Guilty of communicating with a foreign country & inciting aggression

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11540510/

Syria Cracking Down on Human Rights Activists
Julie Stahl
Jerusalem Bureau Chief
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - A Syrian human rights activists was sentenced to 12 years in prison Thursday for meeting with White House officials two years ago. The move signals that any dissent in the country will not be tolerated.

A Syrian court found Dr. Kamal a-Labwani guilty of "communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria," reports said.

Labwani, a 50-year-old physician, was arrested in 2005 after returning from a two-month trip to the U.S. and Europe where he met with government officials, journalists and other human rights activists.

Ammar Qorabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, was quoted as saying that this was the "harshest judgment" handed down to a "prisoner of conscience" since Syrian President Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000.

Washington condemned the Syrian government for what State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called its "harsh and unjust sentencing" of Labwani.

[dave_p]

1. Who he met

The chief official Labwani had met in 2005 was the hawkish Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch, the neocon protege whose team planned the recent Iraq "surge". It's difficult to see quite what the pair would have to discuss that didn't involve some danger to Syria. At least the guy's alive, unlike hundreds of thousands of civilians in "liberated" Iraq.