,
TNNORDINARY MUSLIM TERRORISTS
Dutch teenager seeks new acquittal for attack plan
31 Oct 2005
Reuters
AMSTERDAM, Oct 31 (Reuters) - A Dutch-Moroccan man who was acquitted in April of charges he planned attacks on government buildings said on Monday he expected an appeal against his acquittal to fail.
Samir Azzouz's arrest last year sparked a national security alert after the authorities found machinegun ammunition, a bullet-proof vest, two mock explosive devices, a silencer, maps and sketches of prominent buildings at his home.
Azzouz, 19, was sentenced to three months in jail for illegal possession of weapons in April but acquitted of armed robbery and charges he planned to bomb governing buildings. Prosecutors launched an appeal against the acquittal on Monday.
"I still hate the Dutch judicial system but I do think the judges will do their work and that they will acquit me," Azzouz told judges in a high security court in Amsterdam. "I am saying that the evidence is not strong enough."
Azzouz was rearrested this month along with six other suspected Islamic militants on suspicion of a new plot for attacks against politicians and government buildings.
Since Azzouz's first arrest and trial, Dutch laws have been tightened to introduce a charge of "membership of a criminal organisation with terrorist intent" carrying a maximum sentence of 15 years.
In addition to maps, photographs, parts of weapons, electrical circuits and night-vision goggles, police found videos, discs and radical Islamist documents at his home, as well as chemicals that prosecutors said could be used in a bomb.
However, the Rotterdam court that acquitted him said items found at his home seemed to be intended for use in some crime but were not enough to prove the specific charges.
The defence had accused prosecutors of assuming their client planned an "al Qaeda-style attack" just because he was a Muslim.
Prosecutors have also, in a separate case,
accused Azzouz of having links to a militant Islamist network that is suspected
of plots to kill politicians, and of ties to the man charged with the murder of
filmmaker Theo van Gogh a year ago.
If the Problem is Muslim Terror
By Victor Davis Hanson
City-Journal.org
November 4, 2005
In September, federal prosecutors charged illegal alien Mahmoud Maawad, 29, with wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number. But their real worry was that the Egyptian student had just ordered $3,000 in aviation materials, including DVDs entitled “Ups and Downs of Takeoffs and Landings,” “Mental Math for Pilots,” and “Mastering GPS Flying.” Shortly after this July’s London bombings, U.S. antiterrorism authorities arrested five Egyptian men—four of them illegal immigrants—in a Newark, New Jersey, apartment, which contained maps of the New York City subway system, train schedules, videos of city landmarks, and $8,000 in twenties and fifties.
A few weeks earlier, in the sleepy town of Lodi, California, about two hours north of where I live, the FBI arrested Umer and Hamid Hayat (father and son) on immigration charges and for lying to federal agents about ties with Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan. Officials allege that Hamid visited an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan during 2003 and 2004 for training in weapons, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat. Last autumn, authorities broke up a terrorist cell in Portland, Oregon, charging four with plotting to set up a terrorist training organization and with traveling to Afghanistan to aid al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Since September 11, the list of those arrested, and in a growing number of cases convicted, for Islamist terrorist activities in the U.S. has gotten longer and longer. Some arrestees have been U.S. citizens; more have been aliens, legal and illegal, living in out-of-the-way places on work or study visas. The list includes such abettors of evil as Mukhtar al-Bakri of Lackawanna, New York (ten years for providing support to al-Qaida), Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed of Brooklyn (45 years for providing support to al-Qaida and Hamas), and Ibrahim Admed Al-Hamdi of northern Virginia (15 years for firearm violations in connection with terrorist activities). The continued presence within our borders of so many who seek to destroy us suggests that we still haven’t squarely faced the problem that Islamic radicalism poses to our domestic security.
In fact, sometimes we have seemed to encourage actively the spread of such radicalism on our shores. On Halloween night 2001—just weeks after September 11 and with U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan—firebrand imams Abdul Alim Musa, Muhammad Asi, Abdel Razzag Al Raggad, and other Islamic radicals broadcast live from the National Press Club on C-SPAN2 a bold proclamation of empathy for the Taliban, hatred for Jews, and understanding for the murderers of 3,000 Americans. Asi, for example, spoke of the “grand strike against New York and Washington” and the “twin evils in this world . . . the decision makers in Washington and the decision makers in Tel Aviv.” Not only did we allow such a broadcast to tens of thousands—our government subsidized it.
