position:minister of justice

  • Pan Am Flight 103 : Robert Mueller’s 30-Year Search for Justice | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/robert-muellers-search-for-justice-for-pan-am-103

    Cet article décrit le rôle de Robert Mueller dans l’enquête historique qui a permis de dissimuler ou de justifier la plupart des batailles de la guerre non déclarée des États Unis contre l’OLP et les pays arabes qui soutenaient la lutte pour un état palestinien.

    Aux États-Unis, en Allemagne et en France le grand public ignore les actes de guerre commis par les États Unis dans cette guerre. Vu dans ce contexte on ne peut que classer le récit de cet article dans la catégorie idéologie et propagande même si les intentions et faits qu’on y apprend sont bien documentés et plausibles.

    Cette perspective transforme le contenu de cet article d’une variation sur un thème connu dans un reportage sur l’état d’âme des dirigeants étatsuniens moins fanatiques que l’équipe du président actuel.

    THIRTY YEARS AGO last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack.

    TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

    Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

    A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

    It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

    Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

    For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

    “There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

    He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

    Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

    Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

    The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

    ROBERT S. MUELLER III had returned from a combat tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s and eventually headed to law school at the University of Virginia, part of a path that he hoped would lead him to being an FBI agent. Unable after graduation to get a job in government, he entered private practice in San Francisco, where he found he loved being a lawyer—just not a defense attorney.

    Then—as his wife Ann, a teacher, recounted to me years ago—one morning at their small home, while the two of them made the bed, Mueller complained, “Don’t I deserve to be doing something that makes me happy?” He finally landed a job as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco and stood, for the first time, in court and announced, “Good morning your Honor, I am Robert Mueller appearing on behalf of the United States of America.” It is a moment that young prosecutors often practice beforehand, and for Mueller those words carried enormous weight. He had found the thing that made him happy.

    His family remembers that time in San Francisco as some of their happiest years; the Muellers’ two daughters were young, they loved the Bay Area—and have returned there on annual vacations almost every year since relocating to the East Coast—and Mueller found himself at home as a prosecutor.

    On Friday nights, their routine was that Ann and the two girls would pick Mueller up at Harrington’s Bar & Grill, the city’s oldest Irish pub, not far from the Ferry Building in the Financial District, where he hung out each week with a group of prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops, and agents. (One Christmas, his daughter Cynthia gave him a model of the bar made out of Popsicle sticks.) He balanced that family time against weekends and trainings with the Marines Corps Reserves, where he served for more than a decade, until 1980, eventually rising to be a captain.

    Over the next 15 years, he rose through the ranks of the San Francisco US attorney’s office—an office he would return to lead during the Clinton administration—and then decamped to Massachusetts to work for US attorney William Weld in the 1980s. There, too, he shined and eventually became acting US attorney when Weld departed at the end of the Reagan administration. “You cannot get the words straight arrow out of your head,” Weld told me, speaking of Mueller a decade ago. “The agencies loved him because he knew his stuff. He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy, he just put the cards on the table.”

    In 1989, an old high school classmate, Robert Ross, who was chief of staff to then attorney general Richard Thornburgh, asked Mueller to come down to Washington to help advise Thornburgh. The offer intrigued Mueller. Ann protested the move—their younger daughter Melissa wanted to finish high school in Massachusetts. Ann told her husband, “We can’t possibly do this.” He replied, his eyes twinkling, “You’re right, it’s a terrible time. Well, why don’t we just go down and look at a few houses?” As she told me, “When he wants to do something, he just revisits it again and again.”

    For his first two years at so-called Main Justice in Washington, working under President George H.W. Bush, the family commuted back and forth from Boston to Washington, alternating weekends in each city, to allow Melissa to finish school.

    Washington gave Mueller his first exposure to national politics and cases with geopolitical implications; in September 1990, President Bush nominated him to be assistant attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department’s entire criminal division, which at that time handled all the nation’s terrorism cases as well. Mueller would oversee the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, mob boss John Gotti, and the controversial investigation into a vast money laundering scheme run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals

    None of his cases in Washington, though, would affect him as much as the bombing of Pan Am 103.

    THE TIME ON the clocks in Lockerbie, Scotland, read 7:04 pm, on December 21, 1988, when the first emergency call came into the local fire brigade, reporting what sounded like a massive boiler explosion. It was technically early evening, but it had been dark for hours already; that far north, on the shortest day of the year, daylight barely stretched to eight hours.

    Soon it became clear something much worse than a boiler explosion had unfolded: Fiery debris pounded the landscape, plunging from the sky and killing 11 Lockerbie residents. As Mike Carnahan told a local TV reporter, “The whole sky was lit up with flames. It was actually raining, liquid fire. You could see several houses on the skyline with the roofs totally off and all you could see was flaming timbers.”

    At 8:45 pm, a farmer found in his field the cockpit of Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side, 15 of its crew dead inside, just some of the 259 passengers and crew killed when a bomb had exploded inside the plane’s cargo hold. The scheduled London to New York flight never even made it out of the UK.

    It had taken just three seconds for the plane to disintegrate in the air, though the wreckage took three long minutes to fall the five miles from the sky to the earth; court testimony later would examine how passengers had still been alive as they fell. Nearly 200 of the passengers were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University returning home from a semester abroad. The attack horrified America, which until then had seen terror touch its shores only occasionally as a hijacking went awry; while the US had weathered the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, attacks almost never targeted civilians.

    The Pan Am 103 bombing seemed squarely aimed at the US, hitting one of its most iconic brands. Pan Am then represented America’s global reach in a way few companies did; the world’s most powerful airline shuttled 19 million passengers a year to more than 160 countries and had ferried the Beatles to their US tour and James Bond around the globe on his cinematic missions. In a moment of hubris a generation before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the airline had even opened a “waiting list” for the first tourists to travel to outer space. Its New York headquarters, the Pan Am building, was the world’s largest commercial building and its terminal at JFK Airport the biggest in the world.

    The investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 began immediately, as police and investigators streamed north from London by the hundreds; chief constable John Boyd, the head of the local police, arrived at the Lockerbie police station by 8:15 pm, and within an hour the first victim had been brought in: A farmer arrived in town with the body of a baby girl who had fallen from the sky. He’d carefully placed her in the front seat of his pickup truck.

    An FBI agent posted in London had raced north too, with the US ambassador, aboard a special US Air Force flight, and at 2 am, when Boyd convened his first senior leadership meeting, he announced, “The FBI is here, and they are fully operational.” By that point, FBI explosives experts were already en route to Scotland aboard an FAA plane; agents would install special secure communications equipment in Lockerbie and remain on site for months.

    Although it quickly became clear that a bomb had targeted Pan Am 103—wreckage showed signs of an explosion and tested positive for PETN and RDX, two key ingredients of the explosive Semtex—the investigation proceeded with frustrating slowness. Pan Am’s records were incomplete, and it took days to even determine the full list of passengers. At the same time, it was the largest crime scene ever investigated—a fact that remains true today.

