GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A military court on Wednesday convicted Osama bin Laden's driver of supporting terrorism but acquitted him on the more serious charge of conspiring with al Qaeda in the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War Two.
The trial of Yemeni captive Salim Hamdan at the remote U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was the first full test of the controversial tribunal authorized by the Bush administration to try foreign captives on terrorism charges outside the regular U.S. court system.
The White House welcomed the conviction while human rights and civil liberties groups condemned it.
The judge scheduled a sentencing hearing for Wednesday afternoon for Hamdan, who faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
The jurors deliberated a little over eight hours before reaching their verdict.
Source: Reuters
Hat Tip: United States Action
Commentary
I wish that the military tribunals had begun their prosecutions sooner, and not allowed the America-hating lefties get a perceived upper hand in the Media Battlespace of World War IV. They had better get cracking, because if Obama gets in the White House...he might just let 'em all go, whether guilty or innocent.
Illegal Alien Slime Executed
A Mexican man at the centre of an international legal dispute has been executed in Texas for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1993.
While protesters both for and against the death penalty demonstrated outside the Huntsville Unit near Houston last night, José MedellÃn, 33, died after being given a lethal injection.
The execution came just before 10pm shortly after the US supreme court denied a last request for a reprieve.
Pleas for a stay came from Washington, Mexico and the international court of justice (ICJ).
Source: UK Guardian
Commentary
The liberal Guardian completely misses the whole point. José MedellÃn was human pond scum, and he deserved to die...and got a far too humane path from this life on his way to hell.
He participated in the beating,brutal gang rape, and strangling of two young girls to death in 1993.
1993!
It took 15 years to rid the world of this...person.
If you can stomach it, read this portion of the last hours of the two young lives snuffed out by José MedellÃn and his "friends":
While Jenny and Elizabeth were living the last few hours of their lives, Peter Cantu, Efrain Perez, Derrick Sean O'Brien, Joe Medellin and Joe's 14 year old brother were initiating a new member, Raul Villareal, into their gang, known as the Black and Whites. Raul was an acquaintance of Efrain and was not known to the other gang members. They had spent the evening drinking beer and then "jumping in" Raul. This means that the new member was required to fight every member of the gang until he passed out and then he would be accepted as a member. Testimony showed that Raul lasted through three of the members before briefly losing consciousness.
The gang continued drinking and 'shooting the breeze' for some time and then decided to leave. Two brothers who had been with them but testified that they were not in the gang left first and passed Jenny and Elizabeth, who were unknowingly walking towards their deaths. When Peter Cantu saw Jenny and Elizabeth, he thought it was a man and a woman and told the other gang members that he wanted to jump him and beat him up. He was frustrated that he had been the one who was unable to fight Raul.
The gang members ran and grabbed Elizabeth and pulled her down the incline, off of the tracks. Testimony showed that Jenny had gotten free and could have run away but returned to Elizabeth when she cried out for Jenny to help her.
For the next hour or so, these beautiful, innocent young girls were subjected to the most brutal gang rapes that most of the investigating officers had ever encountered. The confessions of the gang members that were used at trial indicated that there was never less than 2 men on each of the girls at any one time and that the girls were repeatedly raped orally, anally and vaginally for the entire hour. One of the gang members later said during the brag session that by the time he got to one of the girls, "she was loose and sloppy." One of the boys boasted of having 'virgin blood' on him.
The 14-year-old juvenile later testified that he had gone back and forth between his brother and Peter Cantu since they were the only ones there that he really knew and kept urging them to leave. He said he was told repeatedly by Peter Cantu to "get some". He raped Jennifer and was later sentenced to 40 years for aggravated sexual assault, which was the maximum sentence for a juvenile.
When the rapes finally ended, the horror was not over. The gang members took Jenny and Elizabeth from the clearing into a wooded area, leaving the juvenile behind, saying he was "too little to watch". Jenny was strangled with the belt of Sean O'Brien, with two murderers pulling, one on each side, until the belt broke. Part of the belt was left at the murder scene, the rest was found in O'Brien's home. After the belt broke, the killers used her own shoelaces to finish their job. Medellin later complained that "the bitch wouldn't die" and that it would have been "easier with a gun". Elizabeth was also strangled with her shoelaces, after crying and begging the gang members not to kill them; bargaining, offering to give them her phone number so they could get together again.
The medical examiner testified that Elizabeth's two front teeth were knocked out of her brutalized mouth before she died and that two of Jennifer's ribs were broken after she had died. Testimony showed that the girls' bodies were kicked and their necks were stomped on after the strangulations in order to "make sure that they were really dead."
Source: Jennifer and Elizabeth's story on Murder Victims
I will, for one, be celebrating the execution of José MedellÃn.
Moral of the story
Don't be killing people in Texas. I wish that the rest of the states in this country would follow the example of Texas.
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