I was quite ill for the past couple of days but it was just a physical illness and it has passed. I’m not sure however if my inner sense of feeling sick at the collapse of my country’s values will ever be rectified however.
Orwell’s government minions in 1984 used the “memory hole” to rewrite history but I often wonder if what is actually currently happening is far worse: not a disappearance of news archives but more of a “Great Forgetting”. That is, when enough people are hit with a high enough level of shocking information the result is becoming desensitized to it.
Let’s probe these awful wounds in the name of spiritual health.
Via the IHT, an AP story from March 6, 2007:
Reporters will be barred from hearings that begin Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 14 terror suspects transferred last year from secret CIA prisons, officials said Tuesday.
Interest in the 14 is particularly high because of their alleged links to the al-Qaida network. Among them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. He was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.
A New York-based human rights group that represents one of the 14 men accused the Pentagon of designing “sham tribunals.” The organization contended that its client, Majid Khan, has been denied access to his lawyers since October 2006 “solely to prevent his torture and abuse from becoming public” and to protect complicit foreign governments.
U.S. authorities say Khan was being groomed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for an attack inside the United States.
“We might expect this in Libya or China, but not America,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement. It said Khan was subjected to CIA interrogation methods that amounted to torture.
Maybe. And maybe not to the CCR. I have no doubts that the Bush administration would torture anyone they wished but in this case, do they wish to?
Let’s not forget the case of Abdelghani Mzoudi, who was on trial in Germany for being an accessory to the 911 attacks. He was acquitted (not a mistrial) because of a lack of evidence, most especially a lack of evidence provided by the United States concerning Ramzi Binalshibh:
In passing judgment, presiding judge Klaus Ruehle said it was for lack of evidence, not because the court was convinced of his innocence.
He cited the refusal of US officials to release evidence from the alleged coordinator behind the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, as one of the major factors forcing Mzoudi’s acquittal.
Here is the key paragraph however:
US authorities, citing national security, refused to let him testify or to allow his written evidence to be used. German authorities plainly have some of that information at hand, but have been forbidden from using it.
So that’s one Al-Qaeda terrorist let free (Mzoudi).
Then of course there’s the “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) who managed to attend a Baptist school in North Carolina, be friends with the Northern Alliance when the Taliban was in power, fought alongside the United States in Bosnia during the 1990’s, got a job with the US-allied government in Qatar, drank lots of liquor, “masterminded” Oplan Bojinka (which included both liquid explosives in bottles of contact lens solutions as well as crashing a plane), “masterminded” the 1993 WTC bombing (which despite an FBI informant could not be stopped), “masterminded” the Richard Reid drugged out freakazoid “shoe bombing” and also “masterminded” the assassination of Daniel Pearl. Oh and also “masterminded” the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 (against mostly Australians) and killed a number of westerners by “masterminding” the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia.
KSM was then killed once and captured twice by Pakistani officials, the second time in a house where he was not living, posed in a raggedy nightshirt in front of a wall that did not exist in the house and other more kabuki type details. And let’s not forget that prior to the “grumpy nightshirt” photo, practically no one had any idea what he looked like.
So who else is the Pentagon going to conduct a secret tribunal for and then publish a supposedly legitimate but censored transcript of the hearings about?
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. You might remember him as being captured “maybe” in the UAE in 2002, held incommunicado ever since. Supposedly also the “mastermind” of the USS Cole attacks as well as the lesser-known attack against the Limburg (French oil tanker as well as an American oil company plane) and the attempted attack on the USS The Sullivans). I say supposedly because the U.S. refused to let al-Nashiri be tried in these cases in Yemen. He was however convicted in absentia and sentenced to death. Of course the defendants were tortured and given electric shocks because they refused to admit their guilt but they were still convicted anyway.
In other words, a pro-US Arab ally convicted a known terrorist and sentenced him to death. Still the Bush administration would not turn him over to be executed. Which turned out to be a “wisely prescient” decision because not only did the 5 convicted of the Cole attacks escape from prison once, they did it twice. So that’s an additional 5 terrorists free plus 23 Al-Qaeda members also at large.
Which is fine since al-Nashiri himself was once given (Yemeni) presidential safe passage along with three of his bodyguards.
Which reminds me of Omar al-Farouq, a “top lieutenant” of Osama’s, captured in Indonesia in 2002 but somehow managed to “escape” Bagram prison while in American custody. He was supposedly killed by British troops in September 2006.
Of course before 9/11, the FBI was frustrated at Yemen’s lack of cooperation in the Cole investigation including:
A list of people the investigators would like to interview, first presented to Yemen late last year, included a firebrand Muslim cleric, an army general with family ties to Saleh and a long- standing relationship with bin Laden.