    Investigators walked 845 square miles, an area 12 times the size of Washington, DC, and searched so thoroughly that they recovered more than 70 packages of airline crackers and ultimately could reconstruct about 85 percent of the fuselage. (Today, the wreckage remains in an English scrapyard.) Constable Boyd, at his first press conference, told the media, “This is a mammoth inquiry.”

    On Christmas Eve, a searcher found a piece of a luggage pallet with signs of obvious scorching, which would indicate the bomb had been in the luggage compartment below the passenger cabin. The evidence was rushed to a special British military lab—one originally created to investigate the Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605.

    When the explosive tests came back a day later, the British government called the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism, L. Paul Bremer III (who would go on to be President George W. Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and officially delivered the news that everyone had anticipated: Pan Am 103 had been downed by a bomb.

    Meanwhile, FBI agents fanned out across the country. In New York, special agent Neil Herman—who would later lead the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York in the run up to 9/11—was tasked with interviewing some of the victims’ families; many of the Syracuse students on board had been from the New York region. One of the mothers he interviewed hadn’t heard from the government in the 10 days since the attack. “It really struck me how ill-equipped we were to deal with this,” Herman told me, years later. “Multiply her by 270 victims and families.” The bombing underscored that the FBI and the US government had a lot to learn in responding and aiding victims in a terror attack.

    INVESTIGATORS MOVED TOWARD piecing together how a bomb could have been placed on board; years before the 9/11 attack, they discounted the idea of a suicide bomber aboard—there had never been a suicide attack on civil aviation at that point—and so focused on one of two theories: The possibility of a “mule,” an innocent passenger duped into carrying a bomb aboard, or an “inside man,” a trusted airport or airline employee who had smuggled the fatal cargo aboard. The initial suspect list stretched to 1,200 names.

    Yet even reconstructing what was on board took an eternity: Evidence pointed to a Japanese manufactured Toshiba cassette recorder as the likely delivery device for the bomb, and then, by the end of January, investigators located pieces of the suitcase that had held the bomb. After determining that it was a Samsonite bag, police and the FBI flew to the company’s headquarters in the United States and narrowed the search further: The bag, they found, was a System 4 Silhouette 4000 model, color “antique-copper,” a case and color made for only three years, 1985 to 1988, and sold only in the Middle East. There were a total of 3,500 such suitcases in circulation.

    By late spring, investigators had identified 14 pieces of luggage inside the target cargo container, known as AVE4041; each bore tell-tale signs of the explosion. Through careful retracing of how luggage moved through the London airport, investigators determined that the bags on the container’s bottom row came from passengers transferring in London. The bags on the second and third row of AVE4041 had been the last bags loaded onto the leg of the flight that began in Frankfurt, before the plane took off for London. None of the baggage had been X-rayed or matched with passengers on board.

    The British lab traced clothing fragments from the wreckage that bore signs of the explosion and thus likely originated in the bomb-carrying suitcase. It was an odd mix: Two herring-bone skirts, men’s pajamas, tartan trousers, and so on. The most promising fragment was a blue infant’s onesie that, after fiber analysis, was conclusively determined to have been inside the explosive case, and had a label saying “Malta Trading Company.” In March, two detectives took off for Malta, where the manufacturer told them that 500 such articles of clothing had been made and most sent to Ireland, while the rest went locally to Maltese outlets and others to continental Europe.

    As they dug deeper, they focused on bag B8849, which appeared to have come off Air Malta Flight 180—Malta to Frankfurt—on December 21, even though there was no record of one of that flight’s 47 passengers transferring to Pan Am 103.

    Investigators located the store in Malta where the suspect clothing had been sold; the British inspector later recorded in his statement, “[Store owner] Anthony Gauci interjected and stated that he could recall selling a pair of the checked trousers, size 34, and three pairs of the pajamas to a male person.” The investigators snapped to attention—after nine months did they finally have a suspect in their sights? “[Gauci] informed me that the man had also purchased the following items: one imitation Harris Tweed jacket; one woolen cardigan; one black umbrella; one blue colored ‘Baby Gro’ with a motif described by the witness as a ‘sheep’s face’ on the front; and one pair of gents’ brown herring-bone material trousers, size 36.”

    Game, set, match. Gauci had perfectly described the clothing fragments found by RARDE technicians to contain traces of explosive. The purchase, Gauci went on to explain, stood out in his mind because the customer—whom Gauci tellingly identified as speaking the “Libyan language”—had entered the store on November 23, 1988, and gathered items without seeming to care about the size, gender, or color of any of it.

    As the investigation painstakingly proceeded into 1989 and 1990, Robert Mueller arrived at Main Justice; the final objects of the Lockerbie search wouldn’t be found until the spring of 1990, just months before Mueller took over as assistant attorney general of the criminal division in September.

    The Justice Department that year was undergoing a series of leadership changes; the deputy attorney general, William Barr, became acting attorney general midyear as Richard Thornburgh stepped down to run for Senate back in his native Pennsylvania. President Bush then nominated Barr to take over as attorney general officially. (Earlier this month Barr was nominated by President Trump to become attorney general once again.)

    The bombing soon became one of the top cases on Mueller’s desk. He met regularly with Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent heading Scotbom. For Mueller, the case became personal; he met with victims’ families and toured the Lockerbie crash site and the investigation’s headquarters. He traveled repeatedly to the United Kingdom for meetings and walked the fields of Lockerbie himself. “The Scots just did a phenomenal job with the crime scene,” he told me, years ago.

    Mueller pushed the investigators forward constantly, getting involved in the investigation at a level that a high-ranking Justice Department official almost never does. Marquise turned to him in one meeting, after yet another set of directions, and sighed, “Geez, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you want to be FBI director.”

    The investigation gradually, carefully, zeroed in on Libya. Agents traced a circuit board used in the bomb to a similar device seized in Africa a couple of years earlier used by Libyan intelligence. An FBI-created database of Maltese immigration records even showed that a man using the same alias as one of those Libyan intelligence officers had departed from Malta on October 19, 1988—just two months before the bombing.

    The circuit board also helped makes sense of an important aspect of the bombing: It controlled a timer, meaning that the bomb was not set off by a barometric trigger that registers altitude. This, in turn, explained why the explosive baggage had lain peacefully in the jet’s hold as it took off and landed repeatedly.

    Tiny letters on the suspect timer said “MEBO.” What was MEBO? In the days before Google, searching for something called “Mebo” required going country to country, company to company. There were no shortcuts. The FBI, MI5, and CIA were, after months of work, able to trace MEBO back to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier, adding a fifth country to the ever-expanding investigative circle.

    From Meister et Bollier, they learned that the company had provided 20 prototype timers to the Libyan government and the company helped ID their contact as a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who looked like the sketch of the Maltese clothing shopper. Then, when the FBI looked at its database of Maltese immigration records, they found that Al Megrahi had been present in Malta the day the clothing was purchased.

