Upto this day we had only one impression of Islam…..the bright Islam, the quintessence of enlightenment, a bringer of radiance; a herald of glowing teachings from beliefs to worship, from interactions to mannerisms; when its wisdom is followed, the light spreads everywhere……in your outer self, in your inner self; in the surroundings, in your home. Whoever clasps it to their breast will be encircled by a halo of light. If a hundred year old kafir embraces it, the darkness of kufr leaves him to be replaced by a gentle glow……but…..a few days back it was exposed that Islam is of two types: the illuminated Islam and the dark Islam, the modern Islam and the backward Islam! This revelation was made not by any common man but by the President of Pakistan himself!
In a BBC program he aired the view that the idea of confining women to their houses was absolutely incorrect. He thought that the women staying inside their homes and those wearing the veil outside reflect the "backward Islam". He said that some people think that women should be confined to their homes and not step out which was totally wrong. He said, ""My wife is travelling around. She is very religious but she is very moderate,"
A Muslim with his eye on the Book and Sunnah is in a quandary whether to accept the "modern Islam" or the "backward Islam". If he takes the latter, he will be a target for fun, mockery, and ridicule. He will be called a mulla, outdated, fundamentalist, and an enemy to progress. If he accepts the former, where shaking hands with non-mehrams, mixing with the opposite sex, intimate correspondence, free behaviour is all allowed; where it is okay to go in bazaars and markets, clubs, and foreign countries, then the beliefs of the Book and Sunnah slip from he hands and you have to negate the Islam taught by the sahabah-e-kiraam, mufassarin, and muhditheen.
In Surah Ahzab, Allah Ta'ala commands the wives of Rasoolullah (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam),
"You are not like any of the (other) women: if you do fear ((Allah)), be not too complacent of speech, lest one in whose heart is a disease should be moved with desire: but speak you a speech (that is) just."
This command is being given to those chaste and pure hearted women who were not only given the honour of being sahabiyaat but had been through special training as the wives of the Prophet (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam). Then they were the mothers of the ummah, not only in name and in respect but truly for it was haraam to marry any of them after the demise of Rasoolullah (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam). Most of the men talking to them were the sahabah who have been accepted by Allah Ta'ala and whose purity has been attested by Him in His Book. Also keep in mind that whatever conversation took place used to be behind a curtain, because the order is,
"When you ask for something, ask from behind a screen; there is purity of heart for you and for them in this."
Think and think again that when the sacred mothers were not allowed to come before chaste persons like the sahabah, not even talk to them in a womanly fashion, then how do you expect the lustful people of the fifteenth century to be allowed to exchange secrets with, shake hands with, or mix freely with someone's daughter or sister?
The next ayah of Surah Ahzab commands,
"And stay quietly in your houses, and make not a dazzling display, like that of the former Times of Ignorance; "
The Lord of the Worlds is commanding to sit quietly in your homes and not go out except for need, but if this injunction is paralleled with "backward Islam", answer me fairly, is it not a clear rebellion of the Command of Allah?
Before us is the infested, rotten civilisation of glittering Europe, bemused with which we are rebelling against the Book and Sunnah. Why do we not stop to think that the consequences for following this civilisation will be nothing but the destruction of the family system, termination of contentment, souring of marital life, the ruin of the daughter of Eve, and social mayhem. Why are the followers of this civilisation fed up with it themselves? The fire of egotism, obscenity, and immodesty that they had stoked is burning their own hearts; the wonder is that the followers of Azir are clamouring to jump out of this fire while the followers of Khalil (`alayhisalaam) are dying to jump into it!
Hearing the strict injunctions of Allah and His Rasool (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam) about Pardah, the sahabah and the sahabiyaat made such effort in this respect that even extremes of sorrow or happiness did not prevent them from observing hijab. Hazrat Qays bin Shamas (radhiallahu `ta`ala anhu) relates that a sahabiya named Umme Khallad (radhiallahu `ta`ala anhu) came to the Holy presence (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam) to enquire about her son. Her son had been martyred in some battle. She had come with her face behind a veil. Looking at her a sahabi said in wonderment, you come to ask about your son with a veil on your face? She replied with some spirit, if I have become distressed regarding my son, should I heap another kind of distress on my head? (meaning that the leaving of modesty is as distressing as the death of a son). It was as if she was saying, People, if my son is dead, my 'hya (modesty) is not. That is alive and well, then why should I not cover myself? The 'hya of uncovered women is dead and with 'hya goes Imaan. The two are closely related. Hazrat 'Abdullah bin Umar (radhiallahu `ta`ala anhu) reports that Rasoolullah (sallallahu 'alaihe wasallam) said,
"'Hya and Imaan are joined together; when one of them leaves, the other is lifted too."
