On the contrary, I wish more media websites explicitly framed things as opinions, even in fairly clear-cut cases like this. I don’t need or want the media to tell me what ethical opinion I should have.
Actual news, maybe, opinion pieces? No, or the whole thing is a comment section for one.
Plus even news articles can be corrected in comments. I've read many misleading articles where the flaws/bias are pointed out in comments, so ling as the author isn't allowed to "curate" them freely.
The amazing part, to me, is that many people are either unaware or this, or (worse yet) vaguely know that the US tortures people when it likes, but still think of the country as a place that respects human rights or the rule of law.
I used to think that the concept of doublethink in 1984 was satire. It pains me to realize that it absolutely is not.
> The two "doctors" assured the military men who hired them and the lawyers and politicians who signed it off that their techniques were entirely "painless". Let me take you through the one described as "a technique in which the detainees' wrists were tied together above their heads and they were unable to lean against a wall or lie down." I was put down a hole, suspended by my wrists from two chains that were locked to a horizontal metal bar at a height where my feet could barely touch the ground. I was left in total darkness for days—perhaps a week. Without food. Standing on tiptoe in my own excrement.
How can anyone watch this and realize that precisely nobody went to jail or suffered any kind of process of justice as a result and still think that the country has any respect whatsoever for its written policies or procedures?
> I have to admit, it's hard to believe we'd allow this sort of thing these day
Playing the devil's advocate for a moment- suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before, would you torture your informant to get the precise date and location ? one person's rights in exchange for thousands.
And still under the devil's advocate cover- why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial while many times causing suffering collateral damage ?
This “ticking time bomb” scenario where torture was effective at stopping some terror attack has as far as I can tell never happened.
When I was in college Alan Dershowitz participated in a public debate about torture in front of students where (aside from a great deal of incoherent blather and blatant disrespect his opponent, a woman whose husband had been tortured and murdered) he pulled some example of torture stopping a terror plot in (I believe?) Southeast Asia.
But when I looked up the details after the debate, it turned out that in fact torture hadn’t accomplished anything and the plot was stopped through unrelated regular investigative police work.
The whole argument is disingenuous, and many of the torture apologists behind it are lazy and academically dishonest.
> why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial
Personally I would argue that assassination is an unjust, illegal, and ineffective tactic for fighting against criminals, even violent criminals.
But still, assassination and torture are pretty clearly different. One is killing someone who presumably cannot be easily captured by ordinary law enforcement action. The other is inflicting horrific pain and suffering on a defenseless person in custody out of spite, for no practical benefit.
> Playing the devil's advocate for a moment- suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before, would you torture your informant to get the precise date and location ? one person's rights in exchange for thousands.
This is a pretty classic example of a utility monster. It's part of the reason that many have issues with utilitarianism.
Regardless, we're talking about Abu Ghraib. This was a rape factory that pushed several thousand through it's doors, so it's important to keep that in view, rather than drifting off into fantastical hypotheticals that presupposes our defensive reaction instead of our continual aggression.
> This is a pretty classic example of a utility monster. It's part of the reason that many have issues with utilitarianism.
I'm not sure it's even utilitarianism. Otherwise he'd be admitting that "Well, torture doesn't give us any actionable intelligence, so we shouldn't be torturing anybody". Utilitarianism isn't about doing pointless actions in the remote hope of the victim giving up anything useful or true.
> Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.
Stated otherwise: Suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before and you torture your informant to get the precise date and location. You don't get anything because torture doesn't work, and it draws resources away from more useful investigative efforts to track potential attackers, while undermining US strategic and diplomatic efforts overseas. Should you have tortured that person or not?
Utilitarianism is about whether the consequence justifies your course of action. If your goal is to prevent the 9/11 attacks, torturing whoever is the wrong solution. If your goal is to make people feel better, maybe, but even then I'd posit that you'd make them feel better by preventing 9/11.
> Unless the terrorist attack provided greater utility than preventing it, then you wouldn't want to stop it. Utilitarianism is real worrying, isn't it?
Again, it depends on what your goal is. Utilitarianism is as worrying as moral relativism, and I don't see people worried about that either.
> Well, as I've said multiple times, we're talking about Utilitarianism, so the goal is always utility maximization.
Am I talking to a wall? Utility isn't some general concept that automatically applies to everything. Utility of what? For me, utility maximization in that situation would be saving the lives of all the people in the WTC towers. For Bush it might be "how can I justify a war in two countries that have nothing to do with 9/11?". For you, it might be to waste my time with general questions that have nothing to do with anything.
There needs to be a goal to which utility must be maximized if you're thinking in utilitarian terms. Utility maximization isn't the goal, it's the method by which a goal is achieved or the metric by which success in achieving a goal is measured, whether's maximum happiness, maximum number of people killed, maximum number of people pissed off, or whatever else. It is not the goal in and of itself. Everybody has values and goals and preferences - utilitarianism is the application of utility maximization to these values, goals and preferences.
It sounds like you've been watching too much 24. In reality, according to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it doesn't seem to actually work effectively. Their key findings:
1. The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
2. The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
Because that argument has been repeatedly proven false. How would you know that the defendant was telling the truth? If your torture is working, then by definition the victim is in a rather confused mental state. SO even if you, as the devil, can assert that your victim actually has the knowledge (itself a difficult thing to know), how can you trust what is said under torture?
Secondly, the argument is essentially utilitarian, "one person's rights in exchange for thousands"-- which you would argue was true in this one case. However, if your strategy was adopted as policy, how many torture cases would there be? Would it only be this one time? Or are we talking about thousands of people being tortured over the years in the hope that one time this save thousands of lives.
Discussions about the utility of torture always make me thing of what people are really after:
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
No, torture has been proven ineffective in revealing information like that, especially from indoctrinated terrorists - they expect to be tortured. If you could just stick a knife in a person and have them tell you all they know - then by all means, yes - I will stab every single suspected terrorist with a surgeon attending to stitch them back up. As it stands, it's a barbaric practice that doesn't even work.
> Playing the devil's advocate for a moment- suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before, would you torture your informant to get the precise date and location ? one person's rights in exchange for thousands.
Torture literally does not work and the scenarios where it could conceivably work never materialize.
Even at the most basic level; torture doesn't work to reveal the truth, so any "information" that you gained is worthless until confirmed by another reliable channel, and if you can do that - well you might as well could have just used that reliable channel in the first place. It's also worth pointing out that even if someone knows something, they are not going to tell you just because you torture them. Famously the US tortured an actual terrorist for months on end using these methods and the man told his torturers exactly only those things he knew they already knew.
The word "painless" is just for the paper trail so people can start pointing at each other instead of taking responsibility. Means it will be covered up while people are still being held captive without a fair trial.
This needs to go to the International Court Of Justice in Den Haag, regardless if the court is being recognized by the US.
Security agencies actually did have some information about 9/11 more than a week before but didn't follow up on the leads. It's all in the 9/11 commission report, which led to forming the DHS and changing the policies for intelligence sharing.
You have no way to check if the people you torture told you the truth until it's too late. And they know it.
