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Freedom Fighter Called "Terrorist" by INS
27.3.2008
By Michael Totten
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March 27, 2008
Karen DeYoung published a story in the
Washington Post
that ought to embarrass anyone making decisions
about who deserves permanent residence in the U.S.
Saman Kareem Ahmad is an Iraqi Kurd who worked as a
translator with the Marines in Iraq’s Anbar
Province. He was one of the few selected translators
who was granted asylum in the U.S. because he and
his family were singled out for destruction by
insurgents for “collaboration.” He wants to return
to Iraq as an American citizen and a Marine,www.ekurd.net
and has already been
awarded the Navy-Marine Corps Achievement Medal and
the War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal. Secretary
of the Navy Donald C. Winter and General David
Petraeus wrote notes for his file and recommended he
be given a Green Card, but the Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) declined his
application and called him a “terrorist.”
The INS says Ahmad “conducted full-scale armed
attacks and helped incite rebellions against
Hussein’s regime, most notably during the Iran-Iraq
war, Operation Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi
Freedom” while a member of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP). |
Saman Kareem Ahmad, (L), served with then-Capt.
Trent A. Gibson. Gibson backs Ahmad's application
for permanent U.S. residence |
The KDP is one of two mainstream Kurdish political
parties in Iraq. Kurdistan Regional Government Prime
Minister Nechirvan Barzani is a member of the KDP.
The KDP fought alongside the United States military
as an ally during Operation Iraqi Freedom. After
Operation Desert Storm the KDP fought the Saddam
regime after President George H. W. Bush called on
Iraqis to do so. During the Iran-Iraq War, the KDP
fought the Ba’athists because they were actively
resisting genocide in the Kurdish region where
Saddam used chemical weapons, artillery, air
strikes, and napalm to exterminate them. And he’s a
terrorist?
The Kurds in Iraq–unlike the Kurds in Turkey and the
ever-popular Palestinians– did not use terrorism as
a tactic in their struggle for liberation. They
fought honorably against Saddam’s soldiers, not
against Arab civilians in south and central Iraq.
The INS revealingly refers to the KDP as an
“undesignated” terrorist organization. Which
suggests it’s aware that the KDP isn’t a terrorist
organization but has unilaterally labeled it as one
regardless. The blogger Callimachus thinks it may be
because the Patriot Act defines terrorism as “any
activity which is unlawful under the laws of the
place it was committed.” He correctly points out
that Jews in Hitler’s Warsaw Ghetto were
“terrorists” according to this brainless definition.
This is an absurd inversion of the already absurd
“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter” slogan. Usually this sophomoric claim is
made by terrorists or by leftists who make excuses
for terrorists. This time, the INS is calling an
actual freedom fighter a terrorist.
Somebody should tell Vice President Dick Cheney. He
met with the KDP’s Barzani himself just a few days
ago. “That was a unique and interesting
opportunity,” he said,www.ekurd.net
“to go look at what’s
happened in a part of Iraq that was obviously freed
of Saddam Hussein’s influence when the U.S. went in
there and established the Operation Provide Comfort
at the end of the Gulf War, and then set up the ‘no
fly zones,’ and so forth.” Someone might also want
to inform President George W. Bush, who invited
Ahmad to the White House in 2007.
It’s worth comparing this case with two others.
Sayyed Rahmatullah Hashemi was a spokesman for the
Taliban in Afghanistan, yet he was admitted to Yale
University in 2006, though he wasn’t given a green
card, as far as I can tell. And just a few days ago,
drug-trafficking prostitute and Brazilian national
Andreia Schwartz was offered a green card if she
would reveal what she knows about former New York
Governor Eliot Spitzer. But Saman Ahmad faces
deportation to a country where actual terrorists
threaten to kill him? The law (to say nothing of the
INS) truly is “a ass,” as Mr. Bumble once observed.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
michaeltotten com
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