President Obama apparently called the obstruction of habeas rights for detainees at Bagram Air Base (Afghanistan) a victory. Is this confusing to anyone else considering the harsh criticism he verbalized against the former President Bush? It is shocking that in 2008 a leader chides the US and condemns its then leader for withholding rights from detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO). Yet in less than two years the same critic cheers for withholding of the same rights to detainees held at Bagram Air Base.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-bagram-20100522,0,787686.story
This lends more support to the pattern of politics and misinformation clouding the world's view of what is really occurring with the detainees in the current war. FACT: The detainees at GTMO wisely and widely spread false rumors of rampant abuse in the detention center. The world reacted by claiming that they deserved habeas rights. FACT: The detainees at Bagram have not done so and it appears palatable enough to the world that so far, the same country's court that ruled GTMo detainees worthy of habeas corpus, just ruled Bagam detainees to be unworthy.
The decoy technicality that one base sits on American soil leased from the Cuban government, while the other sits on land borrowed from a Middle Eastern country is absurdly bogus. It fails to explain why one group of detainees deserves the right to challenge the terms of its imprisonment, while the other does not. Either a person is entitled to this right because he/is human, or he/she is not entitled to it. The land the individual stands on is irrelevant.
The sad part is that the detainees in Afghanistan are arguably more likely to be innocent than those at GTMO, as the latter detention facility has been said by the Bush Administration to hold the more threatening, instrumental, and/or valuable detainees.
The smoke and mirrors continue, whereby Guantanamo is lambasted and rendered by the world to be an evil place rife with abundant abuse, while the other detention centers seem held to a different standard.
One must wonder if the reason for the discrepant yardsticks relates to the effectiveness of the Manchester Document-driven behavior exhibited by the GTMO detainees - information operations they have executed by recruiting blind lawyers and advocacy groups; and by playing on the heartstrings of world citizens who are ignorant to these detainees' simple ruse.
It continues to be a shame that the world fights for terrorists' human rights only if those detainees reside in certain geographic regions.
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God bless you, Sir, in your efforts. My recent memoir, "Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior," attempts the same goal - to set the record straight about how the detainees are treated, and how they treated us. I was the ranking Army Medical Department officer with the Joint Detainee Operations Group (JDOG) while I was there, from February to June 2002, and my book tells the real story about detention and medical duty at Gitmo. It also tells what it is like to take care of people who want to kill you every day, and tells the story of what it's like for Army Reservists and their families before, during and after a deployment.
ReplyDeleteBest of luck on your book.
Sincerely,
Montgomery J. Granger
Major (Ret.)
USAR