US terrorism report - selective data, wrong lessons
Ramzy Baroud; 14/5/08
The various data provided in the US State Department’s annual terrorism report for 2007 points towards some interesting, if not puzzling, conclusions. The much-publicised document, made available on April 30 through the State Department’s website, makes no secret of the fact that Al Qaeda is back, strong as ever. It also suggests that violence worldwide is nowhere near subsiding, despite President George Bush’s repeated assurances regarding the success of his “war on terror”. But will the report inspire a serious reflection of the country’s detrimental foreign policy, and its role in the current situation? Let’s look at some of the data.
See; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7848
Guantanamo Crimes Made World Less Safe
George Monbiot; 14/5/08
When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih Al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place. Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate.
See: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=109892&d=14&m=5&y=2008
Tags: Guantanamo Bay, Terrorism, USA