    Marquise sat down with Robert Mueller and the rest of the prosecutorial team and laid out the latest evidence. Mueller’s orders were clear—he wanted specific suspects and he wanted to bring charges. As he said, “Proceed toward indictment.” Let’s get this case moving.

    IN NOVEMBER 1990, Marquise was placed in charge of all aspects of the investigation and assigned on special duty to the Washington Field Office and moved to a new Scotbom task force. The field offce was located far from the Hoover building, in a run-down neighborhood known by the thoroughly unromantic moniker of Buzzard Point.

    The Scotbom task force had been allotted three tiny windowless rooms with dark wood paneling, which were soon covered floor-to-ceiling with 747 diagrams, crime scene photographs, maps, and other clues. By the door of the office, the team kept two photographs to remind themselves of the stakes: One, a tiny baby shoe recovered from the fields of Lockerbie; the other, a picture of the American flag on the tail of Pan Am 103. This was the first major attack on the US and its civilians. Whoever was responsible couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

    With representatives from a half-dozen countries—the US, Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Malta—now sitting around the table, putting together a case that met everyone’s evidentiary standards was difficult. “We talked through everything, and everything was always done to the higher standard,” Marquise says. In the US, for instance, the legal standard for a photo array was six photos; in Scotland, though, it was 12. So every photo array in the investigation had 12 photos to ensure that the IDs could be used in a British court.

    The trail of evidence so far was pretty clear, and it all pointed toward Libya. Yet there was still much work to do prior to an indictment. A solid hunch was one thing. Having evidence that would stand up in court and under cross-examination was something else entirely.

    As the case neared an indictment, the international investigators and prosecutors found themselves focusing at their gatherings on the fine print of their respective legal code and engaging in deep, philosophical-seeming debates: “What does murder mean in your statute? Huh? I know what murder means: I kill you. Well, then you start going through the details and the standards are just a little different. It may entail five factors in one country, three in another. Was Megrahi guilty of murder? Depends on the country.”

    At every meeting, the international team danced around the question of where a prosecution would ultimately take place. “Jurisdiction was an eggshell problem,” Marquise says. “It was always there, but no one wanted to talk about it. It was always the elephant in the room.”

    Mueller tried to deflect the debate for as long as possible, arguing there was more investigation to do first. Eventually, though, he argued forcefully that the case should be tried in the US. “I recognize that Scotland has significant equities which support trial of the case in your country,” he said in one meeting. “However, the primary target of this act of terrorism was the United States. The majority of the victims were Americans, and the Pan American aircraft was targeted precisely because it was of United States registry.”

    After one meeting, where the Scots and Americans debated jurisdiction for more than two hours, the group migrated over to the Peasant, a restaurant near the Justice Department, where, in an attempt to foster good spirits, it paid for the visiting Scots. Mueller and the other American officials each had to pay for their own meals.

    Mueller was getting ready to move forward; the federal grand jury would begin work in early September. Prosecutors and other investigators were already preparing background, readying evidence, and piecing together information like the names and nationalities of all the Lockerbie victims so that they could be included in the forthcoming indictment.

    There had never been any doubt in the US that the Pan Am 103 bombing would be handled as a criminal matter, but the case was still closely monitored by the White House and the National Security Council.

    The Reagan administration had been surprised in February 1988 by the indictment on drug charges of its close ally Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and a rule of thumb had been developed: Give the White House a heads up anytime you’re going to indict a foreign agent. “If you tag Libya with Pan Am 103, that’s fair to say it’s going to disrupt our relationship with Libya,” Mueller deadpans. So Mueller would head up to the Cabinet Room at the White House, charts and pictures in hand, to explain to President Bush and his team what Justice had in mind.

    To Mueller, the investigation underscored why such complex investigations needed a law enforcement eye. A few months after the attack, he sat through a CIA briefing pointing toward Syria as the culprit behind the attack. “That’s always struck with me as a lesson in the difference between intelligence and evidence. I always try to remember that,” he told me, back when he was FBI director. “It’s a very good object lesson about hasty action based on intelligence. What if we had gone and attacked Syria based on that initial intelligence? Then, after the attack, it came out that Libya had been behind it? What could we have done?”

    Marquise was the last witness for the federal grand jury on Friday, November 8, 1991. Only in the days leading up to that testimony had prosecutors zeroed in on Megrahi and another Libyan officer, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah; as late as the week of the testimony, they had hoped to pursue additional indictments, yet the evidence wasn’t there to get to a conviction.

    Mueller traveled to London to meet with the Peter Fraser, the lord advocate—Scotland’s top prosecutor—and they agreed to announce indictments simultaneously on November 15, 1991. Who got their hands on the suspects first, well, that was a question for later. The joint indictment, Mueller believed, would benefit both countries. “It adds credibility to both our investigations,” he says.

    That coordinated joint, multi-nation statement and indictment would become a model that the US would deploy more regularly in the years to come, as the US and other western nations have tried to coordinate cyber investigations and indictments against hackers from countries like North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

    To make the stunning announcement against Libya, Mueller joined FBI director William Sessions, DC US attorney Jay Stephens, and attorney general William Barr.

    “We charge that two Libyan officials, acting as operatives of the Libyan intelligence agency, along with other co-conspirators, planted and detonated the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103,” Barr said. “I have just telephoned some of the families of those murdered on Pan Am 103 to inform them and the organizations of the survivors that this indictment has been returned. Their loss has been ever present in our minds.”

    At the same time, in Scotland, investigators there were announcing the same indictments.

    At the press conference, Barr listed a long set of names to thank—the first one he singled out was Mueller’s. Then, he continued, “This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice. We have no higher priority.”

    From there, the case would drag on for years. ABC News interviewed the two suspects in Libya later that month; both denied any responsibility for the bombing. Marquise was reassigned within six months; the other investigators moved along too.

    Mueller himself left the administration when Bill Clinton became president, spending an unhappy year in private practice before rejoining the Justice Department to work as a junior homicide prosecutor in DC under then US attorney Eric Holder; Mueller, who had led the nation’s entire criminal division was now working side by side with prosecutors just a few years out of law school, the equivalent of a three-star military general retiring and reenlisting as a second lieutenant. Clinton eventually named Mueller the US attorney in San Francisco, the office where he’d worked as a young attorney in the 1970s.

    THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the bombing came and went without any justice. Then, in April 1999, prolonged international negotiations led to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi turning over the two suspects; the international economic sanctions imposed on Libya in the wake of the bombing were taking a toll on his country, and the leader wanted to put the incident behind him.

    The final negotiated agreement said that the two men would be tried by a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Distinct from the international court there, the three-judge Scottish court would ensure that the men faced justice under the laws of the country where their accused crime had been committed.

