We sort of hate to swipe two BoingBoing items in one day, but this second one is worth it. William Teesdale, an attorney with the Federal Public Defender's Office in Portland, Ore., has been seeking the release of a Guantanamo Bay detainee. Frustrated with the, shall we neutrally say, unorthodox and complicated nature of the uncharged and untried inmates being held indefinitely and unpleasantly there, he has turned to YouTube to get the message out about his client.
Through a Web site called ProjectHamad.org, Teesdale has released a short documentary video in which, on a beach in Guantanamo bay, he explains that hospital worker and teacher Adel Hamad has been held for years in detention and denied release even after a member of the military tribunal reviewing his case called his incarceration “unconscionable.” The video includes interviews with Hamad’s coworkers from Afghanistan, where he’d worked for a hospital supported by a charity that the CIA seems to think might have counter-American ideals.
The video has also been posted to the wildly popular YouTube site. The soft-spoken Teesdale is hoping the video, "Guantanamo Unclassifed," gets enough attention to force a closer and more just look at Hamad’s case. In extraordinary circumstances, it’s an unusual mood, and it underscores both the dead ends lawyers have run into against the Administration on detainee issues and the nature of the Internet — as government gets more monolithic, the Internet is increasingly populist. Whether that’s enough to get a fair hearing for Pakistani man kidnapped to Cuba remains to be seen.
— Brian McDonough
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