A 48-year-old ex-Taliban commander dropped dead of an apparent heart attack after exercising on an elliptical machine inside Guantánamo’s most populous prison camp, the military said Thursday.
The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 “indefinite detainees,” meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.
Gul had never been charged with a crime during his more-than-eight-year detention as a suspected base commander for the Taliban. American officials said they suspected him of being a base commander for the Taliban. His lawyer, Matthew Dodge, said both sides argued Gul’s “habeas corpus” petition before U.S. District Judge Rosemary Colyer in Washington D.C. in March, but she has not yet ruled on whether his detention was lawful.
READ MORE : http://www.miamiherald.com
As I recall, Closing GITMO was one of President Obama’s primary objectives during the campaign and during the first year of his presidency. In fact, not even two weeks after he was elected to the office of the president, he did a 60 minutes interview in which he stated that he would do just that. Here’s a clip of the interview…
Normally broken promises by a politician are par for the course, but this guy went through the entire dog and pony show. He even staged a public signing of an executive order pretending that it would close Guantanamo Bay’s detention facilities within one year. The video on the below is from that event, back in January of 2009. Two years later the facility remains open, people continue to be held indefinitely, without charges, without due process, and without any form of representation.
Awal Gul had been held for eight years. He had never been charged with a crime. In fact this man had left the Taliban a full year prior to the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Yes he was a fighter in Afghanistan, ironically he was trained by the United States in the 1980′s to fight off the Soviets. We trained him to fight, gave him the equipment to do it, then years later, we threw him in prison, without charge, and denied him basic rights afforded all prisoners for no real reason other than he might have seen a guy that attacked the US.
People need to understand that if you refuse to defend civil liberties, even for the worst people, they will not be there for the best.
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5, rated)
