I have talked about Abu Zubaydah many times on this blog. He is the man that my government wrongly thought was a member of al-qaeda so we used all of the torture techniques on him... and then a few more just because we could. But it turned out he was a nobody but since we did all of those horrible things to him we do not want to release him.
As part of the dog and pony show the government conducted a "periodic review" to see if he could be cleared for release.
Read more about it here.
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Page 2 of this article from Zeit Online contains this sentence:-
The full version of the memo quoted in the U.S. Senate's torture report reveals, at least between the lines, that the people humiliating him had bad consciences. They all seemed to be aware of the fact that they had already gone far beyond the legal limits. The cable ends with the words: "We need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.".
Abu Zubaydah is not the only person who must for the sake of the reputation of the US be held incommunicado until death, the other is Aafia Siddiqui. Enough information has leaked that the outlines of her case are visible to anyone who looks. Another terrorist was tortured to give names of operatives but he ran out of names but the torture did not stop and so he gave more names of people whose names he knew and who were not terrorists, perhaps he chose names of people whom he thought were obviously not terrorists in the hope that the torturers would twig to the fact that he had actually run out of useful information. If he did he reckoned without the credulity of the torturers for whom no amount of information suggesting that an accused terrorist is not a terrorist will suffice to clear that person of the taint.
The US asked their friends in the Pakistani ISI to kidnap Siddiqui which the ISI dutifully did kidnapping her and her three children from a taxi and killing the youngest. The ISI turned Siddiqui over to enhanced interrogaters at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan while Americans took custody of her two surviving children. After several years the interrogaters were finished with, maybe by this time they had realized that she had never been a terrorist but by now they could not afford for her to be free to tell of her experience, for the sake of the good reputation of the US she had to be silenced permanently.
She was dumped in a street in Ghazni eqipped with papers written in her hand incriminating her of terrorism and with some suspicious chemicals. Then someone rang the Ghazni police pointing to Siddiqui as a likely suicide bomber, the Ghazni police were supposed to shoot her dead, but instead they took her into custody, the informant then rang back to confirm that the dangerous terrorist had been disposed of and when he received the wrong information then commenced kabuki dance of US military and FBI rushing to arrest her. This is perhaps were they botched the plan, one of the soldiers shot her but failed to kill her and maybe there were present some who had not been briefed on the importance of termination with extreme prejudice and stopped him from firing to finish her off.
The failure of the assassination necessitated and alternate plan, lynching by means of law. A show trial under judge Berman did not allow Siddiqui to introduce evidence of her where she had been in the missing years thereby depriving her of any defense. When numerous witness allege evidence of guilt the only avenue of defense is that the authorities have ulterior motives leading to a conspiracy in perjury, that the US had held her for years before dumping on that Ghazni street is the necessary evidence of US bad faith. A sentence of 86 years for a forty year old is a LWOP sentence. There has been no communication between Siddiqui and her family since she entered FMC Carswell and US authorities tell her family members that she does not want any communication. People from Pakistan have supposedly been present when a burka clad individual supposedly Siddiqui refused to communicate with them. It may not be special administrative measures but she is incommunicado or may already be dead.
Post a Comment