Hey you, what's YOUR intention?

28/08/2006 Written by Roberto Preatoni

On Wednes­day the New South Wales Supreme Court jury con­demned a pakistan-​born archi­tect, named Faheem Khalid Lodhi, to a 20-​years-​long deten­tion for charges linked to ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties.

The jury found him guilty of hav­ing tried to buy chem­i­cals that could be used to make explo­sives and they proved that he was nego­ti­at­ing the pur­chase of maps of the national power grid, using a false name.

Dur­ing the trial, the pros­e­cu­tor dis­played evi­dences that con­vinced the jury about Lodhi’s com­mit­ment, or at least his deep inter­est, in ter­ror­ism: indeed not only he tried to buy chem­i­cal com­po­nents that could be com­bined together to pro­duce a bomb, but also did he pos­sess fif­teen pages of hand­writ­ten notes in Urdu, Pakistan’s offi­cial lan­guage, con­tain­ing instruc­tions on mak­ing petrol bombs, poi­son, cyanide gas, sul­fu­ric acid, hand grenades and other explo­sive devices. More­over, hun­dreds of files relat­ing to Islamic extrem­ism and U.S. mil­i­tary train­ing man­u­als were found on his computer…

While pro­nounc­ing the con­vic­tion, the judge said that the plot appeared to be in “very pre­lim­i­nary” stages but that tough pun­ish­ment was needed any­way because Lodhi’s actions “dis­played an inten­tion on his part that a vio­lent ter­ror­ist act or acts would be car­ried out in Aus­tralia.”

He got on claim­ing that “It car­ried the obvi­ous con­se­quence that, if car­ried out, it would instil ter­ror into mem­bers of the pub­lic so that they could never again feel free from the threat of bomb­ing attacks within Aus­tralia.”
In Aus­tralia, this is the third con­vic­tion on a case of ter­ror­ism after the pro­mul­ga­tion of anti-​terrorism laws, that were approved in response to ⁹⁄₁₁ attacks in the United States.

The con­tro­ver­sial aspect of this story is that the Aus­tralian anti-​terrorism plan, is based on laws that are con­sid­ered by crit­ics as “hav­ing a lower stan­dard of proof than other crim­i­nal laws”, but accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment hey are nec­es­sary to pro­vide proper pro­tec­tion from ter­ror­ism to the coun­try.

Just one thought here at Zone-​H, at least from my side:

Q: Am I deeply inter­ested in ter­ror­ism?

A: Yes

Q: Do I posses fif­teen pages writ­ten in hurdu con­tain­ing instruc­tions on mak­ing bombs, killing peo­ple etc?

A: Yes, actu­ally I do posses much more than 15 pages and in more than one language

Q: Do I posses hun­dreds of files related to Islamic extrem­ism?

A: Yes, thou­sands actu­ally

Q: Do I have US mil­i­tary train­ing man­u­als on my computer?

A: Yes, and this is due to the fact that most of the mate­r­ial used by Al Qaeda is most of the times some kind of CIA taco with Islamic sauce.

Q: Do I have inten­tion to get power grid plans? SCADA pen­e­tra­tion test­ing man­u­als? SCADA vul­ner­a­bil­ity whitepapers?

A: Absolutely yes

and finally:

Q: am I a terrorist?

A: Cer­tanly not, my inter­ests in the mat­ter is purely jour­nal­is­tic, most of the mate­r­ial that could be used to tell that I am a ter­ror­ist in a trial was actu­ally taken from the Inter­net, where every­one could find it.

See, we all want to put ter­ror­ists on trial, we all hate ter­ror­ists (Islamic and non-​Islamic) but when it comes the time that you get tri­aled for your “inten­tions” , espe­cially if your case could be used to give a good exam­ple, then I don’t feel any­more that the Sys­tem is right. Do you?