Money courier sought in NY bomb plot

By Rasool Dawar and Tom Hays ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK (AP) — Investigators of the failed car bombing in Times Square are looking for a money courier they say helped funnel cash from overseas to finance a Pakistani-American’s preparations to blow up the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb in the heart of New York, a law-enforcement official told the Associated Press.

Investigators have the name of the courier who they believe helped Faisal Shahzad pay for the used sport utility vehicle and other materials to rig up a car bomb that would have caused a huge fireball in Times Square if it had gone off, the official told the AP. The official didn’t know how much money may have changed hands.

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.

U.S. law-enforcement officials traveled to Pakistan — where Mr. Shahzad spent five months before returning to the U.S. in February — to question four purported members of an a Qaeda-linked militant group. Investigators are trying to trace his movements in his homeland and looking into the possible financing of the operation between the Pakistan-born budget analyst and foreign terror groups.

Mr. Shahzad, 30, who remains in custody on terrorism and weapons charges, lived alone in a Bridgeport, Conn., and rented an apartment with no apparent job since February. He is seen on videotape buying boxes of fireworks from a Pennsylvania store and authorities say he bought a rifle in Connecticut over the past three months with no apparent source of income.

He paid for the used SUV with 13 $100 bills, authorities say, then tried to blow up the vehicle in Times Square on Saturday. A T-shirt vendor saw smoke coming from the SUV and alerted police.

Officials have been investigating if Mr. Shahzad got money from militant groups, including the Pakistani Taliban, which originally claimed responsibility for the bombing attempt then backed off that claim.

Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Friday he believed Mr. Shahzad did not act alone, but he had seen no evidence suggesting the Pakistan Taliban were involved.

“All those leads, suggesting it was his own action, I will not accept that. I’d like to see details,” Mr. Malik told reporters in Beijing. “Obviously, he had bought a vehicle filled with explosives. It looks a bit difficult [to say] that he’s [working] alone.”

A Pakistani Taliban spokesman said Thursday the group had nothing to do with the attempted bombing, but added: “Such attacks are welcome.”

“We have no relation with Faisal. However, he is our Muslim brother,” Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq told the AP in Pakistan by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We feel proud of Faisal. He did a brave job.”

The group has never launched a successful terrorist attack against the United States.

Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Associated Press that Mr. Shahzad is a “lone wolf” terrorist who did not work with others. He said Mr. Shahzad was inspired by militants in Pakistan, but didn’t have direct contact with them. Authorities say Mr. Shahzad told investigators he went to a terror training camp in Pakistan, but they have yet to confirm that.

Since his arrest Monday, Mr. Shahzad admitted to the failed bombing and has cooperated in the investigation, authorities say. He has not yet appeared in court.

Still, police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said investigators want to find out if “what he’s saying is in fact the truth.”

“We are directly looking at who did he have contact with while in Pakistan, what did he do, who is supporting him and why,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

In Karachi, Pakistan, both U.S. and Pakistani officials questioned four purported members of the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, two Pakistani security officials told the AP, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The militant group is believed to have been established by Pakistani intelligence agencies, and has been linked to the al Qaeda terror network and the 2002 killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Read the original article Washington Times

Michelle Malkin: Terrorists get citizenship through sham marriages

Peters:We can’t appease Islamists

Ralph Peters

Appeasement doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with dictators, and it doesn’t work with terrorists. The attempted Times Square bombing was yet more proof.

We’ve allowed Islamist extremists to dictate what we can say, print or portray. We don’t want to offend them. The First Amendment bows before Islam.

The Obama administration has ducked all unwelcome evidence that such appeasement doesn’t work. Instead, it goes to absurd lengths to convince Muslim radicals that we respect their views.

Our counterfactual assumption is that, if we’re really, really nice, the fanatics will stop being grumpy and blowing us up. But Islamist extremists haven’t read our actions (or inactions) as an admirable exercise in tolerance. They read our bowing and scraping and apologizing as weakness.

The mean-dog law applies: Let that pit bull sense that you’re afraid, and you’re going to feel its teeth.

