Guantanamo

Guantanamo, Islamofascists, Lawfare

David Hicks is a terrorist

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Pleads guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorism

‘Australian Taliban’ is a misnomer for David Hicks.

After September 11, David Hicks traveled from Pakistan to Afghanistan with other foreign terrorists and fought US and Northern Alliance forces. It is important to set the record straight, to know what he pled guilty to, past all the misleading statements. For years now, his PR team has proffered up David Hicks’ father who passed his son off as only a misguided youth yet numerous reports and his own father’s statements indicate Hicks dropped out of school at 14, abused drugs, and stole cars before twice volunteering for the jihad. While his lawyers downplayed David Hicks’ role, the evidence shows he trained and fought as a terrorist.

Before September 11, David Hicks met Osama bin Laden at least eight times. Hicks complained to bin Laden that terrorists training manuals were not in English and volunteered to translate them from Arabic. Those translations were intended to train other al Qaeda who only spoke English for the jihad.

While visiting Pakistan, Hicks learned of the September 11 attacks and applauded them. He soon traveled to Afghanistan and fought against US and Northern Alliance alongside other “foreign” fighters for two months until captured.

In 2000, Hicks joined and trained with Lashkar-e Tayyiba or LET (also know as Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Army of the Pure):

“…learning guerrilla warfare, weapons training (including landmines), kidnapping techniques, and assassination methods. In a March 2000 letter, Hicks told his family “don’t ask what’s happened, I can’t be bothered explaining the outcome of these strange events has put me in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in a training camp. Three months training. After which it is my decision whether to cross the line of control into Indian-occupied Kashmir.” In another letter on August 10, 2000, Hicks wrote from Kashmir, claiming to have been a guest of Pakistan’s army for two weeks at the front in the “controlled war” with India. At the time, Lashkar-e-Toiba was an Islamic fighting group that had widespread support in Pakistan. It had a reputation for being focused on fighting India in Kashmir but was also accused of attacks against Indian civilians. After the September 11, 2001 attacks and its banning as a terrorist group by Pakistan in January 2002, Lashkar-e-Toiba fragmented and branched out into sectarian violence. Lashkar-e-Toiba was banned in Australia in 2003.”

David Hicks also trained and fought in Afghanistan:

“…attended a number of al-Qaeda training courses at various camps around Afghanistan, including an advanced course on surveillance, in which he conducted surveillance of the US and British embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan”. They claim that, on an occasion when al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden visited an Afghan camp, Hicks questioned bin Laden about the lack of English in training material and subsequently “began to translate the training camp materials from Arabic to English”. Hicks wrote home that he’d met Osama bin Laden 20 times, later telling investigators that he’d exaggerated. He’d seen bin Laden about eight times and spoken to him only once. Prosecutors also allege Hicks was interviewed by Muhammad Atef, an al-Qaeda military commander, about his background and “the travel habits of Australians”. The US Department of Defense statement claimed “that after viewing TV news coverage in Pakistan of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, [Hicks] returned to Afghanistan to rejoin his al-Qaeda associates to fight against US, British, Canadian, Australian, Afghan, and other coalition force. It is alleged Hicks armed himself with an AK-47 automatic rifle, ammunition, and grenades to fight against coalition forces… Hicks spoke to his parents from just outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar in November 2001. “He said something about going off to Kabul to defend it against the Northern Alliance,” Terry Hicks said.”

David Hicks pled guilty yesterday. He is not some poor, misguided youth whose only crime was guarding a disabled Taliban tank. The media conned you, his lawyers misled you, and his PR team spun you.

David Hicks is a convicted terrorist.

Guantanamo, Lawfare

Civilian Courts Can’t Handle KSM

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David Rivkin and Rich Lowry, today, in the New York Post:

UNDOUBTEDLY, the media’s ideological bias prompts it to be dubious about KSM’s confession – for his statements powerfully rebut a favored media narrative, the notion that the Guantanamo-based detainee population is mostly comprised of “innocent shepards” wrongly swept up by the United States and its allies.

This notion is pivotal to the critics’ efforts to delegitimize the military-justice system that features CSRTs, military commissions and the detention in Guantanamo of captured enemy fighters for the duration of this war and their interrogation – all of which have been in play in the case of Sheik Mohammed.

The news of the confession, perversely, has even become an opportunity to renew calls for the closing of Guantanamo and the use of the criminal-justice system as the exclusive venue for dealing with KSM and his al Qaeda colleagues. This is foolishness.

Take the argument that, even if Sheik Mohammed is telling the truth, he is nothing more than an ordinary criminal and should be treated as such. This ignores the revolution over the last several decades in the rights of criminal defendants, resulting in a great emphasis on a variety of technical evidentiary and other rules. Given this emphasis, convicting individuals captured overseas, when all of the physical evidence also is derived abroad, is exceedingly difficult. Thus, trying al Qaeda personnel through the U.S. criminal-justice system would likely result in most of them going free.