Replies to post #139227 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Bush administration, Rumsfeld, God deems it so .. by George ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7yTQBCM5-s

The 1st crusade

The Crusades were a series of religiously sanctioned military campaigns, waged by much of Roman Catholic Europe, particularly the Franks of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The specific crusades to restore Christian control of the Holy Land were fought over a period of nearly 200 years, between 1095 and 1291. .. continued .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

F6, in reading your post the answer to
....................
1 Corinthians 11:7 A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man.

English Standard Version (©2001)
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-27.htm
....................

'' was right there in front of me, all of the time, NO .. the words tore at my mind ..

on top of all that Feith now says ..

I just saw an interview MSNBC's Martin Bashir had with Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the GWB admin, in which Feith was asked why the US went into Iraq...Feith responded at length that the Bush admin was concerned about terrorism, but NOT ONCE did Douglas Feith say anything about WMD - NOT ONCE! .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62754965 .. thanks Peg ..

No mention that Saddam and Bin Laden were not allies, no mention that the Bush invasion of Iraq was the greatest, or at least
2nd to the Bush torture regime, recruiting tool for Al Qaeda .. just the lie that is was all about a concern about terrorism.

They said they didn't expect the Iraqi's to be so against the invasion.

Of course they really didn't consider much of any of consequence as it was going to be a pushover, an election winner, AND it was God's will.

LORDY, oh lordy never again .. electors, please .. never again give us such vile, despicable, Machiavellian leaders, as them.

[StephanieVanbryce]

John Yoo, Still A War Criminal..The Unrepentant John Yoo:

'Enhanced Interrogation' Got Us bin Laden

The fallen author of the infamous torture memos returns to defend the policies of the Bush administration in the war on terror



Former government lawyer John Yoo taking credit on behalf of the Bush administration for Sunday's strike against Osama bin Laden is like Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, taking credit for the results of the 1998 Academy Awards.

Yet front and center here is Yoo, the fallen author of the infamous torture memos, the man whose "flawed legal reasoning" and "professional misconduct" on the topic of "enhanced interrogations" nearly turned him into a criminal defendant, publicly pitching the case that he and his former bosses are "vindicated" (and more) by the way in which the Al Qaeda leader was hunted down and killed. Having long ago caught his finger in the hinge of history, Yoo is inexplicably back for more, clearly unrepentant about the terrible damage his consistently poor judgment cost the United States.

Yoo wants to transfer credit from the White House team that actually got bin Laden to the White House team that famously did not.

From his perch as a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Yoo officially has become the voice of a concerted effort by former Bush administration officials and their shills to retroactively justify even the most odious of the legal policies put into practice immediately following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. And, in Yoo's case, the evident goal is not just to defend those untenable practices but to elevate them in importance to (and, I guess, beyond) the brilliant gumshoe work performed by the Obama team in tracking down bin Laden.

Yoo wants America and the rest of the world to know that "President George W. Bush, not his successor, constructed the interrogation and warrantless surveillance programs that produced this week's actionable intelligence." Got that? Yoo wants to transfer credit from the White House team that actually got bin Laden to the White House team that famously did not. He wants to do so despite good evidence to the contrary. And he wants to do so without any expressed accountability or remorse for the impact many of those extralegal Bush-era "programs" wrought upon our rule of law and standing in the rest of the world. Abu Ghraib? What Abu Ghraib?

And there is more. In the World of Yoo, the Obama administration was able to carry out its daring plan not necessarily because of extraordinary intelligence work on behalf of its operatives but rather in spite of the current president's namby-pamby approach to terror suspects. Forty-eight hours after U.S. forces dumped bin Laden's body into the sea, Yoo writes:

Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things immediately following 9/11. After their "arrest," we would have read [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and [Abu Faraj al-Libi] their Miranda rights, provided them legal counsel sent them to the U.S. for detention, and granted them all the rights provided a U.S. citizen in criminal proceedings.

