Friday, May 22, 2009

RETURNING TO THE BATTLEFIELD, take iv

I am so sick of this fake story. Every time people have actively criticized Guantanamo this story is "leaked" with new numbers. Last time it surfaced was around inauguration time. At least now the NYT is admitting it may have been duped. But they have missed the point of their being duped... now they are saying maybe these men "have not returned to the battlefield" but instead have joined the battle because of being locked up wrongly for so many years. Of couse that makes sense and you could bet your bottom dollar that I would be fighting mad if I was held for 5,6, 7, 8 + years for no reason and then just dropped back home with no apology, no compensation, nothing except a reputation for having been at the worlds most notorious prison. But anyway, getting back to the point of this duping.... no one is looking at who these supposedly dissatisfied people are and what exactly constitutes "returning to the battlefield". First I will point you again to the article I wrote all those many years ago when the first of these bogus stories appeared. In addition to claiming people that were never at Guantanamo, men who were still at Guantanamo and men that did little more than criticize our government as "returning to the battlefield" the propaganda machine has included men who have gone back to their former charitable work and of course working for Al-Jazeera. When the battlefield is everything Muslim it is not hard for them to paint this picture. A law suit will be filed in the next week for disclosure of the, most likely, non existent names. There is a reason that this story is always leaked but the numbers never confirmed with something like "evidence". The numbers are made up. What is not made up is that men who have been held illegally for all these years have a right to be angry. No thought was given to the men released by the Bush regime. They were sent from Guantanamo in the middle of the night and most were given no help to adjust back to a normal life. Even if the pentagon's false numbers were real we would have to consider ourselves lucky to have only 14% fighting mad. Hopefully we can help the remaining men to be settled in a way that will help them to adjust to life on the other side of the wire. Even something as simple as an apology tends to go a long way.