Former Intel Engineer Pleads Guilty To Taliban Aid

theodp writes "Following up on an earlier Slashdot story, software engineer Maher "Mike" Hawash pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban, agreeing to testify against other suspects in exchange for the dropping of other terrorism charges. He will serve at least seven years in federal prison under the deal. In March, federal agents seized Hawash from a parking lot outside Intel Corp., where he worked, and held him as a material witness until charges were filed five weeks later."

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Re:Remember when..

[Omnifarious]

They still were. Them happening to be right about him being a criminal doesn't excuse it. If you have all kinds of secrets from the people who are supposed to ostensibly be your boss (We, the people, remember?) you have to expect them to get really cranky and upset with you. The FBI had no business being so secretive about it all.

You know what's sad about this?

[Faizdog]

Soo many people had rallied around him because of the problems minorities (especially Muslim ones) face in today's conditions. Unfortunately because he has pleaded guilty, next time people will just assume the person is guilty, and they won't rally around the new person, even though he/she may be innocent.

Mark my words, there will be innocents who get caught up, and due to cases like this people will be reluctant to support them. Sad.

Re:Remember when..

[elmegil]

Exactly. It is not reasonable to hold people for weeks without charge, regardless. I think it's also interesting to note that a plea bargain may be what it says it is, or it may constitute a coerced admission (coerced by the alternative of losing even if you're right, and spending 20+ years instead of 7 in jail). Beyond all that, this guy utterly failed to actually provide any aid to the Taliban, and it seems unlikely that he'd undertake any "true" terrorism (I think there's some significant difference between attempting to be a mercenary for your cause in a battlefield and bringing the battlefield to civilians after all).

All that said, there's nothing for it but to accept the plea as presented until such a time as Mike recants it. And if he'd been successful, and caught on the field of battle, he would deserve having a book thrown at him as much as John Walker Lindh. But having failed at that, I think it's outrageous that he was facing the same or greater sentence than Lindh himself (20 years).

Re:Remember when..

[Safety State]

Actually, the complaint was (and remains) that due process was not followed. Why should this matter? Because someone who is locked up, with no prospect for release and a possibility of deportation to a third-world nation for third-party torture, is much more likely to confess to crimes of which he/she is innocent.

And it does happen. People confess to crimes they didn't commit, often because the risk of being executed otherwise is too great. In return for a confession to lesser crimes than in the original accusation, government prosecutors will seek a less harsh sentence.

Due process exists for other reasons as well; if we go around imprisoning people for years before trial, you're right, there is no excessive penalty for those eventually sentenced to more time than served waiting for a trial. But all of the others who are eventually found innocent will have served time for no reason but your willingness to ignore their plight.

Re:Funny.

[pkling]

According to the article: "In March, federal agents seized Hawash, 38, from a parking lot outside Intel Corp., where he worked, and simultaneously searched his home."

Note Intel Corp., where he worked.

Get your facts right. They report you discredit with FUD

The FBI --DID-- overstep their bounds

[SuperBanana]

Remember when the Feds snatching this guy from Intel was a big deal here at /.? When we all thought that the FBI was overstepping their bounds? When we all thought that they were wrong; that an Intel engineer couldn't possibly be guilty?

They still DID overstep their bounds. We have some laws in this country which provide protection to citizens from potential abuse of power by law enforcement. Such as locking someone up for weeks without pressing charges, denying them access to a lawyer, etc. There's also unreasonable punishment- I'd say spiriting someone off and denying you've done so to their family etc certainly qualifies.

Police are required to file charges within a certain, rather short period of time(24 hours? I forget), or let you go- one or the other. You can't just lock someone up, and THEN go looking for evidence of a crime; you have to FIRST find the evidence, THEN arrest them and THEN charge them with a crime.