Or consider the ease with which the now-deported Muhammed Adil Khan, a radical Islamic cleric associated with the two Lodi suspects, first arrived in America in the eighties, welcomed on a “religious worker” visa. Another Lodi extremist, Shabbir Ahmed, entered more recently on such a visa—despite having led demonstrations in Pakistan shortly after September 11 that called for jihad against America. At his immigration hearing, Ahmed successfully pleaded that his past anti-American agitation “was a requirement of all imams. If you don’t [agitate], people turn against you. They sort of force you to say something.”
That America has given Islamists such freedom has doubtless made it easier for them to seduce U.S. citizens to join jihadist groups and seek to kill their countrymen. We remember most vividly John Walker Lindh, who ventured from Marin County to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan. But even more sinister was former Chicago gangbanger José Padilla, who in 1991 converted to Islam, changed his name to Abdullah al-Muhajir, and went off to Egypt. By 2002, he had made his way to Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight at al-Qaida’s side. In early May 2002, just after his return from Pakistan, officials arrested him in Chicago for allegedly plotting to explode a dirty bomb in Washington, D.C. In these cases, we have yet to discover who the spiritual mentors of these homegrown jihadists were, or where in the U.S. they were indoctrinated.
The Islamist seduction also includes disturbed souls here in the U.S. who belong to no formal terrorist group but who emulate jihadists after exposure to their ideas. Such was the suicidal 15-year-old who in January 2002 crashed a light plane into a Florida bank, leaving behind a note praising bin Ladin: “First of all, Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9/11. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees. God bless him and the others who helped make September 11th happen.” Another example may be green-card-holding Eshem Mohamed Hadayet, the Egyptian gunman who three years ago shot up the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two innocents and wounding three. Jihadist literature certainly influenced beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad.
Some say, reassuringly, that Islamic extremism has little appeal to America’s growing Muslim population. America prides itself on being unlike Europe in its powers of assimilation. Thanks to the melting pot and a vigorous economy, this argument goes, we have no Marseilles-like Muslim ghettos or Rotterdam-style “dish cities,” blighted Islamic suburbs where assimilation remains rare and terrorist sympathies widespread even after generations of living in the West. We certainly don’t have the difficulties in assimilating Muslims that England experiences. A chilling Daily Telegraph poll, for example, found that one in four British Muslims sympathized with the motives of July’s subway killers, about one in five voiced little loyalty toward Britain, and a third felt that Western culture was “decadent” and that they should help “to bring it to an end.”
Yet U.S. self-congratulation is premature. Before we condemn Britain as hopelessly retrograde, we need to recognize that we have no idea how much some American Muslims support jihadist causes—comprehensive polls don’t exist. Of the few surveys taken, the results aren’t encouraging. The Hamilton College Muslim America poll of April 2003 revealed that 44 percent of U.S. Muslims had no opinion on whether Usama bin Ladin was involved with the September 11 attacks. Only one out of three blamed al-Qaida.
Top U.S. Muslim organizations and spokesmen are no more reassuring when it comes to condemning Islamic terror. True, the Council on American Islamic Relations finally took out a national advertisement this summer repudiating terrorism in the name of Islam—four years after September 11. But examine the immediate reaction to the ad from San Antonio Express-News columnist Mansour El-Kikhia. “It is a rejection of U.S. and British policies in the Middle East, not Islam, that has promoted terrorism against America,” El-Kikhia writes. “More important, it was the British and the United States that drew first blood. The Middle East didn’t come to America or go to America or go to Britain; rather, America and Britain went to the Middle East.” El-Kikhia ends his rant by implying that the United States has a history of warring on imaginary threats, so American Muslims should feel no imperative to distinguish themselves from those terrorizing in Islam’s name.
