Word: habib
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three weeks after 9/11 and two days before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Mamdouh Habib was on a bus headed out of the Pakistani town of Quetta when police swooped and arrested him. What, they wanted to know, was an Australian citizen doing in this restricted border zone - a Taliban stronghold - without a permit? "Wrong place, wrong time," says Habib's lawyer Stephen Hopper: the Egyptian-born father of four, who planned to move his family to Pakistan, had simply been looking for business opportunities and a good Islamic school for his sons. But U.S. security agents, who soon took custody...
...firm evidence has been made public. But in the view of U.S. authorities, the al-Qaeda theory - lent weight by a confession Habib has since retracted - made the then 46-year-old too risky to release. As a result, he has spent three years behind bars, first in an Egyptian jail where he claims he was tortured, then at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He's also been in a legal no man's land, deemed an "enemy combatant" but neither charged with a crime nor declared a prisoner of war. A military tribunal last year found...
...news revived criticism of the Australian government for not pressing harder and earlier for Habib's release. It also rekindled debate about whether democracies can fight global terrorism without sacrificing their most cherished legal principles. Habib's case, says Law Council of Australia president Stephen Southwood, QC, "shows the danger of depriving people of the ordinary protections of the criminal law. It's horrendous to think that he was detained for so long when it must have been apparent relatively early that he hadn't committed an unlawful...
...cannot have helped Habib that Australia's security services had been watching him for almost a decade. What first caught their eye were his connections with four Egyptians in New York. Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, Mahmud Abouhalima, Sayyid Nosair and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman all had ties to al-Qaeda; all were convicted of involvement in the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center. Habib joined protests at Nosair's 1991 trial for murdering a rabbi, tried to raise money for El-Gabrowny's defense, and raised $500 to buy medicine for Sheikh Omar. But his motives were purely charitable...
...Since the shock of 9/11, the U.S. and other Western governments have tended to err on the side of caution. Canberra has been criticized for its seeming indifference to the plight of Habib and fellow Australian David Hicks (who's been charged with three terrorism offenses). "The government has failed in its most basic obligation to protect Australian citizens," said Shadow Attorney General Nicola Roxon. But since Australia's counterterrorism laws weren't yet in force when Hicks and Habib were captured, they could not have been prosecuted at home, said Attorney General Philip Ruddock. Given the "grave nature...