Instead of applauding our ecumenical decency, terrorists just smell fear.

So we’ve had yet another attempt to ignite an inferno in the heart of Manhattan, to slaughter the innocent and teach America a lesson.

Since the Obama administration deepened our submissive attitude toward Islam — banning all references to “Islamist terror” or “Muslim radicalism” from government documents and statements — the number of terror attacks on our soil has gone up. Does any reader believe this is just a coincidence?

The dogs of terror smell fear. Terror’s response to our president’s Cairo valentine to fanaticism last year was the Fort Hood massacre, the attempted Christmas Day bombing, now the botched bombing of Times Square — and a swelling number of foiled plots.

The Times Square near-miss was particularly revealing. When it looked like the bomber might be a forty-something white male, the media’s delight and the relief of our politicians was palpable: At last, another Timothy McVeigh! It isn’t only Muslims!

Boo-hoo. The perp turned out to be another Islamist terrorist we can’t call an “Islamist terrorist.”

Now the question of most interest about the terrorists’ latest Manhattan Project is whether Faisal Shahzad, a newly naturalized citizen (great vetting job!), chose Times Square just because it’s a powerful symbol and always crowded — or if he also hoped to hit Viacom’s headquarters as punishment for South Park’s (promptly self-censored) lampoon of Mohammed.

This matters. South Park may not embody all that I admire about America, but its irreverence is an important manifestation of our freedom of expression. What politically correct and cowardly madness have we come to, when we allow murderous Muslim fanatics to censor our laugh lines?

I don’t like gratuitous provocations directed at any religion. But freedom of speech applies: We can’t have an anything-goes rule for every other faith, and a don’t-touch rule for Islam.

When those Danish cartoons mocking Mohammed were first published several years ago, I found them tasteless, stupid and gratuitous. But the moment Islamist bullies reached into our civilization to threaten the cartoonists and publishers with death, we should have dug in our heels.

If the Saudis, or the Pakistanis, or the Iranians in their respective spiritual tenements don’t want to watch South Park or look at cartoons of Mohammed, fine. They’re entitled to their own house rules.

But they are not entitled to dictate to us what we can depict, describe or, yeah, laugh at. In our house, you have to play by our rules.

We should have taken a stand years ago. Now our appeasement-addicted administration won’t. Comics will go on ripping up other faiths for their stand-up routines, but the religion that’s spawned such ungodly terror will get a pass.

All of our self-censorship, bowing, kowtowing and apologizing has had no positive effect, whatsoever, on our enemies. Not one terrorist organization has disbanded, nor has one terrorist converted to the Malibu lifestyle.

The only thing we’ve done by caving in to every cultural demand from Islamist fanatics has been to encourage them to make more demands.

Our enemies believe we’re cowards. We’re also fools.

Read the original article New York Post

NY car bomb suspect cooperates, but motive mystery

TOM HAYS and JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN

NEW YORK – A man accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square had found the stable, suburban life he had spent a decade working toward, then abandoned his house in Connecticut and decided to supplement his business degrees with explosives training in Pakistan, authorities say.

Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old son of a retired official in Pakistan’s air force, was charged Tuesday with trying to blow up a crude gasoline and propane device inside a parked SUV amid tourists and Broadway theatergoers. He was in custody after being hauled off a Dubai-bound plane he boarded Monday night at John F. Kennedy International Airport despite being under surveillance and placed on the federal no-fly list.

Passengers disembarking from the flight many hours later described a calm scene as he was removed from the plane. They said he didn’t put up a struggle.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Shahzad had been providing valuable information to investigators as they sought to determine the scope of the plot to blow up the SUV last Saturday night in the heart of Times Square near bustling restaurants and a theater showing “The Lion King.”

“Based on what we know so far, it is clear that this was a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans in one of the busiest places in our country,” Holder said.

A court hearing was canceled Tuesday in part because of Shahzad’s continuing cooperation with investigators, but authorities said they had shed little light on what might have motivated him.

Until recently, his life in the U.S. appeared enviable. He had a master’s degree from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a job as a budget analyst for a marketing firm in Norwalk, Conn., two children and a well-educated wife who posted his smiling picture and lovingly called him “my everything” on a social networking website.

