← Click notepad to Support!    Contact us   Jobs   Fair Use   Search                                             

Mostly Innocent  
Bookmark Page  Link to site  Click to comment  Links  
 
 Of the more than 700 men and boys who have been housed there in the last
 four and half years, only 10 have been charged with criminal offenses.

 Guantanamo Update!   Guantanamo Alert

Shame Of Gitmo Exposed

(Monday, 13 Feb 2006) A Washington lawyer who visited Guantanamo Bay ('Gitmo') last week called it "a disgrace". In this opinion, he echoes what most of the world feels. At Gitmo, 517 men are being held without trial, for the most part even without formal charges. Many have been there for four years now.

These 517 are, President Bush assured the world, "the worst of the worst". This supposedly warrants indefinite incarceration in 'chicken cages' in a facility the US govt defines as a grey zone outside of both national and international insight. These "captured enemy combatants" have even been denied the right to be formally charged within a 'reasonable time'.

  • Who are the Guantanamo Detainees?

    Mark Denbeaux and Joshua W. Denbeaux claim to have used US government data to have assembled a profile of the Guantanamo detainees. They claim their data shows:
    1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.
    2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
    3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority - 60% - are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners, a nexus to any terrorist group is not identified by the Government.
    4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.
    5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants - mostly Uighers - are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

    Indefinite internment with limtied legal rights is sufficiently foreign to the US' ideals that this report should deservedly add pressure on the Bush administration to justify the Guantanamo detentions. I'm prepared to accept that the GWOT requires indefinite detention of people who pose a real existential threat to the United States, but I'm yet to be convinced that the executive branch should have unreviewable fiat in deciding who is to be indefinitely incarcerated.
     

  • A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

     
  • Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

     
  • Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

     
  • The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.
These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 — including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over. http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0203nj1.htm

I suppose it's newsworthy that these tales were told to military tribunals and that the U.S. has been made aware of some issues with the way that it receives and screens detainees. But it's not really news that the U.S. has paid for its prisoners at Gitmo — that's been known for three years. It's also not news that our screening systems in Afghanistan and at Gitmo are seriously lacking. That's also been known for about three years. That fact is reflected in the fact that the vast majority — perhaps 70-90% — of the Gitmo detainee population lacks any real intelligence value, according to various government sources over the past three years. These screening systems are to blame.
 http://www.intel-dump.com/posts/1117631070.shtml

 

There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and "55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.

"Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies."
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0610,hentoff,72399,6.html

Nearly 500 men captured in the "War on Terror" are held as prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Two of the men, picked up by mistake and sold to U.S. forces by bounty hunters, were long ago determined by the military to be innocent. Yet these men continue to live behind razor wire in Guantanamo’s Camp Iguana. A federal judge ruled that their imprisonment is unlawful, but was powerless to order their release, and Congress has since enacted a law that would deny them further access to the courts. These men are not alone — military records show that the Guantanamo prisoners are mostly shepherds, farmers, cooks, and conscripts.  “Guantánamo is a mirror of our government and thus a mirror of us,” McGaraghan told the commencement audience. Or, as a Washington Post editorial said this week, amid mounting global criticism of U.S. practices for holding suspected terrorists: “They shame the nation and violate its fundamental values.”  Read McGaraghan’s remarks.  The Watson Institute for International Studies
111 Thayer Street, Box 1970
Providence, RI USA 02912

Court appearances by the 10 men charged with war crimes have offered us our first meaningful independent view of detainees in the prison's 4 1/2 years. Some seem to be committed holy warriors whose detention has only fueled their hatred of Americans. Others contend that they are innocent of any attack on U.S. forces, just unfortunates swept up in the post-9/11 fervor.  Meanwhile, 450 others have been held for years without charges or legal recourse. Their indefinite detention to keep them off the global terrorism battlefields feels like a Muslim version of the World War II Japanese American internment. Kicked out of Gitmo - Los Angeles Times
 

 

                     Some useful links: 

Academic Freedom, Activism Resource, A Free Press, Activism Archives, Activism Calendar, Activism Links, ACLU,   AFT, AFT Archives, Argumentation, AFT Photos, Alternative News, Alternative News Resource, American Dreams, American Values, Amnesty, Are we better off?, Baldwin, Bias, Big Brother, Bill of Rights, Blues, Blogs, Breaking News, Bush Pictures, Capital Punishment, Cartoons, Children, Code Pink, Computers, Contact us, Coretta, Corporate Bias, Corruption, Creative Art, Creeping Fascism, Democracy for America Portal, Dictionary, Direct Activism, Economic Reality, Election Fraud, Employment, Environment, Fake Headlines, Fascism, Feedback, Fog of war, Freedom, Games, Global Warming, Gitmo, Harley, Human Rights, Impeachment Prudent,  Iraq war, Issues, Immigration, Impeach, Impeach?, International Peace Resources, Iraq, Issue List, It pays to support your UNION, Jewish, Jobs With Justice, Jefferson, KBOO Labor Radio, Langston, Liberalism, Library, Lies, Logic, Martin Luther King, Jr., Media Manipulation, Media Messages, Media Spin, Middle East, Negative Campaign Tactics, Net Job Loss, News, No More War, On Accountability, Onward Oregon, Oregon News, Patriotism, Peace Portal, Peace News, Political Communication, Portland Alliance, Propaganda, Quotations, Resource Index, Rhetoric, Rhetoric Defined, Road to Peace, Searching, Spin City, Spiritual Discussion, Terror, The Rule of Law, Thesaurus, The Wordsmith Collection: Magazine for Writing and Creative Arts, Torture, Tutor, Union Resource, Values, War History, Who Owns the US Media, Wiretapping, Wisdom, Women,  Writing Resources

                                             Return to Main Page   AlternativeNewsResource

Click the notepad at the right for direct support or click below to visit our store and
 Support our Public Benefit Nonprofit.

         © © Copyright 1995-2009 The Wordsmith Collection:   www.WritingResource.org/ , all rights reserved.