UAE President's brother avoids torture charge

A COURT in the United Arab Emirates has acquitted the UAE President's brother of charges of torturing an Afghan as seen on US television but convicted five co-defendants, including two Americans, his lawyer said.

The court acquitted Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan "after establishing he was not responsible" for the torture of the Afghan merchant in 2004, lawyer Habib al-Mulla said.

Allegations against the sheikh emerged after the video, aired in April, appeared to show him beating a man with whips, electric cattle prods and a wooden plank with protruding nails.

Assisted by police, Sheikh Issa is seen to pour salt in the man's wounds and run over him with a four-wheel drive.

The victim needed months of hospital care following the incident.

He was reportedly an Afghan trader who lost a consignment of grain worth $US5000 ($5450).

However, the UAE court accepted the sheikh's defence that he was "under the influence of drugs that left him unaware of his actions", his lawyer said.

The court ordered two co-defendants to pay a "temporary compensation" of 10,000 dirhams ($3000) to the Afghan victim, who can file a new lawsuit to claim full compensation, the lawyer said.

The two US defendants of Lebanese origin, brothers Ghassan and Bassam Nabulsi, were sentenced to five years in jail each in absentia for having drugged the sheikh.

The lawyer said the Afghan victim had demanded compensation from the brothers rather than from Sheikh Issa.

Bassam Nabulsi reportedly leaked the video which exposed the case.

The court also sentenced three other workers at the farm where the torture took place to between one and three years in jail for drugging the sheikh, likewise in absentia, according to Mulla.

A guard at the farm was acquitted.

Mulla said Sheikh Issa, 40, who has been in detention for the past seven months, would be released.

The verdict, however, is not final as it will have to be reviewed by a higher court if the public prosecution decides to challenge the ruling.

Sheikh Issa, who is the brother of UAE President and oil-rich Abu Dhabi's ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, pleaded not guilty at a hearing last month.

The lawyer told the hearing in December the sheikh had been drugged against his will during the incident and had no recollection of what had happened.

"We submitted medical reports showing that the drugs that the two co-defendants administered to him left him unaware of his actions," the lawyer said on December 15.

In a rare trial of a high-ranking member of the ruling family, Sheikh Issa was charged at an opening hearing last October with endangering life, causing bodily harm and with rape for the incident.

The lawyer told the court that one of the sheikh's co-defendants was responsible for Sheikh Issa's medications and had drugged him, then videotaped the incident and tried to blackmail him.

The Australian

Appeals court confirms life sentence for September 11 plotter Zacarias Moussoui

A US appeals court confirmed today a life sentence handed down on Zacarias Moussoui, a French national, for complicity in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The ruling upheld a sentence passed by a federal court in Virginia in May 2006 after Moussoui pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the hijackings of the airliners used in the attacks in New York and Washington.

Moussoui, who later recanted his testimony only to claim he was part of another Al-Qaeda plot, is serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Colorado.

News.Com

Navy SEALs Face Assault Charges for Capturing Most-Wanted Terrorist

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault.

Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement.

Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge of impediment of an investigation.

The three SEALs will be arraigned separately on Dec. 7. Another three SEALs — two officers and an enlisted sailor — have been identified by investigators as witnesses but have not been charged.

FoxNews.com obtained the official handwritten statement from one of the three witnesses given on Sept. 3, hours after Abed was captured and still being held at the SEAL base at Camp Baharia. He was later taken to a cell in the U.S.-operated Green Zone in Baghdad.

The SEAL told investigators he had showered after the mission, gone to the kitchen and then decided to look in on the detainee.

"I gave the detainee a glance over and then left," the SEAL wrote. "I did not notice anything wrong with the detainee and he appeared in good health."

Lt. Col. Holly Silkman, spokeswoman for the special operations component of U.S. Central Command, confirmed Tuesday to FoxNews.com that three SEALs have been charged in connection with the capture of a detainee. She said their court martial is scheduled for January.

More at FoxNews

Attorney: Hospital hearing set for Fort Hood suspect

SAN ANTONIO—An attorney for the Army psychiatrist charged in the mass shooting at Fort Hood says his client will have his first court hearing in his hospital room on Saturday.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's civilian attorney, John Galligan, said Friday that military prosecutors notified him of their plans for the hearing at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

Hasan has been recovering there since the Nov. 5 rampage at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and more than 30 wounded. Hasan was shot by civilian members of Fort Hood's police force.