The “firebrand” is al-Houthi, the general is Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar but of more importance is that “Saleh” is referring to Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is still in power today. Quite an interesting guy that Saleh, who apparently has the phone number to call “Vice” President Dick Cheney when a Spanish warship captured a pirate ship transporting missiles from North Korea headed to Yemen and get them cleared to land.
Let’s not forget the Saudi-born but captured in Yemen fellow named Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, whose arrest was “hailed” by the United States. Google his name and you’ll find tons of references to both his arrest as well as his impending trial for a variety of terrorist offenses, including financing the USS Cole attack. But here’s the story with almost no hits:
He was given a 37 month sentence which was equivalent to time served and he walked after Yemeni authorities “refused” to allow U.S. investigators (in other words, the FBI) interview him.
So right now we’ve got one USS Cole terrorist in American limbo custody and a whole host of others, including our man al-Ahdal who took millions from Saudis to support Al-Qaeda, walking around free or “on the run”.
And none of this includes Khaled Abdul Nabi, a terrorist listed by name in the U.S. State Department’s report on terrorism in 2004 who was given a full pardon by Yemeni president Saleh and is now living the life of an “ordinary citizen” on a farm somewhere.
Yet another person the Pentagon will give a military tribunal to is Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani who “helped coordinate” the bombing of the embassy in Tanzania. Actually he was more of a “gofer” for the bombers in Dar es Salaam, running errands and cooking meals. And let’s not forget that one of the men actually convicted of the attacks said he warned American officials two years before it took place. This was Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, who was born in the Sudan but grew up in the United States and is now in the Witness Protection program after a long stint as the head of Al-Qaeda’s fiscal division (which has cost the taxpayer at least 1 million dollars so far).
He’s not the only one living the good life in the United States as a federally protected witness after being a high-ranking Al-Qaeda member. So is our man L’Houssaine Kherchtou.
Meanwhile Fadl is a skirt-chasing fine-dinin’ guy who skimmed 100 grand from Osama and was never seen to pray even once by his FBI interrogators. Oh yeah, plus he’s a chronic gambler.
Speaking of the African Embassy bombings, let’s not forget Ali Mohamed, born in Egypt, became an American citizen, trained Special Forces at Ft. Bragg, worked for the CIA and Al-Qaeda and the FBI, arrested in 1998 in the U.S. and entered a guilty plea in 1999 but:
After eight months of imprisonment, Ali Mohammed entered a guilty plea in May 1999. What happened after that is unclear. The trial proceeded, but there is no record of any sentencing or even a conviction. As late as February 20, 2002, CBS News reported that “Mohammad pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.”[3] There has been no further news of his specific whereabouts or sentencing but he is currently in federal custody at an unspecified location.
Patrick Briley, an American op-ed journalist writing for NewsWithViews.com, has reported that Ali Mohamed was given an early release from prison by direct order from the Bush Administration’s DOJ, specifically USAG Alberto Gonzalez.
So one more terrorist running around free. Oh yeah, and he also was a close associate of KSM.
And last on the Pentagon’s “sham” list is Uncle Abu Zubaydah. He’s supposed to have been the “chief recruiter” for Al-Qaeda despite an incredibly large number of foiled terrorist attacks, including the 2000 “millenium” attack, a plan to bomb a Jordanian hotel to kill Israeli tourists, the LA airport bomb plot, a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris and he’s also tied to the Algerian Six. These were men who were arrested in Bosnia and formally acquitted and then outright kidnapped by American forces as they walked out of the courthouse and then sent to Guantanamo.
Meanwhile Zubaydah himself has 35 aliases, no reliable photographs before his capture and is a “master of disguise”. Whoever was captured after a shootout in Pakistan, he apparently is certifiably insane. Yet the 911 Commission and many of Bush’s speeches rely heavily on Zubaydah’s secret testimony.
According to Ron Suskind:
“I show in the book exactly the useful information he provided, and at the same time I show that essentially what happened is we tortured an insane man and jumped screaming at every word he [Zubaydah] uttered, most of them which were nonsense.”
And I won’t even mention how Zubaydah was arrested carrying a Saudi bank card and that information was never investigated due to “incompetence” until Saudi intelligence officials “seized” and then “disappeared” all the financial records related to it.
Nor will I even mention how Zubaydah accurately named two high-ranking Saudis (dead of heart attack and car accident respectively) and one Pakistani (dead from airplane crash) as well as their real phone numbers when he thought that could get him out of jail and then tried to kill himself when he realized he had been duped into revealing that information.
It’s incredible what we forget when we get so overwhelmed with this daily dose of spin.
Pax