Doug,
Unfortunately, I can't post to the list today, as I am away from my regular computer and my regular email account. But I thought that you might be interested in posting this to LBO-talk
Steven
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mirror (London) - October 29, 2002
<http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12308158&method=full&siteid=50143>
According to Pakistani detainees, the U.S. military paid the Northern Alliance $5,000 for each captive who confessed to being a Taliban and $20,000 for each purported al-Qaeda fighter. With that incentive, the prisoners claim, the allied commanders grabbed any Pakistani wandering dazed around the battlefield, then extracted confessions by force.
US Editor RICHARD WALLACE on the shambles that saw innocent taxi drivers and pensioners banged up in Cuba...
WHEN I sat down with US Brigadier General Rick Baccus in July and asked him if he was happy that the Guantanamo Bay detainees were terrorists and if he believed they were being treated humanely, he grimaced.
The man in charge of the 598 detainees held in cages on the cliff-top Cuban prison then smiled and trotted out the official line.
"Dangerous men... Geneva Convention... enemy combatants..." he droned, following the official US line to the letter.
But it was the grimace that gave the game away.
Even the senior officer supervising this extraordinary internment camp clearly had doubts about the wisdom of Guantanamo Bay.
Today Baccus, 50, has been forced to retire from the military after 28 years service after being sacked from his post for "policy disagreements". Meanwhile 300 of the detainees are to be freed.
Suddenly many of the "worst of the worst" - as US defence chief Donald Rumsfeld so memorably described the al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects - are harmless individuals arbitrarily hoovered up during the US assault on Afghanistan. People like Abassin Roshan, 21, a student earning extra money for his family driving a taxi.
He left his taxi rank in Kabul on April 10 and disappeared three hours later after coming across a roadblock in Gardez.
Two months later his distraught family learned that Abassin - or rather detainee JJJFGA - was being held in Camp X-Ray.
Apparently, Abassin and another taxi driver were picked up in the middle of clashes between a local warlord and pro-American militia men and handed over to US Special Forces in the camp. They were taken by mistake.
There may be scores more like Abassin Roshan as the US begins its subtle climbdown.
The world was still reeling from the September 11 attacks when Camp X-ray was set up.
It seemed right that people responsible and supportive of such an outrage should be locked up.
But it soon became clear that many of the supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects were either misguided adventurers or innocents.
We now know that among those to be freed are of pensionable age - one man is over 80. There was no evidence they had done anything, but more disturbingly the US had no plans to put them on trial or even give them access to lawyers.
When photographs of the detainees were released - sanctioned by the US authorities - a tidal wave of international outrage enveloped the White House.
Held in cramped wire cages, moved around the camp in chains and blindfolds, the world was looking at men being treated worse than animals.
How on earth could we expect to win a battle for the hearts and minds of a civilised world when we used the kind of brutality favoured by the Taliban?
It was a grotesque assault on human rights.
George Bush insisted these men were being treated within the rules of the Geneva Convention and were highly dangerous.
But exhaustive interrogations from US, British and other allied intelligence officers have now proved that many, perhaps half, are wholly innocent.
And Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants remain free.