“Innocent” British former detainees from Gitmo aren’t so innocent afterall
Anyone with common sense probably knew this already but this sure hasn’t stopped some of our pals from the left here in the US to complain about the “brutal treatment” these “innocents” have suffered (whatever!):
Guantanamo Britons ‘trained by militants’
Four of the British Guantanamo Bay detainees released last week were armed and trained by Islamic militants in Afghanistan, US officials told reporters last night.
Officials at the American Embassy in London sent a letter containing detailed allegations about the four men, from East London and the West Midlands town of Tipton, to The Sun newspaper.
The four – Tarek Dergoul, 26, Ruhal Ahmed, 22, Asif Iqbal, 22, and Shafiq Rasul, 26 – have all strongly denied any contact with terrorists.
A fifth detainee released last week, Jamal al-Harith, 37, was released soon after returning to Britain last week, and was not even questioned by anti-terrorism officers. He is not one of those accused in the embassy letter.
The US embassy letter, signed by the embassy press counsellor, Lee McClenny, alleged that one of the four trained with an AK-47 rifle and pistol at an al-Qa’eda safe house in Kabul in September 2001, and was a “weapons carrying fighter at Tora Bora”, wounded in battle with coalition forces.
Two of the others trained for 40 days in autumn 2000 at a military camp in Afghanistan, the letter claims, learning to shoot a rifle, and watching weapons demonstrations. They are described as being captured near the Afghan city of Kunduz, after spending three weeks with a known Taliban unit.
One is linked in the letter to “an organisation known to be associated with al-Qa’eda”, and is alleged to have called the US and British governments his enemies.
Last week, senior administration officials in Washington told The Telegraph that four other detainees still being held at the prison camp were veterans of al-Qa’eda training camps, who had been judged too dangerous to be released by US and British intelligence and security agencies.*snip article*
Clearly, these guys weren’t held without just cause. Why do some of our pals on the left automatically assume the worst of our gov’t? Yes, it’s good to question the gov’t but that’s not the point – it’s almost like some are jumping at the chance to score any kind of political points they can against the President – but they do it (unknowingly) in a way that undermines our national security. I can’t tell you the number of left leaning blogs that jumped on the stories these guys told to the Brit media upon their return and played up the stories as a sign of how “cruel” the US could be. Maybe next time they’l be a little less knee-jerk before reacting to the obvious lies of those former detainees who have clear ties to terrorists.