Tag Archives: Guantanamo Bay

Gitmo’s Oldest Detainee Freed After 20 Years With No Charges, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is an abomination. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The United States on Saturday released the oldest prisoner who was held for two decades at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – after his arrest in Thailand in 2003 soon after the so-called “Global War on Terror” was launched.

75-year old Saifullah Paracha was transferred to his home country of Pakistan. Amazingly, he spent nearly 20 years in US detention at the high-secure military prison without trial, nor was he ever formally charged. He was suspected of being an al-Qaida financier.

“The Foreign Ministry completed an extensive inter-agency process to facilitate the repatriation of Mr Paracha,” Pakistan’s government said in a statement soon after his release. “We are glad that a Pakistani citizen detained abroad is finally reunited with his family.”

The US Department of Defense said Paracha’s transfer is part of broader efforts to close down the secretive Gitmo prison, saying on Saturday: “the United States appreciates the willingness of Pakistan and other partners to support ongoing U.S. efforts focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Tyranny, Uncategorized

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Forever Prisoners, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on June 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

There is a prisoner at Guantanamo who has been held almost 20 years without being charged. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 30, 1787

When Thomas Jefferson wrote to his friend, neighbor and colleague, James Madison, his view that the basis of government must be to preserve liberty rather than order, the War of Revolution against Great Britain had been won, the Articles of Confederation were in place and Madison was beginning to prepare for his pivotal role in the drafting of the Constitution.

Jefferson was in Paris, as the U.S. ambassador, and he wrote to express to Madison his view that whatever amendments to the Articles of Confederation he was planning to draft, they should embrace the value of personal liberty as the default position. Madison and others were sent to Philadelphia to craft amendments to the Articles. But Madison had no amendments in mind.

He arrived in the then-capital of the new nation with a draft of a new constitution in his mind and in his notes. The draft would undergo many changes throughout the summer of negotiations in 1787, and the document would eventually receive the support of all delegates and be ratified by the 13 states, without Jefferson’s preferences of liberty over order.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Horseshit, Liberty, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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Military Torturers at Guantanamo Bay, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on February 24, 2022 | Leave a comment

American courts have no yet reached the depraved state in which a confession extracted by torture would be admissible evidence. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

After a jury in 2006 declined to impose the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui, who had just pleaded guilty to being the 20th 9/11 hijacker, the government announced that another person was the 20th. Yet, that person, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was ordered released from the U.S. Naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last week.

Here is the backstory.

Moussaoui had been living in Minnesota and taking flying lessons when he was arrested in August 2001 for an immigration violation. When officials questioned him, the answers he gave aroused their suspicions about what he intended to do with a plane once he was qualified to fly.

The FBI conducted a criminal investigation, and shortly after 9/11, Moussaoui was indicted in Virginia for conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism on 9/11. The government sought the death penalty. Five years later, he pleaded guilty during his trial.

The court then conducted a penalty-phase trial before the same jury that had been hearing the case prior to the guilty plea. The jury declined to impose the death penalty with some jurors revealing their beliefs that he had nothing to do with 9/11, but was a jihadi wanna-be. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Stung by the jury’s verdict on the death penalty, the government changed its characterization of Moussaoui as the 20th hijacker and declared that Mohammed al-Qahtani was the real 20th hijacker.

In August 2001, Qahtani had attempted to enter the United States at the Orlando International Airport where Mohamed Atta, one of the true hijackers, was waiting to greet him. Immigration officials rejected Qahtani’s paperwork and sent him back to Dubai. U.S. forces arrested him in Pakistan in December 2001 and accused him of being Osama bin Ladin’s bodyguard.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, History, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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JOHN KIRIAKOU: CIA Torture Finally Rebuked, By Military Jury

Posted on November 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

US government torture revealed leads inexorably to the conclusion that the government has no moral legitimacy or standing. From John Kiriakou at consortiumnews.com:

The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public.