The sahabah were the followers of the same Islam that is today being labelled as the "backward Islam". Come, let's have a look at the lives of those who were the supporters of "Modern Islam".
Who can deny the "open mindedness" of Sir Sayyed? In his open mindedness he even wrote an explanation of the Qur'an that openly refutes the salf-e-saliheen. It is written in his memoirs that when the Muhammadan College, Aligarh had been established, the British Governor of UP was in Aligarh with his wife. His wife wished to visit the daughter-in-law of Sir Sayyed at his home. Sir Sayyed wrote in his answer,
"My daughter-in-law observes Pardah, and Islam does not allow meetings with uncovered non-Muslim women. Therefore, with due respect to the Governor and his wife, I and my daughter-in-law are powerless (to accede to your request)."
The readers should keep in mind that this incident occurred at a time when refusing a common British officer would have been as good as inviting disaster, let alone a governor. Although Sir Sayyed was considered one of the British sycophants, at this occasion he neither feared nor toadied to the request of the governor, but gave such an answer that shows his honour and nobility.
Now another incident of Sir Sayyed that has been told by Dr. Abdus Salaam Khursheid. He writes that once Maulvi Sayyed Mumtaz Ali went to Sir Sayyed and presented his treatise on women's rights. Sir Sayyed's colour changed as he turned each page. At last he tore it apart in anger and said, 'Mumtaz Ali! We lost our leadership, we lost our civilisation, now will we lose our women too?"
Allama Iqbal was one of the intellectuals which popular opinion thought to be broad minded and he is often made out to be opposed to "Backward Islam". Hakim Muhammad Amritsari who had close relations with him is said to relate that once Allama Iqbal went with a delegation to a western country. All members were going with their spouses, Allama was invited to bring along his wife too. He declined saying, my wife observes Pardah and there is no chance of that in delegations like this.
Once he was invited to Sir Muhammad Shafi's "with family", but he went alone. Sir Shafi asked, "You didn't bring your wife?" he replied, "She strictly observes Pardah." His host said, "She could sit in the zanana (women's quarters)". The poet replied, "Uncovered zanana's are all the same (as mixed gatherings)."
At one time a person asked the Allama what he thought of Pardah for women. He said, "I think today's boys must observe Pardah too."
Alright, so if you are put off by the advocates of "Backward Islam" why not take up what the adherents of "Modern Islam" say? To you these people are ideal and the right interpreters of Islam, so why hesitate in agreeing with them? Believe me, we too want our country on the road to success; we too wish not only our nation, but the whole of the Islamic world to leave others behind in science, technology, space programs, business, and modern facilities……but, we want to continue this journey in company of the boundaries of Islam. Let it be known that our ideals are the Pure ladies of the Prophetic household, the chaste daughters, and the sahabiyaat-e-Rasul. Their way of life is the coolness of our eyes and the contentment of our hearts. No one can hold a light to them, no one else can be as wonderful as them; and all of them were strict adherents of Islam, the same Islam that is now being labelled "Backward".
Tuesday, 30 August 2011
Barack Obama's uncle has been arrested and held as illegal immigrant
The arrest ends a mystery over the fate of a relative that the US President wrote in his memoir had moved to America from Kenya in the 1960s, although the circumstances of his discovery may now prove to be an embarrassment for the White House.
Official records say Onyango Obama, 67, was picked up outside the Chicken Bone Saloon in Framingham, Massachusetts, at 7.10pm on August 24. Police say he nearly crashed his Mitsubishi 4x4 into a patrol car, and then insisted that the officer should have given way to him. A report filed with the Framingham District Court said that a breathalyser at the police station registered his blood alcohol at 0.14mg/100ml of blood, above the state limit of 0.08mg.
According to a local newspaper, Mr Obama was charged with driving under the influence and driving to endanger, as well as failing to use a turn signal. He was detained as an illegal immigrant because the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an outstanding warrant for him because he was previously ordered to be deported to Kenya.
The Times has established from his birthdate that Mr Obama is the Uncle Omar mentioned in President Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father. In the 1995 book, President Obama writes of "the uncle who had left for America 25 years ago and had never come back".
Official records say Onyango Obama, 67, was picked up outside the Chicken Bone Saloon in Framingham, Massachusetts, at 7.10pm on August 24. Police say he nearly crashed his Mitsubishi 4x4 into a patrol car, and then insisted that the officer should have given way to him. A report filed with the Framingham District Court said that a breathalyser at the police station registered his blood alcohol at 0.14mg/100ml of blood, above the state limit of 0.08mg.
According to a local newspaper, Mr Obama was charged with driving under the influence and driving to endanger, as well as failing to use a turn signal. He was detained as an illegal immigrant because the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an outstanding warrant for him because he was previously ordered to be deported to Kenya.
