housemates

Robert Sharp's riposte to the Big Brother Racism hoo-ha:

Clive Stafford-Smith has visited the ‘facility’ at Guantànamo Bay sixteen times. He likens the prison to Colditz Castle, the wartime prison camp. His message is simple and disturbing: The very methods employed by the US Government there positively encourage miscarriages of justice and wrongful detention. It is little known than most of the inmates were not caught directly by US forces, but by local Afghanis and Iraqis attracted by the US$5000 reward for captured terrorists. This money would affect a change in lifestyle equivalent to a windfall of £220,000 in the UK. Nevertheless, the word of these bounty hunters is treated as gospel, and the prisoners are detained without charge until evidence against them can be found. Detainees are interrogated and even tortured until they corroborate the story of those who turned them in. In one case, a 14-year-old boy named Mohammed Gharani was incorrectly assumed to be an Al Qaeda financier because the word for ‘salad’ in his Saudi Arabic dialect was similar to the word for ‘money’ in the Yemeni dialect. Those who held him had over-estimated his age by more than ten years.

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