Innocent Until The Bounty’s High Enough
In 1620, a group of English separatists left Europe in search of a place to settle and practice their Puritan lifestyle without persecution. You remember? The Mayflower? Plymouth Rock? If my memory of School House Rocks! and all those years of American History classes serves me right, then this country started with a colony of people who just wanted to be able to worship freely and live a peaceful life.
Oh, I know there’s more to the story than that and I know they weren’t the only ones setting up shop, but every Novemeber for some reason we’re forced to celebrate it and while it’s not any where near Thanksgiving, I do actually have a point. (In case you were wondering.)
So here’s a scenario for you, imagine if you will two men trying to escape religious persecution and seeking assylum where they can live and worship in peace. They have harmed no one. They are pilgrims in search of freedom. Now imagine, these two innocent men have been mistaken for criminals — worse, they’ve been mistaken for possible terrorists and they’ve been captured and hauled off to prison. Now imagine that it’s not just any prison, but the one prison that supposedly houses the worst of the worst of the suspected terrorists. Now believing whatever you want about Guantanamo, imagine being two innocent men, arrested mistakingly, and left to rot in a prison of suspected terrorists.
O.K. But then suddenly they’re cleared not that they were ever really accused. So they can just be shipped off back home like all of the other freed suspected terrorists.
Oh, but wait, in a sudden unusual feeling of guilt, the government realizes that they can’t ship the poor guys home because they were escaping home due to religious persecution. In fact, the country they were running from is well known for it’s persesecution of this particular religion and now all of a sudden since the government has a heart, they want to protect them…
…the detainees before Robertson — Abu Bakker Qassim, 36, and A’del Abdu Al-Hakim, 31, both Muslims and ethnic Uighurs from China — are different from the other 500 Guantanamo prisoners. A military tribunal has found the men were in the wrong place at the wrong time and ordered them released. But the men are languishing at the prison because the United States cannot send them back to China, which has a history of persecuting Muslims, and no other country will take them.
US judge eyes moving 2 Guantanamo detainees - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Washington - News
District Judge James Robertson is the judge considering this case.
So, the catch is that we don’t want to send them back to China because it’s a bad place for them and we don’t want them to stay in the U.S. for whatever undisclosed reason (after all, we aren’t going to offer assylum to any religiously persecuted folks…that’s not we’re about…we’re about freedom…in other countries…um…yeah, that’s it…freedom and democracy…)
”They are not soldiers. They are not criminals. They are just Uighur people,” Willett said. ”There might not be a more pro-US Muslim group in the world because the Uighurs have traditionally suffered under the oppression of the Communist Chinese. I can remember a time when we liked people like that.”
The military, however, insists it must keep them in custody for ‘’safety and security” reasons.
(Willett is the lawyer who volunteered to help the two men.)
By the way, these innocent men who are still being kept in jail (a bit like Cyrus Karr) have still been denied access to telephones to contact their families. Don’t convicted fellons get treated better or is that just the movies?
Oh, and who identified them as terrorists in the first place? Pakastani police arrested them and handed them over to the U.S. for $5,000 bounties. Next thing you know, every greedy bastard in your neighborhood will be eyeing you up wondering what he might get for turning you in — innocent or not.
Makes me feel good about this fair and free country I’m living in right now. What about you?
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“The New Collossus” by Emma Lazarus
tags: Guantanamo Bay, innocent, Terrorists, detainees
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