Guantanamo detainees: U.S. can't tell a combatant from a cook

[struggle4progress]

U.S. can't tell a combatant from a cook

By Joseph Margulies
Published January 14, 2007

Sometime before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, a man named Abdul Aliza was taken from his home and his family in Afghanistan and was forced at gunpoint to work for the Taliban as a cook's assistant.

Interrogated years later by U.S. officers at the military prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba, Aliza insisted that he had never joined with the fighting against America or its allies ...

Officers told Aliza that having been kidnapped by the Taliban and forced to serve as a cook or a waiter was irrelevant to whether Aliza was an enemy combatant. Aliza found this impossible to comprehend ...

No one answered Aliza's questions, and authorities decided he was an enemy combatant. As of late 2006, Aliza was still at the base. He may be there still; the Pentagon refuses to say ...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0701140317jan14,1,1903796.story?coll=chi-opinionfront-hed

[ninkasi]

1. This is outrageous

To think that Bush has the nerve to even utter the words freedom, or peace, or democracy, when he has become the worst so-called leader ever to disgrace our Constitution. Thomas Jefferson would be shocked to think that we didn't impeach, convict, and imprison him years ago.