How senior Locog director and dissembler Bari misrepresents the evidence of spying, money laundering and internet incitement against Babar Ahmad.
Astonishing silence of the UK MSM in this regard
Babar Ahmad
Leader of the notorious East London Mosque Dr Mohammed Bari is always vocal on the subject of British injustice. He has defended long-held terror suspect Babar Ahmad and opposed his extradition to the US in every medium that will entertain his one-sided accounts. Ahmad has been held for seven years without trial: but Bari and his ilk always edit out the powerful evidence against Ahmad….and why he languishes in a British prison. The Slog details it in full.
‘Along with four other British Muslim terror suspects, [Babar] Ahmad has just lost a battle against extradition from Britain to the United States in the European Court of Human Rights. He is accused of running a terrorist website,’ wrote Mohammed Bari in the desperately liberal Huffington Post last April, “Whilst some of our senior politicians have expressed their delight at this verdict, this case raises serious questions about the fairness of justice in Britain.”
Well, it would also raise serious doubts about the ECHR’s fairness too, Mr Bari. But the fact is that the European Court has a long and occasionally insane record of turning down the extradition of the guilty, or overturning guilty verdicts against the run of play. If even the ECHR thinks the US should have Ahmad, the chances are the bloke is a bad guy.
But this is all supposition. Let’s instead look at some of the facts our beloved EU Court might have taken into account. But first, I offer you a classic example of Bari’s familiar dissembling:
‘Babar Ahmad is the longest serving British detainee-without-charge, having been held in a high-security prison for eight years. If this is not a violation of human rights, then what is?’
Ahmad himself has made much of this in his sympathy drive – for example, in this poem:
By Babar Ahmad
Six years
Of pain …
Of despair …
Of injustice…
Of torture.
Six years
Of evil …
Of darkness …
Of fear …
Of uncertainty.
Six years
Of hatred …
Of racism …
Of malice …
Of lies.
Six years
Of births …
Of weddings …
Of deaths …
Of life.
Six years
Of prayers …
Of yearning …
Of dreams …
Of hopes.
Six years
Of waiting …
Of hope …
Of waiting …
Of hope.
Well, the reason you’ve been awaiting trial for eight years Mr Ahmad is that Mohammed Bari and dozens of other radicals have been fighting extradition to the US tooth and nail. So it isn’t really on for him (or them) to claim this as some form of dastardly lettre de cachet: the Count of Monte Christo he isn’t.
Just 13 days after Dr Bari’s impassioned declaration of Babar’s innocence, the BBC (that hotbed of liberal and Islamic sympathisers, and despiser of all things empirical) wrote on 24th April this year about what had been revealed during the recorded testimony of convicted wannabe shoe-bomber Saajid Badat ten weeks ago in the UK, prior to a Jury hearing in Brooklyn:
‘Details have emerged of how Badat was radicalised by Babar Ahmad, a British terrorist suspect who has been held for over seven years awaiting extradition to the US on terrorism charges….Badat explained how, after leaving home as a teenager, he was first introduced to radical Islam in south London. He was befriended by Babar Ahmad….The jury heard how Mr Ahmad arranged for Badat to receive “training in taking up arms”, and that “when we talked about jihad it meant armed jihad, taking up arms”.
Says Mohammed Bari, ‘Why did the US want him extradited to America? It was on the grounds that he supported “terrorism” in the 1990s, which Ahmad has consistently denied.’ He would, wouldn’t he? But that’s not what Saajid Badat says. OK, perhaps Badat has been coached into saying such a thing: the world of security is as murky as it is frequently incompetent. So what other clues are around as to the guilt or innocence of Ahmad?
The BBC again, a decade ago in 2002:
‘Azzam.com is one of the most well-known supporters of jihad, or holy war, on the internet….The website also attacks organisations such as the American Muslim Council and Britain’s Muslim Council for supporting Western action against Afghanistan. Faiz Rahman, a spokesman for the American Muslim Council, says the site is run by a minority of extremists. “We have seen these people, these groups in every faith in every community. I have been through the site, and it is a very clear cut website. Basically they are trying to recruit people and they seem to be desperate,” Mr Rahman said.’
So, the site recruits people for terrorist actions, is denounced by moderate US Muslims, and thinks the BMC ‘weak’. I think that would qualify it as pretty radical. The US Federal authories have made it very clear all along that they have strong evidence to show that Babar Ahmad and Syed Tahla Ahsan created and operated Azzam Publications, and recruited/supplied Islamist holy warriors fighting Western forces in Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan. Both are under indictment in Connecticut — Ahmad since 2004 and Ahsan since 2006 — for conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, and conspiring to kill or maim people in a foreign country. Ahmad also is accused of money-laundering.
Another misleading extract from the Bari argument:
‘His legal team have all along been pleading that he be tried in the UK – where the alleged crimes took place, and the evidence was obtained.’
The above details suggest very strongly that this is simply untrue: Ahmad and his partner Ahsan were attracting 5 million hits a day globally on the Azzam site. But his background in the UK does support his positioning by the authorities as an internet conspirator. A computer expert formerly employed by Imperial College in London, Babar Ahmad was among the operators of Azzam, and widely considered a pioneer in the use of the Internet as a propaganda and fundraising tool for terror groups. The US accusation details how he helped run the Azzam network of websites from about 1997 until U.S. and British authorities shut it down in 2004.
Dr Bari admits any of this detail in his various lopsided accounts of ‘British injustice’, and how the British ‘slavishly’ go along with the US/UK extradition treaty without evidence. I’ve asked around among New York and Washington contacts about how safe the US claims are, and what if anything they could tell me about additional charges. This from the most liberal of those contacts, a heavy-hitting lawyer based in New York:
“First up, Babar Ahmad has always claimed his Azzam site was purely British. I’m told by Federal sources that this is completely untrue and very easily documented a such. Ahmad chose to suggest that, because he knew his chances of getting off were far greater in England. I can also report that Ahmad is heavily implicated in espionage activities against the US navy. He has been traced as the guy who turned a naval rating aboard a destroyer. The British security authorities found classified naval documents in his possession, and these without question helped tip the balance in the European Court’s decision to extradite. The money-laundering aspect has not, I understand, been hard to trace…it ws pretty amateur, frankly. Finally, the email links to him and rebel Chechen leaders are apparently irrefutable.”
I wonder what Dr Mohammed Bari makes of those allegations, and whether he’d care to engage in finding evidence of their falsehood.
As the distinguished British journalist Andrew Gilligan has demonstrated on numerous occasions, Bari’s assertions and promises are not to be trusted. Yet as I posted yesterday, this man is a senior member of Locog, the organisation charged with choosing the Olympics security supplier, and as such privy to sensitive security documentation and plans.
Since I posted that piece, not one MSM journalist has touched the story. Why not? Mohammed Bari represents a clear and present security risk of the highest order. Who is trying to black out this reality?
The Slog 