Amnesty International has released a new report detailing what al Qaeda, rebranded Ansar al-Sharia in several Arab Spring states, has been up to.
In one case, 28-year-old Saleh Ahmed Saleh al-Jamli was found guilty by a religious court in the town of Ja’ar of planting electronic devices in two vehicles carrying Ansar al-Shari’a commanders.
The ruling obtained by Amnesty said the devices had enabled U.S. drones to kill commanders in Zinjibar and claimed Saleh al-Jamli ‘confessed’ to a judicial committee.
The court ruled that Saleh al-Jamli should be killed, and his remains crucified. Meanwhile, Ansar al-Shari’a amputated the hand of at least one person suspected of theft.
One of them was a young man Amnesty met whose left hand had been amputated in a public square in Ja’ar.
He was arrested along with two of his friends by members of the armed group and accused of stealing electric wires.
The friends were eventually released but the youth, a member of a marginalised community widely referred to as al-akhdam (servants), said that he was tortured for five days without access to a lawyer or his family, and then had his left hand amputated without attending a trial and without prior knowledge of the punishment.
Amnesty has been given a 90-second video appearing to show the amputation being carried out. Residents told Amnesty that the amputated hand was later suspended by a rope in the town’s market for all to see.
Is there any chance that US intelligence agencies knew of any of this activity prior to the 9-11 Ansar al-Sharia attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya? Um, the Director of National Intelligence says it still can’t manage to figure out who changed a set of talking points that went to US Ambassador Susan Rice, so…they probably knew, and Barack Obama knew, but he lied about it all on the campaign trail anyway until that Benghazi attack forced him to change his story.
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