I don't care if he was guilty- their actions are improper, unjust, and remind me more of, say, dictatorships and communist governments than the country that supposedly leads the "free world". Inefficiency in law enforcement is the price we pay for our freedom, rights, and protections. When we throw any of the three out the window, what's left to protect? One only need to look as far as 1980's eastern germany to see what road we are headed towards.

Hogwash on Hawash

[watchful.babbler]

I have never seen so much disgusting anti-Americanism as I have in this thread. .... Innocent people do not plead guilty. ... This government is protecting YOU, if you don't like that protection then vote for someone who'll do it your way.

Whoa there! Aren't you the same person who played Thoreau in a different thread?

It's an open secret of law that innocent people plead guilty all the time. Consider, for example, the recent furor in Tulia, TX, where a police source went bad and turned in dozens of innocent people on drug distribution charges. Those people -- uniformly poor and African-American -- chose almost to the one to plead guilty to lesser charges. Governor Rick Perry is currently reviewing papers to dismiss all charges and convictions in that case.

Likewise, in Dallas, the local police department has come under intense fire for planting fake drugs on poor Latino residents, many of whom accepted plea bargains (usually due to inattentive defense counsel, a real problem down this way). Because evidence was moved upwards into the federal courts, even those cases are now under review as judges seek to determine which defendants were truly innocent of charges.

Then there are those quasi-Art. III courts, such as the IRS and immigration courts, where people frequently accept deals even though they may not be guilty at all.

Why do people do this? Simple: it takes time and money to fight in court. If you're hauled in front of an IRS judge on charges you're innocent of, you may still rationally accept a lesser penalty knowing that it's less money than hiring an experienced tax attorney. (I've got a former IRS prosecutor as a friend who quite cheerfully explains every trick up that particular profession's sleeve.) If you're poor, a minority, or an immigrant resident, you may not have the resources or even the knowledge necessary to fight a criminal charge when it comes down the pipe; your defense counsel, who's either a private attorney getting less than scale for his time on your case, or a public defender who has literally hundreds of other cases sitting on his desk, has no incentive to spend more time than is absolutely necessary on your case -- and cutting a deal with the prosecutor is the fastest way to dispose of a pending case.

Now, this doesn't obviate the fact that Hawash doesn't seem to be an innocent party. He's admitted to conspiracy to provide material support of a foreign terrorist organization, starting on October 20, 2001, two years after the official designation of the Taliban as an FTO and following the declaration of hostilities against the Taliban by the United States.

The information set out in the plea arrangement is pretty precise regarding his actions, and the end result is not particularly favorable for Hawash -- if the judge accepts the sentencing level set out in the agreement (and there's no guarantee he or she won't apply an upward departure), Hawash gets a minimum sentence of over eight years. Now, the prosecutors certainly dangled a much harsher sentence over his head, but the specifics in the agreement (such as Hawash going to China and attempting to cross the border into Afghanistan) are precise, and serious, enough that I can't see him being truly innocent in this case.

Nonetheless, just as I can remain conservative while damning every sentence from an Ann Coulter or Michael Savage, I can affirm my belief in Hawash's guilt while saying of your statement: wrong, wrong, naive, and wrong.

From an Afghani slashdotter

[mnmn]

