Pentagon lawyer regrets Seminole-al Qaeda analogy

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon lawyer regrets Seminole-al Qaeda analogy
By CAROL ROSENBERG
[e-mail]
Posted on Friday, 04.08.11

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon’s top lawyer has sent the Seminole Tribe of Florida what amounts to an apology for Guantánamo war court lawyers likening al Qaeda to the Native American tribe in 1818.

But Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson made clear in the single-page letter that the U.S. government was standing by its precedent from Gen. Andrew Jackson’s Indian Wars in its bid to uphold the life-time conviction of Osama bin Laden’s media secretary at Guantánamo’s Camp Justice.

“I regret any larger suggestion that the Seminole Tribe should be equated with al Qaeda,” Johnson wrote in an April 7 letter. “I understand why the members of the Tribe and many others would take offense at the suggestion.”

Johnson pointed out in the letter that war court prosecutors had written the military commissions review panel “clarifying the legal point they originally intended to make” – that the analogy “could have benefited from greater precision” but was a valid precedent.

"The morality or propriety of General Jackson’s military operation in Florida is irrelevant,” they wrote.



unhappycamper comment: Ah, the Indian Wars that we used to conquer Florida. The United States has been a violent society for a loooong time.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Talk about a classic Freudian Slip.

Yesterday's terrorists are converted into today's terrorists. Indigent people have always been the "terrorists" in their minds.