Say Anything Blog

In concept, the ACLU is a good organization, but they need to quit with the hairbrained lawsuits.  As long as extraordinary rendition does not happen to a U.S. citizen, then I don’t understand why the “AMERICAN"CLU needs or wants to get involved.  As a proud Liberal, I agree with ER as long as it does not include Americans.

Obviously, I am not a big fan of the patriot act or the NSA wire-tapping situation (given that I am a liberal).  My reason being that the actions associated with those policies form a slippery slope, but when it comes to terrorists from rogue nations .... screw ‘em.  Send their ass to Egypt or some other country and torture...I mean persuade (muslim style) the info out of them.

but when it comes to terrorists from rogue nations

What about suspected terrorists from allied nations? Shouldn’t we try to ascertain some kind of incriminating evidence before we (extraordinarily) render them? (Rather than their names being similar to those of wanted men)

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

That depends on what we want our foreign policy to be like, and if we care how we are perceived in the world.

But if we do ER citizens from allied nations, we should have the ok from their government.  If we do it anyway, I guess they are really not an allied nation.

Wait, let me get this straight.  We detain a suspected terrorist from let’s say, the UK fighting in let’s say, Iraq (or Afghanistan).  They clearly are not in their country of origin.  I make this point because this is far different than us having the CIA jump someone and abduct them in downtown London.

So a foreign citizen is detained in a country other than their country of origin.  We have several options:

<ul>
<li>Transport them to the US under US jurisdiction and subject them to US laws including jury trial, 3 hots and a cot, conjugal visits (except at a Federal pound me in the a$$ prison), etc.
<li>Export them to country of origin and turn them over to the authorities in country of origin to obtain information.
<li>Send them wherever, so long as there is compelling evidence to suggest that the country we are sending them to has an interest in detaining and interogating said person.
</ul>

In the cases we are talking about, primarily we have been sending folks to Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, etc.  But keep in mind that the authorities in these nations have as much interest in the suspects as we do in that these folks are usually involved in multiple jihad plots to bring down multiple governments. 

Why not charter flights to take these guys to each of these countries in succession to let each’s intel agencies extract information relevant to their own criminal proceedings in the manner they choose, or better, why not send them to one individual country or location and allow multiple countries’ intel agencies interrogate them according to the rules of engagement for each intel agency?

The problem here is that the US has laws and morals that prohibit most of the techniques that the Muslim countries allow--no, encourage for interrogating traitors, insurgents, and criminals.  Most don’t have habeus corpus or other rights.  Most don’t allow attorneys.  And Islamic folks are the ones who want Shariah law (which happens to impose the death sentence for adultery).  Torture may be repugnant to us, but it is not our job to be the moral compass for every single world government.

Funny, but Liberals keep telling us we need to be more PC and respect local customs and traditions.  Stop being so “American” and thinking that we are the only country that matters and that our foreign policy is all that matters.  Stop being the world police.  Yet they expect all prisoners and interogations to be subject to US laws and US rules.

That depends on what we want our foreign policy to be like, and if we care how we are perceived in the world.

But if we do ER citizens from allied nations, we should have the ok from their government.  If we do it anyway, I guess they are really not an allied nation.

I honeslty don’t care if these techniques save lives and keep airplanes from falling from the sky.

Check out:
Goon’s North Dakota Red Neck
Goon’s World

Funny, but Liberals keep telling us we need to be more PC and respect local customs and traditions.

Justin: I am a Liberal and I belive that.  That is why we need to respect the customs of the countries who participate in ER by sending terrorist places that use

techniques that the Muslim countries allow--no, encourage for interrogating traitors, insurgents, and criminals.  Most don’t have habeus corpus or other rights.  Most don’t allow attorneys.

Wait, let me get this straight.  We detain a suspected terrorist from let’s say, the UK fighting in let’s say, Iraq (or Afghanistan).  They clearly are not in their country of origin.  I make this point because this is far different than us having the CIA jump someone and abduct them in downtown London.