The Times has established from his birthdate that Mr Obama is the Uncle Omar mentioned in President Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father. In the 1995 book, President Obama writes of "the uncle who had left for America 25 years ago and had never come back".
How Washington lost faith in America's courts
As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus. The event that "changed everything" did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize. On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.
If, in fact, we are a "nation of laws," you wouldn't know it from Washington's actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country's increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.
Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial. Washington's faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country's sovereign airspace on a moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not. It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation -- and so much less messy -- than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.
The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City. Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.
Given the extraordinary record of underperformance by the military commissions system -- only six convictions in 10 years -- it's hard to escape the conclusion that the United States has little faith in its ability to put on trial a man assumedly responsible for murdering thousands.
And don't assume that these high-level examples of avoiding the court system are just knotty exceptions that prove the rule. There is evidence that the administration's skepticism and faint-heartedness when it comes to using the judicial system risks becoming pervasive.
Pushing Guilt Before Trial
Needless to say, this backing away from courts of law as institutions appropriate for handling terrorism suspects began in the Bush-Cheney years. Top officials in the Bush administration believed civilian courts to be far too weak for the Global War on Terror they had declared. This, as they saw it, was largely because those courts would supposedly gift foreign terrorist suspects with a slew of American legal rights that might act as so many get-out-of-jail-free cards.
As a result, despite a shining record of terrorism convictions in civilian courts in the 1990s -- including the prosecutions of those responsible for the 1993 attempt to take down a tower of the World Trade Center -- President Bush issued a military order on November 13, 2001, that established the court-less contours of public debate to come. It mandated that non-American terrorists captured abroad would be put under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon, not the federal court system. This was "war," after all, and the enemy had to be confronted by fighting men, not those sticklers for due process, civilian judges and juries.
The federal courts have, of course, continued to try American citizens and residents (and even, in a few cases, individuals captured abroad) in terror cases of all sorts -- with an 87 percent conviction rate for both violent and non-violent crimes. In fact, 2010 was a banner year for terrorism prosecutions when it came to American citizens and residents, and 2011 is following suit. As could have been predicted, in the vast majority of these cases -- all the ones that mattered -- there were convictions.
You might think, then, that the courts had proved their mettle against mounting criticism and distrust of a system said to be insufficiently harsh. And initially, Obama's Department of Justice defended civilian courts as resilient and flexible enough to try terror cases.
But that didn't last. Recently, the Obama administration has reinforced a policy (begun under President Bush) which offers an ominous new twist on American justice: punishment before trial. It has, for example, relied upon various extreme methods of pre-trial isolation -- including a version of restrictive orders known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs -- that reek of punitiveness and have often caused severe psychological deterioration in suspects awaiting trial on terrorism charges. The most noteworthy case of this is Syed Fahad Hashmi's. An American citizen arrested while studying in England, Hashmi had allowed an acquaintance, Mohammed Junaid Babar, to stay in his apartment for two weeks. Babar, who testified against Hashmi and was later released, allegedly had socks, ponchos, and raingear intended for al-Qaeda in his luggage and allegedly used Hashmi's cell phone to call terrorist conspirators. Hashmi, accused of "material support" for al-Qaeda, was kept under SAMs for three years without trial -- until he finally pled guilty.
The urge to punish before a verdict comes in reflects the same deep-seated conviction that the U.S. court system is simply not to be trusted to do its job. Two recent cases -- that of whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning -- illustrate how, in cases where national security is believed to be at stake, Obama-era pre-trial treatment has taken up the distrust of the courts, civilian or military, that characterized the Bush years.
Drake, an executive for the National Security Agency (NSA), became a whistleblower over what he considered mistaken policy decisions about an ill-performing data-sifting program which, among other things, he thought squandered taxpayer money. Subsequently, he revealed his disagreement with the agency's warrantless wire-tapping program, which he believed overstepped legal boundaries. Charged initially with violating the Espionage Act and threatened with a draconian 35-year jail sentence, Drake finally pled this past June to a misdemeanor count of "exceeding the authorized use of a government computer."
In Drake's four-year saga, his pre-punishment took the form not of pre-trial detention but of the destruction of his livelihood. He was initially fired from the NSA and from the National Defense University position to which the NSA had assigned him. Once indicted in 2010, he was forced to resign from a subsequent teaching post at Strayer University. All told, the formal and informal hounding of Drake resulted in the loss of his jobs and pension, as well as $82,000 in legal costs. Ultimately, Drake was sentenced to a year's probation and 240 hours of mandatory community service. By that time, he had been ruined financially and professionally, thanks to the government's disparagement of him and the multi-year delay between its accusations and the lodging of formal charges against him. Drake now works at an Apple Store. In other words, well before the government took its chances in court, Thomas Drake was punished.
