It Had To Happen Sometime

By Cernig

A Swedish man is facing a libel case after falsely accusing his son-in-law of being a member of Al Qaeda in an email to the FBI.

The 40-year-old son-in-law and his wife were in the process of divorcing when the husband had to travel to the United States for business.

...When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.

He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

The FBI contacted Swedish intelligence agency Saepo, which discovered that the email tipping off the FBI had been sent from the father-in-law's computer.

The father-in-law has been charged with aggravated libel.

He has admitted sending the email, but said he didn't think "the authorities were so stupid that they would believe anything. But apparently they are."

He said he "couldn't help the US authorities' paranoid reaction".

The son-in-law is lucky he didn't end up at Gitmo for a few years of non-tortuous waterboarding, without habeas rights and awaiting a rigged military tribunal. Which is, according to Amnesty and HRW, why many of the Afghans there are detained - fingered by ill-wishers in return for a hefty US-paid bounty.

This is your country on Republicanism.