Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
- 16,829
- 2,492
- 245
America Locked A Childrens Humanitarian Aid Worker In Gitmo For Seven Years
Lakhdar Boumediene: "I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.
When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never for a second considered this."
Boumediene was not simply arrested and imprisoned for years despite no evidence that he was a terrorist, he was arrested while he was working as a humanitarian aide worker. For children. The man devoted his life to helping the youngest and most vulnerable victims of a terrible conflict, and we locked him up and tortured him.
Sadly, America still has not learned the lesson Justice Louis Brandeis tried to teach us 85 years ago: Men feared witches and burnt women.
That's his side of the story. You seem pretty quick to believe it, without hearing the other side of it. I do not believe people are locked up at Gitmo with no evidence, it may be that the evidence was wrong, maybe somebody fingered this guy to protect a guilty person. There is a review of that evidence in each case, to determine if the risk involved warrants detention.
Mistakes are made, no question. No system of justice is perfect, but we're talking about terrorists here, people that want to kill us by the hundreds or thousands. Which leads me back to the central question of the thread: do we follow the law even though many lives may be lost? Laws were created to protect us, their goal is to keep us safe in so far as possible. They are not an end unto themselves, what good are laws if everyone is dead?
Do you live under a rock, or are you just in denial?
Bush knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent, former Colin Powell aide tells court
George W Bush knew that hundreds of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay were innocent - but covered the fact up for political reasons, a top former aide has told a U.S. court.
Retired Army Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, testified that officials 'knew that they had seized and were holding innocent men at Guantanamo Bay'.
'I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell,' he said. 'I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President [Dick] Cheney and [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.'
They simply refused to release them out of fear of political repercussions,' he continued.
Colonel Wilkerson heaped most of his criticism on the heads of of Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney, saying they knew that the majority of the 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were not guilty of any crimes.
His assertion is understood to have been backed by General Powell, the Times has reported.
General Powell left the Bush administration in 2005 in anger over the false information that he unknowlingly used to make the case for the war in Iraq.
Parts of the document were quoted by the Associated Press, while further quotes - including the Bush quote - emerged in the Times, which said it had obtained a copy.
Read more: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent, former White House aide tells court | Mail Online
Lawrence Wilkerson: Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay
Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative.
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".
It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).
The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.
More