05 May, 2011

Having Gone Astray



Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve discusses the information contained in US government records made public (leaked) about the 779 prisoners of Guantánamo Bay. According to the records, over 80% of the people were completely innocent of those crimes they were suspected of. 606 people have already been acquitted and were known to have no intelligence of value for the government.

The purpose of Guantánamo Bay was/is intelligence gathering to prevent future attacks. He says that the problem is the US was trying to gather intelligence in a very unintelligent way,

“If you sweep people up who you know are innocent (and it is in these documents), and if you mistreat them horribly, then you are not going to get reliable intelligence; you are going to make yourself a lot of enemies.”

The reason he feels the US and everyone else needs to take a close look at what happened (and still is happening) at Guantánamo Bay is simply,

“You can’t learn the lessons of history, if you don’t know what that history is.”

It is important for us to know how terribly the American government went astray.

3 comments:

  1. I am very ashamed of my country's travesties at Guantanamo.

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  2. Kay, all those years ago, when Bush was in office, I needed to "discover" an other America than the one the media portrayed, or the one the news spoke of about what was coming out of Washington. That was when I found you and Ronni and numerous other thoughtful and thought-provoking bloggers. I know you must feel such helplessness when faced by the facts of Guantanamo. I think we all do, no matter if we are American or not. Wouldn't it be wonderful to know how to move Washington just to stop that what they have been doing for nearly nine years?

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  3. Anonymous5:53 am

    So terribly sad for everyone.

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