Another highly publicized case where punishment preceded trial has been the mistreatment of Army Private Bradley Manning while in military custody in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, awaiting charges. The Obama administration believes he turned over a trove of secret military and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks. Following his arrest, Manning was kept in subhuman conditions. He was forced to sleep naked and to strip for daily inspections, though as news about his situation generated bad publicity, he was eventually allowed to sleep in a "tear-proof" gown.
There is something deeply disturbing about the very different ways Manning and Drake were pre-punished by the government -- both directly in the case of Manning and indirectly in the case of Drake -- before being given due process of any kind. Like bin Laden's killing, both cases reflect an unspoken worry in Washington that our courts will prove insufficiently ruthless and so incapable of giving the "obviously guilty" what they "obviously" deserve.
The Courts Take Notice
As it turns out, the judicial system hasn't taken the government's new attitude lying down. Various judges and juries have, in fact, shown themselves to be unfazed by both public and governmental pressures and have, in terror and national security cases, demonstrated signs of balance and of a concern for justice, rather than being driven by a blind sense of revenge.
In the past year, there has been an unprecedented number of high-profile terrorism trials. All have resulted in convictions, which have nonetheless not reflected the unstinting harshness that critics of court-centered counterterrorism insist upon. In the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the sole Guantanamo detainee to face trial in the nation's criminal justice system, the jury, having done its work of assessing the evidence, acquitted the defendant on 284 of 285 counts, including all the murder charges associated with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On the single count on which he was convicted, however, Ghailani was given a life sentence without parole.
Meanwhile, a high-profile terrorism case -- that of Tagawwur Rana -- ended in a jury acquittal on its most serious charge. Rana had been accused of cooperating in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, which resulted in the deaths of more than 160 individuals. The jury found Rana guilty of material support, but not of helping to coordinate the attack.
These cases and others like them have, of course, been fodder for all the usual critics who consider anything but a 100 percent conviction rate on all charges in all cases to be a sure sign not of the justice system's strength, but of its fundamental weakness. And yet, such cases have showcased just how effectively the system still works, in a more nuanced way than in the previous near-decade, as well as in a subtler and more just way than Washington has managed to approximate over that same period. Despite the fears, pressures, and scare tactics that are entangled with all such terror cases, we now have living proof that juries can think for themselves, and guilt can be a partial matter, rather than a Washington slam-dunk.
Of late, federal judges on such cases also seem to have been signaling to the government's representatives that they must be more restrained in their approach to national security cases, both in and out of court. In late June, for instance, during the sentencing of three of the men convicted of conspiring to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York, and to launch a Stinger missile aimed at aircraft over Newburgh's Air National Guard Base, Judge Colleen McMahon struck back at the government's case. "I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt," she said, "that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition. That does not mean that there was no crime. The jury concluded that you were not entrapped, and I see no basis to overturn their verdict."
In the Drake case, Judge Richard Bennett was similarly distraught about the evident excesses in the government's approach. At sentencing for the single minor count to which Drake agreed to plead, the judge bluntly refused to impose the $50,000 fine the prosecution was pushing for on the grounds that punishment had already been administered -- prior to the court process. "There has been financial devastation wrought upon this defendant," said Bennett, "that far exceeds any fine that can be imposed by me. And I'm not going to add to that in any way. And it's very obvious to me in terms of some of the irritation I've expressed... not only my concern over the delay in this case... [but also the prosecution's] inability to explain ... the delay in this case... I think that somebody somewhere in the U.S. government has to say... that the American public deserves better than this."
In the recent jury decisions, as in the growing expressions of judicial dissatisfaction, an optimist might find signs that the system is finally starting to right itself. On the other hand, a pessimist might come to the conclusion that the government will, in the future, simply put even more energy into avoiding the court system.
The bottom line is that the Obama administration, like its predecessor, defines success in terrorism prosecutions not by assessing whether or not due process and fair verdicts are administered, but solely in terms of what they deem proper punishment for those accused of violating national security -- especially when doing so minimizes partisan political clashes. By refusing to rein in its evident distrust of the judicial system when it comes to national security, the government is perpetuating a legal landscape that, to this day, lies in the shadow of Osama bin Laden.
If, in fact, we are a "nation of laws," you wouldn't know it from Washington's actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country's increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.
Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial. Washington's faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country's sovereign airspace on a moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not. It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation -- and so much less messy -- than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.
The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City. Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.
Given the extraordinary record of underperformance by the military commissions system -- only six convictions in 10 years -- it's hard to escape the conclusion that the United States has little faith in its ability to put on trial a man assumedly responsible for murdering thousands.
And don't assume that these high-level examples of avoiding the court system are just knotty exceptions that prove the rule. There is evidence that the administration's skepticism and faint-heartedness when it comes to using the judicial system risks becoming pervasive.
