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From the Wikileaks’ Gitmo Files: Journalist Held for 6 Years to Learn About News Outlet
Image by mohamedn via Flickr
Grant Lawrence–Bodhi Thunder
“…And now we can understand why it was that Major General Dunlavey, who was the commander of Guantánamo in 2002, complained about the “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, the number of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as he described them, that he was being sent from Afghanistan. Here they are. Here are the farmers and the cooks and the taxi drivers and all these people who should never have been rounded up in the first place and who ended up in Guantánamo because there was no screening process…..“(source: democracy now)
Andy Worthington, Author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. He is co-director of the film Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo. His website is: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/
The recently released Wikileaks’ Guantanamo Files reveal a story in which a journalist working for Al Jazeera News was detained at Gitmo for six years in order to mainly learn about that news organization.
…One file shows that Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera journalist held at Guantanamo for six years, was detained partly in order to be interrogated about the news network.
His file states that one of the reasons he was detained was “to provide information on … the Al Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL”.
Al-Hajj was released in 2008 and has since returned to work for Al Jazeera….source: al jazeera
Imagine if another country had held captive a journalist from NBC, ABC, Fox, or some other managed news outlet here in this country. Not only that, suppose that the journalist was being subjected to torture simply to find out how a news organization operates.
Well you can just imagine American indignation and abhorrence over such a violation of human rights.
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