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wouldn’t fuck this chick even with Diane Feinstein’s dick
wouldn’t fuck this chick even with Diane Feinstein’s dick
BAGHDAD—Standing in his prisoner’s yellow jumpsuit, Mustapha Merzoughi remained quiet at first. He shook slightly and brushed at his eyes, before assuming a neutral expression. His Arabic appeared to be limited, and when the judge first began to question him, he stayed silent, eventually saying in French:
“There is no point that I speak. Whatever I say, you will convict me to death.” About an hour later, he was.
Merzoughi was one of 11 French defendants that an Iraqi court sentenced to hang over the course of trials from May 26 to June 3. He was captured, however, not in Iraq but in neighboring Syria, by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) during the last battles against the Islamic State. Merzoughi and his fellow ISIS defendants were the first official cases of foreigners transferred from Syria to Iraq for trial—juridical guinea pigs in an experimental solution to the problem facing many European countries whose citizens left home to fight for the Islamic State. The Europeans do not want them to return, but the SDF does not have the sovereign power to sentence them, leaving their citizens in limbo.
Transferring them to Iraq allows Europe to sidestep the issue, but it comes with a price—or, to be more precise, a fee. Sources from both the Iraqi and U.S. sides have alleged that Iraq wants to be paid for the trouble of trying foreigners. Senior Western officials reportedly have said the Iraqis want $10 billion as an upfront fee, with an additional $1 billion each year to take in detainees. Three Iraqi officials reportedly said they would charge $2 million per suspect per year. The French government has denied making any payments, according to a Reuters report this week. However the article also noted that “a French official briefing reporters after a visit by Iraq’s prime minister in May said Paris expected Baghdad to make an official request, including financially, on what it needed to handle large number of Islamist fighters.”
Between 800 and 1,500 foreigners from countries including France, the United Kingdom, and Germany still remain in Syria detained by the SDF. France alone has about 450 citizens being held in Syria. Jean-Charles Brisard, the head of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism (CAT) in France, believes that as long as public opinion holds steady in resisting their return, this is only the beginning of a new kind of injustice.
“I believe this is the first wave of trials and we can anticipate other waves in the future,” he told Foreign Policy. “From what we know, the trials were very expedited and had very little time for defense. It is the opposite of our own values of justice.”
For French President Emmanuel Macron, the Iraqi trials were an uneasy solution to an intractable problem. In late February, Macron faced a French public haunted by the trauma of the 2015 Paris attacks that left 130 people dead and hostile to the potential return of any French Islamic State members. On the other hand, there was mounting pressure from the United States and the SDF to take the foreign detainees out of their territory in northeastern Syria. Macron met with Iraqi President Barham Salih, and after long discussions, they held a joint press conference in which Macron pledged to deepen France’s military and economic support for Iraq. Salih confirmed that a total of 13 French nationals would be transferred to Iraq for trial.
“I think it was at this moment during this presidential visit that this deal was passed between Macron and the Iraqis,” said Myriam Benraad, a research fellow at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Muslim Worlds in France. “The Iraqis said very clearly to the French, ‘We are ready to keep them, but that’s going to mean money, and that’s going to mean assistance, in particular arms and military assistance.’”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has portrayed the prosecutions as just, stating recently that the defendants had received “fair trials.” His statements have been condemned by lawyers and human rights organizations, but public opinion appears to be with the government. A recent poll in France showed that 89 percent of respondents believed the government was right to let Iraq judge the French nationals.
“Le Drian knows that this is purely a political move because he knows that the French population does not want them back. There’s a certain revenge mode for a lot of French people. They are getting what they deserve after everything we suffered,” Benraad said.
France claims that the transfer was an agreement between the Kurdish SDF forces and the Iraqis and that it was not involved in the decision. France has officially stated that it respects Iraq’s sovereignty in this matter, but Iraq did not claim jurisdiction over these cases until recently.