But shortly after becoming a U.S. citizen a year ago, he gave up his job, stopped paying his mortgage and told a real estate agent to let the bank take the house because he was returning to Pakistan.

Once there, according to investigators, he traveled to the lawless Waziristan region and learned bomb making at a terrorist training camp.

In court papers, investigators said Shahzad returned to the U.S. on Feb. 3, moved into an apartment in a low-rent section of Bridgeport, then set about acquiring materials and an SUV he bought with cash in late April. They said that after his arrest, Shahzad confessed to rigging the bomb and driving it into Times Square. He also acknowledged getting training in Pakistan, the filing said.

The investigation of the fizzled bomb attack unfolded quickly, with a suspect in custody in only 53 hours — but it didn’t go off without a hitch.

After identifying Shahzad through the previous owner of the SUV, investigators had him under surveillance when he nearly slipped away.

Authorities initially planned to arrest him at his Connecticut home but lost track of him, two people familiar with the probe told The Associated Press. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly about the breach in surveillance.

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly played down the slip on the morning TV talk shows Wednesday, telling ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “it’s not unusual in an investigation” to briefly lose track of the target.

Emirates airlines also didn’t initially notice when Shahzad purchased a ticket that he had been placed on the government’s no-fly list, according to a law enforcement official.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano credited customs officials with recognizing Shahzad’s name on a passenger manifest and stopping the flight. Agents apprehended him on the plane.

Passengers said the arrest was made quietly. First-class passenger Samir al-Ammari, a Saudi who was in the U.S. on a business trip, said he saw security surround the suspect.

“Honestly, I was worried,” he said. “I was planning to cancel the flight and get another one.”

Several passengers said the revelation there was a link to the failed Times Square bombing didn’t cause a panic.

“There was no commotion, no general alarm or concern,” said Robert Woodward, of Boulder, Colo.

A gun was discovered in the car Shahzad left at the airport, investigators said.

Kifyat Ali, a cousin of Shahzad’s father, spoke with reporters outside a two-story home the family owns in an upscale part of Peshawar, Pakistan. He said the family had yet to be officially informed of Shahzad’s arrest, which he called “a conspiracy so the (Americans) can bomb more Pashtuns,” a reference to a major ethnic group in Peshawar and the nearby tribal areas of Pakistan and southwest Afghanistan.

The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the Times Square car bomb plot, but U.S. officials said they are still investigating. Federal authorities are looking into possible financing of Shahzad’s activities by the group, according to one of the law enforcement officials who spoke to the AP. A spokesman for Pakistan’s army said Wednesday that it does not believe the insurgent group was behind the attempt.

In Pakistan, authorities detained several people, although the FBI said it had no confirmation that those arrests were relevant to the case.

Shahzad came to the U.S. in late 1998 on a student visa. Not long after earning his MBA, he took a job at the Affinion Group, which does brand-loyalty marketing, and stayed there until leaving voluntarily in May 2009, a company spokesman said.

His path to citizenship was eased by his marriage to an American, Huma Mian. Like her husband, Mian was well-educated, with a business degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

On her profile on the social networking site Orkut, she described herself as “not political,” said she spoke English, Pashto, Urdu and French and listed her passions as “fashion, shoes, bags, shopping!! And of course, Faisal.”

She posted a picture of Shahzad, smiling, with the caption, “what can I say … he’s my everything.”

Read the original article Yahoo News

Car bomb suspect tried to fly to Dubai

U.S. sees foreign ties in NY car bomb plot: report

Reuters) – The failed car bomb in New York’s Times Square increasingly appears to have been coordinated by several people in a plot with international ties, The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing Obama administration officials.

U.S.

White House officials also characterize the incident as attempted terrorism for the first time, dramatically stepping up their description of the intended attack, the Post said.

I think anybody that has the type of material that they had in a car in Times Square, I would say that that was intended to terrorize, absolutely,” Gibbs told a White House briefing. “And I would say that whoever did that would be categorized as a terrorists, yes.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday that investigators had made substantial progress in the investigation into the failed car bomb attempt and that those involved would eventually be caught.