So they will just lie, you will torture them some more until you persuade yourself they told you the truth, and the attack will happen somewhere else than where they told you anyway.
But hey - you get to torture them some more after the fact to feel better.
It amazes me anyone could sell any of these procedures as "painless" and WH lawyers somehow managed to concoct an opinion that even if this was a painful process that it was not torture because the goal of the interrogators was not to inflict pain but rather to gain information.
I'd like to a) see an interview with both doctors about this, and b) see a legal analysis of why the USG got them to sign off on anything, and what they gained from it. Then, if those opinions were invalid or coerced for any reason, you can nail them for breaking the law AND attempting to cover it up.
I would also, assuming its as bad as it sounds, at the very least, I'd go hard after those doctors and get their licenses, at least. I bet it would trigger already existing law if you could elminate this evil little maneuver.
Now, a motivated administration could still get someone to do it, I'm sure, unethical doctors at the end of their career, or doctors you pay off or threaten to do it. But that increases the difficulty considerably.
Oh, and I would also like to see an interview with W and Obama (and Trump!) about this.
If you like 1984 and doublethink, then you'll enjoy this. Department of War was rebranded as Department of Defense three months after 1984 was published. Life imitating art? And ever since, the Department of Defense has engaged in offensive wars all over the world nonstop. Though I suppose the best defense is a good offense...
To be fair, there has not been evidence of systematical torture since that program was abandoned. That's also sometimes forgotten.
And by that I mean that yes, there were individual incidents of torture, but they weren't sanctioned and often prosecuted. There might be as of yet unknown incidents or programs, but the space and scope for such would be rather limited, given all that happened since.
The willingness to torture prisoners arbitrarily, and the unwillingness to police or prosecute or punish the widespread application of torture in prisons is well-distributed and longstanding tradition within the United States.
Additionally, it's sort of hard to say that the incidences in question by the military weren't sanctioned when the CIA actually hacked into Congress to further the coverup.
> I was minding my own business in Karachi when I was kidnapped and sold to the U.S. for a bounty by Pakistani authorities, with the assurance that I was a terrorist called Hassan Ghul.
Meanwhile, he's still in Guantanamo some 17 years later.
So what happened to the real Hassan Ghul?
Ghul was "Captured by Kurdish Peshmarga forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and turned over to American intelligence in early 2004... In 2006, Ghul was transferred to the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which released him in 2007."
These kind of abuses are the best recruiter a terrorist organisation can have - something that the UK only learned very late in the day in Northern Ireland.
Edit: You would think that citizens of the United States would know better than most that oppression by distant governments causes revolts, not obedience.
> These kind of abuses are the best recruiter a terrorist organisation can have
I'm willing to bet that's the whole point. This way some countries can keep up the BS "war on terror". They create and maintain a certain status quo and then "fight" against it. This way trillions of dollars get siphoned (from their own citizens!) into certain people's pockets (some even enemies of their own citizens!), and they maintain influence over the Middle East.
> citizens of the United States would know better
The citizens of the US, like most of the world, has Facebook to keep them entertained, and student loans and more immediate problems to distract them from things that have no obvious direct impact on them. When they found out every aspect of their lives is being spied on and investigated even by their own was there a massive revolt? No, everyone everywhere took it sitting down in a sign that this can continue and even escalate. They'll even justify torture by saying "well they probably are terrorists otherwise they wouldn't get this treatment". Land of the free to do as you're told.
I think the actual problem is where to put him. No single state in the US volunteers to take him on. It's not so much about the rather small risk that he could be a terrorist (or might have become radicalized/motivated by treating him as such) but rather that some voters might THINK there is still a risk, however small. And a politician that advocates for taking him in will be (figuratively) flogged if the former prisoner commits anything worse than a parking ticket in his further life.
Similar pressures apply to Pakistan and to other countries who might feel even less responsibility to free him.
But he still has citizenship, right? In Pakistan? They already know he's not who they thought he was, so what argument/law could they possibly use to not let him back into the country?
I don't know the details, but I could imagine they would prefer to not know that he is a Pakistani citizen.
In that part of the world, citizenship and identity can be a messy subject. None of those countries is ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, not all of them can reliably track all citizens if they lost their papers.
And I can imagine he wouldn't be a "gift" for the Pakistani government itself, considering political implications.
The government of Pakistan were the "kidnappers" that originally turned him over to the US. (He leaves that part out of his story.) They don't want him, and he was previously expelled from Saudi Arabia. I don't know what other options he might have.
"National Security" = we don't want to be embarrassed about our heinous crimes against humanity being revealed, so we keep the subject of those crimes hidden away, at all costs, because "National Security". If the legal precedent is established with even just one case, it will open a whole can of worms because, after all, there are hundreds of innocent people being tortured in our secret torture camps.
So, for the sake of the national security of the committer of these crimes, we will keep them indefinitely, hoping the problem will one day go away or we get a President who will make it all legal.
Seriously.
This is the argument.
EDIT: downvote all you want, but America has a serious human rights issue here. It is detaining INNOCENT people with no due process, indefinitely - for DECADES now. It is time for the American people to demand the closure of Guantanamo, and for an investigation into the CIA's black torture sites, of which there are far, far too many around the world, secretly tucked out of the view of the American public. If you are okay with this, you're the problem.
The defacto argument is "If he's in Guantanamo, he must be bad." But the courts don't use that argument for the determination of whether someone should be released or not.
The sad thing is that it isn't even threatened. All the current wars that the US is fighting or starting are offensive, none of the countries invaded (or about to be attacked) are a threat to the US.
The democratic society doesn’t participate in elections for congress to enable them to control the executive. The people that do vote punish candidates who appear “soft” on “enemies”.
Out of all the senators and representatives, there was just 1 that opposed giving the executive carte blanche authorization to do whatever it wants to whoever it wants after the Sep 11, 2001 attacks. She received tons and tons of hate mail and death threats.
Republican party did unjust war in Iraq and lied to the public to make it happen. It still exists as a mainstream party. Apparently people don't care.
On the other hand having an affair is a reason to remove a president from the office :) Unless of course you like his racism enough :)
The 2-party system is insane, it means no matter what you do you'll be the governing party in a decade or so anyway. So why not risk big? There's no consequences to fuckups.
If you have no democratic control over your intelligence agencies then you don't live in a democracy.
Is money really the motive here when so much public money is spent so that we can continue to control the geo-politics of the middle-east + surrounding region for 'energy security' and so that private companies can profit from the energy exploitation?
It seems to me, a layman, that the motive could be legal or political instead.
If the argument is "he could sue", the justification would be something like there's a miniscule risk that a lawsuit could lead to a Supreme Court decision that puts their kidnapping, torture and black site policies at risk. I don't think money is relevant here.
I'd say the cost of keeping Guantanamo open for decades is way past any settlement figure.
Currently they are treated (relatively) well and have access to lawyers. I think they could sue for damages, but they are probably focused on being released first.
