Guantanamo Detainees: an Interview with an Insider

Here is an interesting interview on PBS, with a man named Abdurahman Khadr.

It's very interesting, and when I'm not spending the last 5 minutes of my lunch break reading it, I look forward to doing more than skimming it.

However, among the things which lept out at me was that this is a man who once knew Osama bin Ladin, now works with us, and who was sent to Guantanamo Bay as a spy for the U.S. (hoping to garner some information that the interogators were unable to get).

He describes the horrible conditions there, but the most enlightening thing about Guantanamo detainees is that in his estimation, less than 20 percent of the people being held there have any business being there. Maybe 10 percent should actually be kept there, and another 10 percent would probably join or re-join al Qaida if freed. He estimated that around 80 percent of the inmates if released would never do anything against the U.S., and 60 percent of those there didn't even do anything in the first place.

He also goes into something I hadn't heard before: That most of the people we have there we have because we paid bounties for terrorist suspects. He tells the story of one man who turned in his own father. Handed his father a gun then took him in, and received $5000 for his troubles.

All in all, he paints a picture that we set up a situation in an impoverished country where by turning in a neighbor, one could get a substantial monetary reward, and a significant number (as I said, he estimated as high as 60-80 percent) of the prisoners in Guantanamo are there not for anything legitimate, but because we paid their neighbors to finger them.

Now, I can't fault anyone for the rewards, that's how we think in the U.S. Offer a reward for information, and often you get the information you're looking for. But it appears we were less than critical in examining the information we paid for, opting instead to simply take it at face value. And certainly it sheds additional light on the Guantanamo situation. Those who have argued that they don't mind the mis-treatment of the detainees because they're terrorists (not here, but I've had this argument with other folks on other blogs) might want to re-think that policy, if in fact some 60-80% of the people we're detaining committed no crime other than to be familiar to someone else who was willing to sell someone else's life, like a slave dealer, in return for a few pieces of gold.

Copyright (c) June 15, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net