Posted on March 28 at 12:19 a.m. (Suggest removal)

They DIDN'T agree to participate in the assassination of a diplomat!! Can't you tell fact from fiction? THEY did not plot this, it was NOT generated by them, the GOVERNMENT plotted this, the government made it up. And if you read the evidence, neither man "got" any connection between the loans that were taking place and the fiction (as in: novel, best-seller, imagination, not true/not real/not actual) of the assassination mumblings. There was NEVER intent on anybody's part, rat or victims or government, to assassinate anybody. Assistant US Attorney General James Comey said, at the sentencing: "There is no evidence of terrorist activity." These men were not convicted of trying to assassinate anybody, they were led on and entrapped by a criminal ratting to save his own worthless skin, who was himself zombied and supported and handsomely paid by the government, who turned a loan 10 months later into his fictional plot. This is what the government calls "material support of terrorism." Doesn't that make you feel nice and safe for when the real terrorists come by?

But I salute your open heart, and agree the men should be given another chance--by having their convictions overturned and coming home to their families, where they should have been all along.

On Should the convictions of Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, the two Albany Muslims accused of supporting terrorism, be overturned by a federal appeals court?

Posted on March 27 at 11:51 p.m. (Suggest removal)

ehgauss: Fertile ground is not an actionable offense, last time I looked. Your analogy to statutory rape is specious. Remember the Duke lacrosse case, where the prosecutor knew all along that there was NO EVIDENCE of rape, yet went forward anyway? Now THAT's a US government official I'm sure to trust. Last time I looked there, he was disbarred and barely escaped criminal charges. (And your Tristan and Isolde commentary here in this discussion isn't in need of umlauts--or, rather, it isn't umlauts that you require, good and arrogant sir.)

The only fertile ground that existed in the Aref-Hossain case was in the rat's programmed instructions to save his own skin, the FBI's novel-writing attempt, and the US prosecutor's willingness to use public smear and ethnic profiling to create terrorists where there were none, since the existence of the JTTF in Albany, the capital of New York, had to be justified somehow--in short, in the mind of the GOVERNMENT, not the victims. Thought-crime isn't in the penal code. (Do double-check Orwell's 1984, since we're discussing novels). In addition, if you had been reading the news of the basis of the appeals, you would see that the definition of money laundering is hardly graven in stone, and is currently before the Supreme Court for review. And hey, what about that secret evidence? Did the jury have all the evidence? Did the judge flat-out tell the jury that it didn't have all the evidence, that it wasn't likely it would ever get all the evidence--but that was to be "no concern of theirs?" I think there's a pesky old document, the Constitution, and that even more annoying document, the Bill of Rights, that guarantees a defendant the right to confront all the evidence against him--except, of course, for "national security" reasons, defined and delineated by the very same government that encouraged the witch hunt of two Muslim immigrants with dark skin and beards who had NEVER been afoul of the law in all their years here, smearing them, ruining them, and then imprisoning them. I thought the US invaded Iraq to take down a dictator who did the very same thing?

Fellow Americans: QUESTION the government before you rush to judgement. It's OK to do that; you have permission; that's part of being a free citizen of this country. Get all the information, and if something doesn't jive, ask why, and why not? Unlike the government, I didn't make my information up, upon which I base my conclusion that these men are innocent. I read it, researched it, it's there in the evidence. Stop reflexing from fear. One day it might be your kid, or your brother, or you who's in the line of fire of an agent provocateur. Who you gonna call? Your friendly neighborhood FBI agent?

On Muslim appeal (2)