No more safe haven in Britain for Abu Qatada, Al Qaeda's "spiritual advisor"

The New York Times reports that a British court has finally ruled that the government can deport a leading Al Qaeda spiritual advisor to Jordan, even though the country doesn't have a human rights record that would meet European standards.

Al Qaeda's advisor in this case is Abu Qatada who was convicted in absentia in his homeland of Jordan on bombing and conspiracy charges (along with his devoted follower, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq until his death in 2006).

Abu Qatada's significance to the organization can be deduced by the fact that tapes of his sermons were found in the possession of lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, as well as Richard C. Reid, the would-be shoe bomber. He was also the person the Madrid train bombers tried to call to get permission to kill themselves before they blew themselves up to avoid being arrested, according to Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker.

Abu Qatada also ran what Wright describes as the "first jihadi think tank," a magazine that was published out of London during the 1990s called Al Ansar. As the magazine was a vocifierous proponent of the jihad in Algeria, Abu Qatada came to be identified with the GIA, the outfit that gained notoriety for slitting the throats and otherwise massacring tens of thousands of Algerian villagers who the organization deemed to be insufficiently helpful to the jihad.

It was during his tenure at the magazine that Abu Qatada became familiar with Zarqawi, incidentally, when he covered Zarqawi's sedition trial in Jordan. According to Seif al-Adl, another Al Qaeda leader, it was Abu Qatada who introduced Zarqawi to Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Zarqawi ran Al Qaeda in Iraq and was the person responsible for most grisly attacks against civilian targets from 2003 until his death in June last year. His attacks included the Samarra mosque bombing, the event which finally pitted the Shiites against the Sunnis and launched what many describe as Iraq's civil war.

It was also Zarqawi who was behind most of the hostage beheadings, including those of the American contractor, Nicholas Berg and Ken Bigley, the British hostage, which he personally carried out. He also orchestrated the 2005 hotel bombings in his native Jordan, suicide bombings that killed some 70 people, mostly members of a Palestinian family attending a wedding.

Given that these were the types of seeds Abu Qatada has sown, it should not be entirely surprising that Britain would want to be rid of this person. But it wasn't until the July 7, 2005 subway and train bombings, that the British government felt that Abu Qatada's right to live in Britain safely away from Jordanian authorities weighed less than the personal security of Britons, whose lives he was putting in danger with his fiery sermons and various writings.

Human rights advocates and Abu Qatada's attorneys, however, argued until the very last moment that au contraire, the human rights of men like Abu Qatada should prevail over any national security concerns. In particular, they objected to the fact that upon his return to Jordan where he would be headed for prison, he could likely be subject to torture.

The court rejected the defense's arguments in the end, saying that given that Jordanian authorities had promised to refrain from torturing returning terrorism suspects, and had further agreed to monitor the conditions of those incarcerated that should be all the protection that Abu Qatada should require.

Indeed.