Comments from Participants
“I appreciate very much your efforts on putting highlights on what is happening in Guantanamo and getting witnesses to say what they endured inside Guantanamo and during their trip from wherever they were kidnapped and then sent to Guantanamo. So I appreciate it very much. This gives me the faith that there are still good people in the United States and they are not appreciating what some of the Administration is doing.”
–Khalid Al-Odah
“Thank you for allowing me to tell my story. What the former GTMO detainees on the project said about it being the first time anybody has listened is true: most of the times reporters are only interested in their questions being answered, which invariably have an agenda behind them.”
–Feroz Ali Abbasi
“Thank you, Professor Honigsberg, for your own courage in pursuing an unpopular cause little understood, but the basis for so much hatred. Love does triumph over evil…America can once again be a great nation, so long as we never again permit our worst impulses to be acted upon out of fear.”
–Darrel Vandeveld
“[My] participation in your project is motivated by—let us not allow anybody to commit that kind of deed in the future…It is a kind of contribution of [mine] to the world’s culture, the world’s civilization…Our religion says that if the judgment day comes, and you have in your hand a tree you want to plant, then plant it. Because even the judgment day is not a reason to stop working good deeds.”
–Haj Boudella
“I don’t think that the American public has ever been able to see the Guantanamo detainees as human beings. That…maybe that will be the beauty and the brilliance of this project.”
–Erwin Chemerinsky
“There’s something that I have never spoken to anybody, not to attorneys, not to any reporters. This is something that I kept to myself, never revealed anywhere. But since your project is Witness to Guantanamo, related to everything that people have gone through, their experience in Guantanamo, I think that this is the time that I should speak out about this.”
–Abubakir Qasem
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your attention to all these heartbreaking cases, including John’s.”
–Frank Lindh, father of John Walker Lindh
“All I want to say is thank you very much for visiting France and precisely Bordeaux, and myself, so that I can speak a little about my situation.”