While Article 9 of the Iraqi Penal Code allows for the prosecution of foreign nationals who commit crimes outside of Iraq as long as those crimes affect Iraq, only a year ago senior judges’ interpretation of the law was quite different, said Belkis Wille, a senior Iraq researcher for the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “Last year they were saying no,” she said. “Our interpretation of our jurisdiction is that we could not prosecute because they never committed a crime in our soil and they’re not our nationals.”
But this year, after Macron and Salih announced the French trials, Wille said senior judges flipped their reading of the article. “A few weeks ago, when I was back at the court, suddenly the tone had completely changed, and it’s obviously because politically they’ve been told that they have to prosecute,” she said.
The Iraqi justice system is infamous for its abuses: Trials lasting 10 minutes, torture, and forced confessions have all been widely reported. If a country pays for its nationals to be prosecuted in Iraq, it could potentially violate international law and make France complicit in torture. Paris is sensitive to these issues, and Wille said she does not believe France would make any public quid pro quo or direct payment for trials. “It would be increased military assistance or development money or whatever else,” she said.
Regardless of payment, France did not object to the transfer of its citizens to Iraq, a nation known for widely applying the death penalty in terrorism cases. Le Drian said France is in talks with Iraq to see if they can reduce the death sentences to life sentences.
The courts prosecute defendants in these cases under Iraq’s 2005 anti-terrorism law, which has been heavily criticized for consisting of broad articles that can be loosely interpreted: In the French cases, the judge needed to prove only that they were members of a terrorist organization to sentence them to death. Sentencing requires only confession, a system that incentivizes abuse and torture in order for interrogators to extract the necessary confessions.
In the French cases, only one of the 11 defendants, Fodil Tahar Aouidate, alleged torture. Aouidate told Iraqi Judge Ahmed Mohamed Ali that he had been forced to sign a confession saying that he fought battles in Syria and Mosul. “I was tortured so of course it says that,” he said. Ali asked him to show him his body, and Aouidate lifted his shirt. The judge ordered a medical exam and delayed his trial to June 2. A few days later, he read aloud the results of the medical exam, which found no signs of torture on Aouidate. The session finished quickly, and Ali sentenced Aouidate to death.
Wille said the forensic medical exams rarely make a difference. “Even in cases where the judge believes them enough to order a forensic medical exam, that rarely leads to them being acquitted. And it rarely leads to the interrogators who are alleged to have committed the torture being investigated and eventually punished,” she said. “What we often see … [is] the defendant simply gets taken back into the hands of the same forces, gets tortured again, makes another confession, and the second time he’s too scared to tell the judge that he’s been tortured.”
A defense lawyer who did not want to be named said flatly that torture was common in these cases. “They’ll torture them with electricity to get them to sign something in a language they don’t understand,” he said in between court sessions.
Addressing the allegations that confessions are often obtained through torture, Ali told Foreign Policy in an interview following the trials: “I don’t know how they have been treated before, but they have confessed here [in the courtroom], and that’s enough.”
“No one touches them because they are foreigners,” he added. “Of the French, no one said they were tortured with one exception, and the medical report said he did not have one mark on his body.”
Both Ali and Khaled Taha Mashadany, the president of the court where Merzoughi was tried, seemed eager to demonstrate the fairness of the trials. They mentioned multiple times that they wanted the media to observe the trials and asked for journalists’ opinions on the proceedings. The trials themselves appeared better than the standard faced by most Iraqis accused of terrorism. Ali was careful to follow procedure, and the trials lasted from 45 minutes to two hours, as opposed to the brief 10-minute cases that have been previously reported. The defendants were given a chance to respond to the judge’s questions fully.
“We have experience. Iraqi justice is better than anywhere else in the world,” Mashadany said. “Human rights organizations have understood wrong. They don’t take the long investigations before the trials into consideration.”
