Wednesday, June 17, 2009

What’s the Matter? We Thought you Cared about them.

Funny just when it is that one can call yourself a ‘crusader’. It’s also amusing to see just where and when it is such adamant ‘crusaders for justice’ themselves have to fess up to their own adolescent ardency:

A Guantanamo Bay inmate said he wants to live in Germany because he has "good memories" of the country. So far, though, Germany's Interior Ministry has no plans to accept a request from Washington to take two prisoners. Berlin fears the men, who allegedy trained at terror camps, could be dangerous.
It turns out that these men are dangerous? Maybe it’s because they were ‘created by America’, or are really CIA flunkies!
Following his time in Germany, Hami moved to Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to the files the US has collected, he attended a paramilitary training camp -- a claim he disputes. They also state that he moved to Kandahar in Afghanistan in 2001 to study Islam. During interrogations at Guantanamo, al-Hami admitted to having received weapons training in the al-Qaida camp Khalden.
Maybe this former drug-dealer, like every other detainee, was just ‘inspecting charities and new mosques’, much as any gathering targeted by the US military in Afghanistan, turns out to be a wedding attended only my militant males without fail, and accepted as such by an unquestioning press.

Here we find after nearly 8 years of hectoring America, some tiny little hint in the Euro-mind that there might have been a reason to pick up ‘charity and mosque inspectors’. Perhaps even some time in the next decade, the notion that there is something wrong with them being dangerous might even sink in too.

In fact the very reason the Bush administration couldn’t comply with the Europeans ardent demands to close Gitmo, it largely because they wouldn’t take their own nationals, and largely ignored the idea that just because they demanded that the remainder weren’t remanded to places where they REALLY WOULD be tortured, they want the US to remand them to places where they didn’t have to deal with the torture that they would be remanded to.
Berlin's skepticism about the two men echoes its recent reluctance to take in a group of Uighurs, members of China's Muslim ethnic minority.
Of course that ethical maze has a different set of causes, respecting a sacred philosophical epistemology called the “cha ching”.

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