The New York Times reported last week that a military jury at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo issued a sharp rebuke against the C.I.A.’s treatment of al-Qaeda prisoner Majid Khan, calling the Agency’s torture program “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”

The jury recommended that Khan receive a 26-year sentence, the shortest possible under the court’s rules. Seven of the eight jurors—all U.S. military officers—then hand-wrote a letter to the military judge urging clemency for Khan.

The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public.

Khan testified that during the course of his interrogations, after he was captured in Pakistan in 2003, he told the C.I.A. “literally everything” he knew. He was truthful with the information, but “the more I told them, the more they tortured me.” Khan said that his only alternative was to make up information about threats, anything to get his interrogators to stop torturing him. When the information then didn’t pan out, Khan was tortured yet again.

Camp 1 in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta, 2005. (Kathleen T. Rhem. Wikimedia Commons)

Khan was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents and raised in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. After his mother died in 2001 and his father sent the family back to Pakistan for an extended visit, Khan’s relatives radicalized him and he formally joined al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Intelligence, Law, Propaganda, Tyranny

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An Illustrated First-Person Guide to the C.I.A.’s Torture Program, from ENMNews and The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Posted on December 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Anyone who doesn’t think the CIA tortures prisoners should volunteer to undergo one or more of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques described in this article. From ENMNews and The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting at enmnews.com:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One shows the prisoner nude and strapped to a crude gurney, his entire body clenched as he is waterboarded by an unseen interrogator. Another shows him with his wrists cuffed to bars so high above his head he is forced on to his tiptoes, with a long wound stitched on his left leg and a howl emerging from his open mouth. Yet another depicts a captor smacking his head against a wall.

They are sketches drawn in captivity by the Guantánamo Bay prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah, self-portraits of the torture he was subjected to during the four years he was held in secret prisons by the C.I.A.

Published here for the first time, they are gritty and highly personal depictions that put flesh, bones and emotion on what until now had sometimes been portrayed in popular culture in sanitized or inaccurate ways: the so-called enhanced interrogations techniques used by the United States in secret overseas prisons during a feverish pursuit of Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In each illustration, Mr. Zubaydah — the first person to be subject to the interrogation program approved by President George W. Bush’s administration — portrays the particular techniques as he says they were used on him at a C.I.A. black site in Thailand in August 2002.

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America’s Forever Wars: Guantanamo Bay “Prepared” For New Inmates, Says US Admiral, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 18, 2018 | 1 comment

Guantanamo Bay may be getting some new prisoners, as America’s interminable war on terrorism continues. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

On Thursday, Kurt Walter Tidd, a high ranking United States Navy admiral, currently serving as the Commander of the United States Southern Command, told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is now “prepared” to receive an influx of new detainees.

“We have 41 detainees who are there right now. We are prepared to receive more should they be directed to us,” Admiral Kurt Tidd, told lawmakers.

“As of today we have not been given a warning order that new detainees might be heading in our direction, but our responsibility will be to integrate them in effectively,” he added.

During President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech last month, Trump said he had signed an executive order directing Secretary of Defense James Mattis to “re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.”

“I am asking Congress to ensure that in the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And In many cases for them it will now be Guantánamo bay,” Trump said during his speech.

https://stockboardasset.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/cuba-guantanamo-10th-anniversary.jpg

AFP notes that Guantanamo Bay has not received any new inmates since 2008, but that could be changing under the Trump administration, as he plans on expanding the forever war on terrorism.

US military officials have been openly discussing the fate of Islamic State group detainees, mainly foreign fighters, held by US-backed militias in northern Syria. Guantanamo has not received any new inmates since 2008 but on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to load the facility with “bad dudes,” and said it would be “fine” if US terror suspects were sent there for trial. During his State of the Union speech in January, Trump said IS captives would in “many cases” end up in Guantanamo.

To continue reading: America’s Forever Wars: Guantanamo Bay “Prepared” For New Inmates, Says US Admiral

 

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