Friday, October 22, 2010

I was at Guantanamo and know Hicks lies

Yesterday I blogged on the attack launched on convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks and his self-serving book Guantanamo: My Journey by retired US Army Reserve major Montgomery Granger.

Granger served in Guantanamo and said Hicks was infamous there for “threatening to kill an American”:
David Hicks was there when I was there - he threatened and abused guards, and this is in my book...He’s an al-Qaida-trained terrorist mercenary, and will try and pose himself as an innocent victim of circumstance. His book will be lies.
He now writes to us in response to readers’ comments yesterday:
To be clear, my book, “Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior,” was published in April, 2010.  Second, it is a journal I kept while at Gitmo in 2002, framed by some of my opinions and some facts.  As a journal, it is full of very personal thoughts and feelings never intended for public eyes when written. 

Am I proud of everthing I thought and felt while at Gitmo?  No. 

Am I proud of the way I and 99.9% of my colleagues performed our duties for the care and treatment of the detainees?  Absolutely. 

In it for the money?  Not hardly. 

They say your first book is a book of passion, and your second book is the one that makes money.  I get about .50 cents per copy sold.

I wrote the book because I became angry and finally fed up with distorted depictions of what goes on at Gitmo.  I knew better and wanted to get the real story out there for those who might benefit from it, namely, U.S. military and their families, who are the target audience for the book.

Although I have only read excerpts from David Hicks’ book, they were enough to remind me that the resistance and disruption training Hicks received as an al Qaeda fighter, including the mantra: “tell lies about how you are treated,” is still alive and well in his psyche.  The things he tells in the excerpts about how he was treated are untrue.  One of my main jobs at Gitmo was to ensure U.S. Army, Department of Defense, and Geneva Convention procedures, regulations, and laws were upheld to the very highest standard, and indeed they were, with very few minor exceptions.

I don’t know how much David Hicks might make on the book, but I assure you that Random House, AUS will make the lion’s share, and I think all of it should go to victims of terror, and to the Australian and U.S. governments to cover the cost of David Hicks incarceration.

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