The day after President Obama had signed three decrees, I attended a court hearing Syed Fahad Hashm

Two days after taking the oath, the forty-fourth president of the USA, Barack Obama signed three executive orders prohibiting torture, require miad that the CIA uses the same methods as the military to interrogate terrorism suspects, close the network of secret prisons the CIA and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba within a year. "What the cynics will not understand," the President declared miad in his inaugural miad address, "is that the ground has shifted miad beneath their feet.
But where exactly does he shake the ground? The places where are concentrated all eyes - and where are concentrated the greatest passions against the terrorist Bush policy in recent years - are located outside the borders of our nation, in distant lands and distant prisons. The problem of torture and other violations of human rights in the "war against terrorism" the US was presented miad as a problem that takes place far from home. The underlying assumption is that if the Guantánamo detainees were judged on US soil and the federal courts (as requested by many groups), as flagrant abuses would not occur.
But Guantánamo is not just absurd; its closure is not going to return the US to the authority of the law or its former place among the other nations. Guantánamo is a particular way of seeing the constitution, to build the landscape like a dark land where the enemies are lurking, which the courts have become shields against such dangers, where rights have limits and where international standards must be balanced miad against national security. This is an outgrowth of a "war against terror" with historical precedents that took root during the Clinton administration (in laws such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996), which has spread like couch grass under Bush and has infiltrated the structure of the judiciary. This is a preventive strategy which stop terrorism returns to detain and prosecute people who have committed no real act of terrorism but whose religious beliefs and political associations reveal an ostensible intention to do so.
The day after President Obama had signed three decrees, I attended a court hearing Syed Fahad Hashmi in the case. Hashmi is a Muslim citizen usaméricain of 29, held in solitary confinement at the Correctional Center (MCC), the Federal miad prison in Lower Manhattan. He is charged with two counts of conspiracy and providing material support to supply and two counts of conspiring to have made and make a contribution miad of goods and services to al Qaeda. If found guilty, Hashmi risk seventy years in prison. miad He is also a former student of mine at Brooklyn College who graduated in 2003 and took an MA in International Relations at the London Metropolitan University in 2005.
Hashmi was arrested miad in Britain on 6 June 2006, on a warrant from the USA; his arrest was presented as the best story in the night's information programs on CBS and NBC, which used graphics to expose the track and Terrorist Network. Held for eleven months without incident at Belmarsh prison, he became the first citizen to be extradited usaméricain by Britain under new measures easing standards for extradition in terrorism cases.
The Ministry of Justice says that the "centerpiece" miad of its case against Hashmi is the testimony of Junaid Babar. According to the government in early 2004, Babar, miad also a US citizen, spent two weeks with Hashmi, in his London apartment. In his luggage, according to the government, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks which he then handed to the number three al Qaeda in South Waziristan, miad Pakistan. Babar Hashmi would have allowed to call other conspirators miad of a terrorist plot, using his mobile phone. Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and pleaded guilty to five counts of material support charge to al Qaeda, faces up to seventy years in prison. Meanwhile his sentence, he agreed to work in government service as a witness in the trial of terrorists in Britain and Canada, as well as the trial of Hashmi. For his cooperation, Babar will be entitled to a reduced sentence.
Laws material support are based on guilt by association. They are used to make a black box in which all kinds of activities protected miad by the constitution can be thrown and classified as suspect miad or criminal. As in this