Read the original article on Reuters

Pelosi stopped one CIA operation. So why not waterboarding?

By Marc A. Thiessen
In mid-2004, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi learned something from a CIA briefing that made her blood boil. Pelosi reportedly “came unglued” at the revelation and had “strong words” with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, demanding that the CIA abandon its plans. As a result, a top-secret finding that President George W. Bush signed to authorize the CIA’s activities was revised. Pelosi succeeded in stopping the agency from moving forward with the controversial operation.

What drove Pelosi to action? Not the CIA’s waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists. In a 2009 interview, a former senior Bush administration official directed me to a little-noticed item from Time magazine. According to this 2004 report, Pelosi objected to a CIA plan to provide money to moderate political parties in Iraq ahead of scheduled elections, in an effort to counter Iran, which was funneling millions to extremist elements. “House minority leader Nancy Pelosi ‘came unglued’ when she learned about what a source described as a plan for ‘the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections,’ ” Time reported. “Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue. . . . A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans.” (Her role was also reported on this page by David Ignatius in 2007.)

Why is this important? Because on May 14, 2009, Pelosi, now speaker of the House, declared in a Capitol Hill news conference that she had opposed CIA waterboarding but was powerless to stop it. A former senior intelligence official told me in 2009 that he was shocked by Pelosi’s claim because, he said, “Speaker Pelosi herself has stopped covert action programs that she has been briefed on by going to the White House. In that very same time frame [after she learned about waterboarding] Pelosi had gone back to the White House [over] a separate covert action program, expressed strong opposition to it. And the remarkable part to me, the White House backed off the program, changed one aspect of the program . . . she was particularly opposed to. And literally, the finding was pulled back and revised.” If Pelosi had truly opposed waterboarding, he said, she had numerous ways to stop it — but she didn’t try.

At the time of her press briefing, Pelosi had been forced to acknowledge that she had learned in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used. Why, reporters asked, did she not object? Flustered, Pelosi claimed that it was not her place to complain because she was no longer the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “A letter raising concerns was sent to CIA general counsel Scott Muller by the new Democratic ranking member of [the] committee [Jane Harman], the appropriate person to register a protest.” She made this claim five times during the briefing.

In fact, Harman’s letter, since declassified, did not “register a protest”; it asked “what kind of policy review took place” and urged the agency not to destroy interrogation tapes. Moreover, when Pelosi made this claim, she knew that in 2004, when she was no longer the committee’s ranking member, she had personally intervened with the White House to stop different covert action. She did not defer to Harman; she herself took action. Why was it “appropriate” for her to intervene then but not in the case of waterboarding?

Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Do you wish now that you had done more? Do you wish it had been your own letter?” Pelosi replied, “No, no, no, no, no, no . . . No letter or anything else is going to stop them from doing what they’re going to do.” She made this claim three times during the briefing. All the while knowing that her phone call to Rice in 2004 had stopped the CIA from “doing what they were going to do” in a different covert operation.

As one of the top four leaders on Capitol Hill, Pelosi had numerous tools at her disposal if she had truly wanted to block waterboarding. She could have threatened to put a hold on funding for the CIA interrogation program, or held up funding for other administration priorities, or worked with her Senate counterparts to hold up nominees for senior CIA positions, or simply called the national security adviser — as she reportedly did in the case of the Iraq program. Pelosi did none of those things when she learned about waterboarding. By her silence, Pelosi gave her consent — and then misled the media by claiming she was powerless to act.

Journalists did not question Pelosi’s claims — and then they stopped questioning her. Pelosi announced that she would not take more questions on the topic, and the media complied. Reporters who relentlessly chased the Valerie Plame leak let the story drop. Pelosi’s role in stopping another covert operation gives lie to her claims that she was powerless to stop waterboarding — but the Washington press corps failed to “connect the dots.” Now that the truth is out, will they continue to let her get away with not answering questions? We’ll learn the answer at her next press briefing.

