By GottaLaff
29 of 35 Gitmo prisoners have been ordered released by federal district judges. The latest is Moahammed al Adahi, and all because of a wrist watch. Really? That was their case? Nearly 8 years of imprisonment and abuse based on a time piece? And what do you know, it turns out to be the wrong kind of watch.
Via CagePrisoners:
A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to free a Yemeni father of two with a heart condition who has been held for seven and a half years at Guantánamo on suspicion of serving as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard.************************************
Mohammed al Adahi, 47, testified by video link from the prison camp that he had met bin Laden socially during the summer before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but never worked for him or waged jihad.
"I did not fight the American alliance. I did not deal with Taliban or al Qaeda. I am a working man in my country. I have never committed a crime,'' he said, according to a transcript of his mostly classified June hearing at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.
[...]
The U.S. is still negotiating a repatriation agreement with the Yemeni government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh for up to 93 Yemeni citizens held among the 229 detainees at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.
Kessler's ruling raised to 29 the number of long-held Guantánamo captives that federal judges have ordered released through unlawful detention suits, compared with the six whose detentions that judges have upheld. [...]
The hearing lasted three days. Justice Department attorneys called no witnesses but showed the judge prison camp videos of guards tackling and shackling the Yemeni and forcing him from his cell, said defense attorney Kristin Wilhelm of Atlanta.
To clear his name, she said, Adahi collected statements from fellow detainees at Guantánamo who supposedly fingered him in prison camp interrogations.
None corroborated the U.S. government allegations, Wilhelm said.
"All Mr. al Adahi wants to do is to return to his wife and two children in Yemen. Unfortunately, his health is not good,'' said attorney Richard G. Murphy Jr., part of a legal team between Washington and Atlanta that defended him without charge.
Pakistani troops captured Adahi as he fled the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan soon after 9/11. He was aboard a bus carrying wounded Taliban soldiers, the basis of a Pentagon claim that he had been in league with the Taliban.
On his wrist was a Casio watch, which U.S. military intelligence said was similar to those al Qaeda terrorists had rigged as explosive triggers. But the Yemeni told the judge at his hearing that his watch had hands, and wasn't digital, a key distinction. [...]
For a time, the U.S. had suspected that Adahi served as a bin Laden bodyguard, in part because his brother-in-law may have worked for the al Qaeda leader.
But Adahi had long maintained that he was captured during what was meant to be a two-month vacation from a Yemeni oil refinery. He was escorting his sister to an arranged marriage with a fellow Yemeni in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
While there, in the summer before the 9/11 attacks, Adahi attended a party of men celebrating his sister's wedding and was introduced to bin Laden among the guests.
Bin Laden, a Saudi, traces his family back to Yemen, and Adahi testified that in the summer of 2001 bin Laden was "in control of Kandahar . . . considered as the governor of the city.''
They made small talk about Yemen he said, and then a few days later he was summoned to meet bin Laden again. "If you are a stranger and you go to that place and the man called you, you submit,'' he said.
SOURCE: Miami Herald
All my previous posts on this subject matter can be found here; That link includes one specific to only Fayiz al-Kandari's story here. Here are audio and video interviews with Lt. Col. Wingard, one by David Shuster, one by Ana Marie Cox, and more. My guest commentary at BuzzFlash is here.
If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.
If you'd like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.
Then read Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side. You'll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I'm all over the CIA deception issues, too.
More of Fayiz's story here, at Answers.com.
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