The New York Times opens a window on oppression, American Style, with a powerful statement by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, an 11 year inmate at Guantánamo (11 years without being charged of an actual crime).
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
I could have been home [in Yemen] years ago—no one seriously thinks I am a threat—but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, in damning detail, there are dozens of men in Guantánamo, many of them Yemeni, who have been cleared for release, and Yemen has announced that it will take them, but Obama is so terrified of “blowback”—being attacked for being “weak” if one of those released is implicated in a terrorist act, that he refuses to let them go. President Obama’s proud boast—“I make Dick Cheney look like a faggot.”
