A Guantanamo Story for Erev Yom Kippur

Courtesy of Mother Jones, an interview with a totally innocent ex-prisoner from Guantanamo:

The Americans interrogated him about Al Qaeda. “They asked me what I knew about the terrorists,” he says. “Did I know where they were?” They asked if his passport was fake, and if he’d seen or met Osama bin Laden. “Of course, I’d heard about him on the radio and TV,” Umarov says. “But how would I, a student, know much about him if people who came from a powerful country like America did not know anything about him”...

When the questions were over, they locked him in a concrete room for 10 days. The room was three feet long and one and a half feet wide and insufferably hot. He wore iron handcuffs. It was impossible to stand up or move about. “All my thoughts were about how my life was going to end,” he says. He worried about his brother Ahliddin, about an unpaid debt to his neighbors, and about the times in his life when he had made people angry or upset...

“I was taken to the dark room,” he says. “The soldiers took all my clothes and left me there.” The room was made of iron; it measured three feet by five feet. At night, frigid air was pumped through a hole in its ceiling, and its small window was covered by Plexiglas so the air couldn’t leave. Two electric coils provided dim light, and during the day, they were turned up to heat the cell to a very high temperature....

(Sigh.) Although I have not a government official of any sort, I am a citizen of this democracy, a democracy engaged in fighting a war with an enemy who has the ultimate aim of destroying us or eliminating our liberty to be as free in our lives as we can be without hurting anyone else. I firmly believe that this country should keep fighting. But we Americans are not omnipotent, nor are we omniscient.

On Erev Yom Kippur, Jews ask for forgiveness from others. I cannot speak for anyone else, but for those out there who have been unjustly wronged by America, I would ask your forgiveness for any such act America has committed out of thoughtlessness, ignorance, or poor judgment. Sometimes we make our decisions are flawed, sometimes we have bad apples (and as Abu Gharaib shows, our system allows us to remove them from power when discovered), but we usually try to the the right thing for everybody.