More coherent—but, in its way, even more frightening—was “Time to Talk to al Qaeda,” a Boston Globe op-ed by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou of Harvard’s Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. Mohamedou assures us that bin Ladin is a reasonable adversary with whom we can reach accommodation. “Al Qaeda is an industrious, committed, and power-wielding organization waging a political, limited, and evasive war of attrition—not a religious, open-ended, apocalyptic one,” he explains. “Over the past year, it has struck private and public alliances, offered truces, affected elections, and gained an international stature beyond a mere security threat.” Few Americans would want us to agree to terms with terrorists who murdered 3,000 people in New York and who behead and blow up democratic reformers in Iraq and across the Middle East. Yet that’s exactly what Mohamedou recommends. “Al Qaeda has been true to its word in announcing and implementing its strategy for over a decade,” he observes. “It is likely to be true to its word in the future and cease hostilities against the United States, and indeed bring an end to the war it declared in 1996 and in 1998, in return for some degree of satisfaction regarding its grievances”—the U.S. out of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, Israel out of the West Bank, and no more support for Arab dictators.
If we really are in a war against Muslim terror, our enemies and those who support or appease them pose a quandary on the home front unlike anything we have faced in past struggles.
First, unlike in previous wars, securing the homeland is absolutely central to the outcome of this conflict. In the war’s overseas fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, no enemy possesses the conventional or other means to defeat the U.S. militarily. The only way America could lose abroad would be if it loses the will to fight—and that could only happen through a succession of terrorist attacks at home that petrified the citizenry, warped our political institutions, or disrupted the economy to such an extent that, Madrid-style, we granted concessions to radical Islamists. Terrorism is not the last desperate resort of this enemy; it is its first, deliberate attack. Domestic security becomes an even more essential concern because of the difficulties of deterring states that may have provided either money or sanctuary to Islamic terrorists in the past—an Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Syria—but that deny culpability and deplore terrorism publicly, making it almost impossible for us to justify a conventional military response against them.
Second, technology has made it easier for small numbers of individuals—even a single person—to inflict substantial damage on America’s social and economic fabric. While the amount of explosives that terrorists needed in the past to do substantial harm was completely unwieldy, these days a single dirty bomb strapped to a terrorist’s body could shut down the New York Stock Exchange for months, because of radioactive contamination. A few bags of anthrax emptied into the Washington subway could wreak enormous social and economic havoc.
Third, in an age of instantaneous communications and global travel, two oceans provide America with precious little security against such weapons. Back in June 1942, submarines had to drop eight German saboteurs, outfitted with clumsy radio communications equipment, off the Florida and Long Island coasts. Today, hundreds of jihadists from a Pakistan or a Yemen could fly to Lodi or Portland in less than 24 hours and communicate in real time with whomever they wish worldwide. Past experience proves that they might be involved with radical agitation back home, enter the U.S. under religious exemptions, and overstay their visas with little scrutiny.
Heightening our vulnerability further, contemporary Americans do not appear as a distinct class, ethnic group, or race. A Middle Easterner casing a subway might stand out in racially homogeneous Sweden or Nigeria; he wouldn’t be so easy to pick out in the multiracial U.S. And given the casualness of American fashion, a Wall Street banker running in Central Park in a jogging suit and sneakers might look identical to a suicide-vest-wearing Pakistani terrorist rushing to a subway station.
Without prior intelligence and infiltration of Islamist mosques and madrassas, it thus becomes very difficult to ensure our safety at the last line of defense: security checks at the crowded intersection, the mall, or the train station. Add politically correct bans on even rudimentary profiling (sex and age) and we wind up only burdening commuters and shoppers with such checks without any real gain in overall safety. The key, then, must be to keep suspects out rather than relying on tracking them down or preventing them from striking once they have blended into the general population.
From a national security standpoint, the prevention of another September 11 thus seems straightforward—in theory. Suspend most legal immigration from Middle Eastern countries known to subsidize or tolerate terrorism. Review all current visas and search out and deport violators. Continue to audit carefully the arrivals of Middle Eastern nationals. Tighten the Canadian and Mexican borders. Extend existing statutes on inflammatory speech and hate crimes to include radical Islamic doctrines that routinely denigrate Americans, Jews, homosexuals, and women. Hand down long sentences to those convicted of promulgating Islamic hatred and plotting terrorism, with special attention given to Saudi-sponsored charities, madrassas, and mosques. Renew the Patriot Act, and create a public culture that associates radical Islamicism with fascism.
