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Now
Bush Cracks Down on Gitmo Detainees, Despite
Overwhelmin Evidence Most are Not Terrorists
Innnocents
Abroad
By DAVE LINDORFF
The U.S. is holding hundreds
of innocent people at its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
Military authorities at
Guantanamo have decided to tighten the screws on detainees because
it has been determined that the U.S. has been too kind and accommodating
to them.
If you find those two sentences jarring
and contradictory, you're not alone, yet both were leading news
items in today's newspapers. The first appeared in a page one
story in of the Philadelphia Inquirer by Associated Press reporter
Andrew O. Selsky, which said most of the detainees are innocent
of any crime. The second was a page one story in the New York
Times by reporter Tim Golden, who reported on a harsh crackdown
on Guantanamo detainees, including removal of common eating privileges,
inmate soccer games, and incentives for good behavior by prisoners.
Selsky, who traced what happened
to 245 of some 360 Guantanamo detainees released by the U.S.,
found that 205 of them, upon arriving in their countries of origin,
were immediately released, after their home governments determined
that they were, after all, not dangerous terrorists. According
to Selsky, all 83 Afghan captives sent back to Afghanistan were
freed after the government there determined that most had simply
been turned over to American forces because of "tribal or
personal rivalries" and to collect ransoms being offered
by US forces.
Pakistan released 67 of 70
Pakistani captives returned to that country after it was determined
they too were "innocent."
All 29 detainees repatriated
to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark,
Bahrain and the Maldives, were freed within hours of being sent
home by the U.S., which had delivered them bound hand and food
as "dangerous terrorists."
Selsky's report is a damning
indictment of the U.S. operation at Guantanamo, and makes a joke
of U.S. claims that the people it is holding indefinitely and
without trial on the naval base there are the "worst of
the worst," and are, in the words of Pentagon officials,
"among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers
on the face of the Earth." Golden, meanwhile, reports that
these remaining prisoners face much harsher conditions in the
future than they have been enduring to date. In recent months,
the prisoners had been benefiting from a program of incentives
that gave them steady improvements in living conditions in return
for good behavior. Now three quarters of them are being moved
to maximum-security cells.
Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris
Jr., commander of the compound, told Golden that in his view
all the captives are dangerous. He is quoted as saying, "They're
all terrorists; they're all enemy combatants," and concluding,
"I don't think there is such a thing as a medium-security
terrorist."
Golden notes dryly, without
comment, that 100 of those 420 prisoners still subject to Adm.
Harris's tender mercies have actually been cleared by the military
for transfer or release, but are being held while the State Department
tries to arr'nge for their repatriation, and that shortly after
Harris's comment, 15 detainees were sent back to Saudi Arabia,
where the government immediately released them to their families.
So what the hell is going on
here?
One hint is provided by looking
at the abusive treatment of Jose Padilla, the so-called "dirty
bomber" that the U.S. held without charge in solitary confinement
at a military brig in South Carolina for three and a half years
before conceding that it had no evidence to charge him with any
major crime (he's now facing a charge of providing money to a
charity that may have links to Al Qaeda, but even that case appears
weak). During his base confinement, Padilla was kept in a dark
cell, unable to contact a lawyer or family member. When he was
removed for a trip to the dentist, he was fitted with soundproof
earmuffs and his eyes were covered by blackout goggles, rendering
him entirely sensory deprived. Though he was completely docile
and posed no threat, he was shackled hand and foot as well, despite
the presence of four guards armed with M-16 weapons. Padilla,
an American citizen by birth, is now said to have lost his mind
and is unable to even understand why he is in captivity.
It seems clear from Padilla's
over-the-top abusive treatment, and the increasingly harsh treatment
that is being applied to captives at Guantanamo, that the Pentagon
and the Bush administration are not genuinely trying to protect
America from anything, but have simply devolved into a bunch
of deliberate, pathological sadists, who are desperately trying
to break and destroy several hundred people who never should
have been captured in the first place.
The goal may be to try and
get these men to break and admit to manufactured charges that
could retroactively justify their illegal detainment. Thanks
to the military tribunal bill that the outgoing Republican Congress,
with the help of treacherous and cowardly Democrats, passed as
one of their final wretched actions, they could then be executed,
or just held incommunicado until death or dementia renders them
no longer threats to the administration's reputation.
Whatever the government's motives
for this ongoing horror, Americans need to wake up and recognize
that Guantanamo and the so-called "War on Terror" have
made America--and every one of us Americans--guilty of the most
obscene of war crimes.
There will inevitably come
a day of reckoning--a day when we will all be called to account
for our collective crime.
Let us at least be able to
say then that we spoke out against what is being done in our
name.
CounterPunch
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