Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha was
released today after more than 2-1/2 years of imprisonment by US forces in Iraq. She had never been charged with any crime. Numbered 197 on the list of Most Wanted Iraqis, the press obediently called her "Dr. Germ."
She has been held since May 2003 for creating biological weapons for Saddam Hussein. For more than a year her captors have known that the biological weapons she was accused of creating did not exist. Her imprisonment resulted in at least one beheading.
Lucky Dr. Taha is being released in the nick of time. Under the Graham-Levin-Kyl Amendment quietly passed on Friday, Dr. Taha could be shipped to Guantanamo Bay as an enemy combatant, tortured aggressively interrogated until she confessed to creating the nonexistent weapons, and held there for the rest of her life based on that evidence, with no right to challenge her detention for the first 10 years.
Dr. Taha has always been my favorite prisoner of the Iraq war. Raised in formerly secular Iraq, Ms. Taha got her Ph.D. in biology at Britain's University of East Anglia.
In September of 2004, Iraqi militants - who are routinely accused of opposing women's rights - took hostages and demanded that the US release any Iraqi women being held without charges, and promised to release their own hostages unharmed once the women were set free.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insisted that no such women were being held. However, CNN and other news organizations reported that Dr. Taha was still in prison. Rumsfeld riposted that she was not being held in the prisons named by the terrorists. Pretty clever, eh?
Then British hostage Ken Bigley was beheaded.
We sure taught those terrorists a lesson by waiting to release Dr. Taha until today!
