Speaking of winning hearts and minds...
`What is my crime?' | Chicago Tribune Nasrat Khan wears the long gray beard of an Afghan village elder. He estimates he is 78 or 79, and he has trouble seeing and hearing. Since suffering a stroke about 15 years ago, he needs crutches or a walker to get around. He doesn't fit the common image of a terrorist, but for much of the last 3 1/2 years, the United States imprisoned Khan at its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.Accused of links to a warlord and questioned about his son's possession of hundreds of weapons, he was designated an “enemy combatant” and a terrorist threat--until August, when he was no longer deemed a threat and released quietly, he and his U.S. lawyer say.
Now back in his family compound, surrounded by relatives and friends, Khan says he still is confused about why he was detained and flown halfway around the world.
“I asked them, `What is my crime?'” said Khan, his swollen legs splayed before him, sitting by the red walker he said U.S. officials gave him in Cuba. “They didn't say anything. No one would tell me what my crime was and why I was there.”
While the details of Khan's Guantanamo experience are hard to verify, his complaints raise questions about who has been sent to the detention facility and how thoroughly the charges against them are investigated, just as a law approved by Congress late last month sets up military tribunals to try some of the detainees. President Bush is scheduled to sign the bill into law Tuesday.
Khan and his lawyer complain that the allegations never were made clear to them and that the U.S. military never contacted defense witnesses whose names Khan and his son provided to a judge at Guantanamo, despite the military's pledges to do so.
Tracked down in Afghanistan, two of the witnesses told the Tribune they never were contacted. One was a government official whose phone number was provided to the Tribune after one call to the Afghan Defense Ministry.
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“We really couldn't understand why Khan was there,” Ryan said. “He really couldn't walk. He had a stroke. . . . He had difficulty hearing. He kept saying over and over again, `Why have they sent me here? Please tell the world I am here. I don't want to die here.'”When the Taliban came to power, Khan and his son initially opposed the harsh regime but later supported it, they said. In Afghanistan, such shifting alliances are not unusual, and merely being loyal to one side or the other has not necessarily been a ticket to Guantanamo.
Tags: Afghanistan, /Taliban, /terrorism
