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February 21, 2007
President Bush has said, “I’d like to end Guantánamo. I’d like it to be over with.” Yet he refuses to close it because, he says, it holds detainees who “will murder somebody if they are let out on the street.” Guantánamo is the single most potent symbol in the misguided war on terror. In the wake of 9/11, the United States’ pledge to do everything in its power to protect its people from further harm led to a policy of overreaction.
H. Candace Gorman, a civil rights attorney in Chicago who blogs at The Guantanamo Blog is able to visit a client of hers at Guantanamo.
Her observation:
I was a little nervous going into that first meeting. I knew little about Al Ghizzawi and it seemed plausible to me that he might be the “worst of the worst”—which is what our government claims Guantánamo is holding. However, when I entered the tiny windowless room, I met a frail, bearded, jaundiced man of about 45, wearing a khaki jump suit and flip flops with his feet shackled to a ring on the floor. In time, I learned this member of the “worst of the worst” had been the owner of a spice shop and bakery in Jalalabad when, in December 2002, he was turned in to the Americans for a bounty—typically $5,000. He was initially held at Bagram Airforce Base before being sent to Guantánamo in March 2002. Initially our military determined he was a non-enemy combatant but this determination was mysteriously overturned by a second tribunal in Washington (five weeks after the first tribunal) because the military claimed it had new evidence against him. My security clearance allowed me to see the top secret “new evidence” and although I cannot disclose the contents, I can assure the readers of In These Times that there was nothing new presented to the second tribunal—nothing whatsoever.
As Gorman "points out on her blog Al Ghizzawi is not an enemy combatant and that there was no evidence tying him to al-Qaeda, the Taliban or any other terrorist organization. Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s capture was a mistake, like so many other “mistakes” at Guantánamo. Yet he has been held more than five years now.
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