    Allowing the Scots to move forward meant some concessions by the US. The big one was taking the death penalty, prohibited in Scotland, off the table. Mueller badly wanted the death penalty. Mueller, like many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, is a strong proponent of capital punishment, but he believes it should be reserved for only egregious crimes. “It has to be especially heinous, and you have to be 100 percent sure he’s guilty,” he says. This case met that criteria. “There’s never closure. If there can’t be closure, there should be justice—both for the victims as well as the society at large,” he says.

    An old US military facility, Kamp Van Zeist, was converted to an elaborate jail and courtroom in The Hague, and the Dutch formally surrendered the two Libyans to Scottish police. The trial began in May 2000. For nine months, the court heard testimony from around the world. In what many observers saw as a political verdict, Al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was found not guilty.

    With barely 24 hours notice, Marquise and victim family members raced from the United States to be in the courtroom to hear the verdict. The morning of the verdict in 2001, Mueller was just days into his tenure as acting deputy US attorney general—filling in for the start of the George W. Bush administration in the department’s No. 2 role as attorney general John Ashcroft got himself situated.

    That day, Mueller awoke early and joined with victims’ families and other officials in Washington, who watched the verdict announcement via a satellite hookup. To him, it was a chance for some closure—but the investigation would go on. As he told the media, “The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.”

    The Scotbom case would leave a deep imprint on Mueller; one of his first actions as FBI director was to recruit Kathryn Turman, who had served as the liaison to the Pan Am 103 victim families during the trial, to head the FBI’s Victim Services Division, helping to elevate the role and responsibility of the FBI in dealing with crime victims.

    JUST MONTHS AFTER that 20th anniversary ceremony with Mueller at Arlington National Cemetery, in the summer of 2009, Scotland released a terminally ill Megrahi from prison after a lengthy appeals process, and sent him back to Libya. The decision was made, the Scottish minister of justice reported, on “compassionate grounds.” Few involved on the US side believed the terrorist deserved compassion. Megrahi was greeted as a hero on the tarmac in Libya—rose petals, cheering crowds. The US consensus remained that he should rot in prison.

    The idea that Megrahi could walk out of prison on “compassionate” ground made a mockery of everything that Mueller had dedicated his life to fighting and doing. Amid a series of tepid official condemnations—President Obama labeled it “highly objectionable”—Mueller fired off a letter to Scottish minister Kenny MacAskill that stood out for its raw pain, anger, and deep sorrow.

    “Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision,” Mueller began. “Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of ‘compassion.’”

    That nine months after the 20th anniversary of the bombing, the only person behind bars for the bombing would walk back onto Libyan soil a free man and be greeted with rose petals left Mueller seething.

    “Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world,” Mueller wrote. “You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification—the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.”

    For Mueller, walking the fields of Lockerbie had been walking on hallowed ground. The Scottish decision pained him especially deeply, because of the mission and dedication he and his Scottish counterparts had shared 20 years before. “If all civilized nations join together to apply the rules of law to international terrorists, certainly we will be successful in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism,” he had written in a perhaps too hopeful private note to the Scottish Lord Advocate in 1990.

    Some 20 years later, in an era when counterterrorism would be a massive, multibillion dollar industry and a buzzword for politicians everywhere, Mueller—betrayed—concluded his letter with a decidedly un-Mueller-like plea, shouted plaintively and hopelessly across the Atlantic: “Where, I ask, is the justice?”

    #USA #Libye #impérialisme #terrorisme #histoire #CIA #idéologie #propagande

  • Solidarité avec les universitaires turcs dont les procès s’ouvrent mardi 5 décembre

    Parmi les soutiens possibles (document intitulé What do do) :
    1. Partager l’appel à solidarité ; montrer votre solidarité en suivant les procès et en les commentant sur vos réseaux sociaux, ou en écrivant des articles de blogs ou de journaux sur le sujet. Des informations sont disponibles ici : https://barisicinakademisyenler.net or http://mesana.org/pdf/Turkey20171017.pdf
    2. Contacter bakuluslararasi@gmail.com si vous souhaitez assister aux procès en tant qu’observateur, ou écrivez à une association des droits de l’homme pour qu’elle envoie un délégué.
    3. Signer la pétition https://academicboycottofturkey.wordpress.com/petition pour soutenir le boycott des universités complices en Turquie ;
    4. Informer vos organisations professionnelles ou le sénat de votre université pour qu’elles prennent acte contre les institutions complices telle le Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK ; www.tubitak.gov.tr/en) ;
    5. Soutenir financièrement les enseignants-chercheurs démis de leurs fonctions en faisant un don au syndicat qui les soutient, ici https://www.youcaring.com/academicsforpeaceinturkey-763983

    N’hésitez pas à faire circuler dans vos réseaux universitaires, syndicaux, et militants.

    #solidarité #résistance #Turquie #université #purge #coup #universitaires_pour_la_paix #procès

    @isskein : je vais essayer de mettre sur ce fil ce que je trouve sur cet horrible procès

    • 147 universitaires au tribunal d’Erdogan

      Ils comparaissent à partir de ce mardi pour avoir signé une pétition réclamant la paix au Kurdistan turc. Les purges du président continuent.

      Ce mardi débute à Istanbul les procès de près de 150 universitaires turcs, accusés de « propagande terroriste », pour avoir signé une pétition appelant à la paix. Ces derniers mois, leur pays semble sorti des radars médiatiques européens. Comme s’il existait une lassitude face à la répétition, la répression interminable, cette purge sans fin. Dans ce silence relatif, la dérive autocratique se poursuit pourtant, le pays s’enfonce. Et ces procès de chercheurs illustrent bien la paranoïa, l’arbitraire, dans lesquels se débattent désormais les démocrates turcs.

      https://lesjours.fr/obsessions/la-bascule/ep21-proces-universitaires

    • Blog dédié au procès:
      Academics for Peace - A Case Study. Documenting and Contextualizing the Instrumentalization of the Law in Turkey

      The law is usually associated as antagonistic to despotism, thought of as a source of freedom. But events in Turkey and other countries have shown how is the law instrumentalised in order to suppress academic freedom. This blog documents judicial proceedings against the Academics for Peace as an example to study a phenomenon that can be witnessed all over the globe.

      At the end of 2015, the predominantly Kurdish regions of Turkey entered an intensifying spiral of violence. Curfews were enforced in different cities and districts lasting for days, weeks and even months. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to the ground. People were left homeless, many lost their lives. In the face of these developments, 1128 academics decided not to remain silent and issued a statement titled “We will not be a party to this crime!”. It called on the government and the security forces to abide by domestic and international law and to return to the peace process that had been interrupted after the national elections of June 7, 2015. After the petition was made public, the Academics for Peace were specifically targeted by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and subsequently turned into objects of hatred and defamation in the media. Since then, they have been attacked and threatened and became subject to administrative and criminal investigations. Some were arrested and kept in prison for more than one month. Hundreds of them have been dismissed from their positions by order of the Council of Education and university administrations. Under the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt of July 15, 2016, hundreds of Academics for Peace were removed from universities and banned from public service. Their passports have been invalidated hindering these academics from travelling abroad. In December 2017, judicial proceedings begin against the signatories, on the charge of “propaganda for a terrorist organization.”

