How a Botched Translation Landed Emad Hassan in Gitmo

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32342-how-a-botched-translation-landed-emad-hassan-in-gitmo

For weeks, Hassan, a small, soft-spoken 22-year-old with dark skin and curly hair, had been held by the Americans in Afghanistan. Born and raised in Yemen, he traveled to Faisalabad, Pakistan, in the summer of 2001 to study the Koran at a small university. But one evening the following spring, Pakistani authorities burst into the house he shared with 14 other foreign students and brought them to a nearby prison. After two months of beatings and interrogation, the Pakistanis handed him over to the U.S. military.

Eventually, Hassan found himself in front of the young American in what he later learned was the U.S. military prison in Kandahar. Confused and afraid, his lawyers say, Hassan decided it was best to continue telling the truth. “Yes,” Hassan said, according to his lawyers, he had a connection to Al-Qaeda. He waited for the next question, but the soldier and the translator seemed satisfied. The interrogation was over. What was lost in translation, Hassan’s lawyers say: The soldier thought he was talking about Al-Qaeda, the deadly terrorist group. Hassan was actually referring to Al-Qa’idah, a village 115 miles from where he grew up in Yemen.

Weeks later, prison guards came into Hassan’s cell. They stripped him of his clothes and put him in a diaper. Then they blindfolded him, placed earmuffs over his head and marched him onto a plane. When the aircraft landed, he soon learned he was in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. What had started as a comic misunderstanding became a surreal odyssey through the dark side of America’s war on terror.

[malokvale77]

1. Every thing about Gitmo is wrong.

I don't think all the wealth of all the 1%s could right the wrongs of Gitmo.

[truedelphi]

2. Gitmo is one of the inner circles of hell.

Our politicians tell us we should bomb other countries back to the stone age, because they make their women cover their heads with scarves.

Meanwhile, our nation has this medieval to0rture chamber set-up, for Moslems whose personal enemies wanted to accept US bounty monies!

[Enthusiast]

3. Huge +1!

[Enthusiast]

4. We abandoned the moral high ground.

Well, we abandoned the moral high ground when we allowed the fake 2,000 election results to stand. Just look at the results.

[uncle ray]

5. we as a nation, have never held the moral high ground. nt.

[Hydra]

6. ^^This

We've always used might makes right as our policy, then mythed our history afterwards.

[Enthusiast]

7. While what you say is true, we have come a whole lot closer to the moral high ground

than after the 2000 election when a non-elected president ignored intelligence that resulted in 9/11, falsified evidence to justify an unnecessary war of aggression and profit and routinely allowed torture.

Yes, we did a lot of bad stuff in the past but there were some brighter moments in our history. Until Bush we appeared to be making slow progress in the area of civil rights, social justice and fairness in general.

Something significantly transformed the nation with the election of Dubya Bush.