European and American experiences both suggest that we can toughen our domestic security without violating constitutional custom. In Europe’s case, the examples are quite recent. The Netherlands is now handing down life sentences for Islamic killers, criminalizing the hate speech of the madrassas, curbing immigration from the Middle East, and deporting suspected Islamists—in some cases, Islamists with Dutch passports. France has gone even further. A radical new antiterrorism package unveiled by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has given the government the right to deport residents summarily and to strip radicals of their naturalized French citizenship. British prime minister Tony Blair in turn has introduced legislation that would criminalize association with radical Islamists and enable the government to deport suspected terrorist sympathizers swiftly. “Let no one be in any doubt that the rules of the game are changing,” Blair warned.
Here in the U.S., there’s no need to go back for guidance on securing the homeland to Abraham Lincoln’s regrettable suspension of habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilson’s questionable Sedition and Espionage acts that jailed hundreds during World War I for saying and writing things (even loosely) that officials felt helped the Central Powers, or Franklin Roosevelt’s military tribunals that tried, convicted, and executed German terrorist agents before they committed any damage. Instead, we should reexamine the cold war, when the threat of mutually assured destruction made conventional war between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies unlikely. The struggle against the Soviets and their minions thus became one of dirty operations, espionage, and terrorism.
In response to the communist threat, we blocked easy immigration from Soviet bloc countries. We did not demonize the citizens of Albania and Bulgaria, but we did not let them in, either. The United States generally tolerated membership in the Communist Party and expression of anti-American sentiments here at home, but we infiltrated hard-core Soviet-funded communist groups and jailed or deported their most dangerous operatives.
By analogy, just as no Czech citizens could easily fly to the U.S. from Prague in 1955, so should we be wary of travelers from Cairo or Riyadh. Critics will counter that Warsaw Pact governments were officially hostile to the U.S., while “allied” Egyptian, Pakistani, and Saudi authorities clamp down on terrorists. But this claim is dubious. Radical Islamists have thrived by following long-understood protocols of engagement: they do not attack the autocracies of the Middle East directly, and in return they receive from those autocracies virtual amnesty for targeting Westerners. When the Islamists break the rules and hit enclaves of foreigners inside Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the autocracies hound them for a bit. When they return to killing people on foreign soil, these dictatorships and monarchies again leave them in peace.
Four years after September 11, with the nature of our dilemma clearly before us, why do we still have terrorists operating freely in our midst? Why do we seem paralyzed over the proper course of action to prevent attacks from within?
Part of the problem is the legacy of our domestic history during wartime. Because most Americans view the U.S. internment of the Japanese during World War II as gratuitously punitive, unnecessary, and illegal, any proposal to monitor particular American subgroups today calls down swift denunciation as the moral equivalent of that internment. Moreover, though the McCarthy period was not, properly speaking, a witch hunt—no witches haunted Salem, but plenty of communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union moved in and out of the U.S. government during the fifties—it matters little. The abuses by anti-communist watchdogs have become enshrined in our collective memory as something we must never repeat. It is now a staple of our history books that the House Un-American Activities Committee was almost more pernicious than 7,000 Soviet nuclear missiles pointed at the U.S. Consequently, we have since believed it better to err on the side of civil liberties than on the side of national security, should the two conflict—at least until September 11.
Our elite commitment to multiculturalism also hamstrings us from taking the needed security steps. For 30 years, our schools have pounded home the creed that all cultures are of equal merit—or, more accurately perhaps, that no culture is worse than the West’s. Millions of Americans consequently aren’t sure whether radical Islam is just another legitimate alternative to the dominant Western narrative. Typical of this mind-set, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi, excusing the London subway terrorism, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that deliberately butchering commuters is no worse than accidentally killing civilians while targeting terrorists in a war zone. “American and British media have devoted hours to wondering what would drive a seemingly normal young Muslim to destroy himself and others,” Makdisi said. “No one has paused to ask what would cause a seemingly normal young Christian or Jew to strap himself into a warplane and drop bombs on a village, knowing full well his bombs will inevitably kill civilians (and, of course, soldiers).”
It is a tremendous historical irony that America’s liberal Left, embracing moral equivalence in this fashion, has all but refused to denounce the illiberal ideology of our enemies—an ideology that supports polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, hatred of homosexuals, and patriarchy. Sometimes, the terrorists even win outright praise: perhaps the most popular filmmaker of election year 2004 was Michael Moore, who celebrated the suicide bombers and terrorists of Iraq as “minutemen” akin to our own Founding Fathers.
