Just to correct you, I do in fact “acknowledge” that there are, and very regrettably so, a number of unjustly-imprisoned individuals at Guantanamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror”. And that all decent, well-meaning people should be concerned to make sure they are identified and freed.

However, a person like Moazzam Begg is not among them. He is not one of those who people like me care terribly about if they got ‘mistreated’ somewhere. By his own admission, according to Wikipedia: “Begg admits spending time at two Islamic militant training camps in Afghanistan, supporting militant Muslim fighters, buying a rifle and a handgun, that he “thought about” taking up arms in Chechnya, and being an acquaintance of people linked to terrorism (most notably, Khalil al-Deek, Dhiren Barot, and Shahid Akram Butt)”

A person like this does not deserve the concern of people like me, or you, or any other decent human being. If for nothing more than “supporting Muslim ‘fighters’ ” (read: murderers who will kill to get their way and violently impose their world-view on others), he deserves everything that happened to him, and more. There are far more pitiable, *truly* innocent victims of injustice and misfortune who should get in line way ahead of him, as people for us to be concerned about.

Moazzam Begg is not “innocent” by any objective stretch of the imagination. He may have had second thoughts once he saw the dangerous game he played and paid some consequences. And he certainly was quite skilled in using the basic decency of the western legal system he worked so hard to destroy to get a lot of money for himself. Quite clever. Bravo, Moazzam!

My point with respect to the *truly* innocent, however, and this is ignored with the same stridency that you accuse me of, is that the ‘obvious and easy’ solution, which you say is to charge the culpable ones as normal “soldiers” (give me a break, these are cold-blooded killers and insane sociopathic fanatics, in no normal person’s mind a “soldier”), and in Federal courts, is in my opinion, and the opinion of the overwhelming vast majority of knowledgeable people, ignorant, naive, uninformed, and starry-eyed in the extreme.

You yourself stated: “I’d like there to have been justice for the victims of 9/11, as would have happened had they been tried in a federal court, which could have happened years ago had it not been for the Bush administration’s refusal to do so.”

And this is what I mean by the 4 adjectives above. This reveals complete ignorance of the reality of the American legal system. And the basic reason why few Americans are terribly concerned about closing Guantanamo, and why few of us would be interested in listening to you. You would strike most of us as, I’m sorry, but this is the truth, ignorant, naive, uninformed, a rabidly ideological left-wing extremist, anti-American, and more enamored of your own opinions than to ever risk examining them or changing them.

Again, Andy, why not try to LEARN something instead of insisting you’re right and everybody else (in this case, the vast majority of perfectly decent and moral Americans) is wrong?

My point is proven by the rather poor sales of your Guantanamo book. Amazon says it’s something like 856,598th in popularity. People are far more interested in Paris Hilton’s biography, ranked in popularity 122,397th, than in what you have to say.

It’s not because we’re bad people. It’s because we can recognize a highly-biased ideological extremist when we see one.

The FACT is that very few terrorist victim’s families would receive anything like justice, and certainly not on a timely basis (“years ago”). It is one of the great irritants of our society, that instead of what you JUST ASSUME WITHOUT KNOWING ANYTHING ABOUT IT, we have obvious criminals, including murderers, going off scot-free because of some trivial technicality. And the process takes years and years and years, and consumes sometimes millions of dollars of public money PER CASE! And victims’ families go on for years and years of further torture by the whole process; appeals, motions, hearings, on and on and on.

Surprise, Andy, the vast majority of Americans and others do not in fact like Guantanamo being an apparent necessary evil. But we like the alternative (such as what you naively think is the solution) even less.

Until you understand this REALITY, I’m sorry, you will continue to be dismissed by people like me, and hundreds of millions of others that you might otherwise be able to interest in your “cause”.

Again, you understand little about the U.S. In your own words, you never even set foot in this country until 3 years ago!

We’re not as stupid and lacking in decency as you think. What it IS, is that things are in reality a whole lot more complicated, far less cut-and-dried, than is the world view that you possess where you think things are just so obvious and the choices are easy.

I’m not going to answer the comment above, as I stated my final opinion regarding her approach in my final comments to her above, but I will continue to allow her comments through, so that I can’t be accused of censorship, although I have no intention of engaging any more with someone who clearly bears me ill will, and actually on a very personal basis, which, to my mind, is actually intolerable behavior.

You want a war, you got one. I really don’t take kindly to censorship.

You are British, and unfortunately that makes you incapable of understanding why so many Americans are not as exercised over Guantanamo as you and other Europeans are. That is because when you live here and grow up in this culture, one sees far, far, too many examples of obvious criminals getting off scot-free (O.J. Simpson is but one more famous example) because of the extreme over-protectiveness of our system. We Americans are almost united in our contempt of our legal system, which we inherited from you Brits. We see far too much time and public resources wasted on utter scumbags, mass murderers, freed because of some technicality.

