Hegland's article, he writes, "provides powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years." This is part of his summary:
--A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
--Fewer than 20% of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
--Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
--The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 -- including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers.
--And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.
Taylor adds: "The tribunal hearings, based largely on such guilt-by-association logic, have been travesties of unfairness. The detainees are presumed guilty unless they can prove their innocence -- without help from lawyers and without being permitted to know the details and sources of the evidence against them.
This is our Wighthouse.
Given the administration's track record on accuracy, why does anyone, let alone everyone, in the major media go along with this instead of saying, "Why should we believe these guys know an al-Qaeda operative when they see one?"
Note that Hegland's last statement also applies to the NSA Eavesdropping Issue.
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