Actually, MOFAL and I were discussing extraordinarly rendering someone while they were in their country of origin, which is an ally.

British resident Mohamed and Italian citizen Britel were separately arrested in Pakistan in 2002, while Egyptian citizen Agiza was apprehended in Sweden in 2001, the ACLU said.

Mohamed is now held at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison in Cuba, Britel was convicted and imprisoned in Morocco on terrorism-related charges, while Agiza was convicted and imprisoned in Egypt for being a member of a banned group.

The ACLU suit is on behalf of these guyscaptured in Pakistan.  The dude in Sweden is really the same situation.  If a Guatamalan national sneaks through Mexico into the United States and then to Canada committing crimes in his home country, Mexico, and then the United States before finally being aprehended in Canada for crimes he committed there, which country has jurisdiction?  US and Canadian jails are far nicer than those further south, and the justice systems in the US and Canada are more prisoner friendly.  In this case, is it wrong for us to hand the guy over to Mexico and let them punish him and then wait our turn?  Or is it wrong for us to send him to Mexico to be punished and simultaneously send our FBI or law enforcement to a Mexican jail to interview said suspect?

That is what we are talking about.  Only substitute Mexico for some other Muslim 3rd World country that has “less pleasant” policies than one would expect in a Mexican jail.  And the ACLU wants to sue Boeing for simply flying the suspect between countries.  It is not our job to make decisions or differentiation between which countries offer good justice systems, fair trials, and humane conditions.  It certainly isn’t Boeings job just because they fly the chartered planes.  As long as Moroco and Egypt have some relevance to the interogation (and with global terror it is pretty easy to make a case that as long as this person has ever or is suspected of making a call to a local terrorist in said country, there is sufficient ties to ship their ass there), then these countries have just as much right to interogate the person using their local means as we do to hold them.

And there appears to be plenty of evidence to suggest this. Maher Arar is a Canadian engineer of Syrian origin. In this link is an article from the New Yorker on his extraordinary rendition. He was seized whilst transiting through New York in a series of events which brought ER into the public eye.

The following is taken from Amnesty International’s website:

Swedish authorities are investigating the US capture and transfer of two men, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, to Egypt where were both were allegedly tortured with electric devices.  Additionally, Germany and Italy are pursuing criminal investigations: German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, was taken from a bus in Macedonia and allegedly abducted by the CIA.  German prosecutors say they have confirmed parts of el-Masri’s story that he was taken to an American prison in Afghanistan, deprived of water, and interrogated for five months before being told that there had been a case of mistaken identity and left in Albania.  El-Masri has since filed a law suit against the United States.  Italian prosecutors investigating the CIA’s involvement in the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr have indicted 22 CIA agents for kidnapping. Nasr was reportedly kidnapped in Milan, sprayed in the face, forced into a van and taken to Egypt.

Here is a link to Craig Murray’s site. He is the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. There is his response to suggestions that he confirmed the existence of the ER programme and a couple of articles elaborating on the Swedish and Italian cases.

Here is a link to a 26 minute documentary on ER, featuring interviews with abductees and their families, as well as with the US architect of ER.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

In the video link I posted, there is also footage of President Bush and Condi Rice denying that they have ever or would ever send suspects for torture.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

Returning a terror suspect to the country they were born in then subjecting them to the local laws and customs regarding prisoner treatment in their country of origin…

How inhumane we all are for sending Mexican criminals who are here in the US back to Mexico to endure their inhumane jails and legal system.

So the argument is that we “should know how inhumane Syrian prison is” and when detaining a suspect in New York who is from Syria originally but now resides in Canada, we should not send them back to Syria because we don’t agree with their local justice system.  Further, our every move needs to be scrutinized by AI to determine if we violated some non-citizen’s rights by detaining them and sending them back to their country of origin.

It is almost laughable.  This is what the ACLU and AI concern themselves with nowadays.

Justin, This guy was a Canadian passport holder.

we should not send them back to Syria because we don’t agree with their local justice system.

