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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

Wait a minute, this guy way misidentified 17 years ago and imprisoned based on that misidentification. How is it possible that he is still in there? Are the authorities claiming he is actually who they misidentified him as or what is their excuse for his imprisonment?

I can see how they could get away with torturing suspected terrorists or whatever (although I don't agree with it) end even how they might keep holding someone who was wrongfully accused after more evidence surfaces (again, it would be deplorable, but not unlikely), but this is a completely third party that they imprisoned because they thought he was someone else! I don't see a single argument that could be made for not releasing him - not even a really bad one.

How is this not on the news every day? How is the UN and every single human rights org not all over this?? How does this not come up in every single US presidential debate?

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I am sympathetic your outrage — but I think you're insufficiently cynical if you can't figure out why he's stuck in that concentration camp despite everyone agreeing he's innocent.

To release him now would be an admission of comprehensive institutional failure at every level -- from his initial capture, through mis-identification, rendition, torture and ongoing imprisonment. The longer the error persists, the worse it gets, and the harder it becomes to admit it's all a horrible mistake. Nobody in the US government institutions that maintain his imprisonment will benefit from admitting it was all a mistake: to the military he's an embarrassment, and to the politicians, releasing him would be handing ammunition to their electoral rivals. (Democracy has failure modes: this is one of them.) So it'd be far better for everyone concerned if he'd quietly die of natural causes so they could bury him and the controversy at the same time.

(Finally, a really cynical part of me thinks that maybe keeping an innocent bloke in jail for 17 years is expedient to a certain part of the US foreign affairs establishment because it sends a message to everyone outside the USA, world-wide: "we can fsck you up on a whim and there is nothing anybody can do about it." In other words, it's dominance signaling. See also the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, imprisoned in Iran, for example.)

I try to give the US the benefit of the doubt occasionally to keep myself from forming a bias against them as my list of reasons to despise the country (NOT the people) seems to just keep growing.

And I do understand why the government won't just release him, but if everyone in the world knew about this, releasing him wouldn't do that much harm (everyone would have already seen the failure) and would actually be brilliant PR for whoever does it. But then again, that would require people and especially media that actually care and have a longer attention span than 30 seconds, which seems rather far from achievable right now.

It's almost a textbook case of institutional failure -- multiple interlocking institutions took a remediable mistake (the first arrest) and doubled-down on it. Almost as if the failures are an emergent property of the institutional architecture.

(This being HN, we see this sort of thing discussed wrt. failing startups or larger corporations, but seldom so brutally and clearly with governments -- although the moderators' policy on political discussions is necessary if only to prevent HN turning into a permanent floating firestorm of flame wars.)

> an admission of comprehensive institutional failure

Not only that, but as soon as you release somebody who was wrongfully imprisoned, they can sue in civil courts, and they often win.

This is probably a silly question, but why can't they sue in civil court _whilst_ being imprisoned?

I'm sure they can, but their case is strengthened quite a bit if they've already been released due to improper procedures in the first place.

I think that's the whole point about Guantanamo - the local court is on the other side of a razor wire fence - in Cuba - by claiming that it's not US soil the US government avoids its own laws

Can't a US citizen be prosecuted by the US for a crime in a foreign country?

This is rather more about not letting these prisoners get access to to the inalienable rights that people in the US have ie the US constitution does not apply there, even though they convene US courts and try people - it's all rather 1984ish

Got to ask if our leaders believe in human rights and the rule of law, why do they pull shit like this?

And damn well they deserve to win, the state owes them.

Not to mention that keeping an innocent man in prison and torturing him for 17 years is a pretty good way to turn him into an actual terrorist. It'd be understandable if the guy would hate the system that wronged him so much, that he'd attempt to attack it if released. I'm absolutely not trying to advocate for them to continue keeping the guy there, but at least it's an argument.

You know what is actual terrorism? Abducting random people and torturing them.

> "we can fsck you up on a whim and there is nothing anybody can do about it."

There are 71 men in Guantanamo that are "too innocent to charge, too dangerous to release."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani

What's sad is that in 2008, the US supreme court issued it's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush:

"The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush

Not saying it's accurate (or even on good faith / truthful), but the wikikeaks prisoner assessment on him paints a different picture.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...

It certainly doesn't justify torture, but it also doesn't look like he's the completely innocent bystander he claims to be.

From my quick reading, looks like he admitted to operating an Al-qaeda safe house and being a high level trusted driver/messenger.

Also looks like majority of his life was spent in Saudi Arabia, but was expelled before going to Pakistan. Arrested multiple times trying to travel to join jihad training...

Maybe that's why no one wants to take him.

This "admission" isn't worth anything. Suspended by the wrists tiptoeing into my own shit for days? Sure I would tell them I was operating an al-quaeda safe house, that I was a driver/messenger and that my mother was the queen of England.

I agree, but the leaked document contains more than just information he confessed. It might not be accurate, and/or maybe all of the other al-Qaeda leaders who named him as an associate were also coerced into confessing that, but it's a much more complicated story than what's written in this article.

Having seen the document, it was also interesting to me to read the article again. I might be over-analyzing, but he seems to have chosen his words very carefully: he claims he's a "nobody" and was "minding [his] own business" when he was captured. He says he was bountied as someone else. He plays up the torture, deservingly, but he doesn't really proclaim his innocence. At least not to the extent I would be, were it me.