If we are not sure as a nation that Islamists really are foes of Western values but instead see them as another persecuted group with legitimate gripes against us (occupied Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, colonialism, the Crusades), then it becomes increasingly hard to identify, let alone fight, the practitioners of Islamic fanaticism at home. Even the military bureaucracy seems to be having trouble naming the enemy: witness the rebranding by some Pentagon officials of “the war on terrorism” into the “global war against violent extremism.” While the original nomenclature was unsatisfactory—wars aren’t fought against a tactic but rather against those using it—the new name is even less helpful. Our fight against jihadists is different from our struggle with recalcitrant Serbian nationalists or Kim Jong-il’s crackpot extremism. We are at war with radical Islam, Islamic fascism, Islamism—the “radical Islamic polemic,” in the words of Sarkozy. We should never lose sight of this fact. President Bush’s October speech describing our struggle against Islamic terror—a first for the administration—is an encouraging, if belated, sign.
Practical considerations also get in the way of securing the homeland. Any radical change in our immigration laws—affecting entry into the U.S., systematic deportation of illegal aliens, or scrutiny of visa holders—requires comprehensive reform. And such transformation immediately raises the question of what to do with the 10 to 15 million illegal Mexican aliens residing here and with our vast, unsecured southern border. So far, sensitivity to Hispanic concerns, both here and in Mexico, coupled with employer lobbying, has precluded securing the border and insisting on legality for all new immigrants. Deporting illegal aliens from the Middle East will immediately lead to questions as to why we are not deporting millions of unlawful Mexican residents—a political hot potato.
Yet immigration control—as the Dutch and French have learned—may be the most powerful tool in the war against the jihadists. Not only does it help keep terrorists out, it also carries symbolic weight. In the Middle East, America is worshipped even as it is hated—constantly slurred even as it proves the Number One destination for thousands upon thousands of would-be immigrants from the Islamic world. Once we have deported the Islamists, and Middle Easterners and other Muslims find it much harder to enter the U.S. because of their governments’ tolerance for radical anti-Americanism, the message will resound all the more loudly in the Muslim world itself that terrorism is intolerable.
Such toughness opposes the current orthodoxy, which holds that curtailing immigration from the Arab and Muslim world will cost us a key opportunity to inculcate moderates and eventually send back emissaries of goodwill. Maybe; but so far, the profile of the Islamic terrorist is someone who has paid back our magnanimity with deadly contempt. Just as bin Ladin, Dr. Zawahiri, and the Pakistanis suspected of bombing the London subways were not poor, uneducated, or unfamiliar with the West, so too we find that those arrested for terrorist activities on our shores seem to hate us all the more because of our liberality.
Perhaps if the message does begin to be heard that America is as unpredictable as it is merciless toward the advocates and supporters of radical Islam, then the much praised but rarely heard moderates of the Muslim world will at last step forward and keep the few from ruining things for the many. Meantime, we should stop allowing illiberals into the United States—illiberals who either wish to undermine Western tolerance or won’t worry too much when others in their midst try.
London bomber's
widow bares her soul
27 Jul 2007
The Times of India
Rashmee
Roshan Lall,TNN
LONDON: The
ethnic Indian origin widow of lead July 7 suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan
has spoken for the first time about the horror, shame and calumny of the life
bequeathed by her dead husband and her complete ignorance of his dangerous
radicalisation in the countdown to the multiple London blasts in 2005.
Hasina Patel, 29, the daughter of educated middle-class Indians, spoke to
Britain's domestic satellite channel Sky TV in her first ever interview.
In an extended account of life with British Pakistani Khan, the days leading up
to and after the 7/7 attacks, Patel described the haunting coincidence of losing
her second unborn child on the very morning Khan was bombing London.
Patel's simple, plaintive account, along with her plea that her husband was a
good, if misled man, is seen conclusively to make a nonsense of the belief that
she had been estranged from Khan at the time of the bomb attacks. She insisted,
"he is still my daughter's father".
Till Friday's interview, Patel and Khan had been thought to be living separate
lives in the run-up to 7/7.
But on Friday, Patel described how her husband took her to hospital for a
standard check on their second unborn child. She said, "I feel there was a good
person in there ...yes I just hope and pray for him because I feel there was a
good person in there but feel he was probably misled and brainwashed by the
wrong people".