Pushing Guilt Before Trial
Needless to say, this backing away from courts of law as institutions appropriate for handling terrorism suspects began in the Bush-Cheney years. Top officials in the Bush administration believed civilian courts to be far too weak for the Global War on Terror they had declared. This, as they saw it, was largely because those courts would supposedly gift foreign terrorist suspects with a slew of American legal rights that might act as so many get-out-of-jail-free cards.
As a result, despite a shining record of terrorism convictions in civilian courts in the 1990s -- including the prosecutions of those responsible for the 1993 attempt to take down a tower of the World Trade Center -- President Bush issued a military order on November 13, 2001, that established the court-less contours of public debate to come. It mandated that non-American terrorists captured abroad would be put under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon, not the federal court system. This was "war," after all, and the enemy had to be confronted by fighting men, not those sticklers for due process, civilian judges and juries.
The federal courts have, of course, continued to try American citizens and residents (and even, in a few cases, individuals captured abroad) in terror cases of all sorts -- with an 87 percent conviction rate for both violent and non-violent crimes. In fact, 2010 was a banner year for terrorism prosecutions when it came to American citizens and residents, and 2011 is following suit. As could have been predicted, in the vast majority of these cases -- all the ones that mattered -- there were convictions.
You might think, then, that the courts had proved their mettle against mounting criticism and distrust of a system said to be insufficiently harsh. And initially, Obama's Department of Justice defended civilian courts as resilient and flexible enough to try terror cases.
But that didn't last. Recently, the Obama administration has reinforced a policy (begun under President Bush) which offers an ominous new twist on American justice: punishment before trial. It has, for example, relied upon various extreme methods of pre-trial isolation -- including a version of restrictive orders known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs -- that reek of punitiveness and have often caused severe psychological deterioration in suspects awaiting trial on terrorism charges. The most noteworthy case of this is Syed Fahad Hashmi's. An American citizen arrested while studying in England, Hashmi had allowed an acquaintance, Mohammed Junaid Babar, to stay in his apartment for two weeks. Babar, who testified against Hashmi and was later released, allegedly had socks, ponchos, and raingear intended for al-Qaeda in his luggage and allegedly used Hashmi's cell phone to call terrorist conspirators. Hashmi, accused of "material support" for al-Qaeda, was kept under SAMs for three years without trial -- until he finally pled guilty.
The urge to punish before a verdict comes in reflects the same deep-seated conviction that the U.S. court system is simply not to be trusted to do its job. Two recent cases -- that of whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning -- illustrate how, in cases where national security is believed to be at stake, Obama-era pre-trial treatment has taken up the distrust of the courts, civilian or military, that characterized the Bush years.
Drake, an executive for the National Security Agency (NSA), became a whistleblower over what he considered mistaken policy decisions about an ill-performing data-sifting program which, among other things, he thought squandered taxpayer money. Subsequently, he revealed his disagreement with the agency's warrantless wire-tapping program, which he believed overstepped legal boundaries. Charged initially with violating the Espionage Act and threatened with a draconian 35-year jail sentence, Drake finally pled this past June to a misdemeanor count of "exceeding the authorized use of a government computer."
In Drake's four-year saga, his pre-punishment took the form not of pre-trial detention but of the destruction of his livelihood. He was initially fired from the NSA and from the National Defense University position to which the NSA had assigned him. Once indicted in 2010, he was forced to resign from a subsequent teaching post at Strayer University. All told, the formal and informal hounding of Drake resulted in the loss of his jobs and pension, as well as $82,000 in legal costs. Ultimately, Drake was sentenced to a year's probation and 240 hours of mandatory community service. By that time, he had been ruined financially and professionally, thanks to the government's disparagement of him and the multi-year delay between its accusations and the lodging of formal charges against him. Drake now works at an Apple Store. In other words, well before the government took its chances in court, Thomas Drake was punished.
Another highly publicized case where punishment preceded trial has been the mistreatment of Army Private Bradley Manning while in military custody in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, awaiting charges. The Obama administration believes he turned over a trove of secret military and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks. Following his arrest, Manning was kept in subhuman conditions. He was forced to sleep naked and to strip for daily inspections, though as news about his situation generated bad publicity, he was eventually allowed to sleep in a "tear-proof" gown.
There is something deeply disturbing about the very different ways Manning and Drake were pre-punished by the government -- both directly in the case of Manning and indirectly in the case of Drake -- before being given due process of any kind. Like bin Laden's killing, both cases reflect an unspoken worry in Washington that our courts will prove insufficiently ruthless and so incapable of giving the "obviously guilty" what they "obviously" deserve.
