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Saudi Webmaster Acquitted of Terrorism Charges
terrymr writes "Saudi Student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen was found not guilty on charges that he 'rendered techical assistance to terrorists' by acting as the webmaster for an Islamic charity. Said one juror: 'The part that surprised me was when I read the First Amendment instructions. I was surprised to learn that people could say whatever they want... providing it would not cause imminent action.'" You might remember our previous coverage of this story. In addition, the AP (via CNN) has more information as well.
They want him dead, regardless of what a jury says.
C:\>
And the jurors, while you can make fun of their lack of knowledge about the law, seemed to take the time to actually understand the law as it is written. Whew, that's a cool concept!
Check out this site about jury nullification. The real questions the jury should be answering are: "does the law make sense", not "is it legal or not". The job of deciding whether it is legal or not has already been decided by the prosecution and the judge before they picked a jury.
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Try RightNation.
You've got to be kidding me, this is a joke right? The web is seething with Conservative forums. Try Little Green Footballs for a start. Check out the hundreds of links they have. Try to keep your lunch down. -- If affirmative action means what I'm for, I'm for it.
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The website with the actual mailing list (which is named, along with about 10 others in the above PDF) is here.
The thing about websites, forums, and mailing lists, is that you can never get the true feel from a description designed to make it sound horrible. For all we know, the messages that they read could be considered the trolls of the mailing list. Even if they weren't, Internet forums is still a sticky subject. People say a lot of stupid things, discussions can get heated, people can troll, people can exaggerate their beliefs to get a better response, and sometimes there are just nuts who use the Internet to let our their ideas that no one will listen to in real life. The sites could have been designed to support and recruit terrorists, but you can never really know, and there certainly wasn't enough evidence to point fingers at a moderator of the mailing list.
Uh, most of the stuff I see in tha freeper article is PURE LIBEL.
I did not know Sami personally but I was aware of his living conditions. By all appearances he DID NOT import 100's of thousands. IIRC he lived in average to low quality student appartments (like most students) and didn't have any evidences of being outstandingly rich. Even if he imported any serious amount of money it would have to be declared with customs.
Of the Mulslim students I knew of he was not one of the scary ones. There were a few who I met and talked to.
At a time when we had dozens and dozens of Saudi and middle-eastern students fleeing the country Sami stayed. What thanks he got. Trumped up charges (helped setup a website and real audio stream) and got the book thrown at him (still 8 counts of visa fraud & related charges that could get him deported).
The DoJ's case was such a joke. Fabricated evidence like the mistranslations (was it Arab Lybian Project or Arab Library Project?? even the CIA couldn't keep the translation consistent!) clearly showed that the government's case was weak from the start.
> If the KKK (Christian extremists) were lynching people still,
> you can guarantee you'd have Christians across the country
> outraged by this and telling everyone.
What makes you think that the lynchings have stopped?
Examples that spring to my mind include Matthew Shepard and the lynchings in the U.S. Navy a few years back.
What about the bombing of abortion clinics?
That is not quite correct. However charge of visa fraud were based on his participation in the website in question "the Islamic Assembly of North America" and him recieving a stipend (money, hence work) while on a *student* visa.
The "making false statements" are based on affadavits provided with visa applications that he did not work while he was in the US.
There was a hung jury on 8 counts related to his visa fraud charge... so he may still escape deportation. However, since his wife and child already went back to Saudi Arabia it doesn't look like he'll stay.
O'Connor's speech was affirmed by the Vatican and published widely in Catholic newspapers. It even made CNN. So if you think Christian churches are turning a blind eye to Matthew Shepard, abortion violence and other things done ostensibly in God's name, then all that shows is you're not paying attention.
This is simply wrong. When North America was inhabited by tribes, and Europe was a patchwork of single tribal and feudal micro states each fighting each other, the Arab world was interconnected with a common language, a common administration system and a common law. Far away from the "tribal structure" you are thinking of. Of course there were different states, and they waged war against each other. Just like the Europeans fighted each other (and did it until recently, and the Kosovo is still at a civil war), and the U.S. was in a long standing feud with Mexico.
Ethnic, religious or nationalist conflicts are abundant even in todays oh so civilized western democraties. Think of the Basques in North Spain, the anglo-irish conflict in North Ireland, or the bashing of all things french in the U.S. (and vice versa the official loathing of everything considered american in France.)
The arab world is not much different in this regard. There are ethnic minorities in the mainly arab states (berbers, kurds, turks...), there are different interpretations of Islam (Sunni and Shiia as the most prominent, Ismaelites and other smaller sects). There are non arab islamic states, which get always mixed into the arab soup in western news (Iran for instance is partly persian in the south and turk [asari] in the north, with kurds spread everywhere. So it is not even an arab country at all.) The largest islamic country in the world is not even in the Middle East. Indonesia is located in the Southeast asian archipel.
But to call this a "tribal system" is just an offspring of a theory of an own superiority theory we should abandon as soon as possible, because it doesn't help us in any way. The state of the arabian world is quite similar today to the state of the western world at the begin of the 20th century: Old, dying monarchies, some quite questionable democracies, civil wars either boiling or going on under the surface. The western world managed to kill more than 100 Mio people in the conflicts between 1850 and 1950. Compared with this achievement the arabian world is a place of piece and security.
Here are some links for you to look at:
Murder
Rape
Sodomy
part of the reason for that is the more obviously guilty the people sitting on the bench are the more the defense goes through the jurors dumping out all the military, college educated and conservative till they have a nice group of sheep who will buy into their story. ive seen it multiple times already.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Just a side note on this: there has never been, nor is there ever likely to be, a communist state. Communism was a pipe dream in which, suddenly, everyone would magically overcome their greed and selfishness and contribute as much as they could, taking only what they needed. Apparently all that was needed for this to come about was that you had to overthrow the current system and let the 'communists' take over.
The reality was that communism served as a bullfighter's cape to the dictators that espoused it--it distracted their opponents, and wowed the crowd. By obsessing on communism, McCarthy, Reagan, and all the rest did exactly what Stalin (clever, evil bastard that he was) wanted them to do. They wasted their energies fighting ghosts and ignored the real enemy: Stalinism. The ethics of communism were stolen directly from Christianity via the writings of Feuerbach: to the Russians, who were indoctrinated in communist ideology, the talk of the evils of communism had all the appeal of someone saying that all kittens are ugly and must be strangled. The right wing allowed the Stalinists to define the terms of the debate. But the 'communist' states were simply totalitarian regimes whose character was determined by the reigning despot. Had the Americans attacked the Stalinists on these terms, they would have kicked out their ideological underpinnings, made them a lot less attractive to western intellectuals, and attacked the root of their support amongst the Russian people, who might have gotten fed up with them 20 years before they did.
There is something similar going on here. The pieces are still up in the air, but Bin Laden and his imitators are hacking Islam, turning it into yet another red cape to distract the Bull and thrill the crowd.
And it's working. The Bull is goring everyone but the bullfighter.