Bob in HI

…were picked up by bounty hunters of the Afghan warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

With some 200 other suspected terrorists, the men were packed in shipping containers in the presence of US forces, according to a report issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. They were shipped to Sherbegan prison, a former Taliban fortress, before being placed formally in US custody. Near suffocation, Iqbal passed out and awoke gasping for air at the small holes Dostum’s guards had created by firing machine guns at the containers. One of the bullets had hit Iqbal in the arm, giving him a wound that soon became infected for lack of medical care. Ahmed says that all three men suffered “cold, dehydration, hunger…uncertainty,” as well as dysentery and other injuries. During the brutal eighteen-hour transport, only twenty of the 200 captives survived.

If that reference to Dostum, shipping containers, dead detainees, etc. rings a bell, it may be bc of this very recent (12/11) McClatchy story:

As possible Afghan war-crimes evidence removed, U.S. silent

Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves …
Earlier this year, bulldozers returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

I don’t think that the Tipton Three are great guys by any means, but while one or more of them may have attended training camps in Afghanistan, they don’t seem to have been any kind of big wheels in al-Qaeda or the Taliban and they don’t seem to have been involved in any planning or scheming with Bin Laden to conduct attacks on America.

Unless, that is, you believe the information solicted under torture – where all three confessed to being the three previously unidentified faces in a video that allegedly showed a meeting between Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/goldstein

they were held at a US-operated detention center in Kandahar, where they were repeatedly beaten, interrogated at gunpoint and told that their families back in England had been thrown out on the street.

In Kandahar the men were subjected to cavity searches, which they say were meant to “degrade and humiliate” them. In various interviews after their release, Rasul said, “I could hear dogs barking nearby and soldiers shouting, ‘Get ‘em, boy’…. I was taken…for a so-called cavity search…told to bend over and then felt something shoved up my anus. I don’t know what it was, but it was very painful.” After being held in Kandahar for two weeks, Iqbal and Ahmed were masked, goggled and shackled, and led onto a large cargo plane with other detainees, where they were told they would be taking a short journey (Rasul would follow one month later). Twenty-two hours later they arrived in Cuba.

The kind of humiliation Rasul describes in Kandahar was only an introduction to what the men would come to experience regularly over the course of their two-and-a-half year detention at Guantánamo Bay. They lived in constant fear of being killed and said that the guards told them “nobody knows you’re here, all they know is that you’re missing, and we could kill you at any moment and no one would know.” In the report Iqbal recalls one guard screaming, “You killed my family in the towers, and now it’s time to get you back.” Almost immediately after they arrived, interrogators began hounding them to admit to being in a videotape with Osama bin Laden that was made in Afghanistan in 2000. The men describe interrogation sessions that went on for fourteen hours during which they were forced to sit in a chair with their hands and feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, while strobe lights and loud music played in a room frigid from air-conditioning. The men were routinely beaten, deprived of sleep, kept in isolation for months at a time and told that the others had confessed. After existing under such conditions for months, all three men finally admitted that they had, in fact, been in the video with bin Laden.

Hold the !!!!!!!!!!!!!! though.

As stunningly incredible as it might seem that the three of the very few who survived the Afghan shipping container transport Just So Happen To Be the 3 unidentified faces —- turns out that despite the torture confessions, umm, they weren’t.

The confessions extracted from all three detainees were false. At the time the video was made they were in Tipton–Rasul was working at an electronics store, and Ahmed and Iqbal were employed at the factory. When the men were released from Guantánamo into British custody in March 2004, the MI5 held the men, as it did not, understandably, want to release potential terrorists who had just confessed to a connection to Osama bin Laden. It was while in British custody that investigators were able to determine the impossibility of the Tipton Three’s guilt simply by examining the tape’s tracking date and matching it to police, employment and passport records. The MI5 disproved in days the false story that had taken interrogators at Guantánamo nearly three years to obtain.

I’m not sure exactly what is being referred back now, but I think the context – that these were survivors of Dostum’s container killings and it was just reported that the US (who may have been fairly active in those killings and/or who may have paid bounties for the bodies after the killings) was insuring that Dostum could destroy the evidence of those who died on the trip that these three survived.

fwiw

Whatever ones biases against the Kennedy family as a class, Caroline Kennedy deserves to be judged as an individual. Do we know anything specifically negative about her?

Why is a distaste for something so anti-democratic as dynasties reflective of a bias? I would think that favoring them shows a far greater bias and abdication of democratic principles.

As for Caroline Kennedy being judged as an individual, get real. The mere fact that her name has come up is the result of her not being taken as an individual but as a Kennedy. If this were being done on the basis of the merits, her name would not have come up at all.

Never did I dream that in my life-time it would be necessary for the supreme court to determine that a human being was a person !!!