Sabin Willett, a lawyer for a Guantanamo detainee, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that begins:
“I brought flowers to the isolation cell when I visited Saddiq this month. He likes to draw roses and often asks for gardening magazines.”
The authorities at Guantanamo won’t let Mr. Saddiq have a garden (he grew one anyway, digging with spoons instead of the denied trowels). Saddiq is described as “one of the many mistakes at Guantanamo Bay. In 2005 our military admitted that he was not an enemy combatant, but the government hasn’t been able to repatriate him. (By a curious irony, Saddiq’s opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.) So he lives behind razor wire.”
It makes me sick to think of an innocent man incarcerated. But Ms. Willett didn’t reveal why he is still incarcerated, a fact she owes the reader. It does sound sad, but I have no idea why he is still there, what the alternatives are. She’s a lawyer, and we’re in need to a little legalese here.
And does the unfortunate Mr. Saddiq’s status lead to this observation:
“One day the sordid history of Guantanamo will be written. There will be chapters on torture, chapters on the how the courts turned a blind eye, chapters on cruelties large and petty, on the massive stupidity and uselessness of the place. Many pages will illustrate the great lie of Guantanamo — that it is a ‘terrorist detention facility’ — with accounts of goatherds and chicken farmers and stray foreigners sold by Pakistani grifters to the United States for bounties. Saddiq may have one of the oddest chapters of all: jailed first by the Taliban as an enemy of its regime, then by us.”
Has Ms. Willett seen any of these horrors or does she infer them from Mr. Saddiq’s lack of farming implements?
I’m glad Mr. Saddiq has his garden-as long as the spoons are plastic-I can see why you don’t want to dispense trowels at Guantanamo-but I need to know more to assess his situation.
More and more, the MSM, and those who are invited to write op-eds, rely on sob sister techniques.
Am I cold-hearted, or do you observe the same thing?