No facts, no evidence, conviction no problem, it's "national security"

Kevin J. Kelley reports for the Kenya Daily Nation on Thursday, December 13, 2007, on the case of the man convicted in the US embassy bombings:

Lawyers for a man in a terrorism appeal case have cited Kenyan laws on surveillance and interrogation in their bid to have their client freed.

Wadih El-Hage was one of the al Qaeda militants convicted of involvement in the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi.

His lawyers told a three-judge panel in New York that some of the evidence used to convict the former personal secretary to Osama bin Laden had been gathered through wiretaps in Nairobi. Such methods would not have been lawful in the US, they said.

However, prosecutors said the wiretaps were warranted on the basis of US national security.

El-Hage’s lawyers also said that statements by another convicted conspirator should not have been accepted as evidence in the original trial because they were made during interrogation in Nairobi that did not conform to US legal standards.

According to the lawyers, Mohamed Al-Owhali had been questioned for 14 days in Nairobi without being advised of his rights and without having access to a lawyer.

US prosecutors acknowledged on Monday that there are “no facts” directly linking Mr El-Hage to the 1998 attack that killed 212 Kenyans and 12 Americans.

But Mr El-Hage’s conviction on conspiracy charges should be upheld, the prosecution added, because he worked closely with Osama knowing that al Qaeda wanted to kill American civilians anywhere in the world.

Judge Jon Newman suggested that El-Hage’s involvement with al Qaeda might qualify him as an “enemy combatant” rather than as a terrorist. Such a designation could mean that El-Hage should not have been tried in a US criminal court. The judges did not indicate when they would issue a ruling on the appeals lodged by three of the four men convicted in 2001, including Mohammed Odeh. All four are serving life sentences under maximum security conditions.

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

- Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)