Guantanamo Plea Leaves Questions

David Hicks' guilty plea may send him home to Australia to serve his terrorism sentence, but it also short-circuits a full test of the new U.S. military tribunal system, which will have to handle more complicated cases in the future.

Not even the prosecution said Hicks' guilty plea Monday night was a victory for the revised Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, set up after the Supreme Court last summer ruled the Pentagon's previous system was unconstitutional.

The 31-year-old Australian was the first detainee to face trial under the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed into law in October. But by pleading guilty at his arraignment to providing material support to terrorism, he deprived the tribunal system of a true road test: a trial.

Unless the Supreme Court steps in again and throws out the new tribunal system, officials plan to prosecute as many as 80 prisoners at the isolated base in southeast Cuba. Probably next in line are Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when he was captured after a firefight during which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army soldier with a grenade, and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden. Unlike Hicks, admitted jihadists are among the 80 who could face the death penalty if convicted.

Lawyers for Hicks and the prosecution were meeting Tuesday to discuss the details of his plea before it is presented to the military judge who must approve it. If the plea is accepted, he could be sentenced this week and would then be sent to Australia, where the United States has agreed to let him serve his sentence.

Hicks, a Muslim convert, allegedly attended al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, conducting surveillance on the British and American embassies as part of his training. But even by the military's account he was a small fish, a hapless holy warrior who had spent only two hours on the Taliban front line before it collapsed in November 2001 under attack by U.S. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance.

While fleeing, Hicks came across a group of Arab fighters who told him they were heading back to the front to fight to the death. Hicks declined to join them and was captured in December 2001 as he tried to escape into Pakistan, according to the military's charge sheet.

Hicks' father, Terry Hicks, said Tuesday he believed his son had pleaded guilty as part of a bargain with prosecutors that would get him out of the Guantanamo prison. "It's a way to get home, and he's told us he just wants to get home," Terry Hicks told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

While the guilty plea may have prevented a trial, Monday's hearing did foreshadow what's in store during upcoming trials. The scene in the small courtroom was at times tumultuous.

The judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, ordered two lawyers to leave the defense table after ruling they were not authorized to represent Hicks. One of the attorneys, Joshua Dratel, refused to sign an agreement to abide by tribunal rules, even those not yet established.

"These are the same problems that plagued the earlier commissions, that the process is ad hoc," Dratel told the black-robed judge before leaving the defense table.

Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch, an observer at the hearing, said the tribunal has failed to establish basic rules for defense lawyers.

"The antics at the Hicks hearing underline the illegitimacy of the Guantanamo tribunals," Daskal said.

Marine Lt. Col. Colby C. Vokey, who represents Khadr, said Hicks pleaded guilty "to escape the oppression of Guantanamo Bay and the fundamentally unfair military commissions system."

"He'll plead guilty and is willing to serve a sentence for his plea, as long as that means prison in his own country," Vokey told The Associated Press.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the tribunals, said he was satisfied Monday's hearing ended in a guilty plea but added: "I don't look at it as a victory. I look at it as a first step."

Davis added that it was important to him that the tribunal system be fair.

Attorneys for Guantanamo prisoners insist the new system is still unfair, and have asked the Supreme Court to intervene again and guarantee prisoners have the right to challenge their confinement in U.S. courts, a principal known as habeas corpus that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

"Hick's guilty plea should not be seen as legitimizing in any way an utterly illegal system of offshore penal colonies, abuse and 'trials' that violate fundamental due process rights," the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, said in a statement Tuesday.

Australian attorney David McLeod, who met with Hicks a day before the hearing, said his client did not expect a fair trial, was depressed and had been considering the plea deal to end his five-year imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.

His guilty plea was seen by attorneys as Hicks' only recourse to get out of Guantanamo.

"As one of my other clients said, he would rather plead guilty and be sent to jahanam -- hell -- than stay in Guantanamo," said Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for several other Guantanamo detainees.

The Australian government won't comment on the sentence or plea bargain. But Don Rothwell, a professor of international law at Australian National University, said Hicks would be obligated to serve out the entirety of his sentence back home under Australia's treaty agreements with the United States.

"Australia cannot in any way seek to interfere with the original sentence unless there have been set parole agreements between the parties," he told the AP.

