Cuidado com o tipo de relógios que usam; ainda vão parar a Guantanamo

This has been our nightmare since Bush administration began stashing prisoners it did not want to account for in Guantanamo Bay: As ordinary man with a name something like a bigwig’s is swept up in the dragnet and imprisoned without any hope of proving his innocence.

Take the case of Abdur Sayed Rahman. The transcripts quote Mr. Rahman as saying he was arrested in his Pakistani village in January 2002, flow to Afghanistan, accused of being the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister and then thrown into a cell in Guantanamo Bay. “I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan” he said, adding that the Taliban official was named Abdur Zahid Rahman.

Other cases included prisoners who owned a particular kind of cheap watch supposedly favoured by Al Qaeda. An Afghan was accused of being the former Taliban governor of a province and subjected to a pretzel logic that would make Joseph Heller cringe. He said he was a different person entirely and asked the tribunal to contact the current governor and verify his story. The presiding officer refused, saying it was up to the prisoner to produce the evidence. The incarcerated Afghan then pointed out that he was being held virtually incommunicado in a United States prison in a remote corner of Cuba and not allowed to make calls. The presiding officer assured the prisoner that he would have plenty of time to write a letter – during the year of continued detention before his case might be reviewed again.
If the story of the chicken farmer and the men with the wrong watch are new, the broad outline of this disaster have long been visible. It is shocking in itself, an in fact that average citizens have not risen up to the demand that these abuses come to an end. The founding fathers knew that when you dispensed with the rule of law, the inevitable outcome was an injustice. Now America is becoming the thing they sought to end.