The New York Times today front-paged a fine piece of reporting on the at least 26 people the CIA took into custody, held, and tortured in one grim way or another, whom the Agency itself decided in the end had played no role in any kind of terror organization or had anything to do with al-Qaeda. The paragraph I thought a classic of our moment in terms of never-having-to-say-youre-sorry fiddling with the language was this one: In fact, the agency has admitted to a degree of chaos and blundering in the early months of the program. But its formal response to the Senate report argues that capturing someone who was sincerely believed to be dangerous should not be counted as “wrongful,” even if the suspicions turned out to be groundless. Clearly, the fault in each case lay with those who were innocent but managed to make themselves look guilty. Shame on them! And by the way, though I have no doubt it would be possible to put some of these tortured innocents on TV, thats not part of the balance of American TV news. Tom One quiet consequence of this week’s sensational release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the C.I.A. detention program was a telephone call that a human rights lawyer, Meg Satterthwaite, placed to a client in Yemen, Mohamed Bashmilah. For eight years since Mr. Bashmilah, 46, was released from C.I.A. custody, Ms. Satterthwaite and other advocates had been trying without success to get the United States government to acknowledge that it had held him in secret prisons for 19 months and to explain why. In the phone call on Wednesday, she told him that the Senate report listed him as one of 26 prisoners who, based on C.I.A. documents, had been wrongfully detained. “Na’am, he answered simply in Arabic. Yes. He said he had had faith that someday his ordeal would be acknowledged. Then he thanked the lawyers who have taken up his case over the years, Ms. Satterthwaite said. Mr. Bashmilah has told them of being tortured in Jordan before he was handed over to the C.I.A., which at times kept him shackled alone in freezing-cold cells in Afghanistan, subjected to loud music 24 hours a day. He attempted suicide at least three times, once by saving pills and swallowing them all at once; once by slashing his wrists; and once by trying to hang himself. Another time he cut himself and used his own blood to write this is unjust on the wall. After learning the news, Mr. Bashmilah pressed Ms. Satterthwaite, who heads the global justice program at New York University Law School, to tell him what might follow from the Senate’s recognition. Would there be an apology? Would there be some kind of compensation? nytimes/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 18:02:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015