Once again The Talking Dog offers original blog reporting — as is (mostly) usual, it deals with issues surrounding the war on terror and its detainees. And, as usual, TTD asks specific questions that show he has done his homework and the result is to extract a fascinating interview.
Here’s the intro:
Gaillard Hunt is an attorney in private practice in Silver Spring, Maryland. Mr. Hunt represents Pakistani national Saifullah Paracha, a businessman and father of four who was detained by American officials at an airport in Bangkok, Thailand in July 2003, where he was abducted, and in a pattern consistent with other so-called extraordinary renditions, had his clothing removed, and was thrust on a waiting plane and taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where he was interrogated for over a year, and then moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has been detained ever since. Mr. Paracha suffers from heart disease requiring treatment that does not appear to be available at Guantanamo. On June 27, 2007, I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Hunt by telephone. What follows are my interview notes corrected as appropriate by Mr. Hunt
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And here is part of a typical, lively exchange:
The Talking Dog: As far as you are aware, what is it Mr. Paracha is accused of (whether from the CSRT reports or any other non-classified basis you have to answer that question)? Again, to the extent you can tell me, what is his response to that? Has Mr. Paracha either been proposed for military commissions charges, or “cleared for release”?
Gaillard Hunt: From the unclassified CSRT itself, there is a list of around 10 items… the legal position we have taken is that while they may make him guilty of arguably bad things, none of them makes him in any way a combatant or a terrorist. The CSRT accuses him of discussing where Al Qaeda could acquire an atomic bomb. His response was– “Can you buy one off the shelf? Will Tony Blair sell me one?” His view is that it is a ridiculous question–and he denied having any such discussions.
Other allegations include having talked to Osama bin Laden and associating with people who are now “high value detainees”. Well, it turns out that he did indeed talk to OBL… among Paracha’s interests include being a t.v. producer in Pakistan. He was in Afghanistan for that purpose, and was trying to get a public audience with OBL to ask if his program could interview him. On one occasion when he managed to actually reach bin Laden, the response was that bin Laden would “think about it”, meaning probably not.
Read the rest yourself..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.