1115.org

The Pentagon is busy trying to make political capital out of the fact that a detainee who was released from Guantanamo in 2005 carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq yesterday:

A suicide bomber in Iraq was identified yesterday as a former Taliban fighter who was held for more than three years at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before he was handed over to authorities in his native Kuwait in 2005 and subsequently released.

… Abdullah Salih Al Ajmi, 29, had driven a car bomb into an Iraqi police patrol …
[…]
… Pentagon officials yesterday said Ajmi, who was among more than 500 former Guantanamo inmates who have been released or transferred to other countries, was a dramatic reminder of the danger in releasing those who are avowed terrorists - even to US allies who promise to ensure they will not pose a future threat.

The Pentagon press office yesterday listed a dozen former Guantanamo inmates who it contends returned to fight against the United States and its allies upon their release. Several were recaptured or killed in Afghanistan, and others were arrested for planning attacks in countries ranging from Russia to Turkey.

US military officials said Ajmi, known as “Captive 220″ during his 3 1/2 years of detention in Guantanamo, helped carry out a triple suicide car bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on April 26, killing seven Iraqis and wounding 28. They said he had recently traveled to Iraq through Syria, a popular entry point for foreign militants.

His photo appeared yesterday on a jihadist website that hailed him as a hero.

“There is an implied future risk to US and allied interests with every detainee who is released or transferred from Guantanamo,” said Navy Commander Jeff Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. “Our reports indicate that a number of former [Guantanamo] detainees have taken part in anticoalition militant activities after leaving US detention. Some have subsequently been killed in combat and participated in suicide bomber attacks.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, estimates that as many as 37 former inmates have been “confirmed or suspected” of returning to terrorist activities, according to Pentagon officials who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak about intelligence matters.

So the Pentagon would like you to believe that military authorities somehow, very much against their will, regularly agree to release Guantanamo detainees who they regard as avowed terrorists? They they somehow agree to release them because U.S. allies say “Pretty please?”, and promise that they’ll never ever be naughty again.

That, of course, is as big a lie as any that the Bush administration ever used to conflate the Iraq war with TWAT, or sell the Iraq war to the American people. An easily proven lie, too. Just the story of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in Germany, is enough to prove the lie. (I guess lying to the American public about terrorism is a habit that’s hard to break. Of course, there’s no evidence that the Bush administration has even tried.)

Here’s the short version of Kurnaz’s story:
• He was detained in Pakistan in October 2001 and taken to Guantanamo a few months later on suspicion that he was a supporter of al-Qaeda.
• By early 2002, both U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information linking Kurnaz to al-Qaeda or terrorist activities.
• A military tribunal at Guantanamo nevertheless concluded that he should remain in prison.
• In January 2005, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green criticized the military for ignoring evidence in Kurnaz’s favor, ruled that his detention was illegal, and ordered him to be released.
• The government appealed, of course.
• He was finally released only in August 2006.
• U.S. officials asked Germany to place Kurnaz under surveillance and open a criminal investigation of him as a condition of his release, but relented in the end (because German officials told U.S. officials to go climb a tree, or something to that effect).
• We put him on a plane, kept him shackled and blindfolded all the way home, and told the German authorities to treat him humanely.

This is how we treat detainees who are clearly not guilty of anything. And the Pentagon, with their usual straight face, would like you to believe that we have been reluctantly agreeing to release dozens of detainees who we just knew were avowed terrorists who would constitute an implied future risk to US and allied interests?

The position the Pentagon is now pushing is clearly that it’s a huge mistake to release anyone from Guantanamo at all (”There is an implied future risk to US and allied interests with every detainee who is released or transferred from Guantanamo”). When they say that, they are only channeling Pol Pot, who is said to have subscribed to the view that “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape”. That has practically been the Bush administration’s guiding principle in TWAT, especially when it comes to Guantanamo.

The Pentagon also wants you to blindly believe that every released detainee who returns to fight against the United States and its allies after his release does so because he was a hardened terrorist before he entered Guantanamo. The thought that our charming detention practices at Guantanamo may possibly drive innocent men to become confirmed America-haters, and to act on that newly hatched hate, has apparently never occurred to the Pentagon, and so it shouldn’t occur to you either.