Read the original article  Washington Post

The handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect: the scandal grows

By Charles Krauthammer

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived for use only abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.

Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department’s other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators — three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman — asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.

Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought . . .

Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed, and it’s a good surrogate for this administration’s insistence upon criminalizing — and therefore trivializing — a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).

On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It’s an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue — should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.

Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.

Read the original article Washington Post

A Terrorist Goes Free

BY Bill Roggio

Apparently we do negotiate with hostage-takers.

On the evening of January 20, 2007, U.S. soldiers serving in the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq, were attacked by an Iranian-backed terrorist squad. The raid was carried out with precision. At 5 p.m., a convoy of five vehicles made to look just like SUVs used by U.S. contractors entered the Karbala base. The terrorists, estimated at 12 men, opened fire with assault rifles and threw hand grenades. One U.S. soldier was killed in the firefight and four others were captured. The attackers fled the base but were tracked by Iraqi police after they passed through a checkpoint.

With the police in hot pursuit, the kidnappers decided to execute the hostages and abandon their vehicles. Three of the U.S. soldiers were found dead in neighboring Babil; the fourth was wounded and died before he could receive proper treatment.

The U.S. military suspected that the Karbala assault was no average attack. The raid had required specific intelligence, intensive training, and major resources (weapons, vehicles, uniforms, identification papers, radios, etc.). “The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution,” Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, the spokesman for Multinational Division Baghdad, said immediately after the attack. “The attackers went straight to where Americans were located in the provincial government facility, bypassing the Iraqi police in the compound.”

The Pentagon also suspected Iran was ultimately responsible for the attack. The Quds Force, Iran’s special operations branch which has founded and supported terror groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, was a natural suspect. The Quds Force’s specialty is proxy warfare. 

There was a good reason the attack was so meticulously planned. A terrorist named Qais al-Khazali was behind it. A cleric and adviser to Moktada al-Sadr, Khazali ran the Khazali Network, an Iranian-baked radical Shia terror group later known as the Asaib al Haq or the League of the Righteous.

During a raid in Basra in March 2007, U.S. forces captured Khazali, his brother Laith (also a leader of the Khazali Network), and Ali Mussa Daqduq. Daqduq was a senior Hezbollah operative who was tasked by Iran to organize Shia terror groups along the same lines as Hezbollah. During a raid in Baghdad in May 2007, U.S. forces killed Azhar al Dulaimi, the tactical commander of the group.

The March raid provided a trove of information on the Shia terror groups and Iran’s involvement in the Iraqi insurgency. During a briefing on July 2, 2009, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, then the spokesman for Multi-National Forces Iraq, described the intelligence gleaned from their capture and confirmed that Iran’s Quds Force was behind the 2007 attack. 

Read the rest of the original article Weekly Standard

Judge tosses out most evidence on Gitmo detainee

AP-By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON – A federal judge has tossed out most of the government’s evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.

Musa’ab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.

The detainee says that after five days in a Pakistani prison, he was handed over to U.S. forces and flown to a pitch-black prison he believes was in Afghanistan. He says he was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day.

He said that he confessed to whatever allegations his interrogators made and that harassment and threats continued after he was moved to a different prison in Afghanistan.

Al Madhwani said that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on multiple occasions threatened him when he tried to retract what he now claims was a false confession.

The judge said he was particularly concerned that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay relied on or had access to the coerced confessions from Afghanistan made by Al Madhwani.

The logical inference from the record, said the judge, is that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay reviewed Al Madhwani’s coerced confessions with him and asked him to make identical confessions.

“Far from being insulated from his coerced confessions, his Guantanamo confessions were thus derived from them,” Hogan wrote.

The judge said the government presented medical records about the detainee’s debilitating physical and mental condition that confirm his claims of harsh treatment during the 40 days he spent in Pakistann and Afghanistan.

Despite Hogan’s concerns about the 23 statements, the judge relied on other evidence and three statements Al Madhwani made to a military tribunal and a review board to conclude that he trained, traveled and associated with members of al-Qaida, including high-level operatives. On those grounds, the judge ruled he is legally detained.

Read the original article on YahooNews