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So claims Human Rights Watch in a press release. [Importation fail! Let's try that lede again.] Human Rights Watch claims in a press release that at least one "recidivist" GTMO detainee counted in the Pentagon’s "recidivism" report confessed to his post-GTMO crimes after they were beaten out of him:
The former detainee, Rasul Kudaev, has been held for more than three years in pretrial detention in Nalchik, a city in southern Russia, where he is accused of participating in an October 2005 armed uprising against the local government. Human Rights Watch’s investigations into Kudaev’s case found that he was severely beaten soon after his arrest to confess to crimes.
“If the Pentagon relied on forced confessions for the evidence to prove recidivism, then its conclusions are pretty questionable,” said Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. “Terrorism is a label that is widely abused by many of the governments who have taken back their citizens from Guantanamo.”
For more on the circumstances behind Kudaev’s treatment in Russia, see this. Something to consider when the Pentagon’s Guantanamo "recidivism" document gets released, as it ought to be.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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I sometimes wonder what happened to the critical thinking skills of Americans. It’s as if their ability to differentiate between facts, suppositions and out and out malarkey have been eroded by an education system based in euphemism and simplification and a media so immersed in a bizarre kind of “balance” fetishism as to present “both sides” of torture, global warming and the geometric shape of the earth as a “debate” with “people of good faith” on “both sides”.
People are released because there is no longer any legal basis to hold them. Any recidivism, whether accurately measured or systematic propaganda, may have bearing on the tactical methodology one uses during incarceration, but can have no ultimate bearing on the system that, as part of it’s very nature, defines an endpoint to that incarceration.
This is another version of the “torture works” argument. It’s invalid on it’s face because it doesn’t matter. It’s not a good faith argument, for all it argues for is an end to American Justice. What they are saying is not that we should change the way manage detainees, what they are saying is “see?? We should NEVER release them at all”. That is neither constructive, nor valuable in any discussion.
It is time for these people to shut up and accept that there have to be SOME rules, and whatever those rules are, the most important thing is that we have to follow them…
mikey