veiled4allah: another of the Guantanamo cases falls apart

The New York Times reports:

The Air Force has dropped three counts in an espionage case against a Syrian-born airman who worked as a translator at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The lawyer for Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi, Donald G. Rehkopf Jr., said on Saturday that once those charges were removed, "simply the gut of the case was gone."

A single count in the charge that accused the airman of "aiding the enemy," a capital offense, was dropped. Also dropped were counts that dealt with e-mailing information about detainees and committing espionage by transmitting information to unauthorized recipients. Airman al-Halabi still faces 17 charges. He was arrested in July.

Lt. Gen. William Welser III, commander of the 18th Air Force at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, convening authority for Airman al-Halabi's general court-martial, gave no rationale for his decision to drop the charges.

Good commentary at World O'Crap, which notes:

However, it seems that al-Halabi is still going to be tried for "Serving unauthorized pastry, i.e., non-military baklava." But if al-Halabi didn't transmit classified information to unauthorized recipients, didn't email any prisoner information, and didn't aid the enemy, then it appears that all he may have done was unwisely collect greetings from the prisoners, presumably with the idea of someday, somehow, passing them along to the prisoners' families. Which (as I opined back in September) would constitute a security breech [sic] and disobedience to orders, but would hardly pose a serious threat to our national security, and would in no way suggest that "we just can't trust those Muslims, since they may all be spies," and some pundits suggested.

World O'Crap also reviews the overheated rhetoric from right-wing commentators about the Guantanamo cases and calls for some apologies from these people.