogate him and he provided a significant amount of intelligence about his connections to al Qaeda, about al Qaeda’s role in the USS Cole bombing and t he murder of seventeen sailors…and also about his relationship to Osama bin Laden.”
Soufan added, “He also provided us some information about a meeting…that was a planning summit for the 9-11 attack. So he is as dangerous as you can get.”
Until now
So why did he provide so much invaluable information? “It’s the way we interrogate people,” said Soufan. “You have to have deep knowledge of the group. At one point, he said, ‘Now I remember you. You were in Kandahar…’ He thought I was undercover…And I speak Arabic. So he starts trying to recall everything that happened when he was there in order to prove to me that he was cooperating. And he gave us one main piece of evidence that linked that thing to 9-11.”
Israel’s ability to commit crimes against Palestinians with impunity relies on international complicity.
The Samouni family narrated the horror they lived through in a short movie named ‘Samouni Street’ [AP]
Chicago, IL - There is a determined international effort to ensure that Palestinians are shut out of every legal forum where they could pursue justice for Israel’s crimes against them. Nothing illustrates this better than the horrifying case of the Samouni massacre.
Last week, Israeli military prosecutors announced that no charges would be filed against the soldiers responsible for killing dozens of members of the Samouni family during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead attack on Gaza.
Israeli officials decided, according to Haaretz, that “the attack on civilians ‘who did not take part in the fighting’, and their killing, were not done knowingly and directly, or out of haste and negligence ‘in a manner that would indicate criminal responsibility’”.
We ought to remind ourselves of what actually happened to put the claim that the killings “were not done knowingly and directly” in its proper context. The events are recounted in harrowing detail in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, based on a thorough investigation.
100 civilians forced into house, then deliberately shelled
On January 4, 2009, nine days into the assault on Gaza, Israeli soldiers invaded the Zaytoun area south of Gaza City.
In an area named al-Samouni – after the extended family that lives there – the invaders entered houses by force, killing and injuring occupants in the process. They then forced about 100 civilians, mostly women and children, to gather in the home of Wa’el Samouni. Israeli forces forbade them to leave for a safer area and, as the UN report states: “There was hardly any water and no milk for the babies.”
“Twenty-one family members were killed and 19 injured in the shelling of just that house… Nine of the dead in Wa’el Samouni’s house were children, the youngest a baby of six months.“
On the morning of January 5, Wa’el Samouni and five other men stepped out of the house to collect some firewood. Israeli soldiers positioned on surrounding rooftops could see the men clearly.
“Suddenly,” the report states, “a projectile struck next to the five men, close to the door of Wa’el’s house, and killed Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni and, probably, Hamdi Maher al-Samouni. The other men managed to retreat to the house. Within about five minutes, two or three more projectiles had struck the house directly.”
Employees of the US military contracting group Academi (formerly Xe, Blackwater USA and Blackwater Worldwide) are seen in new leaked video shooting their machine guns at random while driving through the streets of Baghdad, crashing into other cars and even running over a pedestrian without hesitation. Academi received a $250 million contract by the Obama administration to provide military services in Afghanistan.
The wife of Diab Matar, a Palestinian prisoner who has refused food for the past 17 days, took part in a protest outside
Ramle prison in Israel.
KHARAS, West Bank — The newest heroes of the Palestinian cause are not burly young men hurling stones or wielding automatic weapons. They are gaunt adults, wrists in chains, starving themselves inside Israeli prisons.
Each day since April 17, scores of Palestinian prisoners have joined a hunger strike that officials say now counts more than 1,500 participants. And on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of detainees said that if Israel did not yield to their demands for improved prison conditions, the remaining 3,200 would soon join in.
The two longest-striking prisoners, who have gone without food for 66 days, appeared in wheelchairs before Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday morning, pleading for their release from what is known here as administrative detention — incarceration without formal charges. One of them, Bilal Diab, 27, fainted during the hearing.
“I am a man who loves life, and I want to live in dignity,” the other man, Thaer Halahleh, 33, testified, according to an advocacy group that had a supporter in the courtroom. “No human can accept being in jail for one hour without any charge or reason.”
As the strike has swelled, the prisoners’ names and faces have been plastered on protest tents in villages throughout the West Bank. With the peace process stalled and internal Palestinian politics adrift, many analysts here see nonviolent resistance as a critical tactic for the Palestinian national movement, and the hunger strike as a potential catalyst to bring an Arab Spring-style uprising to the West Bank.
While the revolutions around the region have helped elevate support for the Palestinian cause, they have also undermined the leadership it has long relied on, and until now the streets here have largely remained quiet.
The ringleader is the U.S.-educated one-time chief of al-Qaida operations who bragged that he was responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks “from A to Z.” He was held for years in CIA detention, where agents waterboarded him 183 times, and got to Guantánamo in 2006.
The others include a one-legged militant, a self-described wannabe 9/11 hijacker, a money manager and the mastermind’s nephew, who has introduced himself in court as a Microsoft-certified software engineer.
All five are being brought to the Guantánamo war court Saturday to face arraignment as the architects of the worst terror attack on American soil in U.S. history.
And if that all sounds familiar, it is, because, yes, we’ve been here before.
The Pentagon is resetting the clock and restarting the Sept. 11 terror trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 46, and four alleged accomplices, seeking to write the final chapter of the five men nearly a year to the day after Special Forces hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden.
I ran into this film tonight. I wish I had the faith to believe this could happen, maybe I will someday, but since I have talked to this… person, it’s just so impossible for me to imagine. However, the film makers did a wonderful job. And if we all pray for this to happen – who knows? I would love to be able to remove the “slime” out of Robert (Slime) Spencer when I have to type his name.
Description: The film is based on a real incident happened in Germany. It revolves around a person ‘Robert Spencer’ who seems to be Islamophobe, due to the stereo-typing of the media and constant bombardment of the Islam-hating speakers; he often deems Muslims to be violent. Fortunately, he gets 3 Arabs as his neighbors, whose presence often makes him terrified. But to the contrary, conducive attitude and unprecedented behavior of those Arabs, change his perception about Islam and Muslims at large. — menofcloth (Jazak’Allah Khair menofcloth!)
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
When an Oregon college student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.
This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.
Carefully orchestrated sting operations usually hold up in court. Defendants invariably claim entrapment and almost always lose, because the law requires that they show no predisposition to commit the crime, even when induced by government agents. To underscore their predisposition, many suspects are “warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. But not always, recorded conversations show. Sometimes they are coaxed to continue.
