Posts tagged terrorist

United States authorities prevented a British couple from entering the U.S. on account of their jokes about the country on the microblogging website Twitter, Daily Mail reported.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting were on their way to Hollywood when they were arrested after deplaning in Los Angeles.

Bryan had previously tweeted about his trip to LA, saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?”

Bryan was held on suspicion and questioned about his tweets, including one other in which he had quoted a popular American TV show, saying that he was planning to “dig Marilyn Monroe up.”

“I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe,” Daily Mail quoted Bunting as saying.

Authorities searched the couple’s belongings, and they were held separately for about 12 hours.

“It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels. They did a full body search on me, too,” Bryan said.

The couple was not allowed to enter the country and was sent home, Daily Mail reported.

(Source: hurriyetdailynews.com)

Civil rights groups dismayed as Barack Obama abandons commitment to veto new security law contained in defence bill

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation’s supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law’s critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

There was heated debate in both houses of Congress on the legislation, requiring that suspects with links to Islamist foreign terrorist organisations arrested in the US, who were previously held by the FBI or other civilian law enforcement agencies, now be handed to the military and held indefinitely without trial.

The law applies to anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces”.

Senator Lindsey Graham said the extraordinary measures were necessary because terrorism suspects were wholly different to regular criminals.

“We’re facing an enemy, not a common criminal organisation, who will do anything and everything possible to destroy our way of life,” he said. “When you join al-Qaida you haven’t joined the mafia, you haven’t joined a gang. You’ve joined people who are bent on our destruction and who are a military threat.”

Other senators supported the new powers on the grounds that al-Qaida was fighting a war inside the US and that its followers should be treated as combatants, not civilians with constitutional protections.

But another conservative senator, Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said “detaining citizens without a court trial is not American” and that if the law passes “the terrorists have won”.

“We’re talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk,” he said. “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.”

Paul was backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein.

“Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” she said. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.”

Paul said there were already strong laws against support for terrorist groups. He noted that the definition of a terrorism suspect under existing legislation was so broad that millions of Americans could fall within it.

“There are laws on the books now that characterise who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist,” Paul said. “If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?”

Under the legislation suspects can be held without trial “until the end of hostilities”. They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue.

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would “cause confusion” in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year’s election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

“The paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people’s minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is,” Malinowski said. “It wasn’t asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs.”

In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said he feared the law could compromise the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be more complicated to win co-operation from suspects held by the military.

“The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain co-operation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

Civil liberties groups say the FBI and federal courts have dealt with more than 400 alleged terrorism cases, including the successful prosecutions of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, Umar Farouk, the “underwear bomber”, and Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square bomber”.

Elements of the law are so legally confusing, as well as being constitutionally questionable, that any detentions are almost certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court.

Malinowski said “vague language” was deliberately included in the bill in order to get it passed. “The very lack of clarity is itself a problem. If people are confused about what it means, if people disagree about what it means, that in and of itself makes it bad law,” he said.

Hillary Clinton does an about face on American policy in dealing with terrorists.

Washington ready to negotiate with Mullah Omar

Washington is ready to negotiate with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and now regards his involvement as crucial to the prospects for peace in Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton has said.

Her comments been taken as a significant shift in American policy from moves to divide the Taliban-led insurgency and isolate Mullah Omar, the man who sheltered Osama bin Laden as he plotted the September 11 attacks, to an acknowledgement of his leadership.

It follows the disclosure earlier this month that American officials had met leaders of the Haqqani Network, the powerful Taliban faction blamed for some of the most devastating attacks on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, including last month’s attack on the US embassy in Kabul in which seven were killed and 19 wounded.

Earlier this week the faction’s commander Sirajuddin Haqqani warned Washington that only the Quetta Shura, led by Mullah Omar, could negotiate a peace deal and that his fighters would not be divided from its leadership.

In an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mrs Clinton said the United States would continue to “fight, talk and build” in Afghanistan and Pakistan to “test whether these organisations have any willingness to negotiate in good faith”.

She said there was “evidence going both ways” on its intentions, citing the Haqqani Network’s response to a Pakistan-brokered meeting in August between US officials and Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the group’s top leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Doubts were raised too over the Taliban leadership’s intentions following the assassination last month of former Afghan President Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, by a suicide bomber sent to Kabul with a “message of peace” from the Quetta Shura.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said his government would hold no further talks with the Taliban unless Pakistan, which it regards as its patron, acts as guarantor.

Mrs Clinton said the Haqqani meeting not a “negotiation” and that no subsequent meetings have followed it, but stressed any future negotiations with the Taliban would need the Quetta Shura’s blessing.

“The negotiations that would be part of any Afghan-led peace process would have to include the Quetta Shura and would have to include some recognition by the Quetta Shura which, based on everything we know, is still led by Mullah Omar, that they wish to participate in such a process … We are pursuing every thread of any kind of interest expressed,” she said.

Her change of tone follows earlier exploratory talks with a senior aide to Mullah Omar in Qatar and German earlier this year and appears to have been influenced by her visit to Pakistan last week, where she met army chief General Kiyani and President Asif Zardari. Sources close to the Pakistan military said General Kiyani warned her that “if this game is to end in success for the United States, they have to take these people [the Taliban] on board.”

Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst Arif Rafiq said Mrs Clinton’s comments marked a significant change. “Hillary Clinton’s public statements prior to the recent Pakistan visit noted a desire to split Quetta Shura elements from Mullah Omar. I think they [now] recognise that though talks have yet to yield tangible dividends, attempts to split the Taliban have failed,” he said.