But What Did You Really Expect?
The Guantanamo detainee who detonated himself and murdered people in Mosul? He left behind a tape.
The last words of a suicide bomber in Mosul were a rallying cry for Muslims to join the fight against Americans.
His taking-off point was his experience at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In two accounts — a transcript of his conversation in a jihadist chat room and a suicide message on tape — both posted on Web sites devoted to Al Qaeda after his death, the bomber, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, described his detention as “torture” carried out by infidels. He was in Guantánamo from 2002 to 2005.
There will be those who draw the wrong lesson from this — that we need to keep the detainees imprisoned forever at GTMO, lest this happen again. Down that road madness lies. Injustice can never yield justice, and our fight against al-Qaeda is just and necessary. Everyone should recognize Guantanamo Bay is counterproductive to that fight, just like the Iraq war is. Then we’ll see who actually cares about destroying al-Qaeda and who’s engaged in juvenile posturing.
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4 Responses to “But What Did You Really Expect?”
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May 10th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Injustice can never yield justice?
My man, you are sloganeering. Slow down the rhetoric. There is nothing inherently unethical in taking prisoners after battle.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:43 am
There are those who will see this as some vindication of GITMO.
There are also those who will see this as a condemnation of GITMO and in wanting to make this case, misrepresent this guy.
Juvenile posturing ain’t a partisan thing.
He was captured in Tora Bora after the fall of the Taliban.
Now, even if your knowledge of Afghanistan extended only to looking once at a google maps satellite image of that location, you’d still know he wasn’t an accidentally imprisoned Kuwaiti at the time he was picked up there.
If you got captured in Tora Bora the only possible reason that could occur is if you worked your arse off to get to that most wrong of places at the most wrong of times.
It begs the question, where could you have sent someone to not influence them into becoming a martyr for jihad, if you found them in Tora Bora after the fall of the Taliban, already expressing a desire to kill as many infidels as possible ?
Club Med ? You reckon even that would have turned him around ?
Of course not. Because you think (or at least want to suggest you do) that his detention contributed to anything other than a 6 year delay in him martyring himself.
May 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Sticky Says:
May 10th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Injustice can never yield justice?
My man, you are sloganeering. Slow down the rhetoric. There is nothing inherently unethical in taking prisoners after battle.
_____
No, except the GITMO prisoners aren’t prisoners, according to this administration. They’re unlawful combatants in a state of legal limbo, kept in an offshore facility where they can be tortured and kubarked with impunity. The facility isn’t designed to determine guilt or innocence, it’s designed to strip them of humanity.
The only information we have that Ali al-Ajmi was fighting alongside Taliban forces is information obtained via torture and threats. We don’t have any idea where he was actually picked up or what he was doing in Pakistan at the time.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
“The only information we have that Ali al-Ajmi was fighting alongside Taliban forces is information obtained via torture and threats.”
Except for the logistics involved. This would suggest that those forces capturing him in Tora Bora were also tortured to this end.
More to the point though, the only information you have that he wasn’t is his assurance, given first alongside his assurance than he posed no threat and wished to pursue peaceful purposes once released, then repeated in his pre-bombing message.
Forgoing the reliance on the word of someone established here as a liar, logistics are again the problem.
If the US claims a man spent the best part of a year in Afghanistan, a verbal assurance that he wasn’t seems distinctly lacking. One would expect that any paper trail or other corroboration whatsoever, testifying to your presence in a different country for the duration, would be more persuasive than none. Apparently not.