H17406
Headlines : "War on Terror"Al Jazeera Cameraman Freed From Guantanamo After Six Years
Sami Al-Haj was detained in December 2001 by Pakistani authorities as he tried to enter Afghanistan to cover the U.S.-led invasion. He was turned over to the U.S. military and taken in January 2002 to Guantanamo Bay, where the United States holds some 275 men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban, most of them without charges.
Al-Haj was never prosecuted at Guantanamo so the U.S did not make public its full allegations against him. But in a hearing that determined that he was an enemy combatant, U.S. officials alleged that in the 1990s, al-Haj was an executive assistant at a Qatar-based beverage company that provided support to Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya.
[Posted By Dilated_Rebel]Republished from Truthout
An Al-Jazeera cameraman was released from US custody at Guantanamo Bay and returned home to Sudan early Friday after six years of imprisonment that drew worldwide protests.
Sami al-Haj arrived at the airport in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on a US military plane along with two other Sudanese released from Guantanamo.
Al-Haj was the only journalist from a major international news organization held at Guantanamo and many of his supporters saw his detention as punishment for a network whose broadcasts angered U.S. officials.
Posted by Dilated_Rebel
Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...
I read the whole article.
The statement made for reporters without borders “This case is yet another example of the injustice reigning in Guantanamo.” is not quite accurate. Guantanimo is just a symptom of what is going on in the U.S. itself. Fixing Guantanimo is like prescribing aspirin for Terminal Cancer. A lot of these people working in these camps are American Law Enforcement Officers that serve in the military reserves. I hear people say things like “They can’t do that! It’s against the law” all the time. Then I have to explain to these naive souls that these “people” believe that they are the law or above it. Every-time a person is arrested for possibly one charge, the officers and in quite a few cases the prosecutors immediately accuse the individual with of a whole list of false charges. It’s pretty much standard procedure. The most commonly used false charge is “resisting arrest” and the false is the accusation is the excuse they use for using excessive force on American Citizens. In increasing numbers our citizens are dying as a result of excessive force. It’s really perverse.
It’s not Guantanimo that needs fixing, it’s the United States. We have more people in prison than in any other country, including China.
Are you saying that Reprieve is a front for Reporters Without Borders of on the payroll of the US State Department fame?
What Associated Press, aka Lockheed Martin didn’t mention is that Sami was actually “released” into custody of the Sudanese Authorities.
OPEN QUOTE
A senior US defence official in Washington speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Reuters news agency that al-Hajj was “not being released [but] being transferred to the Sudanese government”.
. . .
Two other Sudanese inmates at Guantanamo, Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali, were freed along with al-Hajj. The two said they were blindfolded, handcuffed and chained to their seats during the flight home.
Planet Earth, meet The Hegemon
OPEN QUOTE
A US defence department official . . . told ABC news that al-Hajj was “a manipulator and a propagandist”.
An official from the US state department said that he had viewed al-Hajj’s show of weakness as an attempt to influence pubic opinion.
The US official said that al-Hajj’s propaganda style was impressive and criticised him for continually complaining about the maltreatment of detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
The official added that al-Hajj looked healthy and in good condition when he boarded the aircraft departing from Guantanamo Bay, which is on US military territory in Cuba.
“After more than 400 days of hunger strike [during which he was force fed] . . . he was transferred to Khartoum for more than 20 hours he was chained to his chair. He did not have food or go to the bathroom [on the flight].
The US administration would not make public any allegations against him, saying only that he was an “enemy combatant” and a security threat.
END OF QUOTE
It is times like these when it is important to deepen the realization that what we are dealing with is a complex adaptive system, not the individual people who have been possessed by it.
Sami’s hand was broken in Guantanamo and he was tortured many times. I know guys who met him there. They used to wake them up in the morning by blasting BORN IN THE USA, BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, then some Eminem, then some Lil Kim. No joke. I dont know what is worse beatings and torture or that trash music!!
Lights always on in the cell and he was in solitary confinement. The Pakistani intel sold him like they did to many of the other to the American for 5000 dollars a head. Any Arab back then was a GOLD MINE. The Americans asked him to work for them as an agent but he refused.
Many of the detainees especially those from the Persian Gulf were in Afganistan to build mosques, learn more about the Quran, or teach it. Building a mosque in Kuwait or other Gulf countries costs a lot of cash. In Afghanistan you could build one for 2000 dollars. Many of these men, lost their pasports because they could has to flee Afghanistan when the bombing started in 2001 and could not retrieve their belongings. So, they hired guids to take them to Pakistan through the desert, but these guards handed them to the Paki Intel, who sold them literally to the Americans!!
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?
with this bit to follow up on R-11’s ping :
36-year old Amir Yacoub al-Amir was one of at least 120 prisoners (around 15 percent of Guantánamo’s entire population), who were captured not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, without ever having been anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. In his tribunal at Guantánamo (one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals convened in 2004 and 2005 to assess whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” without rights), al-Amir strenuously denied an allegation that he was associated with al-Qaeda, saying, “I disagree with al-Qaeda on everything,” and also denied being associated with the Taliban.
Seized from a car in Peshawar in March 2002, while visiting Pakistan, al-Amir’s story echoes reports by numerous other innocent men seized in Pakistan, who said that they were captured and sold for money, a situation that was confirmed at the highest levels in 2006, when, in his autobiography, President Musharraf boasted that in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (who were mostly transferred to Guantánamo), “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”
Has anyone seen or read this?
The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 759 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison
OPEN QUOTE
In 2006, four years after Guantanamo Bay prison opened, the Pentagon finally released the names of the 773 men held there,along with 7,000 pages of transcripts from tribunals assessing their status as “enemy combatants”. Andy Worthington is the only person to have analyzed every page of these transcripts.
Drawing on these documents,as well as news reports and interviews with lawyers and released detainees, this book reveals, for the first time, the stories of all those imprisoned in Guantanamo.
This book does not make for easy reading, Deprived of the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, and, for the most part,sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the detainees have struggled for five years to have their stories heard. Looking in detail at the circumstances of their capture, and at the coercive interrogations and unsubstantiated allegations that have been used to justify their detention, The Guantanamo Files reveals that the majority of those captured were either Taliban foot soldiers or humanitarian aid workers, religious teachers and economic migrants,who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The book also uncovers stories of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and contains new information about the process of “extraordinary rendition” that underpins the “war on terror”’.
Who will speak for the 773 men who have been held in Guantanamo? This passionate and brilliantly detailed book brings their stories to the world for the first time.
from today’s Amy Show
“*‘Torture Team’ — British Attorney Philippe Sands on the White House Role in Sanctioning Torture*”:http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/8/torture_team_british_attorney_philippe_sands
The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings examining the Bush administration’s role in authorizing the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. We speak to British attorney and author Philippe Sands, author of the new book “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.” On Tuesday, Sands testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.