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 Six Held at Guantanamo After Plot Claim Is DroppedPosted on Nov 1, 2008
By Robert Fisk Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at The Independent. In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp. George Bush’s assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address – the same speech in which he wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to import aluminium tubes from Niger – was that “our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo].” Not only has the US government withdrawn that charge against the six Algerians, all of whom had taken citizenship or residence in Bosnia, but lawyers defending the Arabs – who had already been acquitted of such a plot in a Sarajevo court – have found that the US threatened to pull its troops out of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia if the men were not handed over. According to testimony presented by the Bosnian Prime Minister, Alija Behman, the deputy US ambassador to Bosnia in 2001, Christopher Hoh, told him that if he did not hand the men to the Americans, “then let God protect Bosnia and Herzegovina”. That such a threat should be made – and the international High Representative to Bosnia at the time, Wolfgang Petritsch, has also told lawyers it was – shows for the first time just how ruthless and unprincipled US foreign policy had become in Mr Bush’s “war on terror”. By withdrawing their military and diplomatic support for the Bosnian peace process, the Americans would have backed out of the Dayton accord which they themselves had negotiated. Then the Bosnian government would have lost its legitimacy and the country might have collapsed back into a civil war which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and involved mass rape as well as massacre. The people of Bosnia might then have endured “terror” on a scale far greater than the attacks of al-Qa’ida against the United States. When the Bosnian court was preparing to release their six prisoners, Prime Minister Behman was informed that Mr Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney and the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been personally briefed and the White House had decided that, if they were freed, US troops in the Nato Stabilisation Force in Bosnia would seize them, using “whatever force is necessary”. So, despite a three-month investigation by the Bosnian police, their clearance and a specific demand by the Dayton-established Bosnian Human Rights Chamber that they should not be forced to leave Bosnia, US forces seized all six, shackled and blindfolded them and put them on a plane to Guantanamo. Advertisement The administration has withdrawn evidence given by a federal prisoner, Enaam Arnaout, against Boudella – that he trained at an al-Qa’ida camp in Afghanistan – when lawyers were about to discover that the US Justice Department had said five years earlier that an FBI interview with the man was “not reliable”. Even stranger is that the six prisoners are claimed by the US to be “enemy combatants” when – with the dropping of the embassy bomb-plot charge – there is no evidence they have ever fought US troops or planned to attack US interests anywhere in the world. Part of the case against Bensayah involved the alleged discovery of a piece of paper at his home, bearing a telephone number for an al-Qa’ida operative, Abu Zubayder. “The Bosnian police couldn’t get this number to work in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” one of the prisoners’ lawyers, Stephen Oleskey, says. “Now we believe an announcement that the paper had been discovered was made before it was ‘found’.” Mr Oleskey says Clint Williamson, the US war crimes ambassador, met Bosnia’s Prime Minister, Nicola Spiric, this week. “There’s only one reason he makes these visits,” he said. “To negotiate the return of people in Guantanamo.” The White House may intend to save itself further embarrassment by ending the torment of six more apparently innocent young men. Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment
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Obama’s Job Approval Slips Below 50 Percent
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By KDelphi, November 5, 2008 at 10:37 pm #
Is there something about GITMO here? What did I miss?
Some of this stuff is just plain creepy. The kids want a dog, folks. Thats it.
Whoooo….!
Report thisBy Gypsy, November 5, 2008 at 9:22 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
What a delight watching the Obama speech and the crowds celebrating in Chicago. I was reminded of the seering speech I once witnessed by Malcolm X at the Oxford Union and felt the resonances as well as contrasts. Its great to see the groundswell of humanitarianism and diversity.
Report thisAs an anthropologist, I am intrigued that no media commentator has noticed the ritual symbolism of the gift of the puppy soon to enter the White House. This can reassure the paranoid that Obama is not a muslim fundamentalist because dogs are seen by the latter as unclean and NEVER allowed near domestic space.