The hearing is to determine whether Hasan will be placed in pre-trial confinement -- which usually means jail. But Galligan says he'll argue that Hasan should remain in intensive care because he is paralyzed and still needs hospital care.

Fort Hood officials didn't immediately return a call about the hearing.

Boston Globe

Western Court cheerfully sends threatened Apostate Rifqa back Home

September 16th, 2009 9:19 am
Jihadic Barbarians vs the Sleeping Western Giant

Newspeak Triumphs, Truth Slain

“They all looked half drugged or half asleep, dull, as if the creatures had been hypnotized or poisoned….they walked and moved and went about their lives in a condition of sleepwalking: they were not aware of themselves, of other people, of what went on around them.”
Thus spake Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City.

Do people really understand what is going on in our world right now? That language is being used to confuse us? America is the greatest “terrorist,” Israeli Jews are the “Nazis,” non-Muslim pro-western law Brits are called “right wing fascists” because a small number stood up to 200 angry and armed Muslim Brits in front of a Birmingham mosque, parliamentarian Geert Wilders is considered a “racist Islamophobe” and faces a criminal trial because he tells the truth about Islamist jihad.

And, by the way, the so-called “fascist” Brits held aloft an Israeli flag and signs that said “Extremists Out,” “Britain Safe.” One woman interviewed said: “If people come here they should respect out laws.”

The Orwellian doublespeak (or Newspeak) does not stop here. People insist that honor killings which, according to my research, are mainly a Muslim-on-Muslim and male-on-female crime have absolutely nothing to do with Islam; that Islam is a religion of peace; that 9/11, 3/11, 7/7—have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia or al-Qaeda, that Arab and south Asian Muslims did not fly planes into American buildings and embassies or blow up trains in Madrid and London.

Naw. The Zionists and the CIA really did it all. But if the Arab and south Asian Muslims did do it too—they did so for a noble reason, to protest the Zionist “occupation” of disputed lands, long claimed as “Palestinian” by the Arab League, the United Nations, international human rights groups, and the western intelligentsia.

Arthur Koestler, in The God That Failed describes the intellectuals who joined the communist party in the 1930s as naive idealists and those who recruited and used them as carrying on a “white slave traffic whose victims were young idealists flirting with violence.” Or, as my friend and computer genius, Mitchell Price, has put it: Those Americans who keep giving a free pass to jihadists and Islamists are flirting with “the barbarian within.”

I’ll say.

Read All here: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/09/16/jihadic-barbarians-vs-the-sleeping-western-giant/

Islamic Face Masks: Banned in Michigan Courtrooms

By Phyllis Chesler

In 2006, in a small claims matter in Michigan, a Muslim woman, Ginnah Muhammed, refused to take off her face mask (niqab) while she testfied. Judge Paul Paruk dismissed her case. Muhammed sued, the ACLU backed her. They argued for a “religious exception” to courtroom attire. Although Muhammed’s small claim case was against a car rental agency, here is what Michael Steinberg, legal director of the ACLU of Michigan stated:

“The Michigan Supreme Court should not slam the door of justice on a category of women just because of their religious belief…Under the proposed rule, women who are sexually assaulted do not have their day in court if they wear a veil mandated by their religion.”

Sexual assault was not at issue nor was the victim afraid that testifying might lead to her death. Leave it to the ACLU to always get it wrong.

Finally, earlier this month, on June 17, 2009, the Michigan Supreme Court, in a 5-2 vote, ruled that a Judge had the power to “require witnesses to remove head or facial covering as (the witness) was testifying.” A Judge has the right to see a witness’s “facial expressions” to determine her “truthfulness” while she testifies. Read more ...

Source: PJM

Turkish Court: Marital Rape Not A Crime; Turkish Columnist: Decision Turns Women Into Sex Slaves

In response to a ruling by Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeals that marital rape is not a crime, İsmet Berkan wrote in his column in Radikal that because of the ruling, if a woman "resists and is killed by her husband in the end, his penalty even could be reduced due to 'grievous provocation!' We learned [about] this during the 'Stop Violence Against Women' week..."

He continued, "Unfortunately, the court's decision has the effect of turning women into sex slaves in marriages... Forcing someone into sexual intercourse is called 'rape.' In Turkey, which is making efforts to end violence against women, the Court of Appeals decision must have been a really bad coincidence..."

Source: Turkish Daily News / MEMRI
H/T: Atlas