McClatchy News Service Interview
On 15 June 2008 the McClatchy News Service published a series of article based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives. Ilkham Batayev was one of the men they interviewed. The McClatchy report stated that Ilkham Batayev said he couldn't bring himself to talk about his Guantanamo experiences, or how he came to be in Afghanistan.
But the McClatchy report characterized previous reports Ilkham Batayev had offered earlier—to a journalist in 2001, to his Tribunal, and to his lawyer—as inconsistent.
The McClatchy article quoted Ilkham Batayev's lawyer, Thomas R. Johnson Jr., about the credibility of his assertion that fighters in the Uzbekistan Islamic Movement could have kidnapped him, and press-ganged him, into involuntary service in Afghanistan. Johnson thought that the Tribunal officers discounted this part of his story as incredible, because it was outside their experience, and they simply couldn't imagine it was credible, in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Afghanistan:
"He was kept at Guantanamo because U.S. officers at (his tribunal hearing) or the interrogators found this to be an outlandish account. Of course this doesn't happen: People aren't kidnapped and taken to other countries to fight wars."
Read more about this topic: Ilkham Turdbyavich Batayev
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