Guantánamo Swede gives up case against US

A Swedish former Guantánamo Bay prisoner has given up on attempts to sue the United States government for damages.

Mehdi Ghezali was imprisoned in the American military base on Cuba for more than two years.

"We haven't got any further with this case since the American law firm we were working with withdraw," said Ghezali's lawyer Anton Strand.

Strand and his colleagues at Peter Althin's Stockholm law firm had been trying for three years to contact a US law firm that would pursue a case against the American federal government. Ghezali said he wanted compensation for being kept in Guantánamo for two years without trial.

The Swede eventually found a firm willing to take the case on, but it dropped out shortly before the deadline for bringing a case expired.

"We then contacted an American organization which would have been able to make the deadline, but were told that the chances of getting any money out of it were very small. When Ghezali realized this he lost interest in proceeding," said Strand.

Ghezali was "deeply disappointed" at not succeeding in bringing a damages suit in the US, said Strand. He said he also felt let down by the Swedish authorities for their handling of his case.

"Ghezali wants to look into the possibility of acting against the Swedish authorities. I don't yet know what that could lead to - possibly a complaint to the Justice Ombudsman," said Strand.

Ghezali, who is of Algerian descent and was brought up in Örebro, was 22 when he was arrested in Pakistan, close to the Afghan border. His capture in December 2001, came just three months after the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington. He was later taken to the US detention centre on Cuba.

The Swede was released in July 2004 without having faced a court or tribunal and without being given any reason for his imprisonment. He told media in Sweden that he had been tortured while in American custody, something the Pentagon has denied.

This week has been a bad week for the Swedish al-Quada.

Here some news about James Ujaama, the Seattle man who pleaded guilty in 2003 to aiding the Taliban. He admitted to a federal judge in New York on Monday that he fled to Belize last year to avoid testifying against his alleged co-conspirators, one of who is the "Swede" Oussama Kassir.

By violating the 2003 plea agreement, Ujaama paved the way for the government to reinstate the much heftier terrorism charges it previously had dropped - among others trying to set up a training camp in Oregon for al Qaida together with Kassir.

Kassir is presently held in a prison in Prague, Czech Republic, waiting on decision whether he will be extradited to the US. Ujaama's testimony will further increase the likelihood that Kassir soon will be in the custody of US Law enforcement agencies.

For those who read swedish there are two great posts on the case on Per Gudmundson's blog: here & here.

In the second post he brings reminds us of the names of a number of politicians who worked for his release from jail. Name them and shame them.

Oh, yes, to make it a hat-trick there is this piece of news:

'Enemy combatant' lived in Sweden

This man is still anonymous in PC Swedish press, thank heavens for the net. (Who do the journalists or their editors think they are kidding?)

In Algeria, authorities have tried to appease the radical Islamists as well as using them as weapons against the left. This strategy has been just as effective as a similar plan adopted in early 20th century Europe - namely in the case of the German democrats and businessmen who tried to deal with the Nazis in a similar fashion.

A lot of the (North) African Muslim refugees seeking political asylum under the Geneva Convention (as amended by the New York Protocol) in Europe belong to radical Islamist movements consisting of fanatics who are even ‘too Muslim’ to function in a fundamentalist Muslim society.

From Wikipedia;

“After independence the Algerian government asserted state control over religious activities for purposes of national consolidation and political control. Islam became the religion of the state in the new constitution (Article 2), and was the religion of its leaders. The state monopolized the building of mosques, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs controlled an estimated 5,000 public mosques by the mid-1980s. Imams were trained, appointed, and paid by the state, and the Friday khutba, or sermon, was issued to them by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. That ministry also administered religious property (the habus), provided for religious education and training in schools, and created special institutes for Islamic learning. Islamic law (sharia) principles were introduced into family law in particular, while remaining absent from most of the legal code; thus, for example, while Muslim women were banned from marrying non-Muslims (by the Algerian Family Code of 1984), wine remained legal.

Those measures, however, did not satisfy everyone. As early as 1964 a militant Islamic movement, called Al Qiyam (values), emerged and became the precursor of the Islamic Salvation Front (Islamist party) of the 1990s. Al Qiyam called for a more dominant role for Islam in Algeria’s legal and political systems and opposed what it saw as Western practices in the social and cultural life of Algerians.

Although militant Islamism was suppressed, it reappeared in the 1970s under a different name and with a new organization. The movement began spreading to university campuses, where it was encouraged by the state as a counterbalance to left-wing student movements. By the 1980s, the movement had become even stronger, and bloody clashes erupted at the Ben Aknoun campus of the University of Algiers in November 1982. The violence resulted in the state’s cracking down on the movement, a confrontation that would intensify throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The rise of Islamism had a significant impact on Algerian society. More women began wearing the veil, some because they had become more conservative religiously and others because the veil kept them from being harassed on the streets, on campuses, or at work. Islamists also prevented the enactment of a more liberal family code despite pressure from feminist groups and associations.

After the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the 1991 elections, and was then banned after the elections’ cancellation by the military, the tensions between Islamists and the government erupted into open fighting, which lasted some 10 years in the course of which some 100,000 people were killed. However, some Islamist parties remained aboveground - notably the Movement of Society for Peace and Islamic Renaissance Movement - and were allowed by the government to contest later elections. In recent years, the Civil Harmony Act and Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation have been passed, providing an amnesty for most crimes committed in the course of the war.”

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Algeria#After_independence

I like Fjordman but unfortunately he overstates his case and that is not good for the credibility of those arguing for an limited - nay, halt in - immigration.

We do have problems in Sweden - no doubt about it - however, so far the problems are mostly localized to special suburbs around the major cities and some other areas. Mamö (Malmoe) and some of the smaller cities along the coastline opposite Denmark are the areas most afflicted, but even there the problems are still mostly (note mostly) localized to the poorer suburbs.

There are other things with our social security systems that actually have been liberalized - in the old meaning of liberal, ie more market oriented, that Fjordman does not seem to know about. That is not surprising - most Swedish politicians don’t know about it either....

Talking about politicians - they are just as stupid as Fjordman describes them - or even worse. Therefore, it will take a lot of work to change the direction of our society - and there Fjordman may well be right.

To Islamic countries, Western democracy needs to be presented as “the third way.”

- In many cases, yes.

Speaking about democracy and Islam, I recall that some years ago there was lots of talk about the Iranian population demanding a political orientation towards democracy. By today it seems like the freedom loving people of Iran have lost that battle.

I believe you can’t hold a people down forever and I also believe that movements like Islamism and Nazism are against human nature. Therefore also Islamism will lose in the end. But while Nazism was a mayfly in the world history, Islamism is not. Furthermore, Islamism has incorporated barbarian customs that existed before Islam and even though Imams might denounce them, Islam have de facto reinforced them.

A good example of this is honor killings in a country like Iran. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has declared that honor killings are against Islam, but the fact that punishment remains very lenient make people think it IS fine with Islam as long as you are prepared to pay the moderate price for the committing crime.

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