But there were several issues present in the courtroom. Foreign Policy attended each of the court sessions of the defendants, and they followed a similar pattern. In the beginning, Ali read intelligence reports on the defendants’ crimes along with the confessions gathered in the investigative period. No witnesses were present. A slick video showing evidence against the defendant was played, accompanied by a dramatic orchestral music. The method of questioning Ali used established whether or not the defendants traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, which under the counterterrorism law is enough for the death sentence. However, this meant that legally there was no need for the prosecution of individual crimes, leaving few roads for Islamic State victims to get justice.
“No one is really here to know the truth or what happened or the crimes they committed, which is … a denial of justice for the victims,” Benraad said.
At the end of the trial, both the prosecution and the defense stood up and read statements that rarely lasted for more than a minute. The defense lawyers Foreign Policy spoke to were appointed by the state on the day of the trial, and the longest one of them had met with one of the defendants was for 30 minutes the same day.
“The government—by agreeing that these French citizens be transferred from Syria to Iraq to be tried—is clearly a way to avoid handling its humanitarian role in France,” said Brisard, the CAT head. “This is why they are standing on the position to say the trials were fair even though we all know that they are not.”
Thousands of people left Europe to fight for the Islamic State, a fact that years later European countries still appear reluctant to reckon with. But as Europe debates how to dispose of the fighters, Iraqis are left with a different question.
“Iraq has the right not to be used as the most violent country,” said Pascale Warda, the president of the Iraqi Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, after attending the trials. “Why shouldn’t those countries take responsibility? Why should the responsibility be on our people?”
If the person was born in said country, it would be harder to strip them of citizenship. These people should be brought home and charged with treason and have the book thrown at them.
Canada accused the United Kingdom of dodging its responsibilities on counterterrorism Sunday after London stripped an Islamic State fighter of his British citizenship.
Jack Letts was dubbed "Jihadi Jack" by the media after leaving Britain in 2014 and traveling to Syria. He was one of thousands of "foreign fighters" who left their lives in Western countries to join the violent extremist group as it expanded its caliphate in the Middle East.
Letts, 24, was arrested two years ago after trying to escape the crumbling ISIS regime, and he has been held in a Kurdish-run prison ever since.
He has dual nationality because of his Canadian father and British mother. He told ITV News in February that he wanted to return to Britain because he considered it his home.
But the British government has revoked Letts' citizenship, according to his parents and the Canadian government. The British government said it would not comment on the case.
"Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities," said the office of Ralph Goodale, Canada's public safety minister, in a statement given to Reuters and others on Sunday. "Terrorism knows no borders, so countries need to work together to keep each other safe."
In June, Letts' parents were convicted of funding terrorism after sending their son 223 pounds (around $270).
John Letts, 58, his Canadian father, told Channel 4 News on Sunday that the British government's decision to revoke his citizenship felt like being "kicked in the gut," and he accused Sajid Javid, the British government minister who made the decision, of being a "coward and in denial and naive."
He said the British government was guilty of "shirking responsibility and passing the buck off to the Canadians," who he said had a "more enlightened approach to some of this."
"My first concern is how Jack will feel when he hears about it," he added. "It's also really disappointing to see that's how the British government is dealing with this issue."
The U.K. HomeOffice, which handles domestic policy such as crime, immigration and counterterrorism, said it did not comment on individual cases.
"Decisions on depriving a dual national of citizenship are based on substantial advice from officials, lawyers and the intelligence agencies and all available information," it said in a statement. "This power is one way we can counter the terrorist threat posed by some of the most dangerous individuals and keep our country safe."
Letts' case is part of a wider discussion about what to do with foreign fighters, people who left their home countries in the West to join ISIS but now may wish to return. Despite criticizing Britain's actions with regard to Jack Letts, Canada said it had "no legal obligation to facilitate their return," referring to foreign fighters.
In February, the U.K. government revoked the British citizenship of Shamima Begum, one of three British schoolgirls who in 2015 abandoned their lives in east London to marry ISIS militants in Syria.
The British government claimed Begum was eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship, but that country's government denied this. The decision left her stateless in a Syrian refugee camp while pregnant, and her child died soon after birth.
