{"id":223182,"date":"2022-11-07T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=223182"},"modified":"2022-11-07T08:16:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T08:16:49","slug":"american-horror-potus-after-potus-wronged-this-old-pakistani-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/11\/american-horror-potus-after-potus-wronged-this-old-pakistani-man\/","title":{"rendered":"American Horror: POTUS after POTUS Wronged This Old Pakistani Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Nov 2022 – Saifullah Paracha was released last week (29 October) after 19 years in Guantanamo Bay for no crime. He won\u2019t even get an apology.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Saifullah Paracha at a McDonald’s restaurant in Karachi, Pakistan, after he was released from Guantanamo Bay, where he spent 19 years without ever being charged.
[Photo provided by Clive Stafford-Smith, Paracha’s lawyer]<\/p><\/div>\n

I find it infuriating when a scarred life is reduced to a quirky curiosity.<\/p>\n

That is what has happened to Saifullah Paracha<\/a>, a 75-year-old Pakistani entrepreneur who was finally released in late October from the United States-run dungeons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.<\/p>\n

In reporting on Paracha\u2019s belated liberation, several news organisations noted that he was the oldest captive there without, of course, admitting that, like so many others, he should not have spent a moment in jail given his US captors never came even remotely close to finding him guilty of a crime.<\/p>\n

Paracha was locked up for 19 years at what one New York Times (NYT) correspondent called a \u201cseafront compound<\/a>\u201c. Sounds almost like a sun-kissed tourist resort rather than a brutish, remote prison featuring barbed wire fencing, guard dogs and armed US soldiers manning lookout posts.<\/p>\n

In any event, that Paracha was an anomaly at Guantanamo Bay \u2013 where most of the other captives were much younger men \u2013 is what made him newsworthy.<\/p>\n

Not the fact that Paracha wasted nearly two decades of his life in a dungeon as part of a covert, worldwide abduction racket. Nor the fact that Paracha was never charged by his American abductors and jailers during his long imprisonment.<\/p>\n

But journalists, ultimately, aren\u2019t the villains here.<\/p>\n

The responsibility for this horror is shared by a succession of unrepentant US presidents who will likely never experience even a minute measure of regret or discomfort for what they did to an ageing, frail man and his family.<\/p>\n

Paracha was \u201caccused\u201d of being an al-Qaeda sympathiser and \u201csuspected\u201d of bankrolling the group. That sentence, which quotes the BBC<\/a>, contains two of the three most popular weasel words governments use to \u201clink\u201d \u2013 that\u2019s the third \u2013 anyone to terrorism without proof.<\/p>\n

In July 2003, a suspicious FBI lured Paracha to Thailand where they abducted him and flew him \u2013 bound, shackled and hooded \u2013 to Afghanistan, in an obscene affront to international law.<\/p>\n

While being held incommunicado at a US military prison at Bagram, Paracha suffered the first of a series of heart attacks. Fourteen months later, he was taken \u2013 bound, shackled and hooded again \u2013 to Guantanamo Bay where, without a scintilla of evidence that he helped finance or promote al-Qaeda\u2019s interests, he remained until a few days ago.<\/p>\n

In 2005, Paracha\u2019s son, Uzair<\/a>, who was living in New York, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for allegedly \u201cproviding material support to terrorism\u201d. Thirteen years later, in 2018, a US federal court judge ordered his release<\/a> after exculpatory information was discovered that raised doubts about his conviction.<\/p>\n

Justice Sydney Stein said he was granting Uzair a new trial because permitting the original judgement to stand would be \u201ca manifest injustice\u201d. Two years later, prosecutors dropped the case against Uzair.<\/p>\n

The Paracha family has indeed been the victim of a \u201cmanifest injustice\u201d, perpetrated by powerful men who, today, are being rehabilitated and feted as \u201celder statesmen\u201d.<\/p>\n

American presidents are not only immune to accountability; they are also immune to shame.<\/p>\n

I doubt that George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump remember who Paracha is or care a whit about his fate since one of the principal qualifications to become commander-in-chief is to be prepared to deploy American force to harm and kill people in defence of the \u201cnational interest\u201d.<\/p>\n

And this, at least, Paracha has over those who have presidential libraries built as monuments to their importance: There is no basis to claim that he has ever harmed or killed another soul.<\/p>\n

In particular, the conduct of that smug liberal darling, Obama, in connection with Paracha\u2019s ordeal is shameful.<\/p>\n

A \u201ctask force\u201d established on inauguration day by the then-new president reported to him in 2010 that there was \u201cno evidence\u201d to justify laying charges against some of the Guantanamo \u201cdetainees\u201d but added that they were \u201ctoo dangerous\u201d to be set free. In April 2013 it emerged that Paracha was one of 71 captives who were innocent.<\/p>\n

Still, politics trumped integrity. And Obama allowed a sick, honest man to remain captive rather than release him into the care of his loving family in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

What makes Paracha\u2019s lengthy incarceration in America\u2019s gulag all the more egregious is that the businessman had lived and worked in the US since the 1970s and throughout his inhumane odyssey professed not only his innocence but love and gratitude for his adopted country.<\/p>\n

None of that history mattered.<\/p>\n

The US \u2013 spurred on by revenge-thirsty columnists who told Iraqis to \u201csuck on this<\/a>\u201d \u2013 was hunting \u201cterrorists\u201d in Kabul, Baghdad and beyond.<\/p>\n

Paracha was merely disposable, forgettable fodder to be used to show how ruthless both Republicans and Democrats could be in shielding their \u201chomeland\u201d from future attacks.<\/p>\n

The rule of law didn\u2019t matter. International law didn\u2019t matter. The US Constitution\u2019s rights and guarantees didn\u2019t matter. Fairness didn\u2019t matter. Due process didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

And of course, Saifullah Paracha didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

The prime years of his life didn\u2019t matter. He was a nobody. Not a husband. Not a father. Not a brother. Not a son. Just another Muslim that a sham, illegal apparatus run by soldiers at the behest of presidents got what he deserved.<\/p>\n

But what Paracha and his family deserve, at the very least, is an apology. That won\u2019t happen. It should, but it won\u2019t. Presidents don\u2019t apologise to men like Saifullah Paracha. It would be beneath them and the office of the presidency to apologise. They\u2019re important. He\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

But a recent photo of Paracha reveals that, through it all, he held tight to his humanity and perhaps his sense of humour. Arms crossed, wearing a white t-shirt and a wry smile, he sits at a table in a McDonald\u2019s restaurant in Karachi.<\/p>\n

I suppose that after this burst of attention, Paracha will slip back into anonymity and try, as best he can, to recover and enjoy the sunset of his life. He will do that in the quiet knowledge that he is a better man than the preening presidents who will always carry the blot of the indecency they visited on a decent human being.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Andrew Mitrovica is an <\/em>Al Jazeera columnist based in Toronto.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Nov 2022 – Saifullah Paracha, a 75-year-old Pakistani, was released last week (29 October) after 19 years in the dungeons of Guantanamo Bay for no crime. He won\u2019t even get an apology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":223184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,1464,1126,260,1050,1302,112,880,2841,70,2686,492],"class_list":["post-223182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-guantanamo","tag-hegemony","tag-history","tag-imperialism","tag-pakistan","tag-pentagon","tag-state-terrorism","tag-tyranny","tag-usa","tag-war-of-terror","tag-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}