U.S. More Than Sloppy Terror Policies

Added to the totally failed wars of choice policies have created more damage to it's national security by adding to the hatreds with the blanket condemnation, terror and destruction of the multitudes of the innocent it has engulfed with no accountability for the failures!

In Detaining Terror Suspects, U.S. Sloppiness Reigns Supreme

New military reports released by Wikileaks reveal laziness of both thinking and detail in the handling of Australia's Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks

Apr 28 2011 - A bedrock principle of the American criminal justice system is that it's better to have 10 guilty men go free than have one innocent man be incarcerated. The principle was enunciated by the English jurist William Blackstone and has guided us for more than 250 years -- until, that is, the events of 9/11 unleashed a search for terrorist suspects under every bed. The attitude now is that it's better to round up a hundred innocent men than have one terrorist remains at large, a senior FBI official told me, disgusted with the policy.

Two Australian citizens were caught by this monumental shift in law enforcement -- Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born, naturalized Australian, a father of four with a history of financial and mental health problems, who had gone to Pakistan as a possible place to settle his family; and David Hicks, a lost soul who set out to Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of more adventure. Both men are now back in Australia, leading lives as law-abiding citizens, though it is hard to imagine that either will ever be able to lead a normal life after what the United States did to them.

Habib was picked up in Pakistan a few weeks after 9/11, turned over to the Americans and secretly spirited, bound and gagged, by the CIA to Egypt, one of the early subjects of the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition policy, under which he was interrogated and tortured for several months before being shipped to Guantanamo in May 2002.

Habib was suspected of being a "money-launderer and terrorist facilitator," according to an August 2004 memorandum prepared by the commanding officer at Guantanamo, Brigadier General Jay Hood. This is, the general's report says, "because of his extensive international travels." In this era of shrinking borders and expanding globalization, many an international businessman might begin to worry based on that.

The Pentagon report, which was prepared as part of a review of the cases of several hundred Guantanamo prisoners, was among those released this week by Wikileaks. It is marked by errors, some risible if the consequences weren't so severe. The report says that Habib moved to Sydney in 1980; he didn't arrive here until 1982. It says that he lived in "Greenwika." It was Greenacre. It says that he took his wife and children to Egypt, where he had been in the army, in 1986; it was two years later. {continued}