Why was Irek Hamidullin tried in a Virginia court? He is an enemy combatant. He was fighting the U.S. as part of the Taliban’s war against the U.S. If the U.S. had brought every Nazi officer it captured to the U.S. and made him stand trial, it would have slowed down the war effort, perhaps fatally, and created unimaginable chaos. And that’s where we are now. This is a product of the Obama Administration’s unwillingness to face the fact that we are in a war at all.
Meanwhile, here is yet another convert to Islam who somehow got the Islamophobic idea that his new religion mandated warfare against unbelievers.
“U.S. jury finds Taliban fighter guilty on terrorism charges,” by Gary Robertson, Reuters, August 7, 2015:
A former Soviet army officer accused of being a Taliban fighter was found guilty of terrorism charges on Friday by a federal jury in Richmond, Virginia, a court official said.
Irek Hamidullin, 55, a former Soviet tank commander who converted to Islam, faced 15 counts ranging from supporting terrorists to firearms charges stemming from his orchestration of a 2009 attack on an Afghan Border Police base in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost province.
He was the first military prisoner from Afghanistan to be tried in a U.S. federal court. The jury of seven men and five women deliberated more than eight hours before reaching their verdict.
Prosecutors portrayed Hamidullin as the mastermind of the attack whose goal was to lure U.S. troops into a trap and then pound them with heavy weapons and shoot down U.S. helicopters.
“He clearly was setting up for American forces he knew would respond,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney James Gillis.
Hamidullin faces a maximum penalty of life in prison when he is sentenced on Nov. 6….