In case you’re wondering, yes, I did hie myself down to New York City today (Monday) to hear oral arguments in the case of Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, the two Albany Muslims who are appealing their convictions for supposedly supporting terrorism.

It was a partly festive, partly gloomy occasion – festive as a gathering of some 50 Capital Region supporters of the two men who chartered a bus for the trip, but gloomy finally for the content, which was necessarily a rehash of what had already turned out so badly.

That is, it had already ended in 15-year prison sentences for those two men who had no more connection to terrorism than I did but were duped by the FBI into becoming minor, if counterfeit, trophies in the war on terror.

The arguments were presented before three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, in a large art-deco courtroom on the ninth floor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in lower Manhattan, and if you would like details, I’m sorry, you will have to wait till Thursday and pay 50 cents to read my column in the print version of the Daily Gazette.

I will divulge only that as an improbable sidelight to the proceedings I got to talk on the telephone with Mohammed Hossain, lodged in the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, N.J. Details of that, too, will be forthcoming.