Well, here’s a rare case where only death sentences seem appropriate. A custodial sentence (in the US) wouldn’t be workable as we’d probably just end up with another president pardoning the heroic war criminals.
Nothing uncharitable or deliberate about it. I had to read your comment about three times before I figured out that you might not mean the author. That's the most charitable interpretation I could find, and I searched for it since I had trouble believing you would want the prisoner executed, which is the obvious interpretation. The number of downvotes you've received show that other people had the same difficulty.
Here shouldn't have been tortured. He should have a trial.
>evidence that he _did_ anything
There wouldn't be. It's not an "article", it's a (very good) plea for public sympathy written by the detainee. Do you expect him to implicate himself?
I don't even question whether he was tortured. But I do seriously question whether he was an innocent bystander, given the classified WikiLeaks documents on him.
The most shocking thing about this article are the comments down at the page. It's full of people claiming that he deserved the treatment for whatever unknown reasons. It's sickening.
Surprisingly it's not really allowed to be paid for by US state actors.
I haven't yet found any reporting on such operations in English-speaking or even onshore media being tied back to the CIA or NSA or even political campaigns. The latter may even be allowed to do it.
At the very least the US system dealt with this issue on its own.
It's important to remember that US authorities never used torture in general, and probably not at all since this program was used. That doesn't make what happened any better, but it doesn't mean the US is worse in this regard than China, North Korea or Russia. We just don't know the extent of human rights violations there, and we sort of assume that's their normal behavior anyway.
> At the very least the US system dealt with this issue on its own.
We did?
Bush and Cheney are free men, as is the entire chain of those who advocated for torture (John Yoo still gets into the New York Times!), as are those who have carried out illegal orders to torture.
Wait a minute, this guy way misidentified 17 years ago and imprisoned based on that misidentification. How is it possible that he is still in there? Are the authorities claiming he is actually who they misidentified him as or what is their excuse for his imprisonment?
I can see how they could get away with torturing suspected terrorists or whatever (although I don't agree with it) end even how they might keep holding someone who was wrongfully accused after more evidence surfaces (again, it would be deplorable, but not unlikely), but this is a completely third party that they imprisoned because they thought he was someone else! I don't see a single argument that could be made for not releasing him - not even a really bad one.
How is this not on the news every day? How is the UN and every single human rights org not all over this?? How does this not come up in every single US presidential debate?
I am sympathetic your outrage — but I think you're insufficiently cynical if you can't figure out why he's stuck in that concentration camp despite everyone agreeing he's innocent.
To release him now would be an admission of comprehensive institutional failure at every level -- from his initial capture, through mis-identification, rendition, torture and ongoing imprisonment. The longer the error persists, the worse it gets, and the harder it becomes to admit it's all a horrible mistake. Nobody in the US government institutions that maintain his imprisonment will benefit from admitting it was all a mistake: to the military he's an embarrassment, and to the politicians, releasing him would be handing ammunition to their electoral rivals. (Democracy has failure modes: this is one of them.) So it'd be far better for everyone concerned if he'd quietly die of natural causes so they could bury him and the controversy at the same time.
(Finally, a really cynical part of me thinks that maybe keeping an innocent bloke in jail for 17 years is expedient to a certain part of the US foreign affairs establishment because it sends a message to everyone outside the USA, world-wide: "we can fsck you up on a whim and there is nothing anybody can do about it." In other words, it's dominance signaling. See also the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, imprisoned in Iran, for example.)
I try to give the US the benefit of the doubt occasionally to keep myself from forming a bias against them as my list of reasons to despise the country (NOT the people) seems to just keep growing.
And I do understand why the government won't just release him, but if everyone in the world knew about this, releasing him wouldn't do that much harm (everyone would have already seen the failure) and would actually be brilliant PR for whoever does it. But then again, that would require people and especially media that actually care and have a longer attention span than 30 seconds, which seems rather far from achievable right now.
It's almost a textbook case of institutional failure -- multiple interlocking institutions took a remediable mistake (the first arrest) and doubled-down on it. Almost as if the failures are an emergent property of the institutional architecture.
(This being HN, we see this sort of thing discussed wrt. failing startups or larger corporations, but seldom so brutally and clearly with governments -- although the moderators' policy on political discussions is necessary if only to prevent HN turning into a permanent floating firestorm of flame wars.)
I think that's the whole point about Guantanamo - the local court is on the other side of a razor wire fence - in Cuba - by claiming that it's not US soil the US government avoids its own laws
This is rather more about not letting these prisoners get access to to the inalienable rights that people in the US have ie the US constitution does not apply there, even though they convene US courts and try people - it's all rather 1984ish
Not to mention that keeping an innocent man in prison and torturing him for 17 years is a pretty good way to turn him into an actual terrorist. It'd be understandable if the guy would hate the system that wronged him so much, that he'd attempt to attack it if released. I'm absolutely not trying to advocate for them to continue keeping the guy there, but at least it's an argument.
What's sad is that in 2008, the US supreme court issued it's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush:
"The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is'."
I'm no expert, but I think the reason they built Guantanamo in Cuba is so it's away from any legal oversight. And I also assume that this doesn't come up in debates because it would instantly by followed by accusations of being soft on terrorism.
IIRC, it was initially argued by the Bush administration that because the facility was in Cuba, it was exempt from American laws against indefinite detainment, requiring council and forbidding torture and cruel and unusual punishment (sorry... enhanced interrogation), etc. That argument was quickly shot down, though, because obviously an American military base in Cuba is still American property and subject to American laws.
After 9/11 there was this perception (somewhat engineered by the neo-cons, but also organic in that Americans had never experienced anything like that and had a bit of an existential crisis) that American civil liberties and laws had actually made the country weak and had created a loophole that terrorists had been able to exploit. This led to the "new normal", where it was seen as necessary (even a matter of civic duty) to accept ceding our civil rights and liberties in order to allow the government to aggressively pursue the terrorist threat by any means necessary.
This lead to Guantanamo Bay and the normalization of indefinite detainment and torture in American culture, to the increased militarization of American police, to the modern global surveillance panopticon as revealed by Snowden, and the War on Terror.
> an American military base in Cuba is still American property
It's not. Both Cuba and the United States recognize that Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba. They disagree about whether a pre-Revolution lease agreement is still in place or not.
> it would instantly by followed by accusations of being soft on terrorism
Damn, if there are people so dumb that they would buy "I'm not talking about the general case but just this one dude that we KNOW was sent there BY ACCIDENT - can't we just release the poor guy?" as being soft on terrorism then it's no surprise US politics are such a shitshow...
It was built to solidify US naval power projection into the Caribbean and Gulf back in 1898. The detention camp was placed there in 2002 partially to avoid the legal concerns and partially out of convenience (there's only a handful of places outside the US mainland they could have placed it, and Cuba is the only one where they don't care what the host nation says).
Obama's efforts to close it, which did come up in debates (and came back in 2016) were basically rebuffed by Congress. Not because they want to keep Gitmo open, but because nobody wants the prisoners moved into their constituency's backyard.
George W. Bush approved enhanced interrogation and rolled out black sites, Barack Obama closed those sites but failed to close Guantanamo, and Trump seems to be content to keep it open. Republican senators are ardently opposed to trials for detainees on US soil, and dont have a solution for the camp other than to keep it open until the population passes away peacefully or foreign nations start accepting them as immigrants.
The oldest man in GITMO currently is 71. Each of these detainees receives the same care as a US Soldier, but frankly doesnt contribute much. Our reasoning for keeping them there (often against overwhelming evidence of their innocence) has been contemptuous at some times, comical at others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
Id surmise 20 years after 9/11 that GITMO is a sore spot in US politics most bureaucrats are content to just pretend never existed. It hasnt produced the Jack Bauer results we'd all been promised. Its arguably not been much of a detention center at all in the past decade.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157134/PlayStation...
The only concerning human rights fallout from this is that some countries are now more recalcitrant about handing over their citizens to US law enforcement, and many designated enemies are now more emboldened to use torture freely against US soldiers and citizens as we are now on the record as having employed torture ourselves.
It certainly doesn't justify torture, but it also doesn't look like he's the completely innocent bystander he claims to be.
From my quick reading, looks like he admitted to operating an Al-qaeda safe house and being a high level trusted driver/messenger.
Also looks like majority of his life was spent in Saudi Arabia, but was expelled before going to Pakistan. Arrested multiple times trying to travel to join jihad training...
This "admission" isn't worth anything. Suspended by the wrists tiptoeing into my own shit for days? Sure I would tell them I was operating an al-quaeda safe house, that I was a driver/messenger and that my mother was the queen of England.
I agree, but the leaked document contains more than just information he confessed. It might not be accurate, and/or maybe all of the other al-Qaeda leaders who named him as an associate were also coerced into confessing that, but it's a much more complicated story than what's written in this article.
Having seen the document, it was also interesting to me to read the article again. I might be over-analyzing, but he seems to have chosen his words very carefully: he claims he's a "nobody" and was "minding [his] own business" when he was captured. He says he was bountied as someone else. He plays up the torture, deservingly, but he doesn't really proclaim his innocence. At least not to the extent I would be, were it me.
Maybe he's denied his guilt differently in the past, but the article's wording looks suspiciously to me like dancing around a lie.
I'm trying to remain objective, but I'm starting to get that bitterness felt once you realized you've been intentionally fooled.
I agree, and am equally skeptical, but I'm saying:
Maybe there's more to the story than what the detainee chooses to share in his letter to the editor.
Read the linked report, even if it's just for insight into how the system isn't working.
Edit: Also, fwiw, apparently he was a well known al Qaeda "facilitator" in Karachi, meaning he was implicated by others too. It's not solely his "admission". But also the report claims he's a well behaved, cooperative prisoner who voluntary shared a lot...
It's obviously still based on trusting the classified report, if you want to believe it.
They keep him in there because he has been radicalised over the last 17 years to detest Americans, and now would be deemed a credible threat if he were to be released. /s
it is like a person in a police choke hold would naturally/instinctively start to convulse trying to grasp for air, and that is naturally "resisting arrest" which, beside the benefit of being an additional charge (or even the only charge that would stick), allows to immediately escalate the application of force to any level the police feels like.
That's what happens when you have no habeas corpus, or any rights whatsoever. It seems those inalienable rights that man is endowed with do indeed come from the government and can indeed be taken away. Inalienable rights my ass. The only real issue here is that we continue to call the US a democracy and free society. How can it be either when its people have no rights? I'm sure someone will explain about how being in Cuba gives the government the power to ignore the constitution completely and therefore any rights, but that would just prove that those rights are indeed alienable and only exist as long as the government allows them to. So they're not rights at all.
it was in the news for YEARS, countless articles, books were written, movies were made, law suits filed (by all of those human rights org you mentioned)....if you were not aware of the US policy on using torture - you simply weren't paying any attention...
I remember reading an account by a young soldier in the second world war. The war was going badly for Germany, and he was conscripted into the army. Before he left, his father gave him some advice, based on his own experiences in the first world war.
The advice was to surrender to the first American he saw. The father had been taken prisoner by the US Army during the first world war, and his experience in captivity was such that he advised his own son to surrender to the Americans as quickly as possible, rather than fight.
How many lives, both American and others, were saved by this and others like him? We'll never know, but if your enemy believes that by surrendering to you he will be safe and well-treated, surely many.
So where are we now? Now the narrative is "If the Americans capture you, you will wish you were dead." Everyone who carries out these tortures is holding a gun to the head of every American soldier in the field. I'm surprised that torturers don't get fragged by their own side more often. Maybe they do.
Bush was the worst president. But where was the impeachment over starting an illegal imperialist war? Where was the impeachment for setting up an unconstitutional torture prison? Where were all these Democrats then? Oh right, they were voting for it!
Every prison guard in the world “learns” that almost every convict is innocent and is there by accident.
While Guantanamo methods are supposedly shady (and illegal in light of basic human rights and conventions), there is a very non-zero chance that the article is a made up and/or incomplete story by this convict. I’m not going to claim anything, but let’s not jump to conclusions on who is real evil based only on what someone says on the internet out of a prison cell.
It may sound hard for this guy, but if he’s innocent, he is still outnumbered by cynical liars who claim the same everyday. They have time at their hands to figure out ways to make life easier and constant deception is one of the methods used.
Iow, one of the answers on why it’s not a daily headline is because UN, human rights and those who make headlines check a little deeper -or- put it under “opinion” tag (like in this article).
It looks like he was an accomplice to the person they originally mistook him for. Not just a random taxi driver / guy in the street. They mistook him because of where he was and what he was doing, presumably running a safe house and being (taxi?) driver to senior operatives. Not mistaken because of looks, and maybe not as innocent as he makes it sound in the article.
He's not the bad guy they originally thought he was, but still a bad guy, or at least was working for the bad guy.
Not advocating for torture, and not necessarily saying it's true, just presenting the other side.
There is no other side: either they arrested him for cause or they did not. Arresting someone thinking they are someone else should automatically result in a release and in this case probably compensation. You are 'just presenting the other side' in the same way that news organizations will pretend to be balanced by presenting two sides of an argument which has already been resolved as though there is some kind of controversy that needs to be kept alive.
So, either he was 'a bad guy', let's see the charges, or it was a case of mistaken identity. It does not look like there is much middle ground here.
1) If the cops get a tip that Bonnie is hiding out in a house, and they raid it only to find Clyde alone, they're going to still arrest him. Even if it takes them time to figure out that Clyde is -in fact- Clyde, and that he isn't Bonnie. Same goes for a senior member of Al Qaeda and his driver/messenger/accomplice.
2) This isn't about his character or being "good" vs "bad". This is about whether he knowingly provided material support to Al Qaeda or enemy combatants. The leaked report
I linked to makes a compelling (to me) case that he repeatedly attempted to join and assist militant jihad groups, including after being jailed for it in Pakistan.
3) That said, none of it justifies torture, and none of it justifies denying him the right to a trial, be it military or civilian.
You apparently did not read the linked article, so let me repeat a couple of salient points:
(1) the guy was not arrested in some house after a raid but sold by kidnappers to the Americans being told that he was someone else.
(2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
Note that because there is no trial that none of the above has ever been countered so that's the only evidence there is. If the other side has a story it wishes to tell it's had 17 years and counting to do so. The only apparent reason why he is still there is because the people in charge are scared that he will sue them (and rightly so).
It's a case of perverse incentives gone bad, not a case of catching 'Bonnie' when looking for 'Clyde'.
The "article" that's a letter written by the detainee?
I read it. In detail.
I'm saying consider a source other than the detainee.
I'm about as skeptical of perverse government incentives as one can get. But that doesn't mean I automatically take the word of the detainee, either... He has his own incentives at play.
He deserves a trial. He didn't deserve to be tortured and shouldn't have been. But his story doesn't add up to me.
>>1)sold by kidnappers
According to the detainee assessment I linked to above:
(---Which again, l don't necessarily trust to be true or in good faith any more than the detainees letter, but it's 11 pages of pretty damning classified details, that paint a different picture than "innocent bystander".--- )
>The Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISID) captured detainee along with his driver, Muhammad Madni, on 10 September 2002 at detainee’s safe house in Karachi. Detainee was held in Pakistani custody and was transferred to US custody at Bagram, AF in May 2004.
Maybe they thought he was someone different, but it looks like he was definitely involved, since:
>He [Madni] also provided information on other safe houses, which led on the following day to the arrest of
11 September 2001 terrorist attack planners Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
Hassan Muhammad Ali Bin Attash, aka (Muhammed Tawfiq), and other al-Qaida members. During the second ISID raid, a group of eight suspected members of al-Qaida resisted arrest resulting in the deaths of two of the cell members. The remaining six were taken prisoner and weapons and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were confiscated.
>>2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
But we don't know that, other than taking him at his word. (Unless you've got something else you're going off of.) The report calls him a combat trained "facilitator" and says he was paid to do many different things, including driving for his superiors, housing militants and smuggling them over the border to Afghanistan:
>Detainee is an admitted al-Qaida facilitator, who had the
full trust and confidence of al-Qaida leadership. Detainee admitted working directly for senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KSM)...
>In 1994, detainee initially trained for seven months at
a militant camp near Khowst, AF and then went to the Khaldan Training Camp for a two-month training session in tactics. Detainee then attempted to go to Kashmir, PK but was arrested at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, for which he spent 1995 and 1996 in prison.
>Detainee has been forthcoming in the past about his role as a
facilitator and his associations among the highest levels of the al-Qaida organization, which has been corroborated by numerous JTF-GTMO detainees reporting. ... Detainee downplays the fact that he received advanced military training at terrorist training camps and he has become non-cooperative with interrogators since late 2004.
>...Detainee reported meeting with UBL on 6 to 12 occasions...
>In 1999, detainee began working directly for UBL’s chief of operations, Abu Hafs,aka (Muhammad Atif). Detainee would transport al-Qaida fighters for Abu Hafs from Karachi to Quetta, PK, where another driver would take them to Kandahar. Detainee next met senior al-Qaida operational planner KU-10024 who offered detainee a job driving him around in a taxi for 200 Pakistani rupees ...
Sorry, but absent an actual trial we only have his side of the story, anything else could be hearsay or a fabrication, he wants a trial, the US government does not which makes it strongly look as though they know that their evidence will not stand up in court. Given that there has been plenty of fabricated evidence and more than one case of people innocently being left to rot in Guantanamo under the pretense that it is no mans land and therefore outside of any jurisdiction for now the onus is on the counterparty, in other words, the United States government.
If you was mistaken for someone else that doesn’t automagically free you from crimes or connections you have yourself, apart from that person. The story doesn’t tell us how he got caught. Was he kidnapped at night from his family or busted at a secret meeting after a two-month intelligence operation - this can make a big difference.
I think you did read my comment as a definitive statement, while it just describes an option that was not mentioned itt, but has some potential to be true.
> If you was mistaken for someone else that doesn’t automagically free you from crimes or connections you have yourself, apart from that person
Wow. I have seen this attitude deployed by law enforcement against certain demographics "Well, he might not have committed this crime, but he committed some other crime for sure. Pinning this on him is no biggie, he had it coming". This attitude makes a mockery of any nation that considers itself a nation ruled by law - that is not the way the law should work
Who is to say someone is innocent or not? In the western world there is still a thing called "Innocent until proven guilty", and that proof is done in court.
17 years without a trial is not acceptable by any western values.
>17 years without a trial is not acceptable by any western values.
You may not have noticed, but Western values have changed. Indefinite detainment without trial and torture are perfectly acceptable for Muslims and brown people.
If Guantanamo Bay ever harms one hair on a pretty Christian white girl's head, though, Americans will burn it to the ground.
71 detainees were classified as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo, even though there was no evidence to justify laying charges against them.
Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release.
This shouldn't be acceptable even if the guy was osama bin Laden. It makes America look deranged, a violent psychopathic country out for blood at any and all costs. It makes me truly ashamed to be American and pay American taxes, taxes that support this torture and blatant disregard for everyone's rights. It also makes me ashamed of my fellow Americans who support or supported the administrations that did this. There is no excuse for this and no excuse for supporting this, now or then. Apparently we can torture people to death without charges but can't get healthcare for our own people. That's some sick society.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadhttps://www.newsweek.com/dear-president-trump-close-guantana...
Rabbani previously went on hunger strike in 2017, but Guantanamo's force-feeding prevented him from dying:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/guantanamo-detainee-c...
Further details on Rabbani:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rabbani-guantana...
Plus even news articles can be corrected in comments. I've read many misleading articles where the flaws/bias are pointed out in comments, so ling as the author isn't allowed to "curate" them freely.
I used to think that the concept of doublethink in 1984 was satire. It pains me to realize that it absolutely is not.
I have to admit, it's hard to believe we'd allow this sort of thing these days and yet there is also recent history supporting this as a pattern of behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
How can anyone watch this and realize that precisely nobody went to jail or suffered any kind of process of justice as a result and still think that the country has any respect whatsoever for its written policies or procedures?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/cia-admits-spy...
I, for one, am firmly convinced that there are two different sets of laws in this country. One for us, and one for them.
Playing the devil's advocate for a moment- suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before, would you torture your informant to get the precise date and location ? one person's rights in exchange for thousands.
And still under the devil's advocate cover- why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial while many times causing suffering collateral damage ?
When I was in college Alan Dershowitz participated in a public debate about torture in front of students where (aside from a great deal of incoherent blather and blatant disrespect his opponent, a woman whose husband had been tortured and murdered) he pulled some example of torture stopping a terror plot in (I believe?) Southeast Asia.
But when I looked up the details after the debate, it turned out that in fact torture hadn’t accomplished anything and the plot was stopped through unrelated regular investigative police work.
The whole argument is disingenuous, and many of the torture apologists behind it are lazy and academically dishonest.
> why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial
Personally I would argue that assassination is an unjust, illegal, and ineffective tactic for fighting against criminals, even violent criminals.
But still, assassination and torture are pretty clearly different. One is killing someone who presumably cannot be easily captured by ordinary law enforcement action. The other is inflicting horrific pain and suffering on a defenseless person in custody out of spite, for no practical benefit.
This is a pretty classic example of a utility monster. It's part of the reason that many have issues with utilitarianism.
Regardless, we're talking about Abu Ghraib. This was a rape factory that pushed several thousand through it's doors, so it's important to keep that in view, rather than drifting off into fantastical hypotheticals that presupposes our defensive reaction instead of our continual aggression.
I'm not sure it's even utilitarianism. Otherwise he'd be admitting that "Well, torture doesn't give us any actionable intelligence, so we shouldn't be torturing anybody". Utilitarianism isn't about doing pointless actions in the remote hope of the victim giving up anything useful or true.
> Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.
Stated otherwise: Suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before and you torture your informant to get the precise date and location. You don't get anything because torture doesn't work, and it draws resources away from more useful investigative efforts to track potential attackers, while undermining US strategic and diplomatic efforts overseas. Should you have tortured that person or not?
Utilitarianism is about the perception of value. If torturing someone makes a population feel better, then at scale it is a net positive.
It's consequentialist but the OP was pretty spot on. Utilitarianism is about maximizing utility.
> If your goal is to make people feel better, maybe, but even then I'd posit that you'd make them feel better by preventing 9/11.
Unless the terrorist attack provided greater utility than preventing it, then you wouldn't want to stop it. Utilitarianism is real worrying, isn't it?
Again, it depends on what your goal is. Utilitarianism is as worrying as moral relativism, and I don't see people worried about that either.
Well, as I've said multiple times, we're talking about Utilitarianism, so the goal is always utility maximization.
> Utilitarianism is as worrying as moral relativism, and I don't see people worried about that either.
Plenty of people are justifiably terrified about moral relativism.
Am I talking to a wall? Utility isn't some general concept that automatically applies to everything. Utility of what? For me, utility maximization in that situation would be saving the lives of all the people in the WTC towers. For Bush it might be "how can I justify a war in two countries that have nothing to do with 9/11?". For you, it might be to waste my time with general questions that have nothing to do with anything.
There needs to be a goal to which utility must be maximized if you're thinking in utilitarian terms. Utility maximization isn't the goal, it's the method by which a goal is achieved or the metric by which success in achieving a goal is measured, whether's maximum happiness, maximum number of people killed, maximum number of people pissed off, or whatever else. It is not the goal in and of itself. Everybody has values and goals and preferences - utilitarianism is the application of utility maximization to these values, goals and preferences.
1. The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
2. The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniq...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8236336/
Secondly, the argument is essentially utilitarian, "one person's rights in exchange for thousands"-- which you would argue was true in this one case. However, if your strategy was adopted as policy, how many torture cases would there be? Would it only be this one time? Or are we talking about thousands of people being tortured over the years in the hope that one time this save thousands of lives.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/nazi-interrogator-revealed-...
Discussions about the utility of torture always make me thing of what people are really after:
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Edit: Probably doesn't make good TV though....
Torture literally does not work and the scenarios where it could conceivably work never materialize.
Even at the most basic level; torture doesn't work to reveal the truth, so any "information" that you gained is worthless until confirmed by another reliable channel, and if you can do that - well you might as well could have just used that reliable channel in the first place. It's also worth pointing out that even if someone knows something, they are not going to tell you just because you torture them. Famously the US tortured an actual terrorist for months on end using these methods and the man told his torturers exactly only those things he knew they already knew.
It doesn't work.
This needs to go to the International Court Of Justice in Den Haag, regardless if the court is being recognized by the US.
So they will just lie, you will torture them some more until you persuade yourself they told you the truth, and the attack will happen somewhere else than where they told you anyway.
But hey - you get to torture them some more after the fact to feel better.
He doesn't need the help.
I would also, assuming its as bad as it sounds, at the very least, I'd go hard after those doctors and get their licenses, at least. I bet it would trigger already existing law if you could elminate this evil little maneuver.
Now, a motivated administration could still get someone to do it, I'm sure, unethical doctors at the end of their career, or doctors you pay off or threaten to do it. But that increases the difficulty considerably.
Oh, and I would also like to see an interview with W and Obama (and Trump!) about this.
And by that I mean that yes, there were individual incidents of torture, but they weren't sanctioned and often prosecuted. There might be as of yet unknown incidents or programs, but the space and scope for such would be rather limited, given all that happened since.
The willingness to torture prisoners arbitrarily, and the unwillingness to police or prosecute or punish the widespread application of torture in prisons is well-distributed and longstanding tradition within the United States.
Apparently, it's also fairly common to torture schoolchildren: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/11/20/illinois...
Additionally, it's sort of hard to say that the incidences in question by the military weren't sanctioned when the CIA actually hacked into Congress to further the coverup.
Meanwhile, he's still in Guantanamo some 17 years later.
So what happened to the real Hassan Ghul?
Ghul was "Captured by Kurdish Peshmarga forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and turned over to American intelligence in early 2004... In 2006, Ghul was transferred to the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which released him in 2007."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan_Ghul
Also there’s some chance these people may harbor a slight dislike towards the land of the free.
Edit: You would think that citizens of the United States would know better than most that oppression by distant governments causes revolts, not obedience.
I'm willing to bet that's the whole point. This way some countries can keep up the BS "war on terror". They create and maintain a certain status quo and then "fight" against it. This way trillions of dollars get siphoned (from their own citizens!) into certain people's pockets (some even enemies of their own citizens!), and they maintain influence over the Middle East.
> citizens of the United States would know better
The citizens of the US, like most of the world, has Facebook to keep them entertained, and student loans and more immediate problems to distract them from things that have no obvious direct impact on them. When they found out every aspect of their lives is being spied on and investigated even by their own was there a massive revolt? No, everyone everywhere took it sitting down in a sign that this can continue and even escalate. They'll even justify torture by saying "well they probably are terrorists otherwise they wouldn't get this treatment". Land of the free to do as you're told.
https://mamot.fr/system/media_attachments/files/001/582/923/...
Similar pressures apply to Pakistan and to other countries who might feel even less responsibility to free him.
In that part of the world, citizenship and identity can be a messy subject. None of those countries is ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, not all of them can reliably track all citizens if they lost their papers.
And I can imagine he wouldn't be a "gift" for the Pakistani government itself, considering political implications.
No, he doesn't.
So, for the sake of the national security of the committer of these crimes, we will keep them indefinitely, hoping the problem will one day go away or we get a President who will make it all legal.
Seriously.
This is the argument.
EDIT: downvote all you want, but America has a serious human rights issue here. It is detaining INNOCENT people with no due process, indefinitely - for DECADES now. It is time for the American people to demand the closure of Guantanamo, and for an investigation into the CIA's black torture sites, of which there are far, far too many around the world, secretly tucked out of the view of the American public. If you are okay with this, you're the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani
The defacto argument is "If he's in Guantanamo, he must be bad." But the courts don't use that argument for the determination of whether someone should be released or not.