The Courts Take Notice
As it turns out, the judicial system hasn't taken the government's new attitude lying down. Various judges and juries have, in fact, shown themselves to be unfazed by both public and governmental pressures and have, in terror and national security cases, demonstrated signs of balance and of a concern for justice, rather than being driven by a blind sense of revenge.
In the past year, there has been an unprecedented number of high-profile terrorism trials. All have resulted in convictions, which have nonetheless not reflected the unstinting harshness that critics of court-centered counterterrorism insist upon. In the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the sole Guantanamo detainee to face trial in the nation's criminal justice system, the jury, having done its work of assessing the evidence, acquitted the defendant on 284 of 285 counts, including all the murder charges associated with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On the single count on which he was convicted, however, Ghailani was given a life sentence without parole.
Meanwhile, a high-profile terrorism case -- that of Tagawwur Rana -- ended in a jury acquittal on its most serious charge. Rana had been accused of cooperating in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, which resulted in the deaths of more than 160 individuals. The jury found Rana guilty of material support, but not of helping to coordinate the attack.
These cases and others like them have, of course, been fodder for all the usual critics who consider anything but a 100 percent conviction rate on all charges in all cases to be a sure sign not of the justice system's strength, but of its fundamental weakness. And yet, such cases have showcased just how effectively the system still works, in a more nuanced way than in the previous near-decade, as well as in a subtler and more just way than Washington has managed to approximate over that same period. Despite the fears, pressures, and scare tactics that are entangled with all such terror cases, we now have living proof that juries can think for themselves, and guilt can be a partial matter, rather than a Washington slam-dunk.
Of late, federal judges on such cases also seem to have been signaling to the government's representatives that they must be more restrained in their approach to national security cases, both in and out of court. In late June, for instance, during the sentencing of three of the men convicted of conspiring to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York, and to launch a Stinger missile aimed at aircraft over Newburgh's Air National Guard Base, Judge Colleen McMahon struck back at the government's case. "I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt," she said, "that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition. That does not mean that there was no crime. The jury concluded that you were not entrapped, and I see no basis to overturn their verdict."
In the Drake case, Judge Richard Bennett was similarly distraught about the evident excesses in the government's approach. At sentencing for the single minor count to which Drake agreed to plead, the judge bluntly refused to impose the $50,000 fine the prosecution was pushing for on the grounds that punishment had already been administered -- prior to the court process. "There has been financial devastation wrought upon this defendant," said Bennett, "that far exceeds any fine that can be imposed by me. And I'm not going to add to that in any way. And it's very obvious to me in terms of some of the irritation I've expressed... not only my concern over the delay in this case... [but also the prosecution's] inability to explain ... the delay in this case... I think that somebody somewhere in the U.S. government has to say... that the American public deserves better than this."
In the recent jury decisions, as in the growing expressions of judicial dissatisfaction, an optimist might find signs that the system is finally starting to right itself. On the other hand, a pessimist might come to the conclusion that the government will, in the future, simply put even more energy into avoiding the court system.
The bottom line is that the Obama administration, like its predecessor, defines success in terrorism prosecutions not by assessing whether or not due process and fair verdicts are administered, but solely in terms of what they deem proper punishment for those accused of violating national security -- especially when doing so minimizes partisan political clashes. By refusing to rein in its evident distrust of the judicial system when it comes to national security, the government is perpetuating a legal landscape that, to this day, lies in the shadow of Osama bin Laden.
The Decade's Biggest Scam
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Obama, QUIT NOW!
If this struggling country has any hope of reversing the death slide which began over three decades ago, but which has escalated dangerously during the last ten years, it will require a strong, resolute president who will fight for all the American people.
Because Barack Obama is incapable or unwilling to take that leadership role, he owes it to the American people to step aside and let another Democrat run in 2012. That person needs to be a Democrat, because our system is set up so that only a candidate from one of the two major parties is electable. It is obvious that none of the Republican candidates comes even close to having any ideas that would benefit this country. And the prospect of a Republican president pushing an already activist ultra-conservative Supreme Court even farther to the right for an additional generation is almost too horrible to contemplate.
President Obama needs to declare as soon as possible that he will not seek a second term. He needs to help give another Democratic candidate a chance to build a viable presidential campaign.
The United States is in serious trouble. We need a progressive-thinking president to lead our country in the direction that so many of us hoped Barack Obama would have taken us. Since Obama will not be the one to do it, a fiery progressive Democrat must step forward, willing to take on the corporate elite and push for laws to help the middle class, workers, and other Americans slipping behind in this harsh economy.
There are potential candidates who spring to my mind: Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton are established politicians who would draw followers; Van Jones, Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders could fire up a lot of Obama's 2008 base. There are probably other potential candidates who, with the right kind of messaging and charisma, could draw a national following and mount a serious campaign.
