Awesome O'Reilly Debunking of Poor Li'l Terrorist Story In NYT

In this article, the NYT allows a terrorist to tell his story, without offering any external factual guidance.

I WAS released from the United States military's prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in July 2004. As I was about to board a plane that would take me home to France, the last detainee I saw was a young Yemeni. He was overwhelmed by emotion.

"In your country, Mourad, there are rights, human rights, and they mean something," he said. "In mine they mean nothing, and no one cares. So when you're free, don't forget what you've been through. Tell people that we are here."

I now know that this Yemeni was not among the three prisoners who committed suicide at Guantánamo last weekend, but since then his words have been echoing in my head. Although I'm now a free man, the shared pain endlessly takes me back to the camp.

In the early summer of 2001, when I was 19, I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream vacation. His friends, he said, were going to look after me. They did — channeling me to what turned out to be a Qaeda training camp. For two months, I was there, trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.

As soon as my time was up, I headed home. I was a few miles from the Pakistani border when I learned with horror about the attacks of 9/11. Days later, the border was sealed off, and the only way through to Pakistan and a plane to Europe was across the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I was with a group of people who were all going the same way. No one was armed; most of them, like me, had been lured to Afghanistan by a misguided and mistimed sense of adventure, and were simply trying to make their way home.

I was seized by the Pakistani Army while having tea at a mosque shortly after I managed to cross the border. A few days later I was delivered to the United States Army: although I didn't know it at the time, I was now labeled an "enemy combatant." It did not matter that I was no one's enemy and had never been on a battlefield, let alone fought or aimed a weapon at anyone.

He alleges he was tortured by the US Army.

Here are the facts the NYT "forgot" to add to the story:

1) The man has been repatriated into France, where he awaits trial on terror charges.

2) The man's father is an extremist cleric, and a convicted terrorist.

3) The man's brother is a convicted terrorist, and indeed was convicted today (the day the sob story ran).

4) The man's mother is a convicted terrorist.

5) So is his sister.

So, O'Reilly says, the man is claiming he "accidentally" wound up in an Al Qaeda terrorist camp due to some snafu in booking a a weekend in Bali, and then was just trying to get home after 9/11 when he was captured... in the vicinity of Tora Bora.

His whole family are terrorist scum, but we are to believe he "accidentally" wound up at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp, and then "accidentally" also wound up being captured at the place of Osama bin Ladin's fortress.

The NYT uses this man's charges of torture, without noting he comes from an entire family of terrorists, against the US Army, and treats them credibly, giving him a thousand words of precious advertising space to propagandize against his enemy, the United States of America.

Un. Befucking. Lievable.

Remember this when you hear for the ten thousandth time about all these poor innocent noncombatants who were randomly captured by Pakistan, sold to the US for bounties, and unjustly locked away forever.

This, apparently, is one of the more credible accounts of how such a tragedy of circumstance may have occurred -- after all, the "Paper of Record" gave him a thousand words to explain his innocent-as-a-lamb life story.

Andrew Sullivan-- suck my hog. Seriously, you preening jackass.

posted by Ace at 10:25 PM

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