Where Are the Left’s Tears Over Gitmo?
The Abrego Garcia case reveals Democratic hypocrisy in spades.
There are no tears for Ammar al-Baluchi, aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, as there are for Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They both languish in prisons abroad, but only for one does the left weep.
Garcia, the Maryland father (as “his” senator insists on calling him), is an illegal alien who lived illegally in the United States for over a decade. He is a Salvadoran citizen who has been deported from America back to his home country. While in the U.S., Garcia was charged with domestic abuse. He threatened and repeatedly abused his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, according to a protective order she filed in August 2020. The document includes claims that Garcia dragged her out of a vehicle by her hair and left her on the street, smashed her son’s tablet, broke down doors in their house, and pushed her against a wall while breaking TVs and phones.
Garcia also appears to have worked as a human trafficker, driving other illegals from Texas to the Northeast. The left’s immigration martyr either used a fraudulent Social Security number or paid no taxes while illegally in the U.S. He received his due process in 2019, when an immigration judge concluded he was probably a member of the MS-13 gang (based in part on his tattoos and information from a confidential informant) and ordered him deported to anywhere but El Salvador, where he was supposedly under threat from a rival gang. This is the root of his current situation.
The deportation was not effected until 2025, under the Trump administration, which in error sent him back to his home country. There, he was quickly moved from a maximum security facility to a work-based prison with better living circumstances. He has since been visited by a succession of Democratic lawmakers seeking his release back to the U.S. Even his most adamant supporters do not claim he has been tortured or abused in custody. He looked good, dressed in civilian clothes, on national TV.
Protests continue around the U.S. seeking his release, and the Trump administration is under a mild court admonition to get Garcia back. Because of the Garcia case and others like him, many Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous dictator. They worry pointlessly he will not stop with aliens, and soon will ship American citizens off to offshore gulags. Garcia and others are routinely referred to as “disappeared,” even though a large number of Americans, due to incessant media coverage, know his name and recognize his face.
But no one knows the name Ali Abdul Aziz Ali or can picture his face. Ali has been held in Guantanamo for over 20 years for allegedly aiding in the 9/11 attacks (sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers.) He has not been found guilty of any crime. In the latest attempt to convict him of something after two decades of confinement, the military judge deciding the case instead ruled that none of Ali’s confessions could be admitted as evidence. One reason was the prisoner’s statements were obtained through the CIA’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. “However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement—all while being continually questioned and conditioned—is just as egregious” as the physical torture.
Judges in two capital cases at Guantanamo rejected confessions taken from prisoners after they were in CIA detention, illustrating the “enduring stain” of a Bush administration decision to hide suspected members of Al Qaeda in black sites rather than use the court-monitored system in the U.S. From his capture in Pakistan in 2003 to his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006, Ali was kept out of the reach of lawyers, the courts, the media, and the International Red Cross. He was afforded no due process. His confinement began under George W. Bush’s presidency and continued through the presidencies of Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Throughout that time, despite the overt torture and utter lack of due process, no Democratic lawmaker sought to visit Ali, and the only minimal, generic protests over Gitmo took place years ago. (Gitmo has garnered some attention recently when President Trump proposed its use to house deported illegal aliens from the U.S., however.)
Ali was deprived of sleep for 82 hours. He was shackled at the ankles and the wrists and forced to stand, naked, and hooded. He was made to fear he would be drowned via waterboarding. He was shuttled between five overseas prisons, including in Eastern Europe. Food and clothing were given only as rewards for his cooperation with the CIA. He was interrogated over 1,000 times.
“The goal of the program was to condition him through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning,” the judge wrote. “The program worked.”
Why is one man, allegedly deprived of full due process and held abroad, the subject of the left’s anguish, while they remain silent over the same situation, a lack of due process and being held abroad—never mind the torture—for another? Why is one a constitutional crisis driven by an authoritarian, a dictator, and the other an embarrassing bit of forgotten history?
It shows the hypocrisy and emptiness of the left and Democrats. They chose one criminal to glorify and ignored another, the victim of much more heinous treatment. They weep for Garcia because he was sent away by Donald Trump, and ignore Ali. They screech about the rule of law, but then show how easily they will abandon it when it fits with the short-term political needs of hatred for anything Trump does.
None of this is to excuse or downplay the horror of Ali’s alleged crimes. But neither is it to downplay the fact that Garcia also committed crimes against the United States. To say the severity of a crime justifies ignoring torture in one case is simply to say there is no rule of law, and that the rules of a moral society apply only flexibly as partisan politics demand.
Oh wait, that is what the left is saying—efforts to release Garcia have reached the Supreme Court, but Ali’s only hope is for an early death to end the nightmares.
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