In her only angry outburst at the notoriety forever attached to her and their
young daughter because of Khan's horrific actions, Patel said she felt her
husband had uncaringly left her to bear the consequences.
In May, almost two years after the attacks, Patel became the first woman of
Indian origin to be arrested and held anywhere in Europe on suspicion of the
commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. Although she was
released without charge, days later, the arrest "turned her life upside down",
she said.
She said she felt desperately sorry that the arrest renewed the nightmare for
her mother, who is known among Indians in their northern English hometown of
Dewsbury as a morally-upright, law-abiding pillar of the community. Patel's
mother Farida, who has received royal recognition for her charitable work, is
understood to have played a stoutly supportive role to her daughter in the years
since 7/7.
In the in-depth interview, Patel insisted on wearing a full veil that revealing
nothing but dark, pain-filled, teary eyes and slender hands, unadorned with
nothing but one simple ring. Though Patel, who works with disabled children,
does not normally wear a full veil, she is said to want to preserve what little
privacy she has as the widow of one of the UK's most notorious home-grown
suicide bombers, who led a series of attacks seen as Britain's 9/11.
She said that hours before the 7/7 attacks, she desperately tried to phone her
husband to tell him she was in the throes of a miscarriage.
She said she went to hospital that fateful morning only to find she had lost her
baby and then got home to see news of the attacks on television. She said, in a
simple, plaintive description of life as the wife and widow of a suicide bomber,
"I kept trying to phone him leaving messages, saying...'I am still bleeding,
something's up'. I went to the hospital with my mum and the midwife she told me
that I'd lost the baby. I went back to my own house and put the TV on and I saw
that the bombings ... were just all over the news."
Patel added that it was only much later that she realised her husband had never
learnt their second child would never be born because his hand-written will,
offering a small gift of £ 400 asked her to "buy toys for the children".
She said, "It was really sad because he mentioned 'children' and he obviously
thought that the pregnancy had gone ahead and didn't know it would be just me
and my daughter left alone."
She described Khan's last goodbye to her as very "normal", just a "see you
later, I'm going out, I'll be back in a few hours."
She said her husband pleaded for forgiveness and understanding in his will and
handwritten note. "You have tried to be a good wife, but I have deceived you,"
she quoted the letter as saying.
Patel said she "completely condemned" the July 7 blasts, had "full sympathy"
with the victims and admitted she could hardly believe the man she was married
to for eight years could have been so "cold and calculated" to have carried out
attacks that killed 52 people and injured more than 700.
Padilla guilty on all counts in terror case
The verdict is a boost for the administration and may encourage prosecution of other enemy combatants.
By Richard A. Serrano
August 17, 2007
A federal jury in Miami on
Thursday convicted Jose Padilla on charges of aiding terrorist operations
abroad, a verdict that follows a long legal battle that pitted the Bush
administration against civil liberties groups over how terrorism suspects are
detained and should be prosecuted.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested with fanfare in 2002 on charges that he planned
to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in this country, was never tried on those
charges. Instead, his case was combined with that of two other defendants
accused of, among other things, conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people
abroad and providing material support for terrorism.
The conviction of Padilla, 36, and two codefendants was a boost for an
administration that had received sharp criticism for holding Padilla as an
"enemy combatant" for 3 1/2 years without due process until the courts insisted
he be charged with a crime or set free.
The three men were found guilty of all criminal charges against them. They were
accused of being part of a North American support cell that operated in U.S.
cities and in Canada and was designed to send money, other assets and fighters
to Islamic extremists overseas.
Key government evidence was a "mujahedin data form" that Padilla filled out to
join a Muslim extremist organization, as well as a statement he made embracing
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
"We are so pleased with the verdict," said acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Craig S.
Morford. "Frankly, America is a better place today."
U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke set sentencing for Dec. 5. Padilla faces
life in prison without parole.
Attorneys for Padilla, who maintained that the government did not prove its
case, did not call any witnesses in his defense.
Padilla's mother, Estela Lebron, said he would appeal. "My son would not hurt
anyone," she said. "He wanted to go there and learn his religion and the
language. That is all."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Padilla grew up in Chicago under difficult circumstances
and had an arrest record as a youth. He eventually moved to Florida, where he
served nearly a year in jail after a road-rage incident. He was married briefly,
and, in 1992, began exploring Islam. He changed his name to Abdullah al Muhajir.