In no way would it be easy to break away from an incumbent president and run for the highest office in the land next year. But it would be an opportunity and a challenge that is necessary and should not be passed up.
The way things are going, and based on the results we've seen already, the enormous problems confronting this once great nation will only get increasingly worse with a weak leader like Obama remaining in office. Undoubtedly he is a good man and would be a decent president in a different era. But as for being the leader America needs now, he is in way over his head.
Because Barack Obama is incapable or unwilling to take that leadership role, he owes it to the American people to step aside and let another Democrat run in 2012. That person needs to be a Democrat, because our system is set up so that only a candidate from one of the two major parties is electable. It is obvious that none of the Republican candidates comes even close to having any ideas that would benefit this country. And the prospect of a Republican president pushing an already activist ultra-conservative Supreme Court even farther to the right for an additional generation is almost too horrible to contemplate.
President Obama needs to declare as soon as possible that he will not seek a second term. He needs to help give another Democratic candidate a chance to build a viable presidential campaign.
The United States is in serious trouble. We need a progressive-thinking president to lead our country in the direction that so many of us hoped Barack Obama would have taken us. Since Obama will not be the one to do it, a fiery progressive Democrat must step forward, willing to take on the corporate elite and push for laws to help the middle class, workers, and other Americans slipping behind in this harsh economy.
There are potential candidates who spring to my mind: Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton are established politicians who would draw followers; Van Jones, Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders could fire up a lot of Obama's 2008 base. There are probably other potential candidates who, with the right kind of messaging and charisma, could draw a national following and mount a serious campaign.
In no way would it be easy to break away from an incumbent president and run for the highest office in the land next year. But it would be an opportunity and a challenge that is necessary and should not be passed up.
The way things are going, and based on the results we've seen already, the enormous problems confronting this once great nation will only get increasingly worse with a weak leader like Obama remaining in office. Undoubtedly he is a good man and would be a decent president in a different era. But as for being the leader America needs now, he is in way over his head.
The Rise of Another CIA Yes Man
As Gen. David Petraeus prepares to take the helm at CIA in September, he can expect unswerving loyalty from his likely deputy, Michael Morell, who has been acting director since July when Leon Panetta left to become Secretary of Defense.
Like many senior CIA officials in recent years, Morell's record is checkered, at best. He held key jobs in intelligence analysis over the past decade as the CIA often served as a handmaiden to the war propagandists.
As for Michael Morell, as with many other successful CIA careerists, his strongest suit seemed to be pleasing his boss and not antagonizing the White House. If past is precedent, his loyalty will be to Petraeus, not necessarily to the truth.
Forgive me if my thinking about loyalty to the facts seems "obsolete" or "quaint" -- or if it seems unfair to expect CIA analysts to put their careers on the line when politicians and ideologues are misleading the nation to war -- but those were the principles that analysts of my generation tried to uphold.
The recent tendency at CIA to give politicians what they want to hear rather than the hard truth is not healthy for the Republic that we were all sworn to serve.
And, if Petraeus's own past is precedent, loyalty to the four-star general will not always be synonymous with loyalty to the truth.
Burnishing an Image
However, you will get no indication of this troubling reality from the flattering, but thin, feature about Michael Morell, "Mr. Insider Will Guide Petraeus at the CIA," by Siobhan Gorman in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 26.
Gorman is normally a solid reporter; but either she did not perform due diligence and let herself be snookered, or her editors stepped in to ensure her story was consonant with the image Petraeus and the Establishment wish to create for Morell.
Before her "rare" interview with Morell, Gorman should have taken a close look at former CIA Director George Tenet's memoir, At the Center of the Storm, to learn what Tenet says about Morell's record during the last decade's dark days of misleading and dishonest intelligence.
In Tenet's personal account of the CIA's failures around 9/11 and the Iraq War, Morell -- Tenet's former executive assistant -- is generally treated kindly, but Tenet puts Morell at the center of two key fiascoes: he "coordinated the CIA review" of Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous Feb. 5, 2003 address to the United Nations and he served as the regular CIA briefer to President George W. Bush.
Putting Access Before Honesty
So, Morell was there as Bush blew off early CIA warnings about the possibility of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden being "determined to strike in the US" -- and while Bush and his neoconservative inner circle were concocting intelligence to justify invading Iraq.
Tenet credits Morell with suggesting to analysts that they prepare a report on the terrorist threat, which became the President's Daily Brief that was handed to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush brushed aside the warning with a reported comment to the CIA briefer, "all right, you've covered your ass," and went off fishing.
The only moment of discomfort is when you use Tenet as a compass point for the actual truth. Because, of course, Tenet often has his own version of the facts.
Like many senior CIA officials in recent years, Morell's record is checkered, at best. He held key jobs in intelligence analysis over the past decade as the CIA often served as a handmaiden to the war propagandists.
