Poison Stinger

Key Evidence Cast in Doubt on a Claim of Terrorism

Federal prosecutors acknowledged possible flaws yesterday in a major piece of evidence used in their case against two leaders of an Albany mosque on charges that they supported terrorism.

[…]

Prosecutors said they were given information from the Defense Department that a notebook with Mr. Aref’s name and address had been found in what they said was a terrorist training camp in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border. They also said that a word in the notebook, written in Arabic, had referred to Mr. Aref as “commander.”

As it turns out, the word is Kurdish, albeit written using the Arabic alphabet, and the translation may be incorrect. “Commander” could be translated as “brother,” according to federal prosecutors.

Nijyar Shemdin, the United States representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Washington, reviewed a copy of the page at the request of The New York Times and said he did not see how a translation would have come up with the word “commander.”

Mr. Shemdin said that Mr. Aref is referred to with the common honorific, “kak,” which could mean brother or mister, depending on the level of formality.

[…]

In court last week, Mr. Kindlon did not have access to the note, and he expressed frustration at having to rebut the clearly ominous implications of the word “commander.”

[…]

The judge gave the prosecution seven days to give the defense a copy of the note. The prosecutors asked the Defense Department for a copy, which they received and had the F.B.I. translate independently. That brought the discrepancy to light.

Mr. Kindlon said his client would seek a new bail hearing.

He said that Mr. Aref, a Kurd, had three brothers in northern Iraq and that there was no independent verification that the note had been found in a terrorist training camp. According to court documents, United States soldiers found the document on June 12, 2003, near the town of Rawah.

The sting operation being conducted in Albany was already underway then and was not tied to the discovery of the note, according to court documents.

[…]

However, many of the conversations between the informant and the men were in Urdu, as well as in Arabic and English, and Mr. Kindlon said there might be problems with the translations of those meetings, as well.

In court documents, the government provided only snippets of the conversations already translated.

This case is another one of those travesties in the making, you can tell. It’s a bullshit sting that apparently relies on mistranslated notes the DOD conveniently found in a “terrorist training camp” in Iraq after the sting had already been initiated.

Evidently, they’ve caught all the active terrorists so they are now busy entrapping random people as a test of their loyalty. Good to know.