Savage Declares Innocent Afghans Are Dangerous Terrorists

Once again, Mike Savage’s virulent hatred of Islam gets in the way of reality. In the clip below, taken from Savage’s radio program, the nationally syndicated talk radio host tells his audience that the detainees held at Guantánamo and elsewhere are a threat to America. He warns that if these detainees are put in American prisons — as senator Dianne Feinstein suggests — they will radicalize their fellow prisoners in the jihadi philosophy.

	Savage’s tirade aired on May 22, 2009.

Savage ignores the fact most of the detainees in Gitmo are innocent of any crime. As recently as March, Lawrence Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Associated Press many of the detainees are innocent. Wilkerson learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held. “It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” he said.

“U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.”

Wilkerson said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation because “to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership.”

“In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda,” the New York Times reported on June 21, 2004. “They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization’s inner workings.”

The CIA also questioned the value of the Gitmo detainees, suggesting many of the detainees were not only at best low-level recruits but “innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war,” in other words they happened to live in the country when the United States invaded and attacked the CIA-ISI created Taliban and al-Qaeda.

[efoods]As it turns out, according to military tribunal documents released under an Associated Press FIOA, many of the men currently at Gitmo were sold to the United States for bounties. Many were kidnapped by Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces in Afghanistan. Dostum was a pro-Soviet fighter during the CIA instigated war against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan before changing sides. Dostum’s forces sold the abducted men to the Pakistanis for $5,000 each, and the Pakistanis in turn sold them to the Americans.

In Iraq, the situation was similar, according to intelligence officers, where 70 to 90 percent of detainees were innocent. “A US Army report put together last fall says hundreds of Iraqis were held as ‘security prisoners’ despite a total lack of evidence that they posed a security threat,” The New Standard reported. “Compiled by Major General Donald J. Ryder, the report says American officers refused to authorize the release of prisoners against whom no evidence existed. Some of those inmates were interrogated in the Abu Ghraib facility cellblock where torture was systematically employed by guards, intelligence personnel and mercenaries.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

And yet according to Michael “Savage” Weiner, all of the detainees are al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. Savage has called the Muslim holy book, the Quran, a “book of hate,” and has called for “kill[ing] 100 million” Muslims.

Earlier this month, Savage’s hatred of Muslims resulted in his name being included on British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s list of people barred from entering the country for allegedly fostering extremism or hatred.

In the audio, Savage also declares the hapless dimwits accused of plotting to blow up a synagogue and shoot down military aircraft in New York are dangerous terrorists. In fact, the suspects — three petty criminals and a mentally ill Haitian immigrant — are “all unsophisticated dimwits” induced by the government to engage in terrorism. They were harangued by Shahed Hussain, a former New York state motel owner who became an FBI informant in 2002 to avoid deportation to Pakistan after being arrested on fraud charges.

“Anyone with any smarts knew to stay away from [Hussain],” Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, imam at the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque, told the Times Online. Muhammad said that when Hussain first came to the mosque and started talking about jihad — apparently to identify radical elements for his FBI handlers — several members immediately concluded that he must be a government agent.

Micheal Savage, on the other hand, is apparently unable to distinguish a real terrorist (or one created by the CIA) from a government agent.

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