Friday, January 09, 2004

AN ONGOING TRIAL IN CHICAGO

An alleged spy for Saddam is on trial - his cover - why Press, of course.

They don't understand our freedoms, nor do they appreciate them. But they sure as hell will try to exploit them to their ends.
An intelligence dossier found in Baghdad implicated the publisher of an Arabic-language suburban newspaper in a scheme to spy for the government of Saddam Hussein, prosecutors alleged yesterday in a trial that is shedding light on Hussein's efforts to gather intelligence against Iraqi opposition leaders in the United States.

Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi, 61, was charged in July with being an unregistered agent of Iraq. According to the government, Dumeisi traveled to Iraq to learn the trade of spying, passed on phone records and other sensitive material about Iraqi dissidents, produced news credentials for Iraqi intelligence officers, and alerted his spy handlers to Hussein opponents who phoned in complaints to Dumeisi's newspaper because of coverage favorable to Hussein's regime.

Dumeisi has asserted that he's simply a journalist who cultivated contacts in Iraq as part of his job.

Prosecutors introduced what they said were incriminating documents against Dumeisi during the testimony of a man they said was a former high-ranking intelligence official. The reputed spymaster, identified in court only as "Mr. Sargon," had no personal knowledge of Dumeisi but vouched for the document's authenticity.

Defense attorneys tried to suggest that Dumeisi was not the newspaperman mentioned in the documents, and they had objected to allowing the dossier into evidence. But Judge Suzanne B. Conlon sided with prosecutors, noting that three pages in the dossier were in Dumeisi's handwriting.

Doh!

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