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  1. #1
    I'm not safe on my island
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    New leaks reveal info about Guantanamo inmates

    I'll post an article on Salon.com and a link to the Guardian.

    The Guardian, which offers an easy-to-navigate interface for readers to browse the documents themselves, as well as a live blog on the leaks throughout the day, highlights the following discoveries:


    • Almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses. Many went on hunger strike or attempted suicide.
    • Children and senile old men were among the detainees, including "an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim."
    • "Authorities relied heavily on information obtained from a small number of detainees under torture. They continued to maintain this testimony was reliable even after admitting that the prisoners who provided it had been mistreated."
    Risk was sometimes assessed using "the flimsiest" details, we learn: "If a prisoner had a Casio F91W watch, it might be an indication he had attended a Qaeda bomb-making course where such watches were handed out — though that model is sold around the world to this day... A prisoner caught without travel documents? It might mean he had been trained to discard them to make identification harder... A detainee who claimed to be a simple farmer or a cook, or in the honey business or searching for a wife? Those were common Taliban and Qaeda cover stories, the analysts were told."
    http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/...eaks_explainer

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/seri...iles-documents

  2. #2
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    Al jazeera reporter imprisoned for six years solely for the purpose of interrogating him about Al Jazeera:

    Al-Haj has long claimed that he was interrogated almost exclusively about his work for Al Jazeera, and virtually nothing about the accusations against him (being an “Al Qaeda courier”). The files released about him corroborate that claim, as The Guardian notes : “An al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.” In particular:
    His file makes clear that one of the reasons he was sent to Guantánamo was "to provide information on ... the al-Jazeera news network's training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network's acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL".
    http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...amo/index.html

  3. #3
    Ridill
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    Shit is A+ levels of unbelievable.

  4. #4
    The God Damn Kuno
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    Fuck I used to have one of those watches as a kid rofl.

  5. #5

    Quote Originally Posted by Not Kuno View Post
    Fuck I used to have one of those watches as a kid rofl.
    Reported.

  6. #6
    Relic Shield
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    From the pictures it looks like they're just arresting people with beards.

  7. #7

    Quote Originally Posted by chiyio View Post
    From the pictures it looks like they're just arresting brown people with beards.
    FTFY.

    One more reason to just let them all go.

  8. #8
    Queen of the Pity Party
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    that's what they get for having brown skin in a war zone

    sad thing is, that's not really a joke.

  9. #9
    The Anti Miz
    The Anti Miz of the House of Weave

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    glad to know we have people going to such extremes to protect the country. sucks for the innocent victims LOL

  10. #10
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    The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing thousands of secret documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay that reveal the Bush and Obama administrations knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent men for years without charge.
    But all along, it’s been apparent that there’s only been a very small number of genuine terrorist suspects at Guantánamo and that the rest of the people included large numbers of innocent people who were swept up because there was no situation set up to screen prisoners, because prisoners were being bought for bounty payments, and that there were a lot of low-level Taliban foot soldiers in there, as well, which is really at the heart of the failure of the war on terror to make a distinction between, on the one hand, terrorists and, on the other hand, soldiers in a military conflict. So it confirms that.
    ANDY WORTHINGTON: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is that, you know, what’s interesting in a historical sense, really, Amy, is that we’re getting for the first time any information from the government about the first 200 prisoners who were released. Now, you know, we’ve known for years what their names are and when there were released. And in some cases, stories have come about because they’ve been interviewed, or when they released, they spoke to the media. In the vast majority of cases, nothing has emerged. Now we’re getting the details. And now we can understand why it was that Major General Dunlavey, who was the commander of Guantánamo in 2002, complained about the "Mickey Mouse" prisoners, the number of "Mickey Mouse" prisoners, as he described them, that he was being sent from Afghanistan. Here they are. Here are the farmers and the cooks and the taxi drivers and all these people who should never have been rounded up in the first place and who ended up in Guantánamo because there was no screening process.