Like many European governments, the U.K. has been reluctant to repatriate foreign fighters and their families because of the potential they may pose a security risk, and the difficulty in gathering enough evidence to convict them of any crimes committed in the Middle East.
Although Canada criticized Britain on Sunday, it too said it had "no legal obligation to facilitate" the return of foreign fighters," and said it would not expose its consular staff to "undue" risk in "this dangerous part of the world," according to the statement seen by Reuters.
President Donald Trump has sought to pressure European governments into taking back these people, threatening that U.S. backed forces them could release them back into Europe if nothing is done.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under pressure on Monday from the opposition Conservatives who warned against giving any assistance to Jack Letts - a dual citizen dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by the media - after Britain’s decision to strip him of his British citizenship.
Letts, who had dual Canadian-British citizenship, said he hopes Canada can get him out of the Kurdish prison where he has been held for about two years, even if it means he goes to prison in North America, according to an ITV News interview.
Trudeau’s Liberals repealed a law that allowed for the citizenship of those convicted of terrorism offences to be revoked. The policy shift, and Trudeau’s famous “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” mantra, has prompted accusations from some opponents that he is soft on national security.
The timing of the Letts’ case - just two months ahead of the election - is not good for Trudeau. Most polls show the Conservatives holding a slight lead nationally ahead of the Oct. 21 vote.
“‘Jihadi Jack’ is in prison now and that is where he should stay,” Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said in a statement to Reuters. “A Conservative government under my leadership will not lift a finger to bring him back to Canada.”
Letts, a Muslim convert, left Britain for Syria in 2014 when he was 18, according to media reports.
Canada’s foreign ministry said on Monday its ability to provide consular assistance in Syria was “extremely limited.” On Sunday, Canada said it had “no legal obligation to facilitate” Letts’ return.
“If the Trudeau government is contemplating helping Jihadi Jack come to Canada, we urge him to stop those attempts now,” Conservative lawmaker Pierre Poilievre said on Global News TV on Sunday. “It is not the job of the Canadian government or the Canadian taxpayer to now come to his rescue after he’s been caught.”
Britain’s decision prompted a response from Trudeau’s Liberal government on Sunday, with Canada saying in a statement that the United Kingdom was trying to “off-load” its responsibilities in the case.
“I’ve always felt that I am Canadian, my dad is Canadian, and I never grew up being accepted as a British person anyway,” Letts told ITV. “I hope Canada does take me from here, I could go there, to prison of course.”
Even if Canada could get people out of Syria, they “would most likely be detained by authorities and face serious charges in neighboring countries,” a government source said.
Asked whether his government would help the Letts family, Trudeau avoided a direct answer on Monday.
“It is a crime to travel internationally with a goal of supporting terrorism or engaging in terrorism and that is a crime that we will continue to make all attempts to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. “That is the message we have for Canadians and for anyone involved.”
Letts’ father disputed the “knee-jerk assumption” that his son fought with Islamic State while in Syria, but added that if his son had broken the law, he should be tried, according to an interview with Canada’s Global News radio on Sunday.
“If Jack Letts has done something wrong, I will be the first person to stand up and condemn him publicly and ask for him to go on trial and be punished for what he did,” he said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is refusing to say if a Canadian man known as “Jihadi Jack” is welcome in Canada after Britain revoked his British citizenship over his alleged support for the Islamic State in Syria.
Jack Letts, who is currently being held in a Kurdish-run jail in northeastern Syria, told a British television network he hopes Canada will take him back. Mr. Letts said he has been to Canada seven times in his life and has always felt as though he is a “mix” of British and Canadian descent.
“I always expected Canada would help me and they didn’t," Mr. Letts said in a video posted to the ITV News website Monday.
“I hope Canada does take me from here. If they can take me to Canada that would be good.”
Speaking to reporters in Quebec City Monday, Mr. Trudeau was asked whether he would be open to repatriating Mr. Letts to Canada, but he did not answer the question directly.
