Human rights group committed to defending Islamic jihadists captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan and being detained at Guantanamo Bay
Founded by actress anti-Israel Communists Vanessa Redgrave and her brother Corin Redgrave
Works with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights
The Guantanamo Human Rights Commission was buoyed last week by Amnesty International's announcement that it was "call[ing] on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal" -- a reference to allegations that War on Terror prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay have been subjected to both physical and psychological abuse by American military personnel.
The Guantanamo Human Rights Commission (GHRC) is a prisoners'-rights group committed to defending the several hundred incarcerated enemy combatants who were captured on the battlefield by U.S. troops during the war on terror. Most were captured during the 2001 war in Afghanistan, and many were arrested subsequently in Pakistan, Africa, or Southeast Asia. These men are being detained at prison camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The GHRC was founded by actress Vanessa Redgrave, a Trotskyite with a venomous hostility towards the state of Israel, and her brother, actor Corin Redgrave. A founder of the Marxist Party and a supporter of the Communist Workers Revolutionary Party, Ms. Redgrave has a long history of supporting terrorists. In 1977 she filmed a documentary titled The Palestinians, which showed her in a PLO training camp, dancing as she waved a rifle over her head. In 1980 she proclaimed, "The State of Israel must be overthrown, there is no room for such a state." Since the start of the war on terror, she has been a mainstay at antiwar and anti-Bush protests in London. There is no record of Redgrave ever publicly denouncing Islamic terrorism or Communist atrocities.
Vanessa's brother and GHRC co-founder Corin Redgrave is also a committed Communist and an apologist for terrorists. He has characterized President Bush as worse than a Nazi. In 2004 Mr. Redgrave penned an article titled "Even the Nazis Let the Red Cross Visit POWs. Why Won't Mr. Bush?" In that piece, he stated that the detainees' "welfare remains an unknown, because the Red Cross, which even the Nazis allowed to visit prisoner-of-war camps, has not been given access. The little information that has come out is alarming." In truth, the Red Cross has been making routine visits to Guantanamo detainees since early 2002 and has found no evidence of the prisoners being mistreated.
The Redgraves and their organization have enlisted the aid of the Islamic prisoners' families and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights to spread their condemnatory message. The group's goal is to end "all forms of internment without trial," and to win the release of the prisoners at Guantanamo regardless of the reasons for which they were interred.
The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have worked closely with the GHRC to protect and expand the rights, and ultimately to win the freedom, of the Guantanamo detainees. Such endeavors are nothing new for the ACLU, which has supported such terrorist conspirators as Maher Mofeid Hawash, who had provided material support to Taliban and al Qaeda forces fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and Sami Al-Arian, the North American leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group responsible for the suicide bombing murders of more than 100 civilians in the Middle East.
The CCR has similarly worked to repeal the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures embodied in the Patriot Act. When new regulations permitted the FBI, CIA, and INS to share information about possible terrorist plots with one another, the CCR attacked this development as an assault on privacy and civil liberties. CCR president Michael Ratner stated, "If the U.S. government truly wants its people to be safer and wants terrorist threats to diminish, it must make fundamental changes in its foreign policies." In other words the United States was the root cause of the terrorist attacks against it. Ratner is a lifelong supporter of Communist causes.
The detention facilities at Guantanamo, including Camp X-ray and Camp Delta, were constructed specifically to house individuals apprehended in the war on terror. Enemy combatants held at the camp must be foreign nationals who have either received training from al Qaeda, or who have been in command of 300 or more military personnel. They are among the world's most brutal and committed Islamist enemies of the United States. By incarcerating and interrogating them, the U.S. hopes to gain crucial intelligence that could thwart future terrorist attacks against America and to keep them from returning to the terror war against the United States.
According to the Red Cross, which has made regular visits to the Guantanamo prisons, the detainees are treated humanely (very humanely by the standards of the prisons in their lands of origin). They are supplied with regular meals containing only those foods that their Muslim religious traditions permit them to eat, and each detainee is provided with a copy of the Koran. Yet notwithstanding the fact that the Red Cross has expressed no concern over the prisoners' treatment, the GHRC, along with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other leftwing "human rights" organizations - which (unlike the Red Cross) do not have access to the detainees - have charged the U.S. with human rights abuses. According to Vanessa Redgrave, "Guantanamo Bay is not a detention center, it is a "concentration camp" where prisoners are routinely subjected to "torture."
In the summer of 2004, the GHRC helped promote an off-Broadway play titled Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which depicts the detainees as innocent victims who were "simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." The GHRC contends that this play asks the vital question, "How much damage is being done to Western democratic values during the 'war-on-terror'?" (Of course, as Communists, the Redgraves have declared war on those very same values, regarding them as "bourgeois" and worthy of destruction.) The GHRC places quotation marks around the words "war on terror" to signify its belief that the war itself is a fraudulent pretext to justify American imperialism and a scheme to grab Iraqi oil.
The GHRC has been successful in its efforts to win the release of some of Guantanamo's interned enemy combatants. Of the more than 200 detainees who had been set free as of November 2004, an appreciable number returned to terrorism soon after being given their freedom. One former detainee, Abdullah Mehsud, who was released in March 2004 after 25 months in custody, returned to Pakistan and directed the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers, one of whom was killed during a rescue attempt. Senior Taliban commander Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar was held at Guantanamo for eight months prior to release; he was killed by Afghan security personnel in September 2004 after he had rejoined Taliban forces in the country's southern province. Another recently released detainee murdered a judge outside a mosque in Afghanistan. Still other released prisoners have verbally expressed their desire to return to terrorism. Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, who was set free in February 2004, sought to join Chechen terrorists in their fight against Russia, stating, "The Muslims are oppressed in Chechnya, and the Russians are carrying out terror against them." In September 2004, more than 340 people, including 155 children, were killed when Chechen militants laid siege to a Russian elementary school.
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6896
