(Mark Steel) The need for a modern free market in torture

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

However unlucky you are to get taken hostage, some hostages are unluckier than others. Omar Deghayes, a resident of Brighton, has been held for more than three years and has received hardly any publicity at all. Maybe he needs a better agent.

Or could it be that instead of being held in Iraq, he is being held in Guantanamo Bay?

He was arrested in Lahore while with his wife and daughter, and after some warm-up torture in Pakistan, was moved to Guantanamo Bay. He was never charged, and it was two years before his captors announced the reason for his detention. It seems they'd seen a training video for Chechen rebels, and believed he was on it, though everyone who's seen it since agrees there's no one on it who looks anything like him. The American military will probably argue this displays the shortcomings of video evidence - it shows the people who are there but leaves out the people who aren't there.

And this allows suspects to escape justice. If he was in an al-Qa'ida video they could have released him and kept track of him, but instead, if they let him go he'd be free not to be in another guerilla training film, and then they'd have no idea where he was.

But apart from not being in the film, is it likely that someone running around training with Chechen rebels would take their wife and daughter along? Do they say to their wives, "I've got to spend a week up an Afghan mountain waving a kalashnikov and shouting 'Death to infidels', but I get the evenings off so I thought you and the kids could come with me and we'll make a mini-break out of it"? Maybe you can get a special weekend deal with a Family Taliban card.

(...)

http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=6003

[Briar]

1. More...

"Or at least that he learns the rules of torture. That we deplore it to the extent we'll occupy a country for practising it, then if necessary, in order to ensure the defeat of the torturing regime, we'll torture people. Then we'll enlist dictators in this struggle, ignoring their record of torture, and, to make plain our unyielding opposition to torture, we'll torture our own residents, even inviting torturers from nations we'd previously occupied for their record on torture.

"And to make sure our troops are tough enough to administer this stern rejection of torture, we'll let them hold initiation ceremonies in which they torture each other. And if you're not with us, you're against us."