Government's Decision To Accept Guatemalan Terror Detainees A Badone

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp was establishment in January 2002 to interrogate detainees and if found guilty, prosecute them for war crimes. This act met with heavy backlash across the world because the Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions which afford some basic rights of wartime prisoners.

President Obama during his campaign in 2008 made the promise to close down that camp because of the stories that emanated from the camp was putting America in a bad light. He tried several times without a success. Now the Congress have given the green light to transfer the prisoners in order for them to close down the facility. Before that, they passed the Defense Policy Bill which includes a provision that bans any movement of the detainees to the United States.

I was terrified when I saw the press release by the Foreign Affairs ministry that they have accepted the request of the US Government, to give shelter to two detainees of Yemeni origin who were detained in Guantanamo without consulting the good people of this country first. We are told that the duo Yemeni Mahmud Umar Muhammad bin Atef and Khalid Muhammad Salih al-Dhuby will settle in Ghana for two years.

I know the bedrock every foreign policy action of a state is it's national interest. Now the question is, what do we have to achieve as a nation for housing these alleged terror detainees?

These two people are Yemenis who went to Afghanistan to fight and they were caught and sent to Guatemala bay. According to military records, Mahmoud Omar Bin Atef is a Yemeni citizen born in Saudi Arabia in 1979 and was handed over to the US following his capture by Northern Alliance Forces in Afghanistan in 2001. US official documents say Khalid al-Dhuby was born in Saudi Arabia in 1981 and travelled to Afghanistan to fight.

With these track records, no one can convince me that they have been cleared of any involvement in terrorist activities. It is simply to help president Obama fulfil his promise and eventually close down the facility.

If United States with all their weapons of mass destruction and other missiles are afraid to harbour such people, why should Ghana do that? Countries that accepted such people have a very potent security apparatus. We live in a country where pickpockets can break jail and escape.

Government should have consulted the people of Ghana through their parliamentarians before accepting to grant the United States request.

We are watching...

Awal Mohammed

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