Since you are not an American with this knowledge, I would propose that you are not qualified to judge what should and should not be tried in our Federal courts. You know nothing about them.

So all you care about is “broken laws”? Laws are highly imperfect, often made by the same corrupt and incompetent politicians you so stridently rail against. So I take it you would uphold the Nuremberg Laws, simply because they are laws? How about the laws in the old Soviet Union, requiring children to turn in their parents for anti-state activities? Or laws imprisoning people for adultery?

I would propose instead of slavishly worshipping “the law”, and stridently obsessing on its violations, real and imagined, one might be a better person to rely on more nebulous concepts, such as “common sense” and “justice”.

If a captured terrorist had kidnapped and his accomplices were about to kill your family, would you still be so sure that torturing the slimeball to find their location was so clearly a ‘crime’?

Perhaps the biggest difference between people like you and me is that your mindset is more comfortable with, and requires for its security, a rigid, ideological, black-and-white approach to the world. People like me can deal with ambiguity, shades of gray, and fluidity. I can say that *most* of the time, torture is a crime, and an abomination to be avoided, but there are perhaps the occasional instances where righteous and moral people may have little choice. I’d torture Bin Laden in a heartbeat, and you are no more a righteous or ‘better’ person than I am.

And if Bin Laden and his cohorts would to have ever been imprisoned at Guantanamo, I’d be perfectly happy for them to have “no rights”. Did they care about their victims’ families, and *their* rights?

And I’d look again at your attitudes towards the victims of terrorism that I point out. Your disclaimer sounds decidedly breezy and dismissive, so unfortunately the evidence, just from your behavior, is that you do in fact care more about the monsters than the victims.

Personally, I think your mistake is in your blanket condemnation of the entire process. You’d be a more impressive, and more defensible and respected voice, if you were to make the effort to distinguish between *innocent* persons falsely imprisoned and harshly interrogated by mistake, and those who are not. If you were to campaign to free the wrongly imprisoned, you’d have all of decent humanity on your side.

As it is, the shrill one-size-fits-all criticism, meaning you often get in bed with the devil and exalt him, means that most intelligent people will just write you off and dismiss your efforts as naive, and knee-jerk liberal.

You may take offense at the labels, since it is unflattering, but that doesn’t make the discussion “uncivil”.

I once was told something valuable by a professor in college when I myself was manifesting a bit of self-righteousness: “why not try to LEARN SOMETHING instead of insisting the whole world is wrong and you’re right?”

I can guarantee you, the vast majority of people who have normal lives and families to protect, and who may have lost loved ones to the monsters your heart bleeds for, think like I do, and do not agree with your world view.

I know little about you, Andy, but I see “Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, 700,000-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened….”

Question, Andy, have you ever written a single word about the agonies of the families who were torn apart by losing a loved one on 9/11?

By your actions, and your literary crusades, again, you are far more concerned with what happens to the monsters that you are working so hard to protect and exalt, than you are with the real victims.

Can you not grant that perfectly “civil” people might therefore think that perhaps, at least 1%, your ideology (for that’s what it is, clung to just like a religious belief) is perhaps “blind, self-righteous and twisted?”

What part of “IT’S NOT AN OCCUPATION” do people like you not understand??

If the French had sent a peacekeeping force to prevent the Northerners and Southerners from killing themselves by the hundreds of thousands (700,000 dead) during our own Civil War, I and others like me would have the intelligence to not apply some utterly sick and perverse label to it like an “occupation”. Personally, I would have been grateful to the French soldiers for putting themselves in harm’s way. People like you can’t understand that.

Trying to keep the peace between warring factions is not an occupation to unbiased, intelligent people. Otherwise, you can call all United Nations peacekeeping deployments to be “occupations”.

If there are prisoners in Guantanamo who have worked, conspired, plotted, aided an abetted the murder of innocent people in furtherance of trying to get their way, like spoiled brats who think they have a right to force their world view on everyone, then, sorry, I and any non-starry-eyed naive idiot fully believe they deserve everything they’ve “been through”, and more.. People like you are so enamored of your own “goodness” and superior “morals” and wonderfulness that you clearly care more about sick murdering terrorists than you do of the victims and their families, whose lives have been irredeemably damaged by this detritus of humanity. No one? Not even Hitler? Stalin? Ghaddafi? Saddam? Bin Laden? Unfortunately persons like you cannot see your own blind, self-righteous and twisted ideology.