We don’t agree with their entire system of government - remember the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Returning a terror suspect to the country they were born in then subjecting them to the local laws and customs regarding prisoner treatment in their country of origin…

Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen.  You do not get jurisdiction over an individual just because he was born their.

My question is why these fukbags were not thrown from these planes in flight. Screw their intel value.

These lawsuits are another aspect of asymmetrical warfare, using the legal system of an enemy country to strip them of the ability to fight against terrorists.

As for Masri, he was pitched into the street as bait, in the same manner as chumming in deep sea fishing. I wonder how many of his contacts have been captured or killed after AT forces followed him to them. No one beliefs that A. he is not involved with terrorist organizations and B. that he did not tell his interrogators everything he knew about said terrorist orgs. He is well and truly screwed. His own people want him dead. We could care less about protecting him. Successful counter-terror op. BOOYAA!!

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

After he had moved back to Ottawa, Arar had a meeting with Abdullah Almalki on October 12, 2001. Almalki, an Ottawa engineer, was also born in Syria and had moved to Canada in the same year as Arar. They met at the Mango Café, a popular shawarma restaurant in a strip mall and talked about doctors and bought a print cartridge together.

At the time their movements were under close scrutiny by at least three police surveillance teams.</b> The surveillance was prompted by Project A-O Canada, an RCMP-led terrorism investigation team based in Ottawa and a subdivision of Project O Canada which was based in Toronto. Project O Canada was created by the RCMP when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) delegated responsibility for its national security investigation concerning Abdullah Almalki to the RCMP. CSIS had been monitoring Almalki at least since 1998 with respect to his relationship with Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian. CSIS was also concerned with Mr. Almalki’s electronic components export business that he operated with his wife. Mr. Almalki, however, was purely a “person of interest” and was not, in fact, the target of the investigation. Nonetheless, Mr. Almalki’s meeting with Arar appears to have prompted a wider investigation, with Arar also becoming a “person of interest.”

<b>On September 26, 2002, during a stopover in New York City en route from a family vacation in Tunisia to Montreal, Arar was detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, who may have been acting upon information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

It wasn’t like this was just “out of the blue” to grab him. 

But more important, he was grabbed on September 26, 2002 and the case was brought to light immediately.  There was nothing “secret” about him being shipped to Syria.  The CBC had articles about it less than a week later and the US did absolutely nothing in the ordeal except deport him to Syria.  We did not torture him or have anything to do with his captivity after we sent him back.  Here is the CBC article from two weeks after his capture:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2002/10/16/arar021016.html

All Canada had to do was ask for him back.  And now he wants the US to pay him damages for us extraditing him to Syria?  Explain how it is our fault that he was tortured when Canada was informed immediately and it was their job to use diplomacy to get him back.

We didn’t deport him until October 7th or 8th and the CBC was running stories within a week.

My question is why these fukbags were not thrown from these planes in flight

Why not just throw all muslims from all flights? It’d certainly help with the war on terror.

No one beliefs that A. he is not involved with terrorist organizations and B. that he did not tell his interrogators everything he knew about said terrorist orgs

Obviously, 2H9, you (and everyone else) are privy to information which I am unable to source. Just because he was detained, doesn’t mean he’s guilty - look at Cat Stevens.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Okay, bad example, Cat Stevens is guilty of crimes against music.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

so is the ACLU going to give this money they get from the lawsuit to the terrorists that have been interrogated? if not, why should they get involved? if so, then they should be sued, jailed, interrogated, and tortured for aiding the terrorists…

on the same note, its a wonder ACLU didn’t try suing Boeing for 9/11 since it was their planes the terrorists used to fly into the WTC. after all, its the guns fault, not the person squeezing the trigger… (sarcasm intended)

Funny MOFAL

Stevens also gives financial and political support to known terror groups. Not gave, gives.

As for Masri, he was actively surrveiled for a year. I don’t buy the “mistaken identity” bunkum.(I’m glad you used that word the other day, hadn’t heard it in a long time)

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem