Ortiga cultivo

Writing under the headline, ‘1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds’, Elizabeth Bumiller acknowledges that

The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided.

That was in the eighteenth paragraph. The article begins,

An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials. [my emphasis]

And continues,

...the Pentagon believes that 74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism or militant activity, making for a recidivism rate of nearly 14 percent... report says are again engaged in terrorism...

The assumption is that all of those incarcerated at the US ‘coaling station’ at Guantánamo Bay were involved in terrorism in the first place, otherwise they could not return to it. In reality, none of those released was ever convicted of anything, and not for want of trying – unconstitutional ‘military tribunals’, ‘evidence’ extracted under duress, you name it. If there were any convincing evidence that they had had anything at all to do with terrorist activities, even as broadly defined as the W regime liked, they would still be in Cuba.

Among all the 74 recidivists, it transpires than only two of the 29 ‘independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release’ are actually accused of anything in particular.

They are Said Ali al-Shihri, a leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch suspected in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen’s capital, last year, and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, an Afghan Taliban commander, who also goes by the name Mullah Abdullah Zakir. [my emphasis]

No doubt a Taliban commander must be some kind of terrorist. But what of al-Shihri, a suspected terrorist effectively acquitted of terrorism, now suspected of further terrorism, and that makes him a recidivist?

If any of these guys really does take up arms against the occupier, it’s less likely that they do so by way of returning to old habits than by way of revenge for their treatment at Guantánamo.

A dangerous man

According to an AAP report in this morning’s Canberra Times,

CONFESSED terrorism supporter David Hicks is expected to arrive in Adelaide about nine o'clock (Adelaide time) this morning as the US military and the Australian Government maintain a veil of secrecy over his release from Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks is apparently so dangerous that he had to be flown to Adelaide in a privately chartered jet, at a cost to the Australian taxpayer of half a million dollars, according to Greens leader Bob Brown. He is so dangerous that that jet was not permitted into US airspace and had to fly over Mexico, refuelling in the French colony of Tahiti. As the French love terrorism anyway, there was no problem about that. Doubtless all these precautions are well justified. There’s no telling what damage a guy like Hicks could do to the innocent and unsuspecting US, bound and hooded from 38,000 feet after five years under constant scrutiny. He might have managed to secrete some toothpaste and sports drink about his person, and you know what that means. These confessed terrorism supporters are a wily mob.

The ABC, with its more measured ‘Convicted terrorism supporter’ line, reports

He will serve the remainder of his nine-month sentence for providing material support for terrorism alongside some of Australia's most notorious criminals including the infamous bodies in the barrel killers John Bunting and Robert Wagner.

An who could provide more appropriate company for a guy who has never harmed anybody?

Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says he does not know if Hicks is dangerous or just deluded.

But there’s no doubt whatsoever about the abominable Ruddock. Thousands of refugees can attest that he is a truly dangerous man. And some have not lived to be able to testify that he wantonly returned them to countries where their fear of persecution was not only well founded, but in the end borne out by their disappearance at the hands of a stable and peaceful state.

Hicks may have confessed under duress, but Howard and Ruddock and Bush and Blair and their ilk freely – proudly – admit their crimes against humanity and fly through any airspace they like.

Lawyers beware!

Close on the heels of the Saddam trial, where the defense team justifiably feared for their lives – that is, those who survived – now the Bush team has launched not so veiled threats against law firms that represent ‘detainees down there’.

Speaking this week on Federal News Radio, a Web site and AM radio station offering helpful hints for bureaucrats and helpful news for the administration, Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, tried to rally American corporations to stop doing business with law firms that represent inmates of the Guantánamo internment camp.

… when corporate America got word of this dastardly behavior, “those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” He added: “We want to watch that play out.”

Would those be reputable firms like KBR and Halliburton?

…Mr. Stimson’s message to corporate executives that lawyers “are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line in 2001.”

It seems not, because those firms have done a roaring business in the wake of 9/11. To their credit, the NY Times’s editorialists have come down on the right side just this once:

Not only do we find Mr. Stimson’s threats appalling, we differ with him about 9/11. The tragedy and crime of that day was that thousands of innocents were slaughtered — not that it hurt some companies’ profit margins.