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.

Iran, Political wind

House vote prompted Iran to take Brits hostage

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Measure undermines Presidential authority and America’s foreign policy

Friday, the House of Representatives passed 218-212 a resolution that would mandate the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq no later than August of 2008. That same day, 15 British sailors were taken hostage by Iran. While the British government obviously hopes the Iranian government will release them, should it decide to use military force against Iran, it could normally count on the US military’s support.

These are not normal times.

President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, if it reaches his desk after Senate action with the withdrawal date mandates intact. Yet the measure passed by the House Friday included that the President must obtain Congressional approval prior to using military force against Iran.

The Wall Street Journal summed it up this morning this way:

As with the 1979 hostage crisis, how Britain and the rest of the civilized world respond in the early days of the crisis will determine how long it lasts. Britain has already demanded the safe and immediate return of its personnel; they will have to make clear that its foreign policy will not be held hostage to the mullahs.

That does not require a resort to military options while diplomacy still has a chance to gain the sailors’s release. Saturday’s unanimous vote by the U.N. Security Council was also welcome, even if the new sanctions continue to be far too weak. Serious sanctions would target the country’s supply of refined gasoline, much of which is imported.

It is worth recalling, however, that Iran was at its most diplomatically pliant after the United States sank much of Tehran’s navy after Iran tried to disrupt oil traffic in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s. Regimes that resort to force the way Iran does tend to be respecters of it. It is also far from certain that Western military strikes against Revolutionary Guards would move the Iranian people to rally to their side: Iranians know only too well what their self-anointed leaders are capable of.

Most important, the world should keep in mind that Iran has undertaken this latest military aggression while it is still a conventional military power. That means that Britain and the U.S. can still respond today with the confidence that they maintain military superiority. That confidence will vanish the minute Iran achieves its goal of becoming a nuclear power. Who knows what the revolutionaries in Tehran will then be capable of.

It is not mere conjecture to state Friday’s House vote did far more than signal the al Qaeda and insurgents in Iraq to just hold on, August of next year and the November 2008 election are coming. Last night, I heard one talking head cite what surely is within the Democrat Party’s latest talking points, that the taking of British hostages is, “One more example of why we need to get out of Iraq, so that our troops are not subjected to this.”

The House’s vote Friday, passed by the ‘yea’ votes of 216 Democrats and 2 Republicans, told the mullahs in Iran to do more for they are winning the War on Terror. While not specifically named as an enemy in the September 2001 authorization for the use of military force, Iran has waged war against the United States since 1979.

The House’s vote is a clear example of why the framers of our Constitution vested the Executive branch with the authority to conduct foreign policy. The framers knew wars were won or lost and while Congress can declare war, there is no provision in the Constitution for it to withdraw that authorization. They can de-fund war; they cannot undeclare it.

Friday’s House vote sent Iran 218 white flags signaling they at least are willing to surrender.