This is make-believe, a fantasy even more warped and cynical than was the fairy-tale world of legal precedent that Yoo and his Office of Legal Counsel colleagues ginned up in 2002 to justify the torture of terror suspects. It is a wild insult to the men and women of the Justice Department and the Pentagon who have worked so hard (before and after the 2008 election) to be just and thorough in their treatment of the detainees. It completely ignores the force of Supreme Court precedent -- from both before and after 9/11. And it shows that Yoo still darkly believes that if his critics in law and politics are not with him they are necessarily against American interests.

If this, too, were all Yoo were arguing today, it would be bad enough. But there is still more. In Yoo's view, the Obama administration made a big mistake by killing bin Laden. Instead, Yoo argues, the brave Navy Seals should have captured the fugitive so that he could be tortured for information about current Al Qaeda operations. Yoo wrote of bin Laden:

As Sunday's operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders -- whether by drones or special ops teams -- than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention...

[Bin Laden's] capture, like Saddam Hussein's in December 2003, would have provided invaluable intelligence and been an even greater example of U.S. military prowess than his death.

So in the World of Yoo, the Obama administration demonstrated a form of cowardice by killing the man responsible for the most deadly crime in American history. And the Bush administration demonstrated a form of bravery when it captured and tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who, eight years later and unlike his former boss, still walks the face of the Earth, unprosecuted, unconvicted, unsentenced and very much undead. Yoo's notoriety from all of this will last so long as America follows a rule of law. But when, exactly, will his specific 15 minutes of fame end?

Probably not anytime soon. He's got the perfect three-card monte scam going. If the Obama administration makes a mistake in prosecuting the war on terror, there stands Yoo ready to say: "We told you so." And if, as was the case Sunday, the Obama administration pulls off a stunning coup in the terror war, there stands Yoo saying: "You couldn't have done it without us." Like his former boss, Yoo evidently doesn't make mistakes. Instead, he just keeps fighting -- even though he's fighting a war he long ago lost and which now, especially, has entirely passed him by.

Many Embedded Links
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/the-unrepentant-john-yoo-enhanced-interrogation-got-us-bin-laden/238356/

[StephanieVanbryce]

John Yoo, Still A War Criminal

Andrew Sullivan 5 May 2011 05:11 PM

Here's a great quote: "Former government lawyer John Yoo taking credit on behalf of the Bush administration for Sunday's strike against Osama bin Laden is like Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, taking credit for the results of the 1998 Academy Awards," - Andrew Cohen.

Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history. [ The Big Lie - http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/the-big-lie-.html ]

So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.

On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America.

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/john-yoo-still-a-war-criminal.html

.........This is what we get ! WE NEED to PROSECUTE these GUYS ..yeah, I know I'm whistling Dixie....

[F6]

"The Interrogator:" A CIA insider's crisis of conscience


Glenn L. Carle

In a secret prison, a true believer in the war on terror realized he was tormenting an innocent man

By Laura Miller
Sunday, Jul 3, 2011 19:01 ET

"The situation had become Kafkaesque," writes Glenn Carle toward the end of "The Interrogator: An Education [ http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Interrogator/Glenn-L-Carle/e/9781568586731 ]," his new memoir. Boy, he ain't kidding; the author of "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis" would have appreciated this narrative on any number of levels. Carle worked for the CIA for 23 years, in Africa, the Balkans and Latin America, among other locales, but the focus of his book is the several-month period he spent questioning a suspected leader of al-Qaida in two countries he is not permitted to name.

There's quite a lot Carle isn't allowed to say in "The Interrogator." Many lines and words on these pages have been masked with black bars to indicate what "the Agency" forbade him to publish. "I have written this book literally a dozen times over," the author notes in his afterword, explaining that he was willing to address "legitimate" CIA concerns when it came to revelations about its "sources and methods."

But such objections were, as Carle makes abundantly clear, amply mixed with ludicrous pettifoggery and ass-covering. This annoyed him enough that he decided to leave in the redacted bits, complete with black bars, and add the occasional withering explanatory footnote, like one that reads: "Apparently the CIA fears that the redacted passage would either humiliate the organization for incompetence or expose its officers to ridicule; unless the Agency considers obtuse incompetence a secret intelligence method."

