Monday, February 09, 2009
National Security
Early on the morning of July 22, 2002, a Gulfstream V aircraft, then registered with the FAA as N379P, flew Mohamed to Rabat, Morocco where he was interrogated and tortured for 18 months. In Morocco his interrogators routinely beat him, sometimes to the point of losing consciousness, and he suffered multiple broken bones. During one incident, Mohamed was cut 20 to 30 times on his genitals. On another occasion, a hot stinging liquid was poured into open wounds on his penis as he was being cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death. He was forced to listen to loud music day and night, placed in a room with open sewage for a month at a time and drugged repeatedly.
Read that a couple times, and really think about it. Think about it. Think about what it would mean for you or someone you love to go through that. What did Mohamed do to deserve this treatment? He read the wrong website, apparently:
A British ‘resident’ held at Guantanamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a ‘joke’ website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.
Binyam Mohamed, a former UK asylum seeker, admitted to having read the ‘instructions’ after allegedly being beaten, hung up by his wrists for a week and having a gun held to his head in a Pakistani jail.
It was this confession that apparently convinced the CIA that they were holding a top
Al Qaeda terrorist.
But Obama is closing Gitmo, so this is all behind us, right? Hope and change all the way, right?
Not quite. It appears that a lawyer for the Obama Administration is arguing to preserve ‘state secrets’. So more arguments for preserving “national security” at the cost of individual freedoms. Hopefully Obama will back off on this, but I’m not holding my breath.