Dogs do of course have earlier roles in White House history e.g. the one that at first saved Nixon’s career when he said this was the only gift he had accepted
By Claus-Erik Hamle, November 3, 2008 at 5:36 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
The Bush gang must be arrested and tried for war crimes, kidnapping, torture, murder. If not, hopefully, they´ll be arrested and tried if they dare leave the country. Remember Pinochet, McCain´s buddy ? The criminals can actually get arrested !
Report thisBy KDelphi, November 3, 2008 at 1:03 pm #
For change to take hold, we will need justice.
Report thisBy thebeerdoctor, November 3, 2008 at 7:36 am #
Robert Fisk once wrote of regimes in the Middle East: “Dictatorships and caliphates do not give away their secrets.”
Report thisI guess it has become obvious to Mister Robert, that Cheney/Bush want to operate in the same way. That is why an abomination like Guantanamo still exists.
As far as the concentration camp angle, I am reminded of what Israeli Avraham Burg said, that “there are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz. Those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings.”
By KDelphi, November 2, 2008 at 7:47 pm #
diamond-Youve got it about right—-excpet, I think that there should be a way to hold the people who came up with this sociopathic farce to pay for it themselves. I still say we need to PROSECUTE everyone who was involved with Bush & Co.! HOW can we have real change without justice?!
I heard a soldier who had refused to stay an MP at GITMO say, that, “If they werent terroroists when they came here, they will be when they leave! I sure woudl be!”. Behold the hellish monster the neo-cons have created!
If they were prosecuted , we could confiscate every fricking penny of everything they own and give it to the families of GITMO detainees.
And I think I have decided that there IS some use for General Powell—he can testify against them all, He was in on the beginning of it! Sure, he left—but he knows that these are prosecutable war crimes/crimes against humanity!
About a month ago, someone on CD suggested a Truth Commission—alot of people jumped on him. But, the path we are following now wil just lead them to be allowed to GO HOME! LETS NOT LET THEM!
Report thisBy diamond, November 2, 2008 at 6:51 pm #
Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. This has been confirmed by the shocked lawyers who have seen the place while attempting to get some form of justice for the inmates. The people locked up in Guantanamo are in there the same way that Jews were in any of Hitler’s concentration camps. They weren’t arrested and kidnapped because they were criminals: they were arrested and kidnapped and driven mad or murdered because of their religion and/or their nationality. Now Bush and Cheney face a choice. They can release all these people and admit that they were innocent thereby destroying any tiny vestige of respectability they might still have and laying the American government open to claims for damages that could go into the billions or they can stonewall, leave them in the concentration camp, do nothing and kick the whole obscenity down the road for the next administation to deal with. They have chosen the latter course, but I hope for the sake of America and for the sake of democracy that Bush and Cheney and those in the CIA and the Pentagon and the military and the tame lawyers who wrote torture, abduction and murder into military and civil law will all soon face their own day in court, followed by incarceration for their many crimes. Crimes that began with the stolen election of 2000 and progressed to the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks, and the kidnapping and torture of citizens from many countries, as well as the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither of these countries had anything to do with 9/11. I’m not surprised that Palin mentions war with Iran. Iran is on the neo cons to-do list, as are many other countries in the Middle East. If people don’t go to jail, next time the right is in power they’ll do it all again - only worse. That seems to be the pattern.
Report thisBy skulz fontaine, November 2, 2008 at 1:46 pm #
The Bushco ‘war of terror’ rages unabated. Amerika isn’t so great anymore and dreams of democracy are turned an ugly brutish nightmare. Gee thanks Bushco. Tony Blair the lap-doggy war criminal roams the planet freely. Guantanamo harbors the innocent and that malevolent affront to common human decency remains the seminal blot on the Bushco criminal record. Gosh with the Bushco posse, one just about needs a “program” to keep track of ALL their evil. Wars of naked aggression, rendition, detention, and that brilliant torture. Hey John Yoo, you evil son-of-a-bitch, how’s tricks? Yeah, the Bushco crew have set back humanity about 15, 16 hundred years. Our world just might not recover. Amerika will certainly never recover. So this election day, vote the straight Fascist Party ticket and let’s maintain the status quo! Nothing says “stay the Bush course” like John McCain and his Barbie running mate. After all, “Country First!” Basic human decency, NEVER!
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