    These documents, interestingly, the administration—the authorities at Guantánamo give their reasons for why the prisoners were sent to Guantánamo. And they say, "Oh, it’s so that we can investigate more of this and that." And there are some ludicrous examples. There’s a British man who was imprisoned by the Taliban, and it’s to find out more about the Taliban’s way of interrogating prisoners. Poor man. He should never have been sent there. But, you know, what’s kind of behind all this about these—the ways of these stories coming out is just much more alarming, really. It’s really profoundly disturbing, I think, the extent to which this has been happening.
    ANDY WORTHINGTON: Well, Sami, Sami al-Hajj, who was a cameraman with Al Jazeera, had been in Afghanistan covering the U.S. occupation, had then gone to renew his visa, to deal with other things in Pakistan, had everything officially in place to go back into Afghanistan, is then stopped on the border and taken by U.S. forces to Bagram. And, you know, as he has always said and his lawyers said over the years before his release in 2009, everything that happened to him in Guantánamo was about the administration trying to secure information about the workings of Al Jazeera. So, nothing to do with terrorism. You know, we know the Bush administration regarded Al Jazeera as the enemy almost, so it fits in that context. But, you know, what an appalling thing to be doing, to be holding somebody for all those years and interrogating them coercively, using torture, in an attempt to find a way to try and undermine Al Jazeera, the network.
    '


    ANDY WORTHINGTON: Yeah, right. Well, no, exactly. But, you know, I mean, as we were discussing before with the—you know, with all of the wrong people ending up in Guantánamo and all the spurious reasons for sending people there—and I actually think that they came second, Amy, because the thing that I meant to say before was that, you know, there was an interrogator called Chris Mackey—it’s a pseudonym, but he wrote a book about—he was a senior interrogator in Afghanistan—about the process of prisoners being sent to Guantánamo. And he said there effectively was no screening process. What happened was that all the lists of prisoners were sent to the top brass who were in Camp Doha in Kuwait. And their instructions came back: every single Arab that ends up in U.S. custody has to be sent to Guantánamo. And for the first six months, that applied to every Afghan, as well. So, essentially, there was no screening process. Everybody went to Guantánamo. Nothing was known about them. And then they had to invent these reasons as to why they were holding them. And that’s what I think is in those documents. They say, "Oh yeah, we sent this person here to exploit them for intelligence on such and such." They actually grafted that on afterwards. When they arrived, they didn’t even know who most of these people were.
    http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/2...gly_imprisoned

  11. #11
    If you stopped to actually learn something you might not post these uninformed posts.
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    US News Corporations ending up with this al-jazera info? It's more likely then you would think.

  12. #12
    Pandemonium
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    At this point this is almost old news. The question is what's going to happen going forward, and is anyone going to be held responsible for holding terror suspects without trial?

  13. #13
    St. Fiat
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cephius View Post
    and is anyone going to be held responsible for holding terror suspects without trial?
    Be honest. Could you keep a straight face?

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cephius View Post
    At this point this is almost old news. The question is what's going to happen going forward, and is anyone going to be held responsible for holding terror suspects without trial?
    It's the same answer as always. If people really care enough, something might happen, but if not, then we should expect these things to repeat themselves in the not too distant future.

  15. #15
    Bring on the Revolution
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    It's a known fact and stated often that Americans can deal with ill treatment of the "Other" just so long as they don't look like us and we don't see it. Essentially the American public becomes the three monkeys.

    http://www.makeitinmusic.com/BlogIma...ar_no_evil.jpg

  16. #16
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    It seems that a lot of people were held up for years in Guantanamo, not because they were suspected terrorists, but because they might have had useful information.

    http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz1KXmeYl6s

    Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.) Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

  17. #17
    Tekki's Bitch
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    This guy doesn't seem too upset about the whole thing, the others should buck up and be happy they are part of the american freedom process.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by thetruepandagod View Post
    This guy doesn't seem too upset about the whole thing, the others should buck up and be happy they are part of the american freedom process.
    he looks like a rich uncle from bel air happy to be free from his ghetto fab nephew

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