But if the U.S. Supreme Court again rules the military tribunals unconstitutional, Hicks might have grounds to seek to vacate his sentence, Rothwell said.
(Source)



Related News :

Ruddock says Hicks unlikely to appeal sentence - ABC News

The Trials of David Hicks - The Age



Malaysia-Don't Equate Guantanamo With ISA

The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba holding detainees of the United States government cannot be equated with Malaysia's Internal Security Act (ISA), the Dewan Rakyat was told Wednesday.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Foreign Ministry Ahmad Shabery Cheek said any assumption to that effect was totally unjust and would only smear the name and image of the Malaysian government.

"Issues related to the violation of human rights at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, which has been condemned by the world, are something unheard of in the context of the ISA here.

Ahmad Shabery said there have been demands from various human rights groups as well as the United Nations for the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba to be closed but no one has asked for the ISA to be abolished ??

On the two Malaysians, identified as Mohd Farik Amin and Mohammed Nazir Lep, held under detention by the US authorities in Guantanamo Bay, he said the Malaysian government has asked the US government to ensure that both get a fair trial.

"We will continue to monitor the developments in the matter and follow the trial of the two Malaysians," he said.

Mohd Farik and Mohammed Nazir are among the 14 foreign nationals who were transferred from secret detention locations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the US government to Guantanamo Bay last September on suspicion of involvement in the Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah movements.

(Bernama)

Boxing Day Earthquakes

Christmas 2006 will be remembered for seismic as well as festive events.

Boxing Day saw three earthquakes. The major earthquake in Taiwan, recorded at 7.2 on the Richter scale will no doubt engulf the smaller two in the world media reports, as the damage and death tolls of the tragic event continue to be updated. The smaller ones I refer to are a 3.1 magnitude tremor centred near Applecross, Wester Ross, in the West Highlands of Scotland, and a 3.5 magnitude tremor in Dumfries & Galloway not too far from where I live. Unfortunately I never felt it. BBC Reporting Scotland reported two tremors in Dumfries & Galloway, but didn't say where. The report also said that the British Geological Survey (BGS) in Edinburgh measured them at 3.5 on the Richter scale.

Voice and data communication across Asia was severely disrupted on Wednesday after an earthquake off the southern coast of Taiwan damaged under-sea telephone cables linking Asian countries to each other and to the US.

Authorities and telecommunications companies in Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan said international fixed-line, data and mobile connections had been affected by Tuesday’s night’s quake, which had a magnitude of 6.7 and triggered a tsunami alert on the second anniversary of the devastation of 2004.

Telephone and internet services were expected to remain unstable for several days and take up to three weeks to repair fully.

Taiwan was the worst hit as its main carrier lost all but two cables for international telephone and internet connections. The lines route calls and process internet traffic for several Asian countries.

The recent earthquake in Taiwan disrupted our links to the outside world by affecting the undersea cables in Taiwan that link Malaysia, Korea, Japan, etc. to the US. Singaporeans have also been affected, but reportedly their links to Europe are not as badly damaged, alerted Jeff Ooi early yesterday(27th Dec) morning.

It was a tsunami for the digital age, a collapse of the virtual world that radiated through much of Asia and beyond after an undersea earthquake late Tuesday off the coast of Taiwan.

People woke Wednesday to find themselves without e-mail or the Internet and, in some cases, without telephone connections, cut off from the real world around them.

The earthquake ruptured two of the undersea cables that are part of a communications fretwork that circles the globe.

Coming on the second anniversary of the Asian tsunami that took 230,000 lives, it was a reminder of the world's increasing dependence on communications technology.

Financial companies and technology services suffered most directly, with banking and securities trading all but crippled. Operations from travel agencies to newspapers to schools struggled to maintain their routines.

The disruption was widespread, hitting China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere, with knock-on effects as far away as Australia for companies whose Internet is routed through affected areas.

There was no chaos on the stock exchanges or any of the other doomsday scenarios, but reports that services could be down for weeks were dramatic enough.

Taiwan's largest telephone company, Chunghwa Telecom Co, said damage to an undersea cable had disrupted 98% of Taiwan's communications with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Repairs could take three weeks, Vice-General Manager Lin Jen-hung said, but quality would improve daily.


No Gmail, no Yahoo!, no blogs.

Malaysian Internet users woke up yesterday morning to a crawl on the so-called information superhighway that would have rivalled KL’s infamous traffic jams.

Local access to Internet services and websites hosted overseas came to a practical standstill after international links were disrupted by the earthquake that struck southern Taiwan on Tuesday night.

The earthquake damaged submarine cables that form part of the region-wide Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN 2), disrupting voice and Internet communications over much of Asia.

