An increase in terror

Wikileaks, the nonprofit international organization that publishes classified information provided by anonymous sources and whistleblowers, has this past week released more than 700 formerly secret documents relating to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay and its detainees. The released documents reveal, among other things, that the Bush and Obama administrations “knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent men for years without charge,” according to a report done by the television/radio program Democracy Now!.      

Of the more than 700 documents released, all are classified as “Secret/NOFORN,” meaning that, aside from being classified as “secret,” the documents are specifically not to be shared with foreign officials. The documents are described as “assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009,” evaluating the prisoners’ “histories” and providing “glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives.”

Among dozens of cases where senior U.S. commanders were alleged to have concluded that there was “no reason for the men to have been transferred to Guantanamo,” including “farmers ... chefs ... and drivers, who were rounded up or even sold to U.S. forces and transferred across the world,” there are a multitude of particularly disturbing cases. One case is of an innocent prisoner named Mohammed Sadiq, a “frail Afghan man of 89 with senile dementia,” who “was flown halfway around the world and detained for two months at Camp Delta.” Sadiq had been “arrested at his home” after U.S. soldiers discovered “a neighbor’s satellite phone and a list of telephone numbers believed to be for Taliban Fighters.”

However, U.S. officials at the military prison decided Sadiq was neither a member of the Taliban nor of Al-Qaida after interrogators determined that “the items were not Mr. Sadiq’s” and that in fact Mr. Sadiq did not even “know how to use the phone.” Tragically, Sadiq was not even the only elderly man being taken to the camp.

Young children were also shown to have been “shipped to the cages in Cuba.” Naqib Ullah, a 15-year-old “kidnap victim” and “forced conscript of a local warring tribe, affiliated with the Taliban,” spent a year at Guantanamo because of his “possible knowledge of Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders.” According to the 15-year-old’s report, Naqib was only released due to the fact he had “no further intelligence value to the United States.” 

However, perhaps the most disturbing case, at least regarding the often treasured, yet rarely — if ever — practiced, principles of free speech and freedom of the press, is the case regarding the imprisonment of Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for six years partly in order to be interrogated about his employer, the news network Al Jazeera. 

As his prison file highlights, Al-Hajj was sent to Guantanamo in order to “provide information on ... the Al Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment and the news gather operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.”  And the New York Times reports that although Al-Hajj insisted he was simply a journalist, “his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the United Arab Emirates’ claim that he was a Qaeda member. Al-hajj was “released in 2008 and returned to work for Al Jazeera.”  

Back in 2002, then-Vice President Dick Cheney described Guantanamo prisoners as “the worst of a very bad lot ... very dangerous ... devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans ... and, are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.” Yet, the recent secret documents released by Wikileaks say otherwise.   

By now, it is fairly easy for one to recognize the “War on Terror” for what it actually is — nothing more than an increase in global terror perpetrated by those in Washington.  
The recent secret documents released by Wikileaks, alongside those documents already previously released by the nonprofit international organization and other organizations like it, can do nothing but provide American citizens with the information of what the policy-makers in Washington are doing around the world on our behalf. Deciding what to do about it is up to us.     

­— mardunba@indiana.edu