Also today in Minneapolis, the verdict was handed down to the two Somali women from the Minneapolis area accused of fundraising for al-Shabaab. Both were found guilty and face jail time.
Members of the Twin Cities’ Somali community, Homeland Security, and media gathered outside the courthouse in downtown Minneapolis to await the verdict.
Crowds and media gather in front of the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis, 12:30 p.m., Oct. 20, 2011. (Photo: Dan Menssen)
From the Star Tribune:
Amina Farah Ali, 35, and Hawo Mohamed Hassan, 64, were the first people to go on trial in connection with a sweeping federal investigation into alleged recruitment and fundraising activities in Minnesota for Al-Shabab — classified by U.S. authorities in February 2008 as a foreign terrorist organization.
Under U.S. law, it is illegal to support a foreign terrorist group.…
Prosecutors said Ali and Hassan were part of a “deadly pipeline” that supplied money and fighters from the United States to Somalia. They said from September 2008 through July 2009, the women conspired to provide material support to Al-Shabab, knowing it was considered a terrorist group.
Lawyers for Ali and Hassan, however, said that their clients did not know about the designation and were sincere in their efforts to help the needy back in Somalia. As survivors of war themselves, and as religious women, they felt compelled to aid those still struggling in Somalia, the defense argued.
Both Ali and Hassan, who are U.S. citizens, were charged with one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.
Ali also faced 12 counts of providing support for allegedly sending more than $8,600 to Al-Shabab from September 2008 through July 2009.
Additionally, Hassan was charged with lying to FBI agents.
…
Each terrorism count carries a 15-year maximum prison sentence, while lying to the FBI carries an eight-year maximum sentence.
Media and Homeland Security sit outside the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis after the verdict has been passed. Oct. 20, 2011.
In July 2009, the homes of both of these women were searched as part of an FBI probe into the “disappearance” of about twenty men from the Twin Cities.
“Authorities believe the young Somali-American men are fighting with an extremist militia called Al-Shabaab, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group.”
But eventually the women were accused, and today convicted, of knowingly aiding al-Shabab with donations of money and clothes. It has been over two years since their initial encounter with the FBI.
I would be interested to know if the Lewiston/Portland (ME) Somali communities are likewise galvanized by this verdict.
h/t Dan Menssen
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Over here in the adult section, which is actually the kiddies’ section, I may say that I think we should round up all the Somalis we come across and ask them in the nicest way possible if they feel safe to express themselves on the legitimacy of the attempt to save their kind from terrorism.
Now Frank Kafka made clear that the people outside the Castle assume that the people in the Castle are insane and so try to match life in the periphery to that they imagine going on in the center. This is bourgeois, buergerlich, this is normal, this is castledom.
But people here live and work in the Castle and could tell us if they wanted to if the Castle is actually insane. If you ask your boss in the Castle if your current project is supposed to make sense, do they throw you in the moat?
The premise of law (“a mandate of reason promulgated by authority for the common good”–Aquinas: top that if you can) is that people with power are willing and able to explain their actions. I don’t think you can define “mandate”, “reason”, or “authority” without that premise. Furthermore, the term “common good” has to extend that premise to the non-powerful, so that the beneficiaries of governmental action, which is what law produces, actually find the action helpful: the explanation has to make sense to them.
Essentially burning two Somali women as witches in order to keep Satan at bay there in Somalia lest he leap across into Djibouti and threaten the French Foreign Legion base there, doesn’t sound very reasonable out here in the periphery. I wonder what they say about it inside the Castle.
I suspect that law is any reasonable conversation–that any reasonable conversation generates law–so that the Castle will be lawful if it has reasonable conversations. The fact that it isn’t lawful (except in the bare sense of our being able to predict its actions by an ascribed rationale–”bare” in that the apparent motive of the Castle is to destroy the world) means either that they don’t talk at all in there, and fling cruise missiles around willy-nilly, or conduct all conversations according to strict scripts (including stage directions, such as storming out with a hurt and bewildered look on one’s face). Hence my suggestion about getting tossed into the moat.
What is the cure for such deliberate inanity (that’s insanity without the s)? If people refuse to speak reasonably, other people have the right to hold both sides of the missing conversation, as long as they do justice to the inane group’s position.
Finally, let me define insanity (that’s inanity with an s added between the first n and the a). It is the belief that one can disclaim responsibility for one’s actions, including the action of the disclaimor. It is in effect the belief that one floats in a bubble of one’s own making. So, for example, one can burn down the world and not hurt oneself. Naturally this makes conversation with others a total waste of time, since they don’t exist unless the insane person makes them exist. Granting them autonomous existence is to give up the whole idea of one’s own autonomy in the absolute, as opposed to procedural, sense. That is, for the insane, self-naming is self-creating, whereas, to the sane, self-naming is relative to what the other person calls one, hence a willingness to negotiate the terms of one’s existence. This creates the reciprocity whereby one can also negotiate the terms of the other person’s existence.
Ignoring “other” people is not an effective reality-management technique. Castles are, in that sense (which is probably the sense Frank had in mind in 1924 or so), obsolete or even a mistake in the very concept. “If I wanted your opinion, I wouldn’t have enslaved you to build me this castle.”
So what do the people outside do? They wait for the castle to catch fire and burn down, which castles tend to do. Even the most zealous commuters keep one eye on the fire-escape, calculating to outrace the effects of their own fiduciary pyromania. The support network of these commuters, which consists of most of the rest of the periphery, treasure their comfort in the glow of the prospective blaze.
So where do the just abide? Out in the fire-proof wastes? On the contrary, like Vernon Johns, Jr’s, father exhorted him, “If you see a good fight, get in it.” They try, that is, to get elected president of the board of directors of the castle corporation by/in-order-to convincing/e the directors to retool the castle into a recreational destination catering to the insane and inane in a sort of “vacation-at-a-working-ranch” approach to nation-building. “Here is our former king, who now takes care of the former court cat. Smile at the nice people, Bibi. Bibi likes people, but the cat is a little mean.”
This comment is an example of such impertinence, I hope. Don’t you just hate the whole idea of pertness? I’m wrong: it means evident or apparent–in effect, open in heart and manner–whereas “impertinent” means you don’t measure up to someone else’s idea of what pertains. So it’s good to be pert, which is impertinent, which is a contradiction except that they have different roots. Which is what conversation is about.