- Captured by military forces,
- imprisoned for life (indeterminate time, no sentence) with no charges,
- allegedly tortured and mistreated while in captivity
- the government refused to let outside agencies evaluate claims that the prisoner was tortured and mistreated in captivity,
- Then the government finally agreed to let the individual go after five years provided he
- signed a statement "stipulating" he was treated properly and
- vowed to remain silent about the mistreatment to which he was subjected.
It's what we expect from a government run as a tyranny by a small groups in order to impose their ideology on their nation and sometimes others. There is no rule of law, just rule of the whim of the tyrant in these cases. It is the very opposite of what a democracy does.
There have been a lot of such stories which have come out of various tyrannies in the last sixty years. Some such stories have been clearly verified, but most have been taken from statements by the captives and their families and supporters. When the governments speak to counter those stories, we usually discount what the governments have to say. We suspect we know who to believe, since the governments of Argentina, Franco's Spain, Communist China, North Vietnam, the USSR, Cuba, and North Korea are all vicious tyrannies and cannot be trusted to tell the Truth.
Still, how do we really know that the prisoners themselves are telling the Truth and the governments are not? The governments refuse to let independent agencies, non-government organizations (NGO's) or the Press investigate these stories. The surviving prisoners are trying to tell their stories, while the governments are trying to stop them. If the governments were telling the Truth, all they needed to do was let independent investigators verify which was telling the the Truth. It is the government cover-up in every case which confirms the allegations of the prisoners.
Sadly, this story is one of an Australian, David Hicks, picked up by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan and imprisoned first in Afghanistan and then Guantanamo. Except for the fact that we know that the U.S. government is not a vicious ideologically based tyranny, the rest of the pattern is the same. Especially the efforts to cover up what really happened.
The patterns of behavior by the Bush administration are those of guilty tyrants, not of Americans representing the government of the oldest Republic in the World.
[*] Suffer with the day-pass. It's a quick ad and Greenwald is worth it.
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