Hamzeh has notified me that the charges against Abu Odeh have been dropped.
A military prosecutor has dismissed the case brought against a former cabinet minister who was charged with slandering Jordan’s King Abdullah II and harming national unity. The official Petra news agency reported on Sunday that Adnan Abu-Odeh "will not be tried and the case against him is considered closed," quoting an unnamed attorney general at the military state security court.
Source: [Ajlazeera.net]
Finally, some commonsense. The whole thing was just outrageous!
Granted what you said is true to a great extent, it still doesn’t provide a solid argument. Just because you know someone is bad, doesn’t mean that everything bad comes from them.
I’ve heard of such stories myself and belive them to be credible, but this actually makes it more likely that the government didn’t ask the mufti to file the complaints, because you and I already know that the government has other ways of intimidating folks. And who knows, they might have already used this method against Abu Odeh and sent him a couple of thugs.
You can’t attribute every single negative event in Jordan to the government simply because its overall mode of running the country is negative. Many things probably can be attributed to the government, but every single thing? I don’t think so, and in this instance, all the signs point in the other direction.
“I don’t think it makes sense”
I think it makes very good sense. this is a repressive regime where people get tortured as a business and in return for “dolarat” Uncle Sam, and convictions are known to be based on confessions extracted under tortured. nothing is beneath the regime so i think it’s absurd to think the Abo 3odeh’s ordeal was not orchestrated. i know personally of people who have been harmed by plain clothed thugs only to find out years later those thugs worked for mukhabarat.
hkj, I don’t think it makes sense that in order to intimidate this person or to discourage others from acting the same way, the government would ask someone to file a case against him only then to dismiss it within just two days!
I don’t think you would disagree that Jordan is not free of people who would try to suck up to the regime. What prevents one of those people to go ahead and file their complaint against someone like Abu Odeh?
hamzeh, so what if you know the name of the plaintiff? who said the parasite has to have a fake identity? jordan has as many informants as law-abiding citizens, one of the great contributions of the regime, other than increasing poverty, corruption, and criminal lawlessness on the streets of jordan, among other memorable contributions.
kuhg, like you correctly mention, when the story first came out I myself was skeptical of the story that the complaint was filed by independent citizens, but now that we know that the individual who filed the complaint was actually identified and named, the signs all point towards the more likely scenario that it was truely all based on independent action. It’s not impossible, given that the law allows it; it makes it even more likely.
the complaint should have been summarily rejected. there are provisions in the Jordanians law for this but they decided to rattle some sabers. second, few Jordanians belive this is independent “citizen action” since there is no such thing in jordan when it comes to attacking freedoms of expression. this traditional regime thetrics and we know we it all to well, unfortunately.
“wala 7ad”, I think no damage has been done due to this attempt by one individual acting on his own to charge Abu Odeh with a crime he did not commit. Every day there are cases filed by people against each other in courts and some of them are dismissed; this was one of them.
We can’t deprive the individual who filed the complaint against Abu Odeh from stating his opinion and acting on it through the available means that are allowed by the law. We can argue against the law that makes it a crime to speak, but the subject of that discussion is then the law, not the government, nor the individuals like the one who filed the complaint.
I think if one is to talk about damage caused by this incident, more damage has been done by the backlash of some rude and bigotted writers in some newspapers than the damage (if any) that has been caused by the complaint itself.
but it’s too late and damage is done. what just took place is called political “intimidation” , sort of a warning shot. so the message is loud and clear, west Jordanians must eat shirt and deal with it because the ruling thugs are not interested in hearing about it let alone changing the status quo. to change the status quo means redistribution of power, redistribution of tax wealth which will translate into smaller loots for the “elite” parasites.