30% Of Gitmo Detainees Are Innocent

And so it continues. If it were innocent Americans being held indefinitely we’d be yelling and screaming and sending in troops. I guess we really are the bullies who don’t care what we do to anyone else.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 30 percent of the Guantanamo detainees have been cleared to leave the prison but remain jailed because the U.S. government has been unable to arrange for their return to their home countries, the Pentagon said on Friday. [“Nearly 30 percent at Guantanamo jail cleared to go” (Yahoo!News)]

Tags: Guantanamo Bay, detainees, innocent, Pentagon

Free Abu Bakker Qassim and A’del Abdu al-Hakim

Abu Bakker Qassim and A’del Abdu al-Hakim have been held in Guantanamo Bay since June 2002 after they were captured by bounty hunters in Pakistan in 2001. At the time they were fleeing China in search of religious and political sanctuary and in the chaos involving the “enemy combatant” round-up that led to anyone and everyone being handed over for American dollars, bounty hunters sold them to America and they were locked up.

Last year, the U.S. military determined that they were not in fact “enemy combatants.” You’d think then that everything would then be find and dandy for Abu Bakker Wassim and A’del Abdu al-Hakim.

However, both are still residents of Guantanamo Bay and their address doesn’t look likely to change any time soon.

The Bush Administration wisely says it cannot return them to China as they are Uighurs and would face persecution there. “Beijing has frequently cracked down on Uighur dissidents, who are seeking autonomy in the country’s north-western Xinjiang province. The Chinese government accuses Uighur militants of waging a bombing and assassination campaign, and receiving training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.” [“Guantamao Uighur Appeal Rejected” (BBC News)]

The problem is that these men are innocent. They’re still in prison.

The Bush Administration doesn’t want them in the U.S. for some reason — you’d think after such a screw up, we might want to make it up to them, make nice.

I just don’t get why someone isn’t making a bigger deal about this. If these were Americans being held in a prison somewhere, we’d be all up in arms. These are innocent men. They’ve been proven to be innocent. We are violating their rights, holding them indefinitely for no reason. That’s it’s own kind of torture, in my opinion. These men have lives we’re stealing from them. This is that Freedom we’re bringing to the Middle East.

Tags: Abu Bakker Qassim, A'del Abdu al-Hakim, Guantanamo Bay, detainees, innocent, Freedoms

Kill ‘Em All & Let Allah Sort Them Out!

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The U.S. military said Monday that coalition forces launched airstrikes Sunday in and around Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing “an estimated 70 terrorists.”

But an Iraqi doctor who reported 20 people killed — including six children — and 25 wounded said all those were civilians.

An Iraqi Ministry of Health official also said one child was killed and two women wounded in the airstrikes.

Military officials said they had no reports of civilians killed. [“Iraq airstrikes kill dozens in Ramadi area”]

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that the American military has apparently made the decision to count all non-American dead as “insurgents”? Even children? Innocent bystanders must be guilty by association or, at the very least, location.

More

Tags: Iraq, innocent, American soldiers

Beware Tiny Tot Terrorists

I heard this story on NPR this morning and it made me laugh. It’s funny because of the ineptness of the whole thing and not because it’s becoming a hassle to people.

I’m all for airport security. I’ve said so in the past — even if I’m inevitably the one watching them take out every single item from my purse to display to the world because the combination of an iPod Mini and a Palm Pilot in one small bag might indicate evil-doing. If it makes me safer in the long run, I’m good. I hate flying as it is, I don’t want to add worrying about terrorists on the plane to my list of worries like plunging from the air and smashing into the ground.

[“Israeli military releases another baby photo(Scarily, this is a real Middle Eastern baby in military garb)”] Anyway, so I heard this story on NPR this morning about children being stopped from boarding planes because their names match or are similar to names from the Transportation Security Administration’s no-fly list. This results in a major hassle as parents are forced to miss flights while trying to have birth certificates, passports, and other identification faxed to the airport security folks.

Critics including the American Civil Liberties Union say the government doesn’t provide enough information about the people on the lists, so innocent passengers can be caught up in the security sweep if they happen to have the same name as someone on the lists. [“Babies Caught Up in ‘No-Fly’ Confusion”]

I think if a child is five or under, he or she is probably not a terrorist…unless maybe it’s that baby from Family Guy. I also think that real terrorists don’t fly under their real names, but that’s just me. Anyway, I think airport security needs to exercise some common sense here — especially since TSA claims they’ve instructed security not to detain anyone under 12. Really, is this too hard to figure out?

The TSA has a “passenger ombudsman” who will investigate individual claims from passengers who say they are mistakenly on the lists. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said 89 children have submitted their names to the ombudsman. Of those, 14 are under the age of 2. [“Babies Caught Up in ‘No-Fly’ Confusion”]

Tags: NPR, no-fly list, Transportation Security Administration, ACLU, innocent, Terrorists

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

A Day In The Life of A Detained Innocent Iraqi

Please read the tale of Khalid Jarrar. He was arrested in Iraq for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time — that being present day Iraq.

I really can’t even begin to explain my anger and empathy. Just read.

