Families of Prisoners Held at Guantanamo Bay Mark Three Years of Waiting

[rainbow4321]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB2NR1OR3E.html


GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - When American troops liberated Kuwait from Iraqi forces in 1991, Fawzi al-Odah's father said the smiling teenager greeted approaching U.S. tanks, took a small American flag from a soldier's hand and began cheering.
The forces he once saw as saviors, however, have become his captors at Guantanamo Bay.

Like many prisoners who were brought to this remote camp in eastern Cuba when it opened three years ago, birthdays have passed, relatives have died, siblings have graduated and parents have wept with little communication other than censored postcards from their sons.

Fawzi Al-Odah, 27, was captured after going to Pakistan to teach the Quran in a poor border village near Afghanistan where he had volunteered to help a group of Afghan refugees. The U.S. government accuses him of having links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime, though like most of the some 550 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, he has not been charged.

"The United States was supposed to be a beacon of human rights, dignity, the rule of law and freedom," said al-Odah, whose hair has turned gray, watching his other son and daughter graduate from university and his wife's mother die. "We don't understand what is happening"

[stray cat]

1. Terrible. I wonder how many are totally innocent bystanders?