      This blog is curated by Academics for Peace Germany e.V. Its aim is, on the one hand, to create an archive of factual and up-to-date information on the ongoing developments that researchers, journalists and others with an interest in the topic can rely on. On the other hand, this blog will provide contextualization and analysis from a variety of different disciplines and theoretic approaches, in preparation of a planned research network on the instrumentalization of law for the suppression of academic freedom in Turkey and elsewhere.


      https://afp.hypotheses.org

    • A Commentary on the Indictment against Academics for Peace

      The following text consists of a summary of the body of the Bill of Indictment with relevant commentaries in the footnotes. Although the penal case against the Academics for Peace petition has been filed on an individual basis regarding the signatories, each case shares a uniform Bill of Indictment [1]. Several Assize Courts in Istanbul have been appointed as the court-on-duty for the cases—each of them using this uniform Bill of Indictment as the basis of the criminal process. You can also read this commentary as a PDF.

      https://afp.hypotheses.org/59

    • INFORMATION NOTE ON THE ONGOING CRIMINAL PROCEEDINS AND RECENT RULLINGS AGAINST ACADEMICS FOR PEACE IN TURKEY. CALL FOR SOLIDARITY

      The criminal proceedings against several hundreds of academics in Turkey who signed a petition for peace (Academics for Peace) continue in Istanbul. They are individually sued in various Assize Courts. Some cases are recently concluded, the courts of first instances found the academics guilty for “carrying out terrorist propaganda” and sentenced them to 15 months of prison. We are currently waiting the decision of the Court of Appeal.
      We want to highlight these rulings against the signatories and request for urgent international support from our European colleagues.
      In a petition made public in January 2016 , more than two thousand academics and researchers from Turkey, supported by several hundred international academics—called on the Turkish government to abide by domestic and international law and to return to the peace process that had been interrupted in July 2015. After the petition was made public, the signatories were specifically targeted by President Erdoğan and subsequently attacked, threatened and became subject to administrative and criminal investigations. Some were arrested and kept in prison. In October 2017, some signatories of the petition, mostly the ones who are or were working at the universities in Istanbul, started to receive subpoenas, summoning them to the court with an accusation of carrying out terrorist propaganda.
      As of April 30, 2018, more than 260 signatories are individually sued in various Assize Courts of Istanbul. They are separately tried according to hundreds of copy-pasted indictments with an identical content. There is also one group case against four signatories who read a second press statement of Academics for Peace on March 10, 2016. This statement condemned the persecution of signatory academics and affirmed signatories’ commitment to the wording of the petition of January 2016. The four signatories are arrested and were held in pre-trial detention for 40 days.
      There are 2212 signatories of the petition, only around 300 of them have been sued so far. Furthermore 386 signatories have been officially listed as persons affiliated to terrorist organisations in the state of emergency decree-laws, dismissed from their positions, banned from public service for life and had their passports cancelled. But there is only a limited overlapping between the “sued signatories” and the “decreed signatories”.
      The indictment included no attestations that are based on factual evidences, was full of inconsistencies and even manipulated the facts by altering the translated versions of the petition . Against this arbitrariness, the signatories have defended themselves with emphasizing their responsibility as academics that instigates them not to remain silent against historical occurrences. As researchers, lecturers and scientists from numerous fields, they have all underlined their responsibility as a point of intersection, which made them come together through the demand for peace.
      The differences between the qualifications of the “crime” committed by the signatories by different courts demonstrate also arbitrariness of the judicial proceedings. The individual cases against the signatories are engaged with the charge of carrying out terrorist propaganda. The indictment in the group case against the four academics also, initially accused them under Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Act . However, at the first hearing on April 22, 2016, the Public Prosecutor announced that he considered a different qualification for the “crime” committed and intended to launch a new investigation under Article 301 of the Penal Code. That article prohibits “degrading the Turkish Nation and the State of the Republic of Turkey and the organs and institutions of the State.” The Prosecutor requested the Court to stop the proceedings under Article 7/2 pending the required permission by the Minister of Justice for an investigation on charges under Article 301. The awaited decision by the Ministry of Justice in relation to the request for permission for an investigation under Article 301 of the Penal Code has reached the Court in November 2017.
      In order to define an act as propaganda for a terrorist organization under Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Act, there must be an act having the characteristics of propaganda, which carried out in such a way that legitimizes or praises the coercive, violent and threatening actions of terrorist organizations or encourages the employment of these methods. In the Academics for Peace’s petition, there is no single expression having the characteristics of propaganda in favour of a terrorist organization. Neither does it legitimize or praise the coercive, violent and threatening methods of a terrorist organization nor does it encourage the employment of such methods.
      As to the charge under Article 301 of the Penal Code, the act of signing the petition cannot be considered an offence under the third paragraph of the article, which explicitly excludes from its scope “expressions of an opinion for the purpose of criticism”.
      The focal point of all the hearings against Academics for Peace was the lack of clarity regarding the charges. Along with the requests for immediate acquittal, defence lawyers underlined the uncertainty surrounding the definition of the charges by pointing to the decision of the Minister to grant permission for an investigation under Article 301 in the case against four academics. Lawyers of some signatories requested the courts to merge the cases of all academics, including the one viewed before the 13th Assize Court against four signatories. They emphasized the need to avoid inconsistencies in the charges on which the prosecution will proceed and in the conclusions to be reached by different courts in relation to one identical act. On similar grounds, the courts with the exception of 35th Assize Court, dismissed the requests for rejoinder of the cases.
      This routine of requests, pleas, rejections and objections had kept going on until the 23th of February, where the 34th Assize Court of Istanbul had given its first expedited judgment and found three of the academics guilty for “carrying out terrorist propaganda” under article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Act. They have been sentenced to 15 months of imprisonment as the courts have decided that the punishment shall be aggravated as the crime of carrying out terrorist propaganda has been deemed to be committed through means of media.
      The courts, relying on the Penal Procedure Code, have offered the academics an option: the deferment of the announcement of the verdict, which enables the court not to announce the decision, and in the case that the defendant will not be found guilty for another crime in a certain period, to foreclose the case. When the accused accepts this mechanism to be applied, then the qualification of the action as a crime becomes officialised and the accused becomes deprived of any rights on appealing the case at a higher court .
      Until today 13 academics have their judgments delivered and 12 of them have accepted to resort to the mechanism of the deferment of the announcement of the verdict. And so far, one signatory had refused the application of this mechanism. As can be seen in the verdict (which is available in the appendices), the Court had rejected the suspension of the punishment upon the grounds that she had not exhibited any expression of remorse. This academic has applied to the Court for Appeal (Istinaf) and she faces the risk of imprisonment.
      Hundreds of other proceedings against other signatories are still on the course. It is still not clear in which way these 13 first rulings will affect the copy-pasted cases considering that the judiciary of the country is collapsing day by day under the state of emergency regime. The first case before the Court of Appeal will probably create a strong judicial precedent that will be highly persuasive while the decisions are made in the future cases against the other signatories. All signatories are tried before various Assize Courts in Istanbul. Istanbul Regional Court of Justice is the competent court for the appeals. The cases will be reviewed by the same two criminal chambers of this Regional Court having competence on cases related to the Anti-Terror Act.
      Today, it is crucial to ask an international support for our colleagues.
      – We would like to invite you to write a short analysis on the verdicts delivered so far. For this purpose, we send you in the appendices the translation of the verdict against the signatory academic, who faces the risk of imprisonment. Please let us know if you were to write an analysis and to publish it on a blog of your choice so that we can also cross post it on the Blog of the Academics for Peace-Germany. If you wish to publish your analysis on this blog, you can directly send it to us.
      – Many academics from different countries assist the hearings as observers. You can be in solidarity in the courtrooms. The presence of international observers during the hearings is crucial.
      Please also feel free to distribute this call for solidarity among scholars who would be interested in supporting our call by either participating in the hearings or by writing a short analysis.
      These actions for solidarity will certainly not suffice to change the course of this politically motivated trials, but certainly influence the way the hearings are held, strengthen the legal struggle of the Academics for Peace under judicial harassment.
      Thank you for your concern and solidarity.