Warning: A Severe Acronym Advisory is in effect for the next paragraph and for much of "The Interrogator." Carle was a veteran CO (case officer) who worked in the DO (Directorate of Operations, aka, where the action is), when he was invited to do a TDY (temporary duty) interrogating a HVT (high value target) being held by authorities in a Middle Eastern nation friendly to the U.S (I'm guessing Jordan). This was in 2002, and despite being one of the best speakers of "the language" (presumably Arabic) the agency had on staff in the scramble following 9/11, he was doing administrative work. A year earlier, Carle had made a dumb mistake during a period of turmoil in his home life; taking this assignment was his big chance to get back in the game.

This back story serves to indicate how high the stakes were for Carle, and therefore how much he risked, when, months later, he tried to tell the agency that the prisoner he'd been questioning, whose mistreatment ("what some will consider torture") he was obliged to condone, was largely innocent. This man -- known by the code name CAPTUS -- was, Carle became convinced, not even a member of al-Qaida, let alone a kingpin. The luckless fellow had played roughly the same role as "a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket." Any further details Carle chose to relate on CAPTUS' activities and the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used on him by persons unknown have been obscured by CIA censors. (Confidential to the Agency: This makes the latter seem even more vile than they probably are.)

Carle blames multiple factors for this horrific situation, from the cluelessly belligerent interrogator he replaced through the higher-ups who were overly invested in what appeared to be "one of the premier coups and cases in the administration's War on Terror." However, the greatest responsibility, in his opinion, originates with that "small number of senior officials who drafted the legal rationalization for the coercive interrogation methods, and the government officials who ordered them to do so." We all know who they are.

And they were wrong -- morally and practically. Carle firmly believes that coercive methods don't work, and that they deliver less intelligence, and of poorer quality, than the techniques outlined in his bible, something called the KUBARK manual. (Parts of this CIA handbook were regarded as "controversial" back in the 1980s, and the fact that it was considered too mild by the Bush administration is sobering.) He contends that it is always a carefully built (although, of course, manipulative) relationship between the prisoner and the interrogator, rather than fear and pain, that produces the most and best results. Recent events seem to confirm that view. The intelligence used to target and kill Osama bin Laden is said to have been obtained through the psychological methods recommended by KUBARK, after torture fell short.

A lot of "The Interrogator" recounts Carle's frustrated attempts to change CAPTUS' status, and in particular to keep him from being sent to a secret CIA prison into which the detainee seemed likely to vanish forever. He illustrates how difficult it can be to swim against the current of institutional inertia, and how his decision to work internally and diplomatically (the only way, he believed, to have any real effect) left him feeling more and more implicated in actions he saw as both illegal and un-American. Although Carle had always embraced the challenge of working in a morally ambiguous "gray world" -- where he was called upon to lie and scheme in order to serve his country -- the CAPTUS case was categorically dark, and his experience with it permanently damaged his faith in the agency.

For Carle did have faith in the CIA, believing it to observe a certain brand of honor and to be a force for good in the world. From an old Massachusetts family, Harvard-educated and fond of reading Lucretius in nightclubs, he emerges as an odd and admirable, if not always entirely likable, character in "The Interrogator." Witnessing this prickly, rigidly upright man trying to wrest meaning from his bleak dilemma becomes the most compelling aspect of "The Interrogator." He occasionally gets broody, and drives off to explore the desert on camel back and talk philosophy with enigmatic locals. He looks at the "moonscape" surrounding the secret prison -- where CAPTUS does, ultimately, end up -- and quotes T.S. Eliot.

Carle's longest and most absurd struggle was simply to obtain CAPTUS' identification papers, which were languishing in the CIA station of the country where he was nabbed. This proved impossible -- there was never enough staff to courier the documents, despite the high-profile nature of the case. Eventually, Carle didn't even expect to get them, but kept making the request anyway. He was long past irritation or outrage -- even if his readers will not be -- and regards the pointless ritual as "perversely amusing." Like the man said: Kafkaesque.