... there are careers and money to be made.
Out of all the senators and representatives, there was just 1 that opposed giving the executive carte blanche authorization to do whatever it wants to whoever it wants after the Sep 11, 2001 attacks. She received tons and tons of hate mail and death threats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Lee
How you assign blame internally is up to you.
On the other hand having an affair is a reason to remove a president from the office :) Unless of course you like his racism enough :)
The 2-party system is insane, it means no matter what you do you'll be the governing party in a decade or so anyway. So why not risk big? There's no consequences to fuckups.
If you have no democratic control over your intelligence agencies then you don't live in a democracy.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
It seems to me, a layman, that the motive could be legal or political instead.
Currently they are treated (relatively) well and have access to lawyers. I think they could sue for damages, but they are probably focused on being released first.
Sure, if you really want to interpret me in the most uncharitable way possible.
>evidence that he _did_ anything
There wouldn't be. It's not an "article", it's a (very good) plea for public sympathy written by the detainee. Do you expect him to implicate himself?
I don't even question whether he was tortured. But I do seriously question whether he was an innocent bystander, given the classified WikiLeaks documents on him.
I haven't yet found any reporting on such operations in English-speaking or even onshore media being tied back to the CIA or NSA or even political campaigns. The latter may even be allowed to do it.
It's important to remember that US authorities never used torture in general, and probably not at all since this program was used. That doesn't make what happened any better, but it doesn't mean the US is worse in this regard than China, North Korea or Russia. We just don't know the extent of human rights violations there, and we sort of assume that's their normal behavior anyway.
Certainly not how I remember the Iraq War...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_priso...
We did?
Bush and Cheney are free men, as is the entire chain of those who advocated for torture (John Yoo still gets into the New York Times!), as are those who have carried out illegal orders to torture.
What did we do, exactly?
Good luck getting remotely as much from China or Russia...
I can see how they could get away with torturing suspected terrorists or whatever (although I don't agree with it) end even how they might keep holding someone who was wrongfully accused after more evidence surfaces (again, it would be deplorable, but not unlikely), but this is a completely third party that they imprisoned because they thought he was someone else! I don't see a single argument that could be made for not releasing him - not even a really bad one.
How is this not on the news every day? How is the UN and every single human rights org not all over this?? How does this not come up in every single US presidential debate?
To release him now would be an admission of comprehensive institutional failure at every level -- from his initial capture, through mis-identification, rendition, torture and ongoing imprisonment. The longer the error persists, the worse it gets, and the harder it becomes to admit it's all a horrible mistake. Nobody in the US government institutions that maintain his imprisonment will benefit from admitting it was all a mistake: to the military he's an embarrassment, and to the politicians, releasing him would be handing ammunition to their electoral rivals. (Democracy has failure modes: this is one of them.) So it'd be far better for everyone concerned if he'd quietly die of natural causes so they could bury him and the controversy at the same time.
(Finally, a really cynical part of me thinks that maybe keeping an innocent bloke in jail for 17 years is expedient to a certain part of the US foreign affairs establishment because it sends a message to everyone outside the USA, world-wide: "we can fsck you up on a whim and there is nothing anybody can do about it." In other words, it's dominance signaling. See also the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, imprisoned in Iran, for example.)
And I do understand why the government won't just release him, but if everyone in the world knew about this, releasing him wouldn't do that much harm (everyone would have already seen the failure) and would actually be brilliant PR for whoever does it. But then again, that would require people and especially media that actually care and have a longer attention span than 30 seconds, which seems rather far from achievable right now.
(This being HN, we see this sort of thing discussed wrt. failing startups or larger corporations, but seldom so brutally and clearly with governments -- although the moderators' policy on political discussions is necessary if only to prevent HN turning into a permanent floating firestorm of flame wars.)
Not only that, but as soon as you release somebody who was wrongfully imprisoned, they can sue in civil courts, and they often win.
There are 71 men in Guantanamo that are "too innocent to charge, too dangerous to release."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani
What's sad is that in 2008, the US supreme court issued it's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush:
"The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush
After 9/11 there was this perception (somewhat engineered by the neo-cons, but also organic in that Americans had never experienced anything like that and had a bit of an existential crisis) that American civil liberties and laws had actually made the country weak and had created a loophole that terrorists had been able to exploit. This led to the "new normal", where it was seen as necessary (even a matter of civic duty) to accept ceding our civil rights and liberties in order to allow the government to aggressively pursue the terrorist threat by any means necessary.
This lead to Guantanamo Bay and the normalization of indefinite detainment and torture in American culture, to the increased militarization of American police, to the modern global surveillance panopticon as revealed by Snowden, and the War on Terror.
It's not. Both Cuba and the United States recognize that Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba. They disagree about whether a pre-Revolution lease agreement is still in place or not.
Damn, if there are people so dumb that they would buy "I'm not talking about the general case but just this one dude that we KNOW was sent there BY ACCIDENT - can't we just release the poor guy?" as being soft on terrorism then it's no surprise US politics are such a shitshow...
Obama's efforts to close it, which did come up in debates (and came back in 2016) were basically rebuffed by Congress. Not because they want to keep Gitmo open, but because nobody wants the prisoners moved into their constituency's backyard.
George W. Bush approved enhanced interrogation and rolled out black sites, Barack Obama closed those sites but failed to close Guantanamo, and Trump seems to be content to keep it open. Republican senators are ardently opposed to trials for detainees on US soil, and dont have a solution for the camp other than to keep it open until the population passes away peacefully or foreign nations start accepting them as immigrants.
https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/04/guantanamo-nursi...
The oldest man in GITMO currently is 71. Each of these detainees receives the same care as a US Soldier, but frankly doesnt contribute much. Our reasoning for keeping them there (often against overwhelming evidence of their innocence) has been contemptuous at some times, comical at others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
Id surmise 20 years after 9/11 that GITMO is a sore spot in US politics most bureaucrats are content to just pretend never existed. It hasnt produced the Jack Bauer results we'd all been promised. Its arguably not been much of a detention center at all in the past decade. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157134/PlayStation...
The only concerning human rights fallout from this is that some countries are now more recalcitrant about handing over their citizens to US law enforcement, and many designated enemies are now more emboldened to use torture freely against US soldiers and citizens as we are now on the record as having employed torture ourselves.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...
It certainly doesn't justify torture, but it also doesn't look like he's the completely innocent bystander he claims to be.
From my quick reading, looks like he admitted to operating an Al-qaeda safe house and being a high level trusted driver/messenger.
Also looks like majority of his life was spent in Saudi Arabia, but was expelled before going to Pakistan. Arrested multiple times trying to travel to join jihad training...
Maybe that's why no one wants to take him.
Maybe he's denied his guilt differently in the past, but the article's wording looks suspiciously to me like dancing around a lie.
I'm trying to remain objective, but I'm starting to get that bitterness felt once you realized you've been intentionally fooled.
Still, everyone deserves due process.
