Let’s see here. You and your pals traveled to Pakistan to attend your friend’s wedding. Lacking money for a hotel and electing not to stay with family, you crashed at the local youth hostel, er, mosque, where the faithful held regular anti-American rallies. With a couple of weeks to kill before the wedding (No job to get back to in England? Ah yes, convicted petty criminals with limited education and dim prospects, your time was your own.), you decided to travel to Afghanistan “to help.” Now, by “help” do you mean “provide aid and comfort?” And to whom exactly? Never mind.So, when you found yourself doing a lot of sitting around and not much “helping,” you asked to be driven back to Pakistan. Did you offer any resistance when your driver took you deeper into Afghanistan to the city of Kunduz? And is this the same Kunduz that was the last major city held by the Taliban before its fall to US-backed Afghan Northern Alliance forces on November 26, 2001? The same Kunduz from which witnesses reported a Pakistani airlift of as many as five thousand Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters? But you were only there to help. And, like an errant Harold or Kumar, to find “really big naan.”
The simple fact is I’d be stunned if you’d been renditioned off to Cuba after, say, taking a leak on a Louisiana State Trooper’s leg during Mardi Gras. But captured retreating with foreign fighters deep in Taliban country? In late 2001? With no passport? Sorry. I’d be outraged if they’d let you go.
In related news, the visa-less travel of Britons of Pakistani descent continues to pose a special security challenge here in the United States.
6 comments:
"Never mind." LOL.
I'm ashamed that I am from the same country as an imbecile such as yourself. Your blind faith in the lies that our media spoon feeds you is stunning. I'm just happy I never have to meet you.
Thank you, scott b, for your thoughtful, well-reasoned comment.
Will,
You make an interesting argument here. I recently saw this movie at an amnesty international screening and asked many of the same questions, but wasn't given much of an answer by the people who put on the event. It turns out that one of the three actually admitted to having gone to some militant training camps where he learned how to fire an AK47.
Still, knowing this, I don't think that any human being should have to endure what these three men were put through. We live in a modern, civilized society. If they are found guilty in a fair trial, then so be it, but no trial, no lawyers, no habeas... that's very un-American
Caleb, you make a fair point, in stark contrast with the unreasoned vitriol voiced by scott b and the seething mob who responded to a similar thread I posted on IMDb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/
tt0468094/board/flat/74343598
In the intervening year since I watched this movie, my eyes have been opened to the myriad ways in which my government pursued the right ends using the wrong means.
I've seethed while bearing witness to their ineptitude in "No End In Sight." I've wept while reading of the way they hung young soldiers out to dry for their own malfeasance in Abu Ghraib. (Read this: http://www.newyorker.com/
reporting/2008/03/24/
080324fa_fact_gourevitch). And I've reconsidered some of my own uninformed support of their tactics, which the Bush Administration has since hemmed and hawed and sort of, almost, very nearly redefined as, well, yeah, torture.
I still stand by my skepticism that these young men were simply looking for adventure, on an ad hoc relief mission. And I still believe they had some explaining to do, whether in Afghanistan or sunny Cuba. But I can’t defend the way they were mistreated in custody.
Wm.
To wit: "The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency."
http://www.nytimes.com/
2008/07/02/us/
02detain.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th
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