More on the four British Muslims freed from Gitmo. Are their activities being monitored in Britain? After all, there are precedents: other freed Guatanamo prisoners have returned to the jihad. From The Scotsman, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
A DOSSIER gathered by US officials against the four British men freed this week from Guantanamo Bay alleges they all received military training in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, it emerged today.The US Justice Department documents include claims that at least one of the men was taught how a jihad group works and was given instructions on how to use weapons and destroy vehicles.
Similar allegations have previously been denied by the lawyers and families of the former prisoners, who were held for up to three years at the Cuban naval base as suspected terrorists.
Martin Mubanga, Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Moazzam Begg say they were tortured while in captivity. The Pentagon describes the four men as a continuing security threat, but they were freed without charge after being questioned on their return to Britain.
'The US Justice Department documents include claims that at least one of the men was taught how a jihad group works and was given instructions on how to use weapons and destroy vehicles'.
"Claims" being the operative.
These have been all over the British media, and featured prominently in the BBC and elsewhere. It is notable that The Independent, the most Arabized of British newspapers, whose chief ME correspondent Robert Fisk never met an Arab he did not like, chose that day to run a front-page story grimly predicting a "Shia crescent" (as if that were worse than Baathism or Wahhabism or any other of the dozen ideologies competing for the Sunni mind!) from Iran to Lebanon, if that terrible thing, elections, ever took place in Iraq. Someone ought to inform Mr.Fisk that his is supposed to be a newspaper, and that that particular news was old long ago. Everyone knows that the Shias will have the majority in the coming Iraqi Parliament. But grave-faced protestations do a great job of distracting attention from the news that all the rest of the British media were discussing - that the dastardly Americans may have had some reason to imprison those fine upstanding British citizens after all.
Would any person in their right mind deliberately go to a war zone in Afghanistan:
a] for a picnic
b]lost direction in Pakistan and found myself 500 miles off map
c]was going to increase knowledge of Islam
d] was intending to help at Charitable Institution
NO, I AM NOT A TERRORIST BUT I AM A BRITISH CITIZEN. HELP, NEED THOSE BRITISH INFIDEL TAYPAYERS TO GET ME OUT OF HERE...
& about torture…
Christopher Hitchens: With the Left, which is supposed to care about secularism and humanism, it's a bit harder to explain an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats. However, it can be done, once you assume that American imperialism is the main enemy. Even for those who won't go quite that far, the admission that the US Marine Corps might be doing the right thing is a little further than they are prepared to go - because what would then be left of their opposition credentials, which are so dear to them?
Me: The torture question may also fit nicely into the above category…the Left doesn’t complain to loudly when other regimes regularly torture their captives, but their perpetual adversary, the US government,
is not permitted to utilize torture to gather information, which may in fact help stall the Iraq insurgency. This fits their self-serving nature, the Left fears of any US progress in squeezing the terrorists; it is not something the Left is willing to celebrate in public. The Left, wish to pull out of Iraq & bring the troops home, gives us the impression they care about saving the lives of the US troops, but when they don’t support the intelligence effort, including the torture of captured insurgents, to acquire knowledge behind their nefarious modus operandi...it is very clear to the rest of us, the Left does not truly support the welfare of the US troops, and even worse, they tend to stress the perpetual need to understand the insurgent’s grievances. Muslim terrorists routinely target & kill civilians as a means to an end; therefore, the Geneva or Human Rights conventions on torture, by default, are not morally applicable to Muslim terrorists.
Our tax dollars probably funded them as well through some obscure charity here in CONUS.
An option here would have been to implant GPS chip in them while they slept or ate, then we monitor their every move?????????