121 Contact

June 6 2009 NYTimes echoes Pentagon Lies re: Guantanamo prisoner releases

This piece was triggered by Isabel Macdonald's May 27 piece, NYT's Pentagon Propaganda: Misleading Report on Guantnamo and Terrorism. She's the Communications Director of Fair, a fact-checking organization.


There are adequate federal prison facilities to safely detain even the total number of Guantanamo prisoners, should that be necessary. No one has escaped from our federal maximum security facilities, ever.

The "released prisoners return to terrorism" reports from the pentagon have been debunked repeatedly.

The NYTimes allowed itself to print "1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight" without the fact checking that would have allowed its readers to see that:

-the pentagons counts are bogus, including freed men who merely wrote op-ed pieces or appeared in anti-war videos,

-the counts do not bother to exclude some who were never in Guantanamo,

-the counts failed to indicate that the so-called terrorists were never convicted of anything.

The article never even mentioned the fact that the 1 in 7 number included mere suspicious estimations in its totals.

That some prisoners are radicalized in our prisons, from torture and exposure to immoral inhumane treatment may very well be true, but this would not apply to those in solitary confinement. 

The scare-mongering tactics of the right wing fundamentalists like Chaney and his gang of neocons do not deserve major headlines. Their empty ideas perhaps deserve a mention on page 23 about the baseless arguments that they persist in putting forth, but certainly not the opinion-shaping headlines the NYTimes chose to give them.

There is a need for youth education in the country that will enable tomorrows adults to guard themselves against the ever increasing news-for-sensationalism reportage we are subjected to. Perhaps it is also time to add morality education to our journalism students. Then future reporters might not be so apt to lend their names to quasi-truths.

Debunking sources:
Denbeaux 12/10/07 [PDF]
Huffington Post, 3/13/07
Washington Independent, 1/23/09

Y'all have a good day now.

b

Oct 22 2207 iraqis, sunnies, kurdish, sabia, yazidiys, muslims and christians

Listen to these two voices! Eat the courage of their hearts and spit out the pits of vengeance as they have done! All our atrocities in Iraq cannot shake the moral fiber of these young Baghdadis. We can hold guns to their heads. We can make them quake with fear. We can fill them with hatred for us.

But we cannot shake their belief that violence against innocents is evil.

Listen to these two voices and imagine the hundreds of thousands that they speak for. They don't want revenge. They only want our troops to come home and our help to rebuild the nation we crushed.
B

((read responses to these young voices by clicking on "Continue Reading..." at the bottom.))

Hello Mr.Bruce
I want to join your 121contact. Me and my brother A.
I am 16 years old. I live in Baghdad in a shia  neighbourhood because we are shia and we love all iraqis, sunnies and kurdish, sabia or yazidiys, muslims and christians and me and  brother want your troops to go out because they are bad. We do not like them. They came to our house and told the girls inthe house to go out in the garden and my father and my brother saty in the house with the soldiers. they ordered my father to lie on the ground and my brother too. I cried when I saw my father on the ground and the gun on his head. I closed my eyes because I do not want to see him dead. the other soldiers searched our house and threw my books and clothes on the floor. my mother was brave and talked to the translator that we have nothing and we are innocents and we have only one gun to protect our family. they went and leave my house and the rooms broken. I hate you we did not do anything to your houses and your families why you hurt us?
D
Hi Americans
I am A, 13 years old. I want to say that you have the power to do everything but you donot have the power to kill the will of the iraqi people. We are stronger because we have the faith in Allah and we will defeat you one day insha allah because you are attackers and know nothing about decency and I do not respect you because you do not respect the iraqies.
Do you accept Iraqies to start war against you and kill your old father and mother and break your schools and mosques? Do you accept iraqis to burn your country and hurt your women?
But We wont do what you did to us because we are good people and we have morals.
tell your students about that and tell you people about our feeling...
A

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