A final act of cruelty.
One of the things that I find strange in our criminal justice, if I can use the word justice associated with our criminal system, is that we always seem to have this one area where we have to dig the knife in one more time before we let a suspect go.That is where we have a suspect, we are checking up to see if he is a bad guy and, oops, we can't find anything to charge him on. So we release him. Fair enough except the act of releasing him takes a significant amount of time and during that time we don't tell them. Just to twist the knife a little bit more.
it seems the US has the same philosophy. One of the Saudi's who killed themselves over the weekend was due for release but he wasn't told because they didn't know where to send him. Err.... Better not tell him because it will take us another year to work out where to send him. Why not. 'We are going to release you because although we have kept you here for three years we don't have any reason to prosecute.' Thinking about it maybe not. How about 'We are going to release you but don't know where to send you' 'How about sending me home' 'Good idea.' Sounds like a pathetic excuse to me. Read more here.
posted by Bag @ 5:09 pm
4 Comments:
Maybe they couldn't send him back to Saudi Arabia because as a member of banned "militant" group (I believe that means he was a terrorist) he would most likely have been executed and/or tortured by the regime there.
In other words, treated much, much worse than he was at Gitmo. I don't think the Saudi prison guards would be quite so concerned about treating him well and giving him access to lawyers, good food, etc.
From what I can gather you are advocating that because he can't be sent back to his homeland we should just keep him in jail. The default should be that he gets dropped off in his homeland. If that is impossible, for whatever reason, what is wrong with us just asking him where he wants to go.
Part of the problem is that when you do something like this then you take a certain amount of responsability. The US recognises that and now they are in a no win situation. They wanted rid of him but didn't know what to do with him. His actions solved that problem for them but there will be others and, yet again, they have not thought it through.
What's wrong with the US asking where he want's to go is that most countries won't want a Gitmo detainee being foisted onto them. He obviosuly will have no papers, no work permits, etc, etc. Would you be happy with people like this being allowed into Britain- where they have no links whatsoever- for the British taxpayer to have to pay for them; housing benefit, income support, etc, etc. And where they might continue to be a terrorist threat. More than one Gitmo detainee who has been released has returned to fighting.
If the US had simply handed him over to the Saudi authorities, who I'm sure weren't interested in having him back anyway, and they then tortured and killed him; well, you already know how the media will portray that: The Great Satan sends poor, innocent man to his death.
"One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level Al Qaeda operative, Harris said, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there. The third belonged to a splinter group."
Source- http://view.nowpublic.com/?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestar.com%2FNASApp%2Fcs%2FContentServer%3Fpagename%3Dthestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_Type1%26c%3DArticle%26cid%3D1149976210369%26call_pageid%3D968332188492%26col%3D968793972154%26t%3DTS_Home
"U.S. authorities allege Ahmed was a mid- to high-level al Qaeda operative. Al-Zahrani was accused of being a Taliban front-line fighter who bought weapons for offensives against the United States. [He took part in fighting at Mazar-i-Sharif]
Al-Utaybi was recommended for transfer to the custody of another country before his suicide, the Defense Department said. "
Source- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/10/terror/main1699386.shtml
Long before this guy was arrested we always had the issue on where he was going to be returned. If you pick up any people from these remote hell holes you never, ever seem to be able to return them to the country of origin for some reason. The real question is why have they not sorted this out by now. They could get someone to take them. After all anyone who is an enemy of the US has a few choices. The bottom line is that the US can't process him through lack of evidence or something, if he was involved in any way with terrorism I'm sure that they would be able to get jail time, and they don't want to return a willing fighter to the enemy. If he wasn't a willing fighter before he is now. So they are now stuck with what to do with these people. They are now in a no win situation of their own making.
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