APCN 2 is a 19,000km-long fibre-optic cable network linking Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Europe and Australia.

The network has been up since October 2002 and is jointly operated by 26 Asian telecommunications carriers, including TM Bhd.

The damaged links are between Shantou (China) and Tanshui (Taiwan), and, Lantau (Hong Kong) and Chongming (China).

Internet service provider (ISP) Jaring said the disruption started at 3.45am yesterday, and warned users to expect congestion to and from overseas websites during peak hours.

TM Net said in a statement the disruption caused outages to several of its international transit and peering links.

The ISP said Malaysian Internet users would experience “some delay” in accessing content and websites hosted overseas, especially in the United States, Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Europe.

Action is being taken to reduce traffic congestion by diverting traffic through backup links, it added.

TM Net made no estimate of how long it would take to restore normal access but wire reports, quoting other service providers in the region, said repairs to the damaged cables could take several weeks.

ISPs in several Asian countries also reported slow Internet traffic. Some regional telephony services have also been affected.

Most of the affected carriers said they were arranging al-ternative routes for their data, Internet and voice-call traffic.

Meanwhile, TM Net customers can call its Customer Interaction Centre at 1-300-88-9515 anytime, or 1-300-88-1515 between 8am and midnight, or e-mail custcare@tm.net.my.

There are an estimated 11 million Internet users in the country.

But there's a way around the slow network. Instructions on a temporary remedy is available at Johnleemk's Blog.

For those who would like to connect to the Internet, you may want to use some of the proxies out there. There are some good ones being shared right now in the Lowyat forum.

Update (23:30)

Millions of people across Asia suffered a second straight day without full Internet service Thursday as telecoms operators raced to counter predictions of weeks without Web access.

At least eight boats headed to the waters between Hong Kong and Taiwan so that repairmen could tackle the complicated task of fixing underwater fibre-optic cables damaged in a huge earthquake off Taiwan on Tuesday.

Although stock markets across the region functioned normally, access to overseas websites remained spotty, as did the ability to dial telephone numbers in the United States and across Southeast Asia.

Internet and phone companies in Asia may take at least two weeks to restore services as they struggle to fix undersea cables damaged by earthquakes off Taiwan.

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Taiwan - Court sentences Chao to six years in prison

President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) son-in-law Chao Chien-ming (趙建銘) was sentenced to six years in prison and fined NT$30 million after being found guilty of insider trading charges.

After a five-month investigation into the Chao and his father's alleged insider trading of Taiwan Development Corporation shares, the Taipei District Court announced its verdict at 3 p.m. yesterday in the high-profile case.

According to the verdict, the judges ruled that the TDC case was a typical crime committed by influential people and because neither the father nor the son showed remorse for their actions, they deserved to be given stiff penalties.

"Chao Chien-ming, a doctor as well as one of the first family members, and his father Chao Yu-chu, a retired principal, even made use of their influence to obtain confidential information that had a positive effect on the prices of TDC shares. They obtained huge profits through the buying and selling of TDC shares," the verdict read, which put the total profits earned by the two at over NT$58 million.

"A panel of three judges convicted Chao Chien-ming and his father of making illegal gains through insider trading and decided not only to send them to prison but also to fine them NT$30 million respectively," court spokesman Liu Sau-song said at a press conference.

Liu further noted that Chao Yu-chu was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison for not only insider trading of TDC shares but also for embezzling NT$4.5 million from a total of NT$11 million in donations made by Eslite Chairman Robert Wu and other people to the table tennis association he headed.

According to the verdict, the elder Chou put the NT$11 million in donations in his personal account and then loaned NT$4.5 million of it to a friend to make investments in the stock market.

In addition to Chao Chien-ming and his father, former TDC Chairman Su Teh-jien, real estate developer Yu Shih-yi and Waterland Securities Co. board director Tsai Chin-wen were all given jail sentences for their involvement in the insider trading case.

Su was sentenced to four years and three months in jail for leaking confidential information to the president's son-in-law, Yu and Tsai. Su told them of the approval of a syndicated loan from a banking consortium that would save Taiwan Development from potential bankruptcy and also that Chang Hwa Commercial Bank was willing to release its shares in the developer.

The verdict noted that through Su, Chao Chien-ming, his father, Yu and Tsai all bought a large number of TDC shares released by Chang Hwa Commercial Bank. Except for Tsai, they also bought thousands of additional shares of TDC stock on the market.

