Gitmo, and all that awful places represents, is back in the news - well, kinda! The mainstream media have seemingly moved on from Gitmo. Not Andy Worthington, a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007) who in a piece in CounterPunch "The Anonymous Victims of Guantánamo" highlights the "quiet" release of 8 detainees who have never been charged with anything, and the disgrace Gitmo is and the total abrogation of rights of those imprisoned:
"Hot on the heels of the release of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian student who was just a teenager when he was kidnapped for a bounty payment on a street in Pakistan over five years ago, the Pentagon has released another eight detainees -- six Afghans, a Libyan and a Yemeni -- thinning "the worst of the worst" at Guantánamo from 778 men to just 335.
Of the six Afghans released, the identities of three are unknown. This is hardly surprising, as the Department of Defense never reveals the names of those it releases, and the media long ago abandoned turning up in Kabul to welcome back another bunch of farmers, shopkeepers and Taliban conscripts from their brutal and surreal sojourn in a small corner of Cuba that is forever America. Of the 163 Afghans released since Guantánamo opened (out of a total of 218), a dozen of those released in the last few years have not been identified, and these three look like remaining just as anonymous.
To compensate, however, the three Afghans who have been identified represent a microcosmic cross-section of the ineptitude of the US military and the Pentagon during the two years that followed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, consisting of a pro-US, anti-Taliban military leader, another man who was arrested after his house was bombed, and another who was seized while walking in the street."
As coincidence will have it, over at the LA Times, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity that provides legal representation to prisoners around the world, as the lawyer for prison detainees is struck in a piece "Gitmo: America's Black Hole" by how the immoral mistreatment of inmates has become so mundane.
"Hot on the heels of the release of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian student who was just a teenager when he was kidnapped for a bounty payment on a street in Pakistan over five years ago, the Pentagon has released another eight detainees -- six Afghans, a Libyan and a Yemeni -- thinning "the worst of the worst" at Guantánamo from 778 men to just 335.
Of the six Afghans released, the identities of three are unknown. This is hardly surprising, as the Department of Defense never reveals the names of those it releases, and the media long ago abandoned turning up in Kabul to welcome back another bunch of farmers, shopkeepers and Taliban conscripts from their brutal and surreal sojourn in a small corner of Cuba that is forever America. Of the 163 Afghans released since Guantánamo opened (out of a total of 218), a dozen of those released in the last few years have not been identified, and these three look like remaining just as anonymous.
To compensate, however, the three Afghans who have been identified represent a microcosmic cross-section of the ineptitude of the US military and the Pentagon during the two years that followed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, consisting of a pro-US, anti-Taliban military leader, another man who was arrested after his house was bombed, and another who was seized while walking in the street."
As coincidence will have it, over at the LA Times, Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity that provides legal representation to prisoners around the world, as the lawyer for prison detainees is struck in a piece "Gitmo: America's Black Hole" by how the immoral mistreatment of inmates has become so mundane.
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