Tags: blogs, Iraq, innocent, detainees

Are we supposed to be fearing the terrorists or ourselves?

From The Guardian in the UK:

Brazilian did not wear bulky jacketJean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.

“He used a travel card,” she said. “He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn’t be an excuse to kill him.”

Flanked by the de Menezes family’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, and by Bianca Jagger, the anti-Iraq war campaigner, she condemned the shoot-to-kill policy which had led to her cousin’s death and vowed that what she called the “crime” would not go unpunished.

“My cousin was an honest and hard working person,” said Ms Figueiredo who shared a flat with him in Tulse Hill, south London. “Although we are living in circumstances similar to a war, we should not be exterminating people unjustly.”

Another cousin, Patricia da Silva Armani, 21, said he was in Britain legally to work and study, giving him no reason to fear the police. “An innocent man has been killed as though he was a terrorist,” she said. “An incredibly grave error was committed by the British police.”

Mr de Menezes was shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at 10am last Friday after being followed from Tulse Hill. Scotland Yard initially claimed he wore a bulky jacket and jumped the barrier when police identified themselves and ordered him to stop. The same day the Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said the shooting was “directly linked” to the unprecedented anti-terror operation on London’s streets.

The following day Sir Ian apologised when detectives established that the Brazilian electrician, on his way to a job in north-west London, was not connected to attempts to blow up three underground trains and a bus in the capital.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission has began an inquiry which is expected to take several months. Yesterday it emerged one armed officer involved has been given leave, and two have been moved to non-firearm duties. Ms Figuerdo condemned Sir Ian’s decision to authorise the leave, saying she wanted to see the man who shot her cousin, and he should be in jail.
Read the rest of the story…

Next thing you know, our neighbors, our loved ones, our co-workers will just start inexplicably disappearing in the night. No judge. No trial. A strange feeling of deja vu is coming over me…didn’t they try this in Germany at one point?

Are we supposed to be fearing the terrorists or ourselves?

And how far away are we from Guatamo Bay to death squads and the Gestapo?

Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? Why are those of us who actually care, written off as bitter sore losers and non-Patriots? More and more I feel like I’m in a horrible Twilight Zone episode.

Tags: Jean Charles de Menezes, London, Terrorists, Conspiracy Theories, innocent

Why isn’t America talking about Cyrus Kar?

I first heard about Cyrus Kar last week while listening to NPR. Since then, I’ve kept an eye open for stories on such media sites as CNN.com. Most of the information I’ve found about the strange case has been from foreign media and blogs.

Any American media references appear to be mostly after this past weekend and I’m amazed to note that while CNN.com has no searchable references, the right-wing biased Fox News does. This North Carolina paper’s site only had a sentence on the subject.

And yet, this is the tale of an ex-Navy Seal who was arrested in Iraq simply for being in the wrong cab at the wrong time. This is a right-winger American film-maker on a personal journey to research a former Persian king who supported civil rights who was arrested simply because the trunk of the taxi he was in had washer timers, commonly used for bomb-making in the Middle East. He was held in a 5′x7′ cell without due process even after the FBI informed his family that he had been cleared of suspicion after passing a polygraph test.

“Saddam Hussein has had more due process than Cyrus Kar. This is a detention policy that was drafted by Kafka.”

I just don’t understand why a bigger deal isn’t being made of this. I thought we were supposed to be fighting for freedom and liberty and all of that. I thought we were supposed to be bringing freedom to these other countries. Not only are we out of control in treating the citizens of other countries like non-entities, we have begun stripping the rights of Americans.

What kills me is the argument so many people give that if you haven’t done anything, the FBI or the CIA or whoever is enforcing the Patriot Act, won’t be knocking down your door to haul you away to some prison where they’ll be able to hold you without telling you why and without letting you talk to lawyers, family, or friends indefinitely. Cyrus Kar didn’t do anything wrong. He was just taking a taxi, the wrong taxi…

Who’s next? Your neighbor? You? Me?

Why aren’t we talking about this? Why are we letting it slip into the back pages of the paper to be forgotten by the time we read the comic pages?

Tags: Cyrus Kar, NPR, Fox News, detainees, Iraq, FBI, innocent, Civil Rights

On Politics and Arm-chair Politicians

Talking politics is a quick way to make friends and enemies these days. Personally, I have tried not to discuss politics or religion in my journals or with my friends “back home”. For the most part I discovered that some people tend to take both subjects way too personally and feel the fanatical need to convert everyone they know to the “right” way of thinking which is of course always their way. Some of my friends “back home” had a penchant for getting into loud, angry, pissing matches over politics, religion, and sometimes even books and movies and while I enjoy a good debate, I don’t like shouting matches or banging my head against a wall.

For the most part, many people either make up their minds and cling to those opinions no matter what the facts or opinions of others or they do as their parents or spouses do and believe what their parents or spouses believe. Sometimes both options play a part. Unfortunately many people never let exeriences or newly learned facts to change their opinions; they cling to the belief that they are right despite everything.

Some of my friends “back home” are like that which is why I don’t allow such topics on the mailing list we all use to keep track of each other. People become too easily offended, emails fly back and forth because people are offended or they want to force others to see things their way. It’s all very unpleasant and sad.