      Academics for Peace – Germany
      Legal Working Group
      afp.jurists@gmail.com

      For more information about the judicial proceedings against Academics for Peace, including the reports and comments of the international observers, please check our blog: https://afp.hypotheses.org
      For a detailed flow of the hearing processes, please check: https://bianet.org/konu/trial-of-academics
      For the calendar of the hearings, please check: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=nstr2fppd37d7o0ekp83qu6e7g@group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Istanbul&pli=1

      Document word reçu via email le 14.05.2018, et que j’ai copié-collé ici.
      Texte accompagnant le message:

      Plus de 260 universitaires signataires de pétition des Universitaires pour la Paix sont actuellement en procédures et plusieurs décisions ont déjà été prises. Certains de nos collègues ont traduit l’acte d’accusation, et plusieurs textes analytiques discutent des procédures et de leurs conséquences.

    • Avant d’entrer en prison à Istanbul, #Füsun_Üstel traite de l’histoire de la citoyenneté en Turquie…

      Toujours aussi déterminée et ferme sur ses principes, notre collègue historienne et professeure de sciences politiques à l’Université de Galatasaray, Füsun Üstel, a prononcé il y a quelques jours à Istanbul une dernière conférence publique avant d’entrer en prison pour 15 mois (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLU7Vu-hyGU

      ). Le thème abordé traitait, et ce choix ne devait évidemment rien au hasard, de « L’histoire de la citoyenneté dans la Turquie républicaine », une histoire sur laquelle Füsun a beaucoup travaillé et publié.


      https://questionsorientoccident.blog/2019/05/03/avant-dentrer-en-prison-fusun-ustel-traite-de-lhistoire-de

      Je découvre dans ce même article qu’elle a travaillé à #Grenoble :

      « Pour la connaître depuis longtemps, et avoir travaillé et enseigné avec elle à Istanbul et à Grenoble, nous ne doutons pas que Füsun saura continuer derrière les barreaux de sa prison pour femmes d’Istanbul son activité d’intellectuelle engagée et de pédagogue… »

      Petite recherche et je me rends compte qu’elle est chercheuse extérieure dans le « Groupe d’études sur la Turquie et l’Europe » à #Pacte :

      https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/node/23734
      #université_grenoble_alpes

  • Women In ISIS: Prison Study Reveals Face Of Female Jihadists
    https://www.worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/women-in-isis-prison-study-reveals-face-of-female-jihadists

    “BEIRUT – Few women have ever gained access to Block B of Beirut’s notorious Roumieh prison. This is where Lebanon holds radicalized criminals. It is also a place where suicide bombings have allegedly been planned, and has been called an “operations room” for the so-called Islamic State by Lebanon’s interior minister. So when Maya and Nancy Yamout first began interviewing convicted jihadists in the prison, the Lebanese sisters aroused both confusion and suspicion among guards and prisoners alike.

    The Yamouts’ interest began with a university project, but it took the support of the former minister of justice to get them inside Roumieh. It was unheard-of for two young women, even professionals, to attempt such a project. The sisters are forensic social workers, which means they tackle issues relating to law and legal systems, such as recommendations about mental status, child custody or neglect.

    “It was strange for ISF [Internal Security Forces] to see us in prison … [we] were asked, ‘Why do you want to do this? Go pick another topic,’” Maya says. Even the ISF guards who helped them showed no interest in their interviews.

    Seven years on, after a Master’s thesis about The Role of Forensic Social Work in Terrorism and its impact on society, the pair have become prison regulars. Apart from lawyers and family members, the sisters are the only civilians the Block B prisoners meet. They regularly interview more than 70 inmates – about 10% of the block’s total population – from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, Russia and Sudan. Roughly half are said to have been de-radicalized, and are finishing their prison time. Prisons are key recruiting centers for radicalization, putting Maya and Nancy into a potential cauldron of violent extremism.”

  • Lire absolument: Saudi Arabia Gazes at Lebanon with Vengeance
    http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/24102/saudi-arabia-gazes-at-lebanon-with-vengeance

    On 21 June 2015, angry families in Lebanon took to the streets protesting the brutal treatment of Islamist prisoners at Roumia prison. A leaked video showed one security officer flogging a naked, handcuffed, bearded man with a water hose while shouting profanities: “Do you want houriat? It’s your mother who will be the hourieh.” The featured torturers turned out to be members of the Information Security Branch, which is under the direct command of Minister of Interior and Future Party leader Nouhad al-Mashnuq. Protesters in Tripoli, Beirut, and Iqlim al-Kharrub (in Mount Lebanon) chanted slogans and insults against Hariri, al-Mashnuq, and Minister of Justice Ashraf Rifi, calling them “secular infidels that do not represent ahal al-Sunna.”

    In the face of this public resentment, some Future Party MPs in the north (MPs Khalid al-Daher and Mouin Mer’abi) distanced themselves from their party for fear of losing their local constituency, while others blamed the whole thing on Hizballah. Rifi, with his trademark impulsive miscalculations, blamed Hizballah for leaking the video showing humiliation and torture of Lebanese Islamist prisoners (mostly from Tripoli and other parts of the north). But in his attempt to direct Sunni anger against the Shi‘a, Rifi’s sectarian politics backfired. Angry protesters turned apoplectic because of their perception that Rifi assumed that they were too stupid to discern his tactics, and instead some protesters went on television, shouting, “We want to thank Hizballah for exposing the truth about the torture our sons are subjected to in Roumia.” Hizballah denied leaking the video; moreover, the IP address of the original YouTube account where the video was first published turned out to be that of the media office of Ashraf Rifi. Hizballah’s advantage lies in the fact that Saudi Arabia’s proxies in Lebanon are currently caught up in a maelstrom of confusion and a lack of public credibility.

