[13]-Year-Old Guantanamo Bay Prisoner released

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Smith <snowdog-IITh4nd5zvmTnpBtbRfDVg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: aaron.hawley-SeHYGLvqMtg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 17:23:18 +0900
Subject: 10-Year-Old Guantanamo Bay Prisoner released

http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?pid=1313
(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.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=500033

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3034697.stm

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/02/1678473.php

http://www.ncccusa.org/news/04march8guantanamostory.html

http://www.afghanmania.com/en/news/0,news,2738,00.php

http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?pid=1305

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2639432

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=474371&section=news

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=283942004
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