Haji Ghalib: The Afghan Freed From Guantánamo Who Is Now Fighting Islamic State And Taliban
Haji Ghalib: The Afghan Freed From Guantánamo Who Is Now Fighting Islamic State And Taliban – OpEd
When it comes to reports about prisoners released from Guantánamo, there has, since President Obama took office, been an aggressive black propaganda policy — firstly from within the Pentagon and latterly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — painting a false picture of the alleged rate of “recidivism” amongst former prisoners, a trend that has also been echoed in the mainstream media, which has repeatedly published whatever nonsense it has been told without questioning it, or asking for anything resembling proof from those government departments that are responsible. For some background, see my articles here, here, here andhere – and my appearance on Democracy Now! in January 2010.
The three outstanding problems with the supposed recidivism rate — beyond the lamentable truth that no information backing up the claims has been made publicly available since 2009, and that the media should therefore have been very wary of it — are, firstly, that lazy or cynical media outlets regular add up the numbers of former prisoners described as “confirmed” and “suspected” recidivists to reach an alarming grand total, which, in recent years, is over 25% of those released, when the numbers of those “suspected” of recidivism are based on unverified, single source reporting, and may very well be unreliable. Back in March 2012, for example, as I explained in my article, “Guantánamo and Recidivism: The Media’s Ongoing Failure to Question Official Statistics,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said, “Someone on the ‘suspected’ list could very possibly not be engaged in activities that are counter to our national security interests.” (emphasis added).
The second huge problem with the reports is that even the “confirmed” rate is, very evidently, exaggerated, as it is, to be blunt, inconceivable that as many former prisoners as alleged can have been engaged in military or terrorist activities against the US. In the latest DNI report, for example, made available in September 2015, it is claimed that 117 former prisoners (17.9% of those released) are “Confirmed of Reengaging,” but no indication is given of how that can be possible. Claims can certainly be made for a few dozen “recidivists” — primarily in Afghanistan, and amongst those few former Gulf prisoners who apparently set up an Al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — but the figure of 117 is simply implausible.
A third important reason for disputing the claims, as noted by the Constitution Project, is that the overwhelming majority of those allegedly “Confirmed of Reengaging” — 111 of the 117 — were released under President Bush, and only six men released by President Obama — just 4.9% of those released on his watch — are regarded as being recidivists; in other words, the current threat is just 4.9%, and as a result, as the Constitution Project explained, “95.1% of detainees transferred during the Obama presidency have not reengaged.”
In the New York Times at the weekend, another more positive take on the reporting about former prisoners took place with the publication of an article about Haji Ghalib (aka Hajji Ghalib), an Afghan former prisoner, who, since his release in 2007, has become a formidable opponent not just of the Taliban, but also of efforts by Isis fighters to make inroads into Afghanistan.
Ghalib, it should be noted, is one of several dozen Afghan prisoners I identified in my research for my bookThe Guantánamo Files as having worked with US forces, but who ended up at Guantánamo because of rivalries with other Afghans, who took advantage of the Americans’ generally woeful intelligence, and their inability or unwillingness to cross-reference information about prisoners, to get their rivals banished to the US prison in Cuba. See the front-page story I wrote for the New York Times with Carlotta Gall, in February 2008, about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a heroic opponent of the Taliban, whose appeals for verification of his story were repeatedly ignored. Hekmati died of cancer at Guantánamo in December 2007, but the Bush administration never acknowledged its mistake.
Wow! You win the award for the longest run-on sentence in recorded history. Good job.
And you just proved you're a dumbass...
Congratulations!!!
http://nypost.com/2015/12/10/bin-laden-pal-released-from-gitmo-is-now-an-al-qaeda-leader/
A former Guantanamo detainee who worked for Osama bin Laden has become an al Qaeda leader in Yemen — and is promoting lone-wolf attacks in a new propaganda video released by the terror group.
Ibrahim al-Qosi, a k a Sheik Khubayb al Sudani, encourages “individual jihad” in the video released by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and titled “Guardians of Sharia,”
according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“And as the US has waged war on us remotely as a solution to minimize its casualties, we have fought it remotely, as well, with individual jihad,” he proclaims.
This marks the first time Qosi — who worked as a cook, driver and bookkeeper for bin Laden — has appeared in a propaganda video since his 2012 release from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, according to The Long War Journal, a news site that reports on the war on terror.
Qosi was transferred to his native Sudan after his release.
“One of the main reasons the United States was willing to return him to Sudan was the US confidence in the government of Sudan’s program and its confidence that Mr. al-Qosi would not represent any kind of threat to the United States,” his attorney, Paul Reichler, said at the time.
“If they had considered him a threat, they would not have released him.”
In July 2010, Qosi pleaded guilty to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support to terrorism. He got a 14-year sentence that was later reduced to two years.
Just a couple of years after his July 2012 release, he joined forces with al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and has since become one of its leader