    Internally, in light of an ongoing and self-inflicted trash crisis, both March 8 and March 14 politicians continue to de-escalate their political rhetoric. However, Saudi Arabia’s insistence on a confrontation with Hizballah means that it is only a matter of time until the Saudis withdraw their losing card, Sa‘ad Hariri, and deploy another Trojan horse to create the sort of chaos the kingdom seeks. This means other Sunni figures will be given a leading role and Hariri will be out of the Lebanese arena–again. Saudi Arabia’s possible nominees for unconventional roles could include Jabhat al-Nusra or/and IS, alongside thuggish Sunni figures who have splintered from Future and set up their own shop as warlords for hire. This includes those who perpetuated a six-year war between the poorest communities in Tripoli.

  • Why did French Justice Minister #Christiane_Taubira resign?
    http://africasacountry.com/2016/02/why-did-french-justice-minister-christiane-taubira-resign

    Last week, #France’s Minister of Justice, Christine Taubira (known for introducing the 2013 same-sex marriage law in France) resigned from the government, contesting French President François #Hollande’s new ‘terrorist law.” Shortly after the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande, along with the Prime Minister Manuel Valls, pledged to conduct legal reforms that would allow taking […]

    #FRONT_PAGE #citizenship #Europe #immigration #Nicolas_Sarkozy

  • Germany’s Post-Cologne Hysteria - The New York Times
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/09/opinion/germanys-post-cologne-hysteria.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

    The attacks — along with similar incidents in Hamburg — come at a critical time for Germany, and they raise tough questions about where Germany is headed: not just whether it will remain open to more refugees, but whether it can peacefully integrate those already here.

    Rarely in recent memory has a single event captured the German conversation quite like the Cologne attacks. Long before any facts were in, commentators were already drawing conclusions.

    Alice Schwarzer, a well-known German feminist, wrote on her blog on Tuesday that the events were a “product of misguided tolerance.” Frauke Petry, head of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, said the events were a “result of uncontrolled migration.”

    And Julia Klöckner, the top Christian Democratic candidate in the coming state election in Rhineland-Palatinate, called for an “open debate” on whether foreigners, including asylum seekers, could be kicked out for committing crimes — a proposal that even Chancellor Angela Merkel cautiously endorsed, though such laws already exist.

    But as quick as the right was to use the attacks as a wedge against refugees, the left moved just as fast to deflect the blame. Heiko Maas, the minister of justice and a member of the Social Democrats, said on Tuesday that “organized crime” was behind the attacks, though no evidence exists for such a connection (he has since threatened to deport foreigners found guilty in the attacks).

    In other words, precisely when the country needs a coolheaded conversation about the impact of Germany’s new refugee population, we’re playing musical chairs: Everybody runs for a seat to the left and to the right, afraid to remain in the middle, apparently undecided.

  • Sleeves ’rolled up’: Canada’s new justice minister eager to get started | CTV News
    http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/sleeves-rolled-up-canada-s-new-justice-minister-eager-to-get-started-1.26440

    Canada’s new justice minister says her “sleeves are already rolled up” and she’s looking forward to tackling several issues in her portfolio, including doctor-assisted suicide legislation and calls for an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women.

    Jody Wilson-Raybould told CTV’s Canada AM Thursday morning she has met with some of the officials and is going through the briefing material they’ve prepared for her to decide on her first priorities.
    Doctor-assisted suicide is certainly a priority that we need to move forward with sensitivity and urgency,” she said from Ottawa.

    Also, the inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, this is a concrete commitment we made in our platform and certainly again one that needs to be approached with sensitivity, openness and honesty.
    Several First Nations groups have applauded Wilson-Raybould’s appointment as minister of justice and attorney general, noting she’s the first aboriginal person to hold the post.
    Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde says it’s worthwhile to point out that Wilson-Raybould wasn’t “pigeon-holed” into the ministry of aboriginal affairs simply because she is indigenous.

  • • Watch Out! | C/O Berlin
    http://www.co-berlin.org/en/watch-out

    The title of the current exhibition at C/O Berlin celebrating the 100th anniversary of Leica photography pinpoints what lawyers dealing with photography-related issues are racking their brains over right now:

    1. On the initiative of Germany’s minister of justice, Section 201a of the German Penal Code was amended earlier this year to the effect that a penalty may be imposed on persons who give third parties access to a photo of another person without that person’s consent if the photo is “capable of doing significant damage to the reputation of the person shown in it.”

    2. The European Parliament is debating whether to place Europe-wide restrictions on what is known as freedom of panorama (that is, the right of a photographer to photograph copyright-protected buildings from public streets, walkways and squares).

    3. Civil courts are having to deal with an increasing number of lawsuits in which people (by no means just celebrities) consider their personal rights to have been violated as a result of the creation or distribution of photographs.

    http://www.co-berlin.org/sites/default/files/styles/headerbilder_postings/public/article/headerimages/andreasbehr_artikelbild_960x1440px.jpg?itok=1PNA7Kxh

  • Bahrain’s Justice Minister Picks Fight With Newspaper Editor on Twitter · Global Voices
    http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/11/25/bahrains-justice-minister-picks-fight-with-newspaper-editor-on-t

    The difference in percentages was noted by daily newspaper Al-Wasat’s editor-in-chief Mansoor Al-Jamri, who reminded readers there’s more to elections than simply winning in the numbers. But his observations about freedoms sparked a war of words on Twitter with Bahrain’s Minister of Justice Khalid bin Ali Al-Khalifa, a member of Bahrain’s ruling Al-Khalifa royal family.

  • The Deportation Mess: A Bureaucratic Muddling of State Fantasies

    In the past four weeks alone, the Minister of Justice and Security in the Netherlands was blamed for deporting failed asylum seekers with severe medical conditions to countries in which their health treatment cannot be guaranteed; the chief of the national police in Melilla, Spain, was charged by a judge for illegally performing ‘pushback’ operations of migrants into Morocco; and the Israeli High Court ordered the dismantling of the biggest detention center and revoked a recent law that permitted the imprisonment of asylum seekers for one year without trial. I could go on providing more examples from other countries that illustrate the formal and informal mess that overwhelmingly characterizes the running of modern state deportation regimes.

    http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/deportation-fantasies

    #renvoi #expulsion #asile #réfugiés #migration #push-back #refoulement #régime_de_départation

  • Kuwaiti minister, accused of backing “jihad” in #syria, resigns
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/kuwaiti-minister-accused-backing-jihad-syria-resigns

    Kuwaiti Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs, Nayef al-Ajmi talks during a parliament session at #Kuwait's National Assembly on April 1, 2014 in Kuwait City. (Photo: AFP - Yasser al-Zayyat) Kuwaiti Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs, Nayef al-Ajmi talks during a parliament session at Kuwait’s National Assembly on April 1, 2014 in Kuwait City. (Photo: AFP - Yasser al-Zayyat)

    A Kuwaiti minister, accused by a senior US official of promoting jihad in Syria, has resigned just days after receiving the backing of fellow cabinet members, a report said Friday. Justice and Islamic Affairs Minister Nayef al-Ajmi, who strongly denies the US accusations, said he had asked to be relieved of his duties for health reasons, Al-Rai (...)