“It is a crime to travel internationally with a goal of supporting terrorism or engaging in terrorism. And that is a crime that we will continue to make all attempts to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. That is the message we have for Canadians and for anyone involved,” Mr. Trudeau said.
The Liberal government has faced calls from families of Canadians trapped in Syria, including the Letts family, to repatriate their loved ones, but Ottawa has maintained it is too dangerous to send Canadian officials into the war zone to help. Families who have spoken to The Globe and Mail believe there is little political will from any Canadian politician to embrace the hot-potato issue ahead of October’s federal election.
Meanwhile, Official Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer said a Conservative government, if elected, would not make any effort to bring Mr. Letts to Canada.
“Jihadi Jack is in prison now and that is where he should stay. A Conservative government under my leadership will not lift a finger to bring him back to Canada,” Mr. Scheer said in a statement.
NDP spokeswoman Melanie Richer said it’s “deeply disappointing that the United Kingdom is offloading their responsibility and we hope that the PM will raise this disappointment to the U.K. Prime Minister next week at the G7 Summit.”
With his British citizenship revoked, Mr. Letts will now be the responsibility of Canada if he is ever deported from Syria.
Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, said Ottawa can’t legally strip Mr. Letts of his Canadian citizenship because it would make him stateless. As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, Canada is obliged to prevent statelessness.
Leah West, a lecturer at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, said Mr. Letts “will be in Syria indefinitely because the Canadian government has made no real moves to repatriate Canadians.”
The government says it has no legal obligation to facilitate the return of Canadian citizens detained in Syria.
Ms. West said it will also be harder for Canada to prosecute Mr. Letts than it would be if he returned to Britain. She explained that the easiest offence for Canadians to be charged with and convicted for is travelling to commit an offence for a terrorist organization or to facilitate terrorist activity, but the accused has to leave from Canada.
“He left the United Kingdom, so automatically the offences that, at least I think are most likely to be successfully prosecuted, are off the table,” she said.
Mr. Letts’s case has refuelled a debate in Canada over dual citizens convicted of terrorism.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper passed a law in 2014 that gave Canada the power to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals who had been convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage. The Trudeau government reversed the law in 2017 after campaigning on the slogan “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”
Despite Mr. Scheer’s opposition to repatriating Canadian foreign fighters, his office said the Conservatives “would not re-introduce grounds for the revocation of Canadian citizenship that relate to national security.” The Conservatives did not explain why Mr. Scheer would not reinstate the law.
Legal experts say the former law, if re-introduced, would likely lead to a legal challenge on the grounds that it would create a two-tier citizenship system.
Audrey Macklin, a law professor and chair in human-rights law at the University of Toronto, said these kinds of citizenship revocation laws encourage an “arbitrary race to see who could strip citizenship of dual nationals first.”
“It’s hard not to recall that Canada had such a law inspired by the U.K. itself but now it finds itself on the receiving end of another state’s practice. It just reminds us that this is a parochial, unhelpful, kind of grubby response," Prof. Macklin said.
Trudeau on whether 'Jihadi Jack' will be allowed in Canada (question at 15:55)
I'm gonna need a Canadian to translate from Trudeau to English here, cause I can't seems to find the answer to this simple Yes or No question.
Trudeau refuses to say if ‘Jihadi Jack’ is welcome in Canada
By Michelle Zilio & Janice Dickson | Aug 18, 2019
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/pol...s-to-say-if-jihadi-jack-is-welcome-in-canada/
The translation is he doesn't want to say no only for the courts to over rule him if they find out he is being mistreated.
They said they will not help him get anything he needs to get a passport or travel to Canada.
But again if/when he is out of jail if he gets a passport and plane ticket and gets to Canada.
By the charter of freedom and rights in Canada if he can get to Canada he has a constitutional right to live and stay in Canada.
If you don’t welcome the person trying to kill you into your home, they win.