T hhink the biggest Terror threat we have and have had for some time now is really an ECONOMIC THREAT, that is the weapon of mass destruction . The smoking gun or mushroom cloud will be $5.00 /gallon at the pump.,and a ressission.
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All Locked Up and No Place to Go
Why can't the Brits deport a suspected terror figure?
Apr 10, 2008 | Updated: 9:24 a.m. ET Apr 10, 2008
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A British appeals court Wednesday blocked the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown from deporting to Jordan a firebrand Islamic cleric who has long been suspected of close ties to Al Qaeda. The court's rationale: there were reasonable grounds to believe the Jordanians would jail him for life based on evidence obtained through the torture of other detainees.
The court ruling is the latest example of how the alleged use of torture is complicating efforts by the United States and its allies to prosecute high-profile terror suspects and their associates. In this case, the suspect at issue, Abu Qatada, is a notorious radical imam who, British authorities charge, has inflamed British Muslims with his anti-Western sermons. All the while, he has maintained "long-established connections with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda," according to a British government dossier entered into evidence in his court case. Abu Qatada has always denied being an Al Qaeda operative or leader, although in an interview broadcast after 9/11 he said that even though he has never met Osama bin Laden he would have been "proud" to have done so.
British authorities sought to deport Abu Qatada to his native country, Jordan, where he has twice been convicted in absentia for conspiracy to commit terrorist activities and was sentenced to life in prison. But the three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for England and Wales stopped the move on the grounds that it would violate Abu Qatada's human rights. The court cited Jordan's long history of using torture against terror suspects, and pointed to a 2006 Amnesty International report detailing "persistent complaints of torture" against suspects in "incommunicado detention" by Jordanian security forces. Human Rights Watch, a group that campaigns against the use of torture, released a report this week that described how detainees held by Jordan's intelligence service, known as the GID, were allegedly subjected to brutal beatings and threats of rape. The report claimed that from 2001 to at least 2004, the GID served as a "proxy jailer" for the Central Intelligence Agency. The organization claimed that "more than just warehousing these men, the GID interrogated them using methods that were even more brutal than those in which the CIA has been implicated to date." In one such instance, a Jordanian detainee, in a note smuggled out of a GID detention facility in 2003, claimed that he had been "threatened ... with electricity ... and with snakes and dogs ... [They said] we'll make you see death."
A spokesman for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington could not be reached for comment. In the past, the Jordanian government has repeatedly denied that it engages in torture.
The British government said it plans to appeal the court's ruling. A government spokesman said that Abu Qatada, who has been detained without trial since 2005, "will remain behind bars."
The issue is especially sensitive for the CIA. After the 9/11 attacks, the agency flew a number of terror suspects picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere to prisons in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. The fate of many of these suspects, who were transported under what is known as the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, remains unknown. Bush administration officials have repeatedly insisted that Jordan and other countries reassured them that suspects would not be tortured. Asked for comment, a CIA spokesman said: "Renditions are a lawful, valuable tool and they have been used for years to take terrorists off the streets. The United States does not transport individuals for the purpose of torture, and has no interest in any process that would produce bad intelligence. The agency does not, as a rule, comment publicly on allegations of specific rendition activities."
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