Normally I wouldn't post about this, but this time I just can't help it. A friend of mine sent me a link to a video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E3w7ME6Fs), in which a British lawyer tries to defend a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.
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Now, what I’m seeing in the clip is that the guy in question had a landlord, and that landlord says he was a nice guy.
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He had friends and coworkers, too, and three of them say he was a nice guy. You know, he jokes around a lot.
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He worked in a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan. His job was to buy the food for the hospital.
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Now, evidently, when we combine these facts with quotes from various sources about how we “got the wrong people,” and if we flash these quotes dramatically enough across the screen, we can convince a lot of people that this particular detainee – and by extension, all of the detainees at Gitmo – is innocent and is being held in contravention of international law.
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Once we arrive at that lofty goal, we can then proceed to villainize the Bush administration and all Americans, by showing distorted and grainy images of the president, scowling during some news conference, and American soldiers escorting prisoners around the Gitmo compound.
Beautiful.
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I don’t know why, but I really was disappointed to find that this is evidently the kind of junk that passes for evidence in the UK. I knew we were a lost cause here in the US, but I would have expected the British people to have more sense than that. See, here in our Sensationalist Nation, all that matters is how we feel about something. Our knee-jerk, over-emotional response is all the evidence we need. But it has become evident that the same is now true of the UK, which was a disappointing revelation for me.
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I believe that the people being arrested around the world and detained in places like Abu Ghraib, Baghram and Guantanamo Bay are being arrested and held for a reason. That’s not to say that all are guilty; I can’t go that far. But they were put there because of a very real suspicion. And I’m not seeing anything in this video clip, or in the countless others like it that I’ve seen, that shows me otherwise.
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I realize that these people should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but that’s not how it works in this case. Unfortunate? Absolutely. And are there people being held unjustly? Probably – almost definitely. But if a man is arrested in Peshawar and held for a year at Guantanamo Bay, you’re not going to convince me of his innocence by showing me how much his coworkers at the hospital in Pakistan liked him. What did Mohammad Atta do for a living? And could you find people who liked him, once upon a time?
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This brings me back to the question of Buddhist practice versus support for violent action when necessary. While violence is always wrong, there will always be people willing to do violence against others, for a vast variety of reasons. And as long as this is true – as long as there are people who want to destroy my country, as long as they plan and plot and connive to kill my people by the thousands, by flying airliners into buildings or by whatever terrorist means, then it will be necessary to operate places like the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
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Compassion, yes - but at what expense? Does being compassionate have to mean that we turn a blind eye to terrorism?
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And I guess there will always be lawyers who try to “defend” these people by starring in their own little video productions and showing us that these terrorists once had jobs and neighbors.
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Time for a BLUE UPDATE:
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From my conversations on YouTube, it would appear that there are those who would assume that my dissent from the popluar view consititutes some kind of extreme right-wing fanaticism. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
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I have absolutely no interest in seeing Adel Hamad, or anyone else, languish at Guantanamo Bay without at least some kind of fair hearing. And I do mean a FAIR hearing. But you must remember that fair also means fair to the government. It may be, for example, that some detainees at Guantanamo (and elsewhere) are known terrorists or known supporters of terrorist organizations, but would be released if they were granted an American-civilian-style trial. Lack of evidence, or whatever. This is only speculation on my part, mind you.
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My point is that, after all this time and after all these horror stories, I still have a hard time believing that this guy Adel - an aid worker from the Sudan, who chose to work in Pakistan instead of the Sudan - and was working for an organization that had been identified by the UN as a financial front for Al Qaeda, juts happened to be standing around, minding his own business, when the Pakistani authorities arrested him, for nothing at all, and turned him over to the evil Americans, who are holding him in a big, evil concentration camp, without anyone ever suspecting, accusing or questioning him in connection with some kind of terrorist activities.
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And watching a nine-minute video, in which is former "co-workers" describe him as a nice guy who joked and played ping-pong, isn't going to make me suddenly decide to stop questioning it.
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And questioning the popular position that Adel Hamad should simply be released does not make anyone a right-wing extremist. It's not unreasonable to figure that, when someone was working for a known terrorist-supporting organization, thousands of miles from his own home, was arrested by a cooperating nation and has now spent years in prison, that guy MIGHT not be innocent - even if he is being held by the big, bad, evil and scary Bush adminstration, and even if he did once play a mean game of ping-pong.