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com [ http://www.magiciansbook.com/ ]. More: Laura Miller [ http://www.salon.com/author/laura_miller/index.html ]

Copyright ©2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/07/03/the_interrogator/index.html [comments at http://letters.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/07/03/the_interrogator/view/?show=all ]

[F6]

U.N. Finds ‘Systematic’ Torture in Afghanistan


Afghan security officers guard arrested Taliban fighters in Herat. There appears to have been little effort to scrutinize Afghan detention practices.
Aref Karimi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: October 10, 2011

KABUL, Afghanistan — Detainees are hung by their hands and beaten with cables, and in some cases their genitals are twisted until the prisoners lose consciousness at sites run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan National Police, according to a United Nations report [ http://unama.unmissions.org/Portals/UNAMA/Documents/October10_%202011_UNAMA_Detention_Full-Report_ENG.pdf ] released here on Monday.

The report, based on interviews over the past year with more than 300 suspects linked to the insurgency, is the most comprehensive look at the Afghan detention system and an issue that has long concerned Western officials and human rights groups.

It paints a devastating picture of abuse, citing evidence of “systematic torture” during interrogations by Afghan intelligence and police officials even as American and other Western backers provide training and pay for nearly the entire budget of the Afghan ministries running the detention centers.

The report does not assess whether American officials knew of the abuses. But such widespread use of torture in a detention system supported by American mentors and money raises serious questions about potential complicity of American officials and whether they benefited from information obtained from suspects who had been tortured.

“I know of no one who knew about these alleged abuses as they were happening,” said an American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issues involved. “Thus, it’s impossible to know if there was any information passed on that came in some form from these alleged incidents.”

At a minimum, there appears to have been little effort to scrutinize the practices of Afghanistan’s security forces at the detention centers, as pressure has built to move as much responsibility as possible to the Afghans and to reduce American involvement here.

As the United States looks to wind down a decade of war here, the report threatens to complicate efforts to transfer more detention responsibilities to the Afghans. It could also set in motion provisions of American law that would require the United States to cut off money to any Afghan unit involved in abuses.

The Afghan government denied the worst of the allegations in the report, while allowing that there were “deficiencies” in a war-torn country that routinely faced suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism.

Early word of the findings spurred immediate action. After seeing a draft of the report in September, Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander here in Afghanistan, halted transfers of those suspected of being insurgents to 16 of the facilities identified as sites where torture or abuse routinely took place.

He has since initiated a plan to investigate the sites, provide training in modern interrogation techniques and monitor the Afghan government’s practices. The American Embassy is now heavily involved in devising a long-term monitoring program for Afghan detention sites, American officials said.

In a statement [ http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/isaf-outlines-proactive-detainee-safeguards.html ], NATO officials said they were working with the United Nations and the Afghan government to “improve detention operations” and “establish safeguards.”

Nearly half of the detainees interviewed by United Nations researchers who were in detention sites run by the Afghan intelligence service, known as the National Directorate of Security, told of torture. The national police treatment of detainees was somewhat less severe and widespread, the report found. Its research covered 47 facilities in 22 provinces. Most of those interviewed were suspected of involvement in the insurgency, which has attacked both Afghans and their Western allies.

Of the 324 security-related detainees interviewed, 89 had been handed over to the Afghan intelligence service or the police by international military forces, and in 19 cases, the men were tortured once they were in Afghan custody. The United Nations Convention Against Torture [ http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm ] prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that the detainee is at risk of torture.

“Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law,” the report said.

One detainee described being taken in for interrogation in Kandahar and having the interrogator ask if he knew the name of the official’s office. The detainee said that after he answered, the interrogator said, “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban — even stones confess here.”

The man was beaten over several days for hours at a time with electrical wire and then signed a confession, the report said.

The report pointed out that even though the abusive practices are pervasive, the Afghan government does not condone torture and has explicitly said the abuses found by the United Nations are not government policy. Several longtime aid workers here said that as disturbing as the allegations were, there had been improvements in detainee treatment, particularly since the Soviet occupation, when many people were detained and never heard from again.

