Four more Guantanamo Detainees Released Without Charge

Mother Davis opens her front door and appreciates the fresh air as she notes,

There’s an interesting piece of news from the Center for Constitutional Rights today. It seems that four of their clients who were held as prisoners at the American military base at Guantanamo Bay were released today.

Now, there are two possibilities to explain this release.

1. The men are innocent of any involvement in terrorist activities. Certainly, this is the possibility that traditional standards of law would recognize. You see, before George W. Bush came to occupy the White House, there was something called presumption of innocence. That meant that if a person were accused of a crime, the system must regard that person as innocent until proven guilty.

Of course, these four men were not ever even formally accused of any crime. They were just snatched, as part of a huge body grab that also brought to the Guantanamo Bay prisons people who turned out to be completely uninvolved in any armed struggle against the United States – people like taxi cab drivers, farmers, and teachers. Why, some of those people that Donald Rumsfeld insisted were “the worst of the worst” sent to be imprisoned, degraded, and tortured at Guantanamo Bay were little boys less than 13 years old. The American military still holds many of these boys as prisoners, without charge, without access to lawyers, at Guantanamo Bay.

The fact that the men are being released shows that the Bush Administration has no evidence against them, and never did. It shows that the Bush Administration has been imprisoning and torturing people without regard for who they are. It gives the appearance that the Bush Administration only cared about rounding up a sufficient number of Muslim men and boys to give the appearance to the American public that vengeance was being carried out.

2. The second possibility is that these four men are, in fact, among “the worst of the worst” – some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world.

Of course, if the Bush Administration has evidence that this is the case, if it was so sure that these men were despicable and wretched “evildoers” with certain ties to Al Quaida’s plots to kill thousands of Americans, then the Bush Administration could easily have just put these men on trial to show to the whole world what twisted nasty people the enemies of America are.

So, if these men are not innocent, then what possible reason would the United States have for releasing them?

Well, some Republican apologists are suggesting that these men might have been deadly dangerous Al Quaida evildoer operatives, but they have been “turned” through “special techniques” to become double agents for the United States. The idea is that the prisoners were subjected to such a mind-bending routine of torture, interrogation, sensory deprivation and confinement that they have become putty in the hands of prison guards, and now are being sent back to their countries of origin to settle back with Al Quaida, and report back intelligence to their former American captors.

Now, for silly little old me, neither option seems particularly reassuring. If the first possibility is true, then America is being ruled by lawless, despotic thugs. If the second possibility is true, then America is being ruled by fools.

Consider this for a moment: If the four men were released from the hellhole of Guantanamo Bay to serve as double agents for the United States of America, then the USA has certainly set them up to fail. For one thing, the American government released their names: Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar, and Moazzam Begg. How could these men possibly work as double agents when their identies are now known to the whole world, including Al Quaida?

Furthermore, if these men truly were among “the worst of the worst”, what kind of idiots are they in the Bush Administration to believe that they can be trusted to work as American intelligence agents? If they could really be transformed into pro-American zealots through torture by American guards, then what would stop them from just converting back to anti-American zealotry?

Considering these two possibilities, it becomes clear that the first possibility – that the men are innocent – is much more plausible. Consider the case of one of these men: Moazzam Begg. Mr. Begg is the son of a banker in Birmingham, England. He went to Afghanistan, with his three young children, to become a teacher. While there, he also worked constructing wells for drinking water in poor communities. When the Americans started bombing his area of Kabul, he went to live in Pakistan. It was in Pakistan that he was thrown into the trunk of a car by American soldiers and Pakistani intelligence agents.

Begg was held prisoner in terribly harsh conditions at Bagram in Afghanistan for one year. Torture was common at the prison where he was held. Then, Begg was sent to Guantanamo Bay. The Bush Administration declared that Begg was one of six prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who would likely be tried by a military tribunal set up explicitly to evade the standards of American law.

Now, we do not know if Begg actually committed any crime. Neither does Begg’s father, who last year begged the American government to put his son on trial so that his status could be determined.

It’s very strange that the Bush Administration would go through all the trouble of capturing Begg, calling him one of the “worst of the worst”, imprisoning him for years in inhumane conditions, and preparing him for a military tribunal only to release him without any criminal charge whatsoever.

Behavior of this kind can only be described as irrational. This is the thought that sticks with me – that America’s foreign policy and systematic degradation of the rule of law at home has been motivated, planned and executed not in a carefully considered effort to make America safer, but out of a raw fear and rage that blinds our leaders to reason.

Whether or not Moazzam Begg and the other three men released today were innocent, or were guilty of heinous terrorist acts, the way that the Bush Administration has dealt with them makes no sense at all – and there is nothing more terrifying than a government that regards itself as above the law and beyond all need of reason.

Anticipating the next irrational strike,
Mother Davis