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A BRITISHER’S VIEW – Gitmo defense wrong about the rights of thugs

Allowing suspected al-Qaeda terrorist Salim Ahmed Hamdan to speak with his wife by phone from Guantanamo Bay – plus providing him with reading material and fish sandwiches – seems a pretty friendly way of getting him to spill the beans about Osama bin Laden.

It also seems to be at odds with a judge’s determinations of the “highly coercive” methods used to siphon information from the Yemeni driver, who is being tried for plotting to kill American service members and providing material support to a terror group as the nation’s first war crimes tribunal since World War II gets underway at the American terrorist jail in Cuba.

Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred’s ruling to toss out self-incriminating statements made by Hamdan, because his rights weren’t read to him by interrogators following his 2001 capture in Afghanistan, is the first jab of what is likely many more of junk justice headed for the prosecution, whose case relies heavily Hamdan’s initial Freudian slips.

Hamdan’s lawyers contend he was a low-level employee, who FBI agents kept isolated and beat into submission, while prosecutors maintain that Hamdan admitted to supplying the Taliban with weapons, and driving bin Laden to a safe haven days before the 9/11 terror attacks, which wiped out New York’s financial hub and killed 2,974 people.

Low-level or not, all al-Qaeda members, affiliates and employees are lowlives, who contributed to America’s worst day. They are part of the mosaic of malevolence, and every last one of them needs to face the force of America’s judicial fist for turning a gorgeous sunny fall morning into an ongoing nightmare for the Free World, and blotting the face of Islam with a damning footprint. Their engine of hate has revved up a new generation of terrorists to hatch their evil in cyberspace, and inspired old ones to revamp their wickedness. The fear is hugely multiplied by a July 15 report in the Kuwaiti daily, Al-Siyasa (as reported by the Israeli daily, Arutz Sheva), that North Korea has supplied Hezbollah with the chemicals needed to make mustard and nerve gases, which can be loaded into missiles provided by Iran and Syria for mass destruction and despair.

Could an attack on the Free World be far away?

The Guantanamo Bay trials should be conducted seriously if they are to thwart the clear and present danger posed by the structure, discipline and single-minded focus of Muslim terrorists, whose intent it is to destroy the world’s most powerful nation and annihilate its alliance with Israel. The rigors of constitutional law is definitely being put to the test in the United States, whose keepers should note that there must first be a nation in which to maintain the due process so readily being defended in Cuba as of this writing.

Civil libertarians can rest assured that any coercion by the FBI pales in comparison to the dispensation of human suffering al-Qaeda-style.

According to the website, “The Smoking Gun,” during an April 2007 raid on an al-Qaeda torture chamber in Iraq, US military authorities stumbled upon a dead man hanging by a chain from the ceiling upon a cache of drawings illustrating the terror group’s preferred methods for human torment – among them, “blowtorch to the skin” and “eye removal,” in addition to recovering torture instruments, such as wire cutters, whips and meat cleavers.

The job of a national intelligence agency is not to flog the finer points of law enforcement to uncooperative enemies – a point well made by the prosecution’s star witness, former agent Ali Soufan – but to distill information from them. Given its tall task, the Federal Bureau of Information is doing its job.

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