When the syndicated loan to TDC was made public, the company's share price soared to the benefit of the four individuals convicted yesterday.

Judges believed that the way in which the accused obtained the shares released by Chang Hua Bank was illegal.

The verdict pointed out that the illegal profits that the father and son made on transactions in their names was only NT$4.27 million, but it found that they also profited to the tune of NT$54 million from the trading of 5 million shares bought in the name of Chao Chien-ming's mother.

For Yu, in addition to illegal gains of NT$4.27 million, the gains he made from the trading of TDC shares bought separately amounted to more than NT$66 million. As a result, Yu was sentenced to four years in jail and fined NT$60 million.

Court spokesman Liu added that in addition to the fines judges imposed on the senior Chao, the junior Chao and Yu, illegal profits the three obtained will be confiscated.

Because Tsai confessed that he took part in the insider trading case and donated all of the illegal profits he obtained to the Securities and Futures Investors Protection Center, he was given a two-year jail sentence with a suspension of four years.

Meanwhile, in another case derived from the TDC case, two top managers of Nice Group's subsidiaries Chen Jing-yao and Huang Min-sen were respectively sentenced to two and one and a half years in prison for breach of trust, district court spokesman Liu noted.

According to the verdict, Chen was convicted of harming the interests of the company he manages by misusing the companies' money to provide loans of NT$40.8 million to the senior Chao through Huang.

In addition to transferring the NT$40.8 million from Chen to the senior Chao, Huang gave the senior Chao NT$7 million that he took from the company he manages.

All of those convicted have the right to appeal the verdict.

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Floods round-up

Flood In Johor Worsens, Situation In Pahang And Melaka Improves

Flood situation in Johor worsened, while the situation in Pahang and Melaka had improved, Wednesday evening.

Rainfall since yesterday morning until 7am today in Johor Baharu had worsened the flood situation, with the number of evacuees at relief centres in the city increasing to 3,367 against 1,208, Wednesday.

To date, a total of 60,156 evacuees in Johor were still staying at 229 relief centres in the state.

A spokesman from the Johor Police Contingent Headquarters' Flood Operations Room said from the total, 25,669 victims were in Batu Pahat, Muar (19,723), Kota Tinggi (6,380), Segamat (3,609), Pontian (57), Mersing (780), Kluang (571) and Johor Baharu (3,367).

Meanwhile, a 14-year-old student was feared to have drowned when he was swept off by strong current after falling into an irrigation canal at Kampung Parit Kasan, Simpang Lima, Bukit Gambir, here Wednesday morning.

Mohd Farid Poniman was playing near the canal with four friends and a younger brother when he slipped down the canal.

Muar OCPD ACP Mohd Nazir Mohd Ali said a search operation was being carried out by members of the armed forces, police, fire and rescue department and Civil Defence Department.

Mohd Farid and his family were staying at a relief centre at Sekolah Agama Simpang Lima since last week when their house was flooded.

Prior to this, the flood in Johor had taken the lives of teacher M. Mageswari, 27, and her uncle A. Muniandy on Dec 20; painter Mohd Azahari Nordin, 27 and two senior citizens Ahmad Sharkawi, 70, and Masiah Ahmad, 69 (Dec 21); senior citizen Ow Kee Heng, 60's (Dec 22); Mepalese Chandra Bahadur Kharka, 24 (Dec 23); and an Indonesian Abdul Wahid, 29, (Dec 25).

In PAHANG, one more relief centre had been closed as many victims returned to their homes this evening.

Pahang Police Contingent Headquarters' flood operations room spokesman said as of 4.30pm Wednesday, the number of evacuees at eight relief centres in Rompin and Pekan had been reduced to 832 people from 1,250 in the afternoon.

In MELAKA, the number of evacuees at seven relief centres were also down to 2,283 people as of 2.00pm, Wednesday compared with 3,187 victims in the afternoon.

A State flood operations room spokesman said all the relief centres were in Jasin.

Update (23:30 )

The death toll from the devastating floods in Johor has risen to 11 when the body of Mohd Faiz Poniman, 14, who Wednesday fell into an irrigation canal at Kampung Parit Kasan, Bukit Gambir, here was found by the rescue team at about 4pm Thursday.

Muar District Police Chief Mohd Nazir Mohd Ali said the student's body was found by the team, floating about 100 metres from the spot where he slipped and fell.



Malaysia flood help Asian tsunami Taiwan Earthquake