“Reform is both possible and desired,” said Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, noting that the government had cooperated with the report’s researchers and had begun to take remedial action.

“We take this report very seriously,” said Shaida M. Abdali, the Afghan deputy national security adviser.

“Our government, especially the president, has taken a very strong stand on the protection of everyone’s human rights, their humanity, everywhere and especially in prisons and in detention,” he said.

The government said that it had set up a group to look into the problem and that it had dismissed several employees at a unit known as Department 124, where the United Nations said the torture appeared to have been the most entrenched. The intelligence service is now admonishing newly assigned interrogators to observe human rights, the government said in its response.

Still, a senior diplomat here said, the report had the potential “to undermine the strategic partnership” with both the European Union and the United States, referring to the agreement for future relations that the Americans and Afghans had hoped to complete by December.

It could also jeopardize American financing. Under a law written by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, neither the State Department nor the Defense Department can provide assistance or training to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if there is credible evidence of gross human rights abuses. However, financing can go forward to other units not involved and even to the offending units if serious remedial actions are taken.

“This would clearly constitute credible evidence,” said Tom Malinowski, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Washington bureau, who has tracked the Leahy law.

Recently, the United States pulled financing for some units of the Pakistani military that were involved in extrajudicial killings in the tribal areas. Money for the Afghan intelligence agency may not be not covered by the law, but it was unlikely that the Obama administration would use a legal technicality to continue financing the agency if torture allegations persisted, Mr. Malinowski said.

Ultimately the prosecution of the torturers is required, said Georgette Gagnon, the director of human rights for the United Nations here, in order to “prevent and end such acts in the future.”

There have been a number of instances that raise similar questions in other places, including Uzbekistan, Pakistan and El Salvador, according to a RAND Corporation report in 2006 [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG550.html ]. Aid to Colombia in fighting its drug cartels and insurgents has also raised some of these issues and has periodically been halted to some military units as a result of gross violations of human rights, Mr. Malinowski said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/asia/un-report-finds-routine-abuse-of-afghan-detainees.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/asia/un-report-finds-routine-abuse-of-afghan-detainees.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/world/asia/un-report-finds-routine-abuse-of-afghan-detainees.html ]

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[F6]

My Guantánamo Nightmare

By LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE
Published: January 7, 2012

Nice, France

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/washington/13scotus.html ] to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/06-1195.pdf ] that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

Five months later, Judge Richard J. Leon, of the Federal District Court in Washington, reviewed all of the reasons offered to justify my imprisonment, including secret information I never saw or heard. The government abandoned its claim of an embassy bomb plot just before the judge could hear it. After the hearing, he ordered the government [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/us/21guantanamo.html ] to free me and four other men who had been arrested in Bosnia.

I will never forget sitting with the four other men in a squalid room at Guantánamo, listening over a fuzzy speaker as Judge Leon read his decision in a Washington courtroom. He implored the government not to appeal his ruling, because “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.” I was freed, at last, on May 15, 2009.

Today, I live in Provence with my wife and children. France has given us a home, and a new start. I have experienced the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my daughters and, in August 2010, the joy of welcoming a new son, Yousef. I am learning to drive, attending vocational training and rebuilding my life. I hope to work again serving others, but so far the fact that I spent seven and a half years as a Guantánamo prisoner has meant that only a few human rights organizations have seriously considered hiring me. I do not like to think of Guantánamo. The memories are filled with pain. But I share my story because 171 men remain there. Among them is Belkacem Bensayah, who was seized in Bosnia and sent to Guantánamo with me.

About 90 prisoners have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo. Some of them are from countries like Syria or China — where they would face torture if sent home — or Yemen, which the United States considers unstable. And so they sit as captives, with no end in sight — not because they are dangerous, not because they attacked America, but because the stigma of Guantánamo means they have no place to go, and America will not give a home to even one of them.

I’m told that my Supreme Court case is now read in law schools. Perhaps one day that will give me satisfaction, but so long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

Lakhdar Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in Boumediene v. Bush. He was in military custody at Guantánamo Bay from 2002 to 2009. This essay was translated by Felice Bezri from the Arabic.

