They Came For the Chicken Farmer

[welshTerrier2]

the PR value of catching a bunch of "the worst of the worst" and tossing them into Guantanamo for the rest of their lives must have seemed like a very big prize to Rove and the political jackasses who direct WH policy ... and shutting them off from any kind of due process was the perfect script to ensure that the truth about exactly who some of these prisoners are never emerged ... locked away in their cells in Cuba with no promise of a day in court, the "truth" would be whatever bush et al said it would be ...

slowly but surely, however, the truth about who these prisoners are has been leaking out ... it turns out that bush has been "winning" the war on terror one chicken farmer at a time ... one fine day these innocent prisoners will return to their homes and families and they tell the world the truth about American justice; bush's justice ... Guantanamo is the ugliness the world will see when it looks into the eyes of American justice ...

source: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0308-31.htm

They Came For the Chicken Farmer

This has been our nightmare since the Bush administration began stashing prisoners it did not want to account for in Guantánamo Bay: An ordinary man with a name something like a Taliban bigwig's is swept up in the dragnet and imprisoned without any hope of proving his innocence.

A case of mistaken identity's turning an innocent person into a prisoner-for-life was supposed to be impossible. President Bush told Americans to trust in his judgment after he arrogated the right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and toss people into indefinite detention. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld infamously proclaimed that the men at Guantánamo Bay were "the worst of the worst."

But it has long been evident that this was nonsense, and a lawsuit by The Associated Press has now demonstrated the truth in shameful detail. The suit compelled the release of records from hearings for some of the 760 or so men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. (About 490 are still there.) Far too many show no signs of being a threat to American national security. Some, it appears, did nothing at all. And they have no way to get a fair hearing because Gitmo was created outside the law.

Take the case of Abdur Sayed Rahman, as recounted in Monday's Times. The transcripts quote Mr. Rahman as saying he was arrested in his Pakistani village in January 2002, flown to Afghanistan, accused of being the Taliban's deputy foreign minister and then thrown into a cell in Guantánamo Bay. "I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan," he said, adding that the Taliban official was named Abdur Zahid Rahman.

read the full article ...

[hobbit709]

1. Just a similar sounding name

In the phone book here in Austin there are 8 people listed with my name-none of which are me. There is even a listing for someone with my father's name-including middle initial-he doesn't even live in this state. Hell, when I was in the Air Force, my pay records got confused with someone else with the same last name and the same last 4 digits of the social security number. Coincidences happen but they don't prove that one is the other.