UK’s Intelligence & “Guantánamo’s Lost Souls”
News regarding Gitmo are getting murkier and murkier.
Here’s the latest about the American CIA and the British intelligence MI5…
“Two British residents held in Guantanamo Bay for more than four years were detained by the CIA after MI5 failed to recruit them as paid informants, according to documents released in the United States, says The Times.
“The extent of MI5’s involvement with Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna — including offers of new lives and new identities financed by the British taxpayer — is detailed in papers released under United States freedom of information laws.
“Mr al-Rawi, 39, was released last weekend and returned to Britain without being arrested or questioned by police. But Mr el-Banna, 43, remains incarcerated at Camp Delta…”
Here is an earlier The Guardian story about ‘Guantánamo’s lost souls’. “The abuse of British residents Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna in US detention is an outrage of justice we must bring to an end…”
13 Responses to “UK’s Intelligence & “Guantánamo’s Lost Souls””
I gotta say, looking at this Iran prisoner situation and then thinking about Gitmo and Abu Ghraib prisons, the contrast is very troubling. Think about how we treat our prisoners, and how Iran has treated it’s British prisoners. I mean compare this to this .
Now, I understand that Iran is not exactly the highest example of human rights, but discounting the contrast out of hand is foolhardy, at best. If we’re the good guys, then how is it that their government is shown to treat prisoners better than ours?
Lynx,
I agree with you on that, but I think the reason Iran treated the British prisoners was a calculated move. Everything that happened I believe they may have planned long before they captured the British soldiers/sailors. It is of course our own fault that we’ve treated prisoners so poorly and left wide open this propaganda victory for the Iranians. If we treated prisoners like human beings to begin with, in a dignified manner without the secrecy and fully complying with international law, then this propaganda opportunity for Iran would have never existed.
Lynx and Ashen[
Yes!
What keeps me awake at night is calculating if the effects of this horrible episode in our history can ever be
sufficiently ameliorated.
How long before we can become the good guys again?
domajot,
As early as tomorrow. What we have to do is recognize and apologize for our mistakes and put into place a plan to do that. All these extralegal means must be abandoned and all international laws immediately followed. Everyone we are holding must be brought to trial or released.
None of this will happen though because besides the fact that the right would say this would be admitting or showing weakness, it would also be an admission that many in our government committed crimes. So we’ll have to wait until 2009 when (hopefully) the white house is no longer in the hands of the Republicans.
Maybe we should calculate more and torture less. It’s sad when Iran can put forth a better politician than Britain and the US.
There are other factors to considered besides information that might just possibly one day have the hope of stopping a terrorist attack, and to ignore those factors as this administration has done is a catastrophic lapse of leadership.
On the specific case of these two Brits however, they probably had some Jihadi connections, or else MI5 wouldn’t have wanted them in the first place. Actually makes it seem like some of the more credible detainments.
> Think about how we treat our prisoners, and how Iran has treated it’s British prisoners.
Apples and oranges — false comparison
Suspected illegal combatants and terrorists kept under heavy guard for security vs. innocent kidnapped military personnel exploited for geopolitical reasons
DLS,
So how do you know that they were innocent of crossing into Iranian waters?
Also, though I am all for capturing terrorists and putting them on trial, how we are treating them and holding them is morally wrong. Many are likely innocent, and we are still holding them. And whether innocent or not, torture which is being used on them is definitely not legitimate.
Anyway, Iran rubbed this in our face. They would have had every right to mistreat those prisoners the way we mistreat ours; to throw human rights laws out the window the same as our administration has. They didn’t and showed they were more humane, more moral than our administration. That stings, and it is a sad commentary as to where our great nation has fallen.
I have turned against the shia. They are, IMO, impossible. This latest act of trying to embarrass the west and gain favor in the eyes of the world is laughable. Even if the Brits had strayed a little into their waters, so what? Is the water dirty now? They should have made a diplomatic complaint like civilized nations do. It simply proves they are backward fools playing games with people they quietly would like to kill. To hell with Iran. I say gun them down the second they stray into Iraqi waters!
> It simply proves they are backward fools
> playing games with people they quietly
> would like to kill.
A light begins to shine.
However, I’ll point out that they often are not quiet about what they want.
> So how do you know that they were
> innocent of crossing into Iranian waters?
Britain claimed satellite evidence. Also, are you presuming the Brits are guilty and favoring the Iranians’ word naturally over that of the UK?
> Also, though I am all for capturing terrorists
> and putting them on trial, how we are treating
> them and holding them is morally wrong.
> Many are likely innocent, and we are still
> holding them. And whether innocent or not,
> torture which is being used on them is
>definitely not legitimate.
Any torture is wrong. Other wrongdoings should be exposed and may be after 2008.
> Anyway, Iran rubbed this in our face.
Its aggression? Yes, it did, and it and its proxies will probably claim a great “victory” over this event.
> They would have had every right to mistreat
> those prisoners the way we mistreat ours;
Absolutely not. If you now still insist they do, you are dishonest.
> to throw human rights laws out the window
> the same as our administration has.
No, they do not. Again you stand corrected. Also, don’t engage in moral relativism, trying to pull us down and falsely claim we’re the same as they are (or more dishonestly, worse than they are).
> They didn’t and showed they were more
> humane, more moral than our administration.
> That stings, and it is a sad commentary as to
> where our great nation has fallen.
They were not only less moral, they were cynically exploitive. What’s sad is that they could count on exploiting some in the West as well as their peers in the Middle East.
If we caught four Iranian spys in Iraq, why does the world know about it? Spys are spys, they have no rights. Why were they not simply tortured, killed, and, their rotting bodies dumped at the Iranian border?
I’ll tell you why; Its because Bush and his enabling republicans have screwed up this war so badly, and, on the cheap, that our forces in Iraq are little more than outpost defenders that occasionally walk bait patrol.
We are presiding over a civil war were combatants slaughter innocent civilians but are simply to coward to fight each other in the open. If we leave, then they REALLY have to fight. I say pull back to the oil fields and let them have at it. I’m tired of feeling responsible for piles of dead civilians everyday.
Oil is very slippery you know…and explosive!!!
You can live without oil…but not without water!!!
“There is enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
So instead of surrounding the oil wells with innocent soldiers and sacrificing them, please tell President Bush to change track and protect his own country from the collapsing democratic value system and increasing threats from even strangers who are now becoming enemies!!!
DLS,
I only stand corrected if I am wrong, and I am not. There are consequences to the actions our country takes, and one of those consequences is that other countries are going to commit crimes and come with the defense that we did it. Our country or at least the government for that matter, as many such as you do not seem to be able to grasp, is basically the same as that of Iran or any other country. Internationally, our government will pull out all the stops to get what it wants to its advantage over all others. If there was a similar chance of a propaganda coup for the US against Iran, we would have taken it.
And to say the actions of one side are more moral than the other is naive at the least and willfully ignorant at the very worse. To say we are more moral than them is to say we are superior and all our actions are justified while theirs are not. It is easy to say that our government has been cynically exploitive of the 9/11 attack to justify preemptive war with Iraq.
In the end, though the US and Iran are different culturally and systematically in government structure, they are at the base totally the same. By the way, both regimes to have conservative, bombastic, belligerent rulers. The reason they keep butting heads is because they are in many ways very similar.