Saturday, August 22, 2009
Unable to stand up to Republican terrorists like Sens. Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe, President Obama instead chose to flex his administration’s muscle by snatching a Lebanese contractor for the crime of bribery but not before he was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration.
Unlike terrorism suspects during the George W. Bush administration who were picked-up, harshly interrogated and imprisoned overseas, Raymond Azar was flown to a Washington DC suburb for a case involving inflated invoices.
Azar, 45, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit bribery, the only charge against him. He faces a maximum of five years in prison, but a sentence of 2 1/2 years or less is likely under Federal guidelines.
Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch, called the case “bizarre.”
“He was treated like a high-security terrorist instead of someone accused of a relatively minor white-collar crime,” she said.
Obama Justice Department lawyers have denied any misconduct in the case.
In court papers, Azar said he was denied his eyeglasses, not given food for 30 hours and put in a freezing room after his arrest by “more than 10 men wearing flak jackets and carrying military style assault rifles.” Azar also said he was shackled and forced to wear a blindfold, dark hood and earphones for up to 18 hours on a Gulfstream V jet that flew him from Bagram air base, outside Kabul, to Virginia.
Before the hood was put on, he said, one of his captors waved a photo of Azar’s wife and four children and warned Azar that he would “never see them again” unless he confessed.
“Frightened for his immediate safety and under the belief he would end up in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib to be tortured,” Azar signed a paper he did not understand, his lawyers told the court.
From the Left 
So the Obama administration is using rendition to prosecute people for bloated invoices? Somehow, the punishment does not fit the crime. You really have to wonder why anyone would want to work for the U.S. government? If you drink one too many cups of coffee, you could wind up in a gulag.
What a silly use of government resources.
Bloated invoices now meet the threshold for a rendition case?
This makes about as much sense as arresting protesters who flipped “the Bird” to Bush or Cheney during a rare appearance before their subjects.
And The Bugman will be on Dancing With the Has-Beens. I love this country.
Barack Bush strikes again.
I think it’s disturbing that folks are making the assumption that what this guy is claiming actually happened.
BTW, let’s be a bit more honest in our blog posts, shall we? From the article this post is based on:
“Arrested along with Azar was Dinorah Cobos, 52, a naturalized American from Honduras. Cobos, who did not make the same claims of abuse, this week pleaded guilty to conspiracy and bribery.
Their case is different from the widely criticized “extraordinary renditions” carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks. In those cases, CIA teams snatched suspected Al Qaeda members and other alleged terrorists overseas and flew them, shackled and hooded, to prisons outside the United States without any arrest warrants or other judicial proceedings.”