    #Al-Nusra_Front #al-Qaeda #Top_News

  • Rifi : #Tripoli's new strong-man
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/rifi-tripolis-new-strong-man

    Minister of Justice, #Ashraf_Rifi (R), while he was head of the Internal Security Forces. (Photo: Marwan Tahtah) Minister of Justice, Ashraf Rifi (R), while he was head of the Internal Security Forces. (Photo: Marwan Tahtah)

    The Ministry of Justice, like the Internal Security Forces (ISF), is firmly in Ashraf Rifi’s grip. His heavy-handed actions appeal to the people of Tripoli, who have been frustrated by politicians’ empty promises of big projects for the city that don’t materialize.

    Ghassan Saoud

    read (...)

    #Lebanon #Articles #Bab_al-Tabbaneh #Future_Movement #Mohammed_al-Safadi #Mohammed_Kabbara #Najib_Mikati #Rashid_Karami #Salafi #Samir_al-Jisr

  • Mission de première urgence pour le tout nouveau ministre de la justice du Liban, Ashraf Rifi : mettre au pas le quotidien Al Akhbar.

    Ashraf Rifi takes on Al-Akhbar
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/ashraf-rifi-takes-al-akhbar

    Amin hit back Tuesday: “Today we have Michel Sleiman, who is impersonating the president, and Ashraf Rifi, who is impersonating the Minister of Justice. Tomorrow we might face … the Court of Publications, which is becoming more like a mock court which serves the authorities of death and oppression.”

    He then scorned Sleiman for a brief scandal in which he and his family were caught with fake French passports in 2004. Amin then challenged Sleiman for not taking responsibility for the deaths of dozens of soldiers killed in Denniyeh in 2000 during a battle with Salafi gunmen.

    Amin then attacks Rifi, the “militia leader in Tripoli,” who backs armed gangs.

    “Will you, General Ashraf Rifi, tell us the story of how you did not take orders from the Minister of Interior and did what you thought was appropriate, then bluntly accuse us of ‘instigating disobedience?’ Will you do what your fellow officers did, and give us a detailed account of how you spent your secret expenditures?”

    Amin concluded: “We at Al-Akhbar do not fear any of you for one main reason: You do not know the meaning of real dignity. Your arms haven’t hugged a martyr’s body and you haven’t heard the gasps of a mother running to receive her son who fights in the Resistance. You haven’t had the chance to breathe in pure air that does not contain the poison of an enemy or a traitor.”

    “Take your best shot

  • Local initiatives on the rise in the Netherlands - Sensi Seeds Blog
    http://sensiseeds.com/en/blog/local-cannabis-initiatives-are-on-the-rise-in-the-netherlands

    Local cannabis initiatives are on the rise in the Netherlands
    posted by Martijn on September 21st 2013

    Since it is increasingly clear that the new cannabis policy of the Dutch government is not working, more and more local councils are taking matters into their own hands. These developments cannot meet with the approval of the watchdog of the new policy, the Minister of Justice, Ivo Opstelten. Is the Netherlands copying the American approach here?

    In 1996 California was the first state in the United States to legalise medicinal cannabis. This was a historic moment, as it is well known that the U.S. plays an important role in the global ban on cannabis and the overall failure that is the War on Drugs. After California, more states followed, until now as many as 20 of the 50 states have legalised medicinal marijuana and two of them – Colorado and Washington – have recently even decriminalized recreational use. The federal government of the U.S. never agreed to this. Under federal law, cannabis is on the list of banned substances and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) must ensure that citizens do not violate drug laws.

  • Le dialogue bahreïnien dans son bourbier. Ici le Ministre de la Justice explique les raisons du piétinement.

    Bahrain’s Minister of Justice on the National Dialogue | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT
    http://www.aawsat.net/2013/07/article55309035

    Q: A document from opposition organizations that was posted on the Internet spoke about what they termed “balanced representation” and the necessity of changing the political representation equation at the negotiating table by replacing the representatives of the legislative authority with independent individuals. How do you see this particular issue?

    Such a discourse arouses two significant points: First, it is unreasonable that now that four months of prolonged sessions and negotiations have passed, one of the sides suddenly attempts to impose a change on the structure of the negotiations without any convincing legal or political reason. This raises significant questions about the goal of such a discourse, which in my assessment seems to be an obstacle to progress towards the objectives of the dialogue.

    Second, accepting such a discourse regarding a major component of national dialogue—independent representatives of the legislative authority, who perform a vital role in the present and the future in smoothing the process to consensus and dialogue—would be an insult to the legislative authority and to the individuals who represent it, as well as to the role it is performing in Bahrain’s political arena. This must be clear, particularly as MPs, for example, are elected individuals whose legitimacy is unquestioned. The current parliament represents 52 percent of eligible voters, hence it is clear that such a discourse does not serve national consensus.

  • Saudi to keep ban on churches – minister
    http://www.arabianbusiness.com/saudi-keep-ban-on-churches-minister-499626.html

    Saudi Arabia has no plans to lift a long-standing ban on the construction of non-Muslim places of worship, according the Gulf kingdom’s Minister of Justice.
    In comments to Saudi media on Thursday, Mohammed Al-Issa said that the country is "home to the Muslim holy places, it does not allow the establishment of non-Muslim places of worship”. Al-Issa is currently on an official trip to Brussels.

  • Libya: The Ruined Revolution | As‘ad AbuKhalil | Al Akhbar English
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/angry-corner/libya-ruined-revolution

    Western oil companies are scrambling to get a foothold in the new Libya, just as they competed to win favor with Qaddafi’s’s regime. The Libyan Transitional Council does not bode well: it is headed by Qaddafi’s Minister of Justice and his second-in-command is the former mentor of none other than Gaddafi’s son Sayf Al-Islam. The Gaddafi era may have ended, but with NATO in charge, it is likely that the new leader of Libya is another Hamid Karzai or an even more compliant client of Western powers. Mustafa Abd al-Jalil will be the weakest leader of any Middle East country; With NATO in charge, it is certain that Libya won’t be free. For that to happen, the Libyan people have to rise up again, this time against the external forces of colonial powers, and against the reactionary ideologies that the new Libyan government will bring along with it.