BELLACIAO - 10-year-old boy prisoner of Guantanamo Bay -- found innocent after two years of detainment - Sinpleton Says: - Collective Bellaciao

BELLACIAO - 10-year-old boy prisoner of Guantanamo Bay -- found innocent after two years of detainment - Sinpleton Says: - Collective Bellaciao

10-year-old boy prisoner of Guantanamo Bay -- found innocent after two years of detainment
3 comment(s).
February Sunday 19th 2006 (05h00) : 10-year-old boy prisoner of Guantanamo Bay -- found innocent after two years of detainment 23 comment(s). From: Eric Smith> Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 02:10:46 +0900 To: http://www.thenation.com/outrage/in... (hyperlinks also follow story.)

You’re kidding, right? That’s it?

After holding Brits in our extralegal dungeons for two years, one day we just let ’em go?

We’ve still got more than 600 people imprisoned in our Halliburton-built prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where for more than two years we’ve been interrogating them, denying them lawyers, denying them any kind of judicial review, hinting quite bluntly that they could all remain in limbo like this forever, and trying to put a brave face on all of the suicide attempts.

And every now and then, without comment, we bundle a few of them onto international flights and dump them out on a street somewhere -- and suddenly it turns out that this dangerous menace was just a bewildered Kabul taxi driver, or a 10-year-old.

What the heck is that about?

I mean, if the argument is that these people are too horrifically dangerous to ever risk granting them access to the American judicial system, how can you just up and cut them loose?

And if they’re not dangerous -- well, how can you hold a man in a Kafkaesque jail for two years, slapping him around, denying him sleep, asking him randomly desperate (and therefore asinine) questions like " Do you know Mullah Omar?"; and then one day open the door, shake his hand and wave goodbye, without even the slightest blush of shame, the most sheepish of apologies?

One of the first of five Britons released this week from Gitmo was one Jamal al Harith of Manchester, a website designer and a father of three.

"After a while, we stopped asking for human rights -- we wanted animal rights," Harith told Britain’s Daily Mirror. "In Camp X-Ray my cage was right next to a kennel housing an Alsatian dog. He had a wooden house with air conditioning and green grass to exercise on.

"I said to the guards, ’I want his rights’ and they replied, "That dog is a member of the US army’."

This man, Harith, wasn’t held but a few hours by British police and security services before they had shrugged and let him go free. There’s no case, apparently.

And now, of course, these and other detainees are gearing up to sue the pants off of the United States government. Chalk it up as one more bill that the Bush-Cheney team will leave us to pay for long after they’re gone.