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Related

Times Topic: Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba)
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/guantanamobaynavalbasecuba/index.html

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© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/my-guantanamo-nightmare.html

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Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor

By MURAT KURNAZ
Published: January 7, 2012

Bremen, Germany

I LEFT Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier — shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.

When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials. The American officer offered to re-shackle my wrists with a fresh, plastic pair. But the commanding German officer strongly refused: “He has committed no crime; here, he is a free man.”

I was not a strong secondary school student in Bremen, but I remember learning that after World War II, the Americans insisted on a trial for war criminals at Nuremberg, and that event helped turn Germany into a democratic country. Strange, I thought, as I stood on the tarmac watching the Germans teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law.

How did I arrive at this point? This Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I am not a terrorist. I have never been a member of Al Qaeda or supported them. I don’t even understand their ideas. I am the son of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in search of work. My father has worked for years in a Mercedes factory. In 2001, when I was 18, I married a devout Turkish woman and wanted to learn more about Islam and to lead a better life. I did not have much money. Some of the elders in my town suggested I travel to Pakistan to learn to study the Koran with a religious group there.

I made my plans just before 9/11. I was 19 then and was naïve and did not think war in Afghanistan would have anything to do with Pakistan or my trip there. So I went ahead with my trip.

I was in Pakistan, on a public bus on my way to the airport to return to Germany when the police stopped the bus I was riding in. I was the only non-Pakistani on the bus — some people joke that my reddish hair makes me look Irish — so the police asked me to step off to look at my papers and ask some questions. German journalists told me the same thing happened to them. I was not a journalist, but a tourist, I explained. The police detained me but promised they would soon let me go to the airport. After a few days, the Pakistanis turned me over to American officials. At this point, I was relieved to be in American hands; Americans, I thought, would treat me fairly.

I later learned the United States paid a $3,000 bounty for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the United States distributed thousands of fliers all over Afghanistan, promising that people who turned over Taliban or Qaeda suspects would, in the words of one flier, get “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” A great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result.

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/torture/waterboarding/index.html ] but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over — my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.

Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.

I remained confused on basic questions: why was I here? With all its money and intelligence, the United States could not honestly believe I was Al Qaeda, could they?

After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, I was brought before what officials called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, at which a military officer said I was an “enemy combatant” because a German friend had engaged in a suicide bombing in 2003 — after I was already at Guantánamo. I couldn’t believe my friend had done anything so crazy but, if he had, I didn’t know anything about it.

A couple of weeks later, I was told I had a visit from a lawyer. They took me to a special cell and in walked an American law professor, Baher Azmy [ http://law.shu.edu/Faculty/display-profile.cfm?customel_datapageid_4018=4070 ]. I didn’t believe he was a real lawyer at first; interrogators often lied to us and tried to trick us. But Mr. Azmy had a note written in Turkish which he had gotten from my mother, and that made me trust him. (My mother found a lawyer in my hometown in Germany who heard that lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; the center assigned Mr. Azmy my case.) He did not believe the evidence against me and quickly discovered that my “suicide bomber” friend was, in fact, alive and well in Germany.

Mr. Azmy, my mother and my German lawyer helped pressure the German government to secure my release. Recently, Mr. Azmy made public a number of American and German intelligence documents from 2002 to 2004 that showed both countries suspected I was innocent. One of the documents said American military guards thought I was dangerous because I had prayed during the American national anthem.

Now, five years after my release, I am trying to put my terrible memories behind me. I have remarried and have a beautiful baby daughter. Still, it is hard not to think about my time at Guantánamo and to wonder how it is possible that a democratic government can detain people in intolerable conditions and without a fair trial.

Murat Kurnaz [ http://us.macmillan.com/author/muratkurnaz ], the author of “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo,” was detained from 2001 to 2006 [ http://www.amazon.com/Five-Years-My-Life-Guantanamo/dp/0230603742 ].

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/notes-from-a-guantanamo-survivor.html

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