His trial on terrorism charges, begun under extraordinarily high security in
April, was the first significant test of a terrorist case moved from behind the
shadows of Bush's enemy combatant program and placed in the hands of a public
jury. The government's success in the Padilla case could now encourage officials
to bring other enemy combatants into federal courtrooms.
"This clearly shows that in some cases, yes, the process can handle it," Morford
said. "You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. And these particular
charges did work in a regular criminal trial."
Donna Newman of New York, Padilla's initial attorney who fought for months just
to get a lawyer-client meeting with him, agreed, saying the administration was
wrong not to "trust the courts" for so long.
"I don't necessarily agree with the verdict," she said. But in the future, "the
government should be hard-pressed to say the [criminal justice] system doesn't
work. It shows you can bring forth the evidence and try someone in court."
But Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said the jury's
decision was not a blanket approval of how the administration had dealt with
terrorism defendants.
"This verdict, if it stands, cannot be seen as an endorsement of a regime of
unreviewable executive detention," he said. "President Bush should not take
today's ruling as permission to continue to hold Americans outside the law at
his whim."
The White House did not signal how it might proceed on hundreds of enemy
combatants, including some top Al Qaeda lieutenants housed at the U.S. naval
base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Deputy White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe commended the jury and added, "Jose
Padilla received a fair trial and a just verdict."
Padilla and codefendants Adham Amin Hassoun, formerly of San Diego, and Kifah
Wael Jayyousi of South Florida were convicted of conspiracy to murder, kidnap
and maim individuals in foreign countries, conspiracy to provide material
support to terrorists and of providing material support to terrorists.
Government testimony and evidence showed that the three raised money and
provided manpower to extremist groups abroad, especially in places such as
Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan where Muslims were engaged in conflicts.
A key piece of the
prosecution's case was the application Padilla filled out in July 2000 to join
extremists "in preparation for violent jihad training in Afghanistan."
The government also maintained that Padilla flew to Cairo in the late 1990s and
confided to colleagues that he had "entered into the area of Usama," a presumed
reference to Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Prosecutors said Padilla often conducted his recruiting efforts in code. They
said he would say "fresh air" for action in a conflict area, "tourism" for
travel and expenses, and "football" for combat.
"Jose Padilla became an Al Qaeda trainee who provided the ultimate support --
himself," Assistant U.S. Atty. Brian Frazier told the seven men and five women
on the jury.
But Padilla's defense lawyers maintained that he traveled overseas merely in
pursuit of his newfound religion.
And they said he was treated inhumanely in solitary confinement for years,
tortured and abused, and could not adequately assist his defense by the time the
government decided to seek a grand jury indictment.
The defense also complained that Padilla was never given a fair shake by the
government from the moment in spring 2002 that then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft
went on national television and identified him as a major terrorism suspect
intent on causing great harm with a dirty bomb.
"Throughout our history there have been times of crisis, times when fears run
high, when political convenience causes parts of our government to overreach,"
defense lawyer Anthony J. Natale told the jurors. He was referring to how
Padilla was caught up in much of the anger and hysteria that followed the Sept.
11 terrorist strikes on New York and the Pentagon.
"Now is one of those times of crisis, and this is one of those cases," Natale
said.
Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Ashcroft and
other top administration officials said that upon returning to the United
States, Padilla had planned to scope out sites for detonating a radioactive
device.
The Padilla case immediately became the government's signature front in the war
on terrorism at home.
But those charges were dropped after lawyers fought for years over his legal
rights, and the courts ultimately ruled that Padilla must be either granted a
trial or set free.
In November 2006, Padilla was added to an indictment originally drawn up in
South Florida in 2004. It was on those charges that he was convicted Thursday.
Skilled to kill: Textbooks to terror is a one-way street
The Times of India
8 Jul 2007
Indrani
Bagchi,TNN
Sabeel, Kafeel
and Haneef have blasted through the stereotype that terrorists are poor,
desperate, single young men. As a matter of fact, the psycho-sociological
profile of the modern terrorist indicates a far greater danger to society as we
know it - far from our modern terrorists being mere victims of oppression or
reacting to perceived political injustice like the Iraq war, Palestine etc,
these merchants of death are increasingly using these events to mask a larger
social engineering project at work.