Maybe he's denied his guilt differently in the past, but the article's wording looks suspiciously to me like dancing around a lie.

I'm trying to remain objective, but I'm starting to get that bitterness felt once you realized you've been intentionally fooled.

Still, everyone deserves due process.

I agree, and am equally skeptical, but I'm saying:

Maybe there's more to the story than what the detainee chooses to share in his letter to the editor.

Read the linked report, even if it's just for insight into how the system isn't working.

Edit: Also, fwiw, apparently he was a well known al Qaeda "facilitator" in Karachi, meaning he was implicated by others too. It's not solely his "admission". But also the report claims he's a well behaved, cooperative prisoner who voluntary shared a lot...

It's obviously still based on trusting the classified report, if you want to believe it.

I'm no expert, but I think the reason they built Guantanamo in Cuba is so it's away from any legal oversight. And I also assume that this doesn't come up in debates because it would instantly by followed by accusations of being soft on terrorism.

IIRC, it was initially argued by the Bush administration that because the facility was in Cuba, it was exempt from American laws against indefinite detainment, requiring council and forbidding torture and cruel and unusual punishment (sorry... enhanced interrogation), etc. That argument was quickly shot down, though, because obviously an American military base in Cuba is still American property and subject to American laws.

After 9/11 there was this perception (somewhat engineered by the neo-cons, but also organic in that Americans had never experienced anything like that and had a bit of an existential crisis) that American civil liberties and laws had actually made the country weak and had created a loophole that terrorists had been able to exploit. This led to the "new normal", where it was seen as necessary (even a matter of civic duty) to accept ceding our civil rights and liberties in order to allow the government to aggressively pursue the terrorist threat by any means necessary.

This lead to Guantanamo Bay and the normalization of indefinite detainment and torture in American culture, to the increased militarization of American police, to the modern global surveillance panopticon as revealed by Snowden, and the War on Terror.

> an American military base in Cuba is still American property

It's not. Both Cuba and the United States recognize that Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba. They disagree about whether a pre-Revolution lease agreement is still in place or not.

> it would instantly by followed by accusations of being soft on terrorism

Damn, if there are people so dumb that they would buy "I'm not talking about the general case but just this one dude that we KNOW was sent there BY ACCIDENT - can't we just release the poor guy?" as being soft on terrorism then it's no surprise US politics are such a shitshow...

It was built to solidify US naval power projection into the Caribbean and Gulf back in 1898. The detention camp was placed there in 2002 partially to avoid the legal concerns and partially out of convenience (there's only a handful of places outside the US mainland they could have placed it, and Cuba is the only one where they don't care what the host nation says).

Obama's efforts to close it, which did come up in debates (and came back in 2016) were basically rebuffed by Congress. Not because they want to keep Gitmo open, but because nobody wants the prisoners moved into their constituency's backyard.

That's what happens when you have no habeas corpus, or any rights whatsoever. It seems those inalienable rights that man is endowed with do indeed come from the government and can indeed be taken away. Inalienable rights my ass. The only real issue here is that we continue to call the US a democracy and free society. How can it be either when its people have no rights? I'm sure someone will explain about how being in Cuba gives the government the power to ignore the constitution completely and therefore any rights, but that would just prove that those rights are indeed alienable and only exist as long as the government allows them to. So they're not rights at all.

They keep him in there because he has been radicalised over the last 17 years to detest Americans, and now would be deemed a credible threat if he were to be released. /s

it is like a person in a police choke hold would naturally/instinctively start to convulse trying to grasp for air, and that is naturally "resisting arrest" which, beside the benefit of being an additional charge (or even the only charge that would stick), allows to immediately escalate the application of force to any level the police feels like.

it was in the news for YEARS, countless articles, books were written, movies were made, law suits filed (by all of those human rights org you mentioned)....if you were not aware of the US policy on using torture - you simply weren't paying any attention...

The whole guantanamo thing evolved slowly over many presidencies but few senate/congressional bodies. Its turned into a hot potato. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniq...

George W. Bush approved enhanced interrogation and rolled out black sites, Barack Obama closed those sites but failed to close Guantanamo, and Trump seems to be content to keep it open. Republican senators are ardently opposed to trials for detainees on US soil, and dont have a solution for the camp other than to keep it open until the population passes away peacefully or foreign nations start accepting them as immigrants.

https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/04/guantanamo-nursi...

The oldest man in GITMO currently is 71. Each of these detainees receives the same care as a US Soldier, but frankly doesnt contribute much. Our reasoning for keeping them there (often against overwhelming evidence of their innocence) has been contemptuous at some times, comical at others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism

Id surmise 20 years after 9/11 that GITMO is a sore spot in US politics most bureaucrats are content to just pretend never existed. It hasnt produced the Jack Bauer results we'd all been promised. Its arguably not been much of a detention center at all in the past decade. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157134/PlayStation...

The only concerning human rights fallout from this is that some countries are now more recalcitrant about handing over their citizens to US law enforcement, and many designated enemies are now more emboldened to use torture freely against US soldiers and citizens as we are now on the record as having employed torture ourselves.

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