As for Michael Morell, as with many other successful CIA careerists, his strongest suit seemed to be pleasing his boss and not antagonizing the White House. If past is precedent, his loyalty will be to Petraeus, not necessarily to the truth.
Forgive me if my thinking about loyalty to the facts seems "obsolete" or "quaint" -- or if it seems unfair to expect CIA analysts to put their careers on the line when politicians and ideologues are misleading the nation to war -- but those were the principles that analysts of my generation tried to uphold.
The recent tendency at CIA to give politicians what they want to hear rather than the hard truth is not healthy for the Republic that we were all sworn to serve.
And, if Petraeus's own past is precedent, loyalty to the four-star general will not always be synonymous with loyalty to the truth.
Burnishing an Image
However, you will get no indication of this troubling reality from the flattering, but thin, feature about Michael Morell, "Mr. Insider Will Guide Petraeus at the CIA," by Siobhan Gorman in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 26.
Gorman is normally a solid reporter; but either she did not perform due diligence and let herself be snookered, or her editors stepped in to ensure her story was consonant with the image Petraeus and the Establishment wish to create for Morell.
Before her "rare" interview with Morell, Gorman should have taken a close look at former CIA Director George Tenet's memoir, At the Center of the Storm, to learn what Tenet says about Morell's record during the last decade's dark days of misleading and dishonest intelligence.
In Tenet's personal account of the CIA's failures around 9/11 and the Iraq War, Morell -- Tenet's former executive assistant -- is generally treated kindly, but Tenet puts Morell at the center of two key fiascoes: he "coordinated the CIA review" of Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous Feb. 5, 2003 address to the United Nations and he served as the regular CIA briefer to President George W. Bush.
Putting Access Before Honesty
So, Morell was there as Bush blew off early CIA warnings about the possibility of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden being "determined to strike in the US" -- and while Bush and his neoconservative inner circle were concocting intelligence to justify invading Iraq.
Tenet credits Morell with suggesting to analysts that they prepare a report on the terrorist threat, which became the President's Daily Brief that was handed to Bush on Aug. 6, 2001, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush brushed aside the warning with a reported comment to the CIA briefer, "all right, you've covered your ass," and went off fishing.
The only moment of discomfort is when you use Tenet as a compass point for the actual truth. Because, of course, Tenet often has his own version of the facts.
The true faces
Going by his remarks he made while talking to the media at the State Guest House at Lahore on Sunday, Prime Minister Gilani seemed to recognise the true faces of India and the USA, but created a sense of puzzlement why his government does not act on those beliefs. He said that the USA was an important country, and Pakistan wanted to have good relations with it “on the basis of mutual respect and interest”. His admission that talks were underway to grant Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India must be related to this. It is because the USA has decided to back India in its regional desires of hegemony in exchange for its becoming its regional counterweight against China, that it has fallen in with Indian desires about Pakistan, and wishes it to become a mere adjunct of India’s, with the grant of MFN status something which India has long desired. It cannot be ruled out that Islamabad’s anxiety to get such a deal, to please the USA more than India, will lead it to ignore the multitude of non-tariff barriers India has put up.
This alone should prove to Mr Gilani the incompatibility of interests between Pakistan and the USA. For Pakistan, giving MFN status would mean the destruction of its industry, the impoverishment of its people and a frittering away of a useful bargaining point in its struggle to make India accept its commitments to the Kashmiri people and the international community. For the USA, it would merely be another favour done to India by bringing pressure to bear upon a ruling elite anxious to please it.
This leaves one inescapable conclusion, that Pakistan is not merely helped by its American alliance, it now finds that its vital interests are threatened. Therefore, Mr Gilani should take the action which his logic makes inevitable, and that is the ending of the American alliance, as well as Pakistani participation in the USA’s war on terror. As Mr Gilani said, Pakistan’s location made it an inevitable part of the war, but he did not explain why Pakistan must take sides with the Crusaders.
This alone should prove to Mr Gilani the incompatibility of interests between Pakistan and the USA. For Pakistan, giving MFN status would mean the destruction of its industry, the impoverishment of its people and a frittering away of a useful bargaining point in its struggle to make India accept its commitments to the Kashmiri people and the international community. For the USA, it would merely be another favour done to India by bringing pressure to bear upon a ruling elite anxious to please it.
This leaves one inescapable conclusion, that Pakistan is not merely helped by its American alliance, it now finds that its vital interests are threatened. Therefore, Mr Gilani should take the action which his logic makes inevitable, and that is the ending of the American alliance, as well as Pakistani participation in the USA’s war on terror. As Mr Gilani said, Pakistan’s location made it an inevitable part of the war, but he did not explain why Pakistan must take sides with the Crusaders.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)