Arab terrorists started out with a territorial goal: they wanted the Americans
out of Arab lands, and they wanted to toss out their own corrupt regimes so they
could make their Muslim countries into Islamist countries. Since 9/11, the
politically correct elite have explained this phenomenon as a brain-washing
exercise by the likes of Osama bin Laden, or that Islam had been hijacked by
them out of ignorance or poverty.
That does not explain what these Indian Muslims were doing practising jihad in
another country. India has had its own jihadis - even the 1857 revolt had a
jihad element to it, but you could quantify the grouse - Kashmir on the boil,
masjid torn down, pogroms in Gujarat.
The bigger trend that is sucking in Muslims from widely different countries is a
global jihad ideology. The "cause", argue analysts, is a nebulously conceived
"pure" Islamist society, which would recapture the documented glories of a
previous golden age, practising the "authentic" faith, without the inequalities
of the present world. Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks,
calls the new social movement the "global salafi jihad".
The components of this jihad are familiar: Over 60% of jihadis now come from
middle-class, caring and intact families, well-educated professionals,
psychologically stable, mildly religious and upright members of their
communities. When they settled in foreign countries, they became lonely,
homesick and embittered. They formed tight cliques with fellow Muslims and
drifted into mosques more for companionship than for religion.
Between their new "friends" and radical preachers, these young men and women
gradually move into a distorted world where it's easier for their new spiritual
masters to propel them into unbelievably cruel acts. They are led to believe
that their perceived social iniquities would find relief in an Islamist society
and sacrifice is the way to go about getting it.
In Bangalore, therefore, the iniquities against Muslims may have been merely a
sense of dissatisfaction. In the charged atmosphere of the minority society in
the West, it is easy to move from this "orbit" of dissatisfaction to the "orbit"
of violence.
"Indoctrination" or "brainwashing" does not come into it anymore. These jihadis
are becoming the modern fulfilment of the controversial 1971 Stanford Prison
Experiment where closed, highly monitored environs impose incredible role
responsibilities on the participants. In this context, it means a non-jihadi, in
a place like a radicalised mosque, for example, begins to accept and live the
logic of jihad.
A more dangerous trend that is coming to light is the recruitment of jihadis
almost unconnected to the immediate cause. Traditional terrorists targeted their
home governments, often based in a foreign land. But the present crop is
different - their origin, their residence, their terrorist acts and their cause
are seemingly unconnected. As Sageman argues, "This imparts a very different
dynamic to this terrorist social movement...Because the terrorists are
completely disconnected from their target, they are not socially embedded in the
society they target...These multiple bonds act as a limit to the damages the
terrorists can bring to their environment. Lack of such bonds frees them from
these responsibilities and local concerns. Unrestrained by any responsibility to
their target, this free-floating network is free to follow the logic of its
abstract ideology and escalate the scale of terror."
Evil, or the perpetration of evil thus becomes routine, or "normalised", as was
argued by Hannah Arendt years ago. It leads to unbelievable acts of cruelty and
terrorism by otherwise "normal" people, immunised from any empathy with the
human cost of such terror.
None of this is really possible if the agents of terror are not educated or
enlightened enough to feel the original sense of inadequacy, but be vulnerable
enough to radical teaching that promises a better world in return for violence.
Former spymaster Ajit Doval points out that the growth of information technology
and communication networks means that Islamist ideologies have a ready,
approving and growing audience. "We cannot say Indian Muslims will not be
affected." Doval says the shift in a person's mind from animus to terror depends
on two things - the intensity of the stimulant and the "doability" quotient of
the terrorist act.
The world, or India for that matter, has not yet figured out how to counter the
spread of a social movement that believes violence against civil society is the
answer to its ills. These numbers are steadily on the rise, says Doval. That is
the danger, he says. If it also appears that America is quitting Iraq, it's an
implicit victory for the global jihad movement.
A Gallup poll that came out earlier this year surveyed 10,000 Muslims through
2005 and 2006 from 10 predominantly Muslim countries. Its findings: richer and
more educated Muslims are more likely to be radicalised. They are smart and men
of the world. Contrary to liberal dogma, education does not stop terrorism.