"We could not understand what he was saying."

by: Jacob Freeze

Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 10:15

On January 20, 2002, six Algerian men who had been arrested in Bosnia arrived at the American prison on Guantanamo Bay. One of them, Lakhdar Boumediene, won a landmark case in the Supreme Court, and was subsequently released to France on May 15, 2009. Others, including Saber Lahmar, are still "detained."

Melissa Hoffer, one of the lawyers who represents the Algerian prisoners, has described the conditions of their imprisonment and the circumstances of their transfer from Bosnia to Guantanamo.

After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the United States.

"We could not understand what he was saying."

When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting -- brief, truncated cries.
We could not understand what he was saying.

Jacob Freeze :: "We could not understand what he was saying."

Tags: Guantanamo, Lakhdar Boumediene, Saber Lahmar, (All Tags)

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"We could not understand what he was saying." | 2 comments

Corporate resource wars leave no room for the law. (4.00 / 1)

People in the Bush and in the Obama administration try to justify this behavior, but it's nonsense. There is no excuse. We are engaged in kidnapping, torture, and murder, a criminal enterprise, resource wars on behalf of corporations, using mercenary forces and relying on terrorism and the slaughter of civilians to smooth our path.

Imagine that Saudi Arabia declared that the U.S. was engaged in a war on Islam, so any American determined to be a supporter of this plan can be arrested, held, tortured by Saudi Arabia. American tourists in Europe or Asia or South America could be routinely kidnapped on the streets, taken to secret black-hole prisons and tortured, never informed of any charges other than vague "support for the assault on Islam" claims, imprisoned, eventually murdered.

It's the same thing. The U.S. claims there is a "War On Terror" which authorizes us to kidnap any person from any country in the world, authorizes us to attack, invade, occupy any country in the world at any time, authorizes us to murder, plunder, steal.

We perfected the brutality of these methods through our instructions and funding of client states in South and Central America, and now we use them throughout the world. Generations from now, people will speak of us like we today speak of the German Nazis. And our own people are too frightened and ignorant and misinformed to understand what's really going on.

by: NABNYC @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 22:03:22 PM UTC

2002-2009 (0.00 / 0)

Way back in 2002 a story leaked out of Guantanamo about an Afghan man 75+ who had been chained to a ring in the floor of his cell in some sort of pretzel configuration for more than 24 hours, and I had all sorts of different thoughts about that story, but I never thought that the same sort of thing would be happening to many of the same people 7 years later.

by: Jacob Freeze @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 05:37:34 AM UTC

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