I like to keep an open-mind. I won’t say that I don’t think I’m right. I just admit that I could be wrong. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, my opinions on many things have changed over the last 33 years. Things I believed in with all my heart when I was a teenager have proven themselves not true or have become questionable as my experiences and new facts have reared their ugly heads. I may still be a bit naive. I may still not understand every facet of everything going on in the world, but at the very least I have an open-mind and I accept when I’m wrong and I find talking, debating with others either strengthens my beliefs or changes them.

I think it’s a sign of a mature individual…though I don’t know that I’m all that mature or that I’m even mentally healthy at times.

So, I’ve come to enjoy in my new life the ability to have mature, adult conversations about politics with people here and people I’ve met online — people who don’t just shout rhetoric back and forth and people who have a clue not only about what is going on in the world but don’t believe everything they hear or read.

So, here is my political stance for those of you who are interested:

• I have voted for every President who has been in office since I started voting at 18 years old — I’m 33 now.
• I have been registered as a Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent at various times in my life. Currently, I am registered as a Democrat though 3 months ago I was an Independent.
• I have never believed that we should invade Iraq. I never thought they had weapons of mass destruction last year. I can’t believe the Bush Administration keeps insisting that is why were are there. I don’t know why other countries who do indeed have weapons of mass destruction have been left to their own devices. I believe we were lied to and if we weren’t lied to then the Bush Administration can’t admit they made an error in judgement and I don’t know which is worse.
• I was for invading Afghanistan but very disappointed that Bush didn’t finish the job.
• I am offended that Bush doesn’t think the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries is an issue. The companies might be saving money but they aren’t passing along that savings to the unemployed masses.
• I am offended that Bush’s administration thinks that the 1.25 million jobs they “created” in the last few months should quell the rising voices when the jobs that have been created are not equivallent in skill or money to the ones that millions of Americans have lost over the last 4 years.
• I am horrified that Bush wants to change the law to keep Americans who love each other from any kind of union, whether you call it a marriage or not, and the rights and benefits such a union should have.
• I am against abortion but believe it’s not my place to tell anyone they can’t have one for whatever reason.
• I am against the draft.
• I am against any merge of church and state and yet Bush’s administration is constantly dragging religion into their politics.
• Bush’s administration scares the hell out of me. I really believe they are out of control and believe that they are too powerful to be ruled by the laws, standards, and beliefs they hold everyone else to.
• It scares me to talk to people who still believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It scares me to listen to people who swear by every word that comes out of Bush’s mouth.
• It scares me that people still think there was a connection between Sadaam and 9/11. I never thought there was and it makes me sick to think that propaganda was used and so widely believed.
• It scares me that people don’t realize that some of those prisoners in those Iraqi prisons were innocent bystanders who were arrested by accident, tortured and humiliated, and even killed. People were killed in inhumane and compassionless ways and yet we are justified because other people that look like them caused 9/11 and other people who look like them have been killing hostages in the Middle East — ironically, the terrorists weren’t in Iraq before we arrived and opened the door but their presence now is used as a reason why we invaded…
• I am afraid of the Homeland Security and the Big Brother concept that it is.
• I am afraid that the terrorists have won by causing us to step closer to losing the freedoms they hate us for.

Tags: politics, dysfunctional drama, George W. Bush, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Gay Rights, abortion, pro-choice, WMD, innocent, detainees, Homeland Security, Terrorists

Horrors of the Day

More horrors coming from the Middle East today as video feed from a website shows a non-military American being beheaded in retaliation for the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq.

Someone on a message board I’m on had the nerve to claim that Americans would never do something so horrible! Of course, she was verbally attacked because most of us are certain that there are Americans who would do something like that — even to other Americans. That sort of nightmarish thing doesn’t just happen in other countries and movies.

But I guess the question is: When is all of this evilness going to end? What will stop the chain of revenge and resentment and retaliation?

I’m not surprised at all that other countries want out of this nightmare.

***So, day four without caffeine. I had meant to exercise yesterday via The Firm Body Sculpt system’s “CardioSculpt” workout, but something snapped in me yesterday afternoon. I felt miserable and headachy and muscle achy and I was craving high-fat foods on top of feeling flushed and warm. So I had a Snicker bar and a Wendy’s chicken sandwhich and Wendy’s medium fries which unfortunately weren’t salted to my satisfaction. I then went home, unpacked a few boxes, went to bed and ate 2 rice krispy treats while I watched Wrinkle in Time, which was somewhat of a disappointment.Anyway, last night I woke up at least twice feeling all hot and sweaty but woke up comfortable this morning. I hate having those nights where I keep waking up as I don’t feel like I slept well at all.This afternoon, I’m feeling warmish again and headachy, particularly in my forehead. However, today I don’t have quite the craving to cure this with caffeine like I did the last few days. I am still craving chocolate for some reason. ***Saw a funny ad: “$167.00 is all it takes to buy Bush a One Way ticket home. Chip in $50 now.” It was paid for by John Kerry’s people. Funny.

Tags: Middle East, innocent, hypocrisy, politics, George W. Bush, discombobulated, humor