I will begin by trying to define 'terrorist'. Anyone who terrorizes anyone else is a terrorist. That means the US ventures in Vietnam and Iraq where they tried to intimidate the civilians to drop support to their governments is just as terrorist as say the USSR trying to invade Afghanistan. So a government can be a terrorist organisation and all current governments are except some small ones ruling city states without their armies. Next, the Taliban were a political group. They also represent an extremist thinking. They supported the Al Qaeda because of what they believed, not because they wanted to terrorize US citizens. They were terrorists because they terrorized Afghans. By the way Al Qaeda and the Taliban both killed more civilians in Afghanistan each, than Al Qaeda did on 9/11. They also fought for years trying to take over Afghanistan fully but never really did. One well-known former CIA chief testified in his book that the Taliban were created by US funds during the Soviet occupation years to create a strong religious resistance against USSR. Couple these facts with the fact that few people in Afghanistan ever supported the Taliban, and they were mostly composed of Pakistani army, that hardly makes the Taliban Afghan, let alone Al Qaeda. A terrorist to some is a freedom fighter to others. People in foreign countries who supported the Taliban were usually sincere to their own countries and never supported them as a Threat to America or Democracy. They never knew of the Taliban's antics within Afghanistan. A Pakistani-British kid raised in London was caught among the Taliban when the Americans came, and was interviewed. He joined because he thought he would be fighting the Russians defending Islam. He didnt know there would be cries of "Allah o Akbar" from both sides of the hill. Most people in Pakistan under the current Taliban propaganda still believe the Taliban should rightfully be in Afghanistan without knowing who the enemy is exactly. Such is the sorry state of affairs of the region. I will just ask everyone to:

1. Never hate anyone single-mindedly. Information is skewed in every media and the world out there can be radically different.
2. Never sling around a word without completely understanding its definition and checking how it applies to yourself. Words like WMD, terrorist and wacky are some.
3. never treat anyone like the plague because he supported someone else. Many people even in America still defend communism, many others have strong religious affiliations of all sorts. None of them are absolutely evil, and evil only lies in the eyes of the beholder.
4. never support any form of government to the extreme that you impose it on others. Face it, democracy is a total failure in poorer countries where people only vote for the person most seen on TV, which is the richest politician around. The communists were in the same shoes a few years ago.
5. never assume yourself, your country or your religion to be the center of gravity of humanity. The Germans tried that half a century ago. Ask them how they feel now. Anyone is a savage/terrorist/evildoer/moron/unintelligent to someone else.
6. never start a political debate on slashdot. Ever.
7. Profit!

Re:Treasonous criminal or not...

[KrispyKringle]

Are you aware of the term "habeus corpus?"

People often say, "Yeah, but he was a terrorist! He has no rights! I have no sympathy. Do you really want this guy to go to trial and risk him being set free?"

Yes. He does have rights. As an American citizen, he is innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt. He is an alleged terrorist. Quite a difference. And if you really think tearing to shreds the fundamental basis of our freedoms does a whole lot to protect them, you are very sadly wrong.

If the terrorists really want to destroy our way of life, all they have to do, at this point, is sit back and hope the Bush administration gets re-elected. Ashcroft's disdain for the rule of law--his disdain even for court orders he doesn't feel like complying with--shows him to be worse than just a silly ideologue. He has no conception of justice, no respect for the ideals he claims to be defending, and is more of a threat to our American way of life than any terrorist.

Re:Exactly, he looks like a terrorist so arrest hi

[hazem]

Pretty lucky guess, if he's pleading guilty and that's all they had to go on when they picked him up.

Don't be so sure. I don't know if he is in fact guilty in this case, but people have been known to plead guilty when they are in fact innocent.

Here's a possible scenario. They pick him up on secret evidence and secret warrant, then hold him secretly with no access to a lawyer or his family. That's pretty scary right there.

Next, they tell you, "listen buddy, you look just like one of Osama's boys, so when we put you before a jury of your *peers*, they'll have no problem locking you away for the rest of your life being gang raped by muslim-hating white supremicists"... OR, if you plead guilty, we'll take it easy on you, put you in a nice prison, and you'll see your family in 7 years."

What does his lawyer tell him? Oh wait, he didn't have access to one for quite a while... in fact, nobody did.

What do you do given a choice like that?

Prosecutors have a lot of power in our system, particularly when they can frighten you into pleading guilty out of fear for what a guilty verdict means.

Slashdot moderation in action

[jamesmrankinjr]

Slashdot for you. The factually false post bashing the US gets +4 Interesting, while the corrections pointing out facts that put the US case in a more favorable light get no higher than +2.

Figures.
-jimbo