The US is trying to discredit the prisoners who have been released from its notorious Guantanamo Bay prison by leaking a story to US media that some of them worked as spies for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), says Barry Grossman, an international lawyer based in Indonesia.
In the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, the CIA started to use a secret facility known as Penny Lane, just a few hundred yards from the administrative offices at the Guantanamo detention center, to turn a number of inmates into double agents, current and former US officials told the Associated Press.
According to the report, the CIA offered the prisoners millions of dollars from the agency�™s secret bank account, code-named Pledge, in return for them signing contracts to help the US in counter-terrorism operations.
In addition to offering huge amounts of cash, the CIA used other tactics to turn the inmates into spies. For some it was the promise of keeping their families safe and for others the threat of hurting their children.
Some of the information provided by these double agents was used to launch assassination drone strikes on al-Qaeda operatives, an official said. Some prisoners ultimately stopped cooperating with the CIA after they were released, the report said.
Nevertheless, Grossman has questioned the reasons behind leaking such a report to media outlets, saying the report is aimed at discrediting the prisoners who have been released from the notorious US-run prison.
�œThe purpose of leaking this story is to discredit those people who have been released and to set them as targets wherever they turn to,” said Grossman in a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday.
�œThe point of this story, it seems to me, is really for the United States and the CIA and the US military to get at those 600 people who were released from Gitmo in the relevant period by casting doubt over them and by holding them out to the world, after all that they endured at Gitmo whether they deserved it or not, as potentially being back in their homelands helping the CIA to target drone attacks on people in their community,” he added.
ISH/ISH
Source: Press TV