First off, this news is a day or so old now, I meant to write this thread yesterday but couldn’t find the time. Still, there don’t seem to be any Pit threads on this at the moment, so better late than never. Anyway…
Hook-handed radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza Al-Masri, who ran the Finsbury Park Mosque in London has finally been arrested by British police. Many times over the past few years he has come out supporting attacks by Al-Qaeda, consistently preaches anti-Western messages from outside his Mosque (he was shut out of it and stripped of his British citizenship after accusations of terrorist activity in January 2003), and has repeatedly claimed he wants to turn Britain and the US into Islamic states. Until now though, there has never been enough evidence to arrest him despite many allegations of his involvement with terrorists.
Now he stands accused by the American government of setting up and funding Al Qaeda training camps in Oregon and for hostage-taking in Yemen. The British police arrested him and he now awaits extradition to the US to face formal charges - we cannot deport him to Yemen where he is also wanted, as it is certain that he will face the death penalty there (and possibly worse, before hand). As Britain is fully signed up to the International Human Rights Act, we cannot deport a suspect if his life will be in danger (Tony Blair is also a fucking moron for not thinking before signing on the dotted line on that one too).
So what does John Ashcroft do when announcing the news of Abu Hamza’s arrest? He tells a news conference that the hostage taking charges may carry the death penalty.
From here (Reuters) although I expect that should read “New York”…
Now it is looking extremely likely that Hamza will be able to fight the extradition on the grounds that he will face death if sent to the US, and thanks to Ashcroft trying to make himself look good that will be very tough for our lawyers to fight. How can Ashcroft call himself the top lawyer in the US if he doesn’t even understand the basic extradition laws of what is not only the country that he is seeking to extradite Hamza from, but also one of the US’s major allies? Shouldn’t some basic research have revealed this fact particularly as David Blunkett is adamant that the US government knew this was the case? I hope you’re proud of yourself John, your grandstanding may have just cost you a major scalp in the war against terrorism.
Ashcroft may, in fact, be my least favorite politician/gov’t official of all time, but he couldn’t have lied, could he? And even if he simply hadn’t mentioned that the death panalty applied, surely those in the extradition process would still know the death penalty applied in the US, wouldn’t they?
Ugh, what’s this awful evil taste in my mouth! It’s the horrific residue from defending Ashcroft! Someone, I beg of you, prove my arguments wrong! I’m serious here, please!
The point is, he didn’t need to come out and say this, at least not until Hamza was in the custody of the American government. Yes, it is known that the death penalty may have been applied to him in this case, and yes, it was likely that he would have been able to attempt to fight extradition on those grounds anyway, but the fact that Ashcroft has specifically stated that the death sentence may be used gives Hamza much better legal grounds to fight deportation and makes it that much harder for the legal teams trying to get him out of Britain and into the States.
No, I can quite steadfastly assure you that if the US simply didn’t bring this up and then, once it had him in custody, decided that it was willing to apply the death penalty in-spite of our clear extradition treaty commitments to the contrary, there would have been a FAR larger shit-storm over this.
One hopes that John Ashcroft will soon realize his folly and quietly rescind his statements so that Mr. Hamza can be extradited and tried, and if it is found that he indeed directly gave aid to terrorism, he can waste away the rest of his existence in a maximum security prison here in the US.
If we fuck this one up, who knows how many criminals we will lose the chance to bring charges against and suffer punishment at all just because old Johny and Georgey boy won’t be able to satisfy their lethal injection hunger.
Kal, threemae I sit corrected. Even so, it’s still turning into one big fuck-up, after all, it’s so hard to imagine Ashcroft eating humble pie and announcing to the the press and in writing to the British Home Office that even if the charge carries the death penalty and desptie what he said earlier, it will not be used whatever the circumstances.
Downright amusing, that. It’s my contention that Ashcroft’s mother was frightened by a boob, thereby causing Johnny’s problems. The boob being his father, of course.
As much as I despise John Ashcroft I don’t see a problem with him announcing American intentions to kill this dude. Americans are a savage and bloodthirsty lot and would never accept anything but a death sentence. This is just a problem with American policy in general, not Ashcroft. England is exactly right not to hand anyone over for an American execution and the US needs to join the rest of the civilized fucking world in getting rid of the capital punishment before they even have a right to demand extraditions like this.
Or maybe he was frightened by a calico cat. (To be fair, I don’t know the truth of this–maybe someone can enlighten me. But this is the Pit and the subject is John Ashcroft, so I am not inclined to be strictly fair.)