Maybe there's more to the story than what the detainee chooses to share in his letter to the editor.
Read the linked report, even if it's just for insight into how the system isn't working.
Edit: Also, fwiw, apparently he was a well known al Qaeda "facilitator" in Karachi, meaning he was implicated by others too. It's not solely his "admission". But also the report claims he's a well behaved, cooperative prisoner who voluntary shared a lot...
It's obviously still based on trusting the classified report, if you want to believe it.
He’s a “bad guy”.
“Bad guys” pay forever, right?
Nothing more need be said.
That’s the American way, a country divided into good guys and bad guys who are doing time.
It’s easy to understand.
Politicians aren’t bad guys, that’s important to understand. Nor police. Or armed forces.
Bad guys pay forever.
The advice was to surrender to the first American he saw. The father had been taken prisoner by the US Army during the first world war, and his experience in captivity was such that he advised his own son to surrender to the Americans as quickly as possible, rather than fight.
How many lives, both American and others, were saved by this and others like him? We'll never know, but if your enemy believes that by surrendering to you he will be safe and well-treated, surely many.
So where are we now? Now the narrative is "If the Americans capture you, you will wish you were dead." Everyone who carries out these tortures is holding a gun to the head of every American soldier in the field. I'm surprised that torturers don't get fragged by their own side more often. Maybe they do.
While Guantanamo methods are supposedly shady (and illegal in light of basic human rights and conventions), there is a very non-zero chance that the article is a made up and/or incomplete story by this convict. I’m not going to claim anything, but let’s not jump to conclusions on who is real evil based only on what someone says on the internet out of a prison cell.
It may sound hard for this guy, but if he’s innocent, he is still outnumbered by cynical liars who claim the same everyday. They have time at their hands to figure out ways to make life easier and constant deception is one of the methods used.
Iow, one of the answers on why it’s not a daily headline is because UN, human rights and those who make headlines check a little deeper -or- put it under “opinion” tag (like in this article).
They might have mistaken him initially for someone else, but it doesn't seem like his real identity is really an innocent bystander.
So, let me try to follow your reasoning:
(1) he was arrested because of a case of mistaken identity
(2) the person he was mistaken for was arrested later and positively identified
(3) he must have been guilty of something because he was arrested
I'm really not following, care to explain?
He's not the bad guy they originally thought he was, but still a bad guy, or at least was working for the bad guy.
Not advocating for torture, and not necessarily saying it's true, just presenting the other side.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...
So, either he was 'a bad guy', let's see the charges, or it was a case of mistaken identity. It does not look like there is much middle ground here.
2) This isn't about his character or being "good" vs "bad". This is about whether he knowingly provided material support to Al Qaeda or enemy combatants. The leaked report I linked to makes a compelling (to me) case that he repeatedly attempted to join and assist militant jihad groups, including after being jailed for it in Pakistan.
3) That said, none of it justifies torture, and none of it justifies denying him the right to a trial, be it military or civilian.
(1) the guy was not arrested in some house after a raid but sold by kidnappers to the Americans being told that he was someone else.
(2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
Note that because there is no trial that none of the above has ever been countered so that's the only evidence there is. If the other side has a story it wishes to tell it's had 17 years and counting to do so. The only apparent reason why he is still there is because the people in charge are scared that he will sue them (and rightly so).
It's a case of perverse incentives gone bad, not a case of catching 'Bonnie' when looking for 'Clyde'.
Really? C'mon man...
The "article" that's a letter written by the detainee?
I read it. In detail.
I'm saying consider a source other than the detainee.
I'm about as skeptical of perverse government incentives as one can get. But that doesn't mean I automatically take the word of the detainee, either... He has his own incentives at play.
He deserves a trial. He didn't deserve to be tortured and shouldn't have been. But his story doesn't add up to me.
>>1)sold by kidnappers
According to the detainee assessment I linked to above:
(Edit: Wikileaks classified Detainee Assessment link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...)
(---Which again, l don't necessarily trust to be true or in good faith any more than the detainees letter, but it's 11 pages of pretty damning classified details, that paint a different picture than "innocent bystander".--- )
>The Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISID) captured detainee along with his driver, Muhammad Madni, on 10 September 2002 at detainee’s safe house in Karachi. Detainee was held in Pakistani custody and was transferred to US custody at Bagram, AF in May 2004.
Maybe they thought he was someone different, but it looks like he was definitely involved, since:
>He [Madni] also provided information on other safe houses, which led on the following day to the arrest of 11 September 2001 terrorist attack planners Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bin Attash, aka (Muhammed Tawfiq), and other al-Qaida members. During the second ISID raid, a group of eight suspected members of al-Qaida resisted arrest resulting in the deaths of two of the cell members. The remaining six were taken prisoner and weapons and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were confiscated.
>>2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
But we don't know that, other than taking him at his word. (Unless you've got something else you're going off of.) The report calls him a combat trained "facilitator" and says he was paid to do many different things, including driving for his superiors, housing militants and smuggling them over the border to Afghanistan:
>Detainee is an admitted al-Qaida facilitator, who had the full trust and confidence of al-Qaida leadership. Detainee admitted working directly for senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KSM)...
>In 1994, detainee initially trained for seven months at a militant camp near Khowst, AF and then went to the Khaldan Training Camp for a two-month training session in tactics. Detainee then attempted to go to Kashmir, PK but was arrested at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, for which he spent 1995 and 1996 in prison.
>Detainee has been forthcoming in the past about his role as a facilitator and his associations among the highest levels of the al-Qaida organization, which has been corroborated by numerous JTF-GTMO detainees reporting. ... Detainee downplays the fact that he received advanced military training at terrorist training camps and he has become non-cooperative with interrogators since late 2004.
>...Detainee reported meeting with UBL on 6 to 12 occasions...
>In 1999, detainee began working directly for UBL’s chief of operations, Abu Hafs,aka (Muhammad Atif). Detainee would transport al-Qaida fighters for Abu Hafs from Karachi to Quetta, PK, where another driver would take them to Kandahar. Detainee next met senior al-Qaida operational planner KU-10024 who offered detainee a job driving him around in a taxi for 200 Pakistani rupees ...
I think you did read my comment as a definitive statement, while it just describes an option that was not mentioned itt, but has some potential to be true.
Wow. I have seen this attitude deployed by law enforcement against certain demographics "Well, he might not have committed this crime, but he committed some other crime for sure. Pinning this on him is no biggie, he had it coming". This attitude makes a mockery of any nation that considers itself a nation ruled by law - that is not the way the law should work
That’s bad, but I can’t see this “attitude” in my comments. I thought I put enough “one of maybe possible, chances are, explanation”.
This is not what I meant. Speaking about versions and possibilities is not the same as acting solely out of these.
17 years without a trial is not acceptable by any western values.
You may not have noticed, but Western values have changed. Indefinite detainment without trial and torture are perfectly acceptable for Muslims and brown people.
If Guantanamo Bay ever harms one hair on a pretty Christian white girl's head, though, Americans will burn it to the ground.
Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release.