Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Tidbits:

James Yee on the Talking Dog

The Talking Dog is a reliable source of excellent interviews on Guantánamo. On Sunday, TD posted an interview with James Yee, Guantánamo's former Muslim Chaplain. Captain Yee was charged with espionage and sedition as well as numerous other charges (all of which were dropped).

The interview touches on the rarely-reported juvenile prisoners held in Camp Iguana:

As for the juveniles, there were at least three boys in Camp Iguana between 12 and 14 years old. There were at least 6 others, by the way, who were 15 or 16, definitely younger than 18, in general population. The three in Camp Iguana I met weekly. We were led to believe they were "hard core terrorists" but this was utterly ridiculous. The guards in charge of them would frequently discipline them with "time-outs" just as many American parents discipline their own children.

And on the Yee's general impression of the GMTO population:

The expectations I had, both from the military itself and our political leaders, were that we were holding 700 totally hard core terrorists. Of course, that's not at all what I encountered when I got there. It became clear that none of the individuals we were holding at Guantanamo were connected in any way to the September 11th attacks. It became more clear that if our military and government had captured a legitimate terrorist suspect, they would not have been brought to Guantanamo Bay at all, but to the secret CIA black sites, that the President admitted existed when he transferred 14 so-called "high value" terrorist suspects to Guantanamo in September 2006 in order to get Congressional support for the Military Commissions Act after the Administration lost in its attempt to unilaterally impose military commissions of its own devising after the Hamdan case. Only at that time were any real terrorists possibly connected with September 11th brought to GTMO.

New on Huffington Post:

Candace has a new entry on Huffington Post in which she asks, just how many detainees have actually "returned to the battlefied?"