 | Jail. Sorta. Suspended. Y'urp-peon sentencing guidelines. |
PARIS - A French public prosecutor called on Tuesday for five former Guantanamo Bay inmates to be jailed for a year for their links to Al Qaeda and said there was not enough evidence to convict a sixth defendant.
Sonya Djemni-Wagner condemned the men’s detention at the U.S. military camp on the Caribbean island of Cuba but told a terrorism trial at the main Criminal Court in Paris that the men had to pay for their actions. “I do not approve of Guantanamo and I cannot but take into account the detention they endured there. But that detention does not wipe out the wrong they did,” Djemni-Wagner told the court. “Whatever they did, these men did not deserve the fate that was reserved for them, which is unworthy of a democracy,” she said.
| Ah, shuddup and jug 'em. Save the politicizing for your next campaign. |
Should presiding judge Jean-Claude Kross and his two assessors follow her recommendation, the accused will be freed even if convicted because they have spent between 12 and 18 months in French prisons on their return from Guantanamo.
| And 12 months equals five years in Y'urp detention time. |
The prosecutor said five defendants had gone to Afghanistan via London, had been taken in hand by aides to Osama bin Laden and underwent military training in Al Qaeda camps.
| Sounds like five years in American jug time to me ... |
Djemni-Wagner said investigators had failed to prove the guilt of the sixth defendant, Imad Achab-Kanouni, 29. He denied going to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda training camps, saying he went there only to receive fundamentalist Islamic instruction.
| Which is one and the time, but the French court can't bear to admit that ... |
Djemni-Wagner requested terms of four years in prison, three of them suspended, for Khaled ben Mustapha, Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi and Redouane Khalid. She further sought five years in jail, with four suspended, against Brahim Yadel, the only one of the six men held in custody throughout the trial.
| I mean, why make an example? |
Lawyers for all six men say their clients should be freed as the case against them was based on secret interviews conducted by French intelligence agents while the men were held at Guantanamo Bay.
| Make sure their friends all know they sang like canaries ... |
French courts have already ruled detention in the U.S. military facility illegal in their effete opinion, and a report that French intelligence agents had interviewed the men at Guantanamo disrupted the trial on its second day.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement last week it had made no secret of three administrative visits to the camp.
| "We done it in the open!" |
Presiding judge Kross refused to suspend hearings and said he would take the matter into account at the end of the trial. |