Some of the people rounded up and sent to Gitmo weren’t hard-core terrorists and 9/11 conspirators. Some were low-level soldiers caught up at the beginning of the war. Have we damaged and angered those we release to such an extent that if they weren’t terrorists before, they are now?
A little more than two years after his release from the Guantanamo Bay military prison, Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi knelt in front of a white wall, clutched the upturned barrel of an AK-47 rifle and delivered a message before a video camera. [...] “Praise be unto God, who evacuated me from Guantanamo prison and joined me with the Islamic State of Iraq,” he intoned. As the camera’s light cast an outsize shadow behind his head, he wagged his finger and issued a vow: “We are going, with permission from God, to God — glory be unto him. We will enter the nests of apostasy.”
At 6:15 a.m. on March 23, 2008, not long after making the video, Ajmi drove a pickup truck filled with 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives, hidden in what appeared to be white flour sacks, onto an Iraqi army base outside Mosul. He barreled though the entrance checkpoint and past a fusillade of gunfire from the sentries, shielded by bulletproof glass and makeshift armor welded to the cab.
[...]
Since his death, U.S. intelligence agencies have sought to determine when Ajmi became a hard-core jihadist. Was it in the late 1990s, when he came under the sway of a radical preacher while serving in the Kuwaiti army? Was it in 2001, when he allegedly joined the Taliban? Was it upon his release in 2005, when extremists back home celebrated him as the “Lion of Guantanamo”?Or is the answer potentially more alarming: Was his descent into unrepentant radicalism an unintended consequence of his incarceration?
[...]
As Wilner learned more about Ajmi’s story, he became convinced that he never should have been sent to Guantanamo. “This was a kid who could be nothing more than a lowly foot soldier. He was clearly not a leader or a planner or anything else like that,” the lawyer said. “He struck me as one of the least dangerous people I’d seen at Gitmo.”
“Did Gitmo Create A Suicide Bomber?”
Most likely. It is stupid to be involved with ground wars in Iraq & Afghanistan.
This example makes a strong case to never let those in gitmo free.
You can even take it as far as if they are now destined to become suicide bombers, killing others as well as themselves why not just eliminate the one before he has a chance to eliminate the innocent many.
Every Gitmo prisoner should be rendered into a grease-spot. Let Allah sort them out.
How many neirons do I have to lose in order to make this story worthy of something?
Maybe we should bury this tragedy in our history. Not to preserve Pedro’s neirons (whatever the hell that is) but rather to pretend this never happened
We can repent decades from now. It works so well for the Catholic Church.
What do people expect? Torture is designed to radicalize an enemy, not to glean information.
IF they released this guy, why the hell weren’t they keeping tabs on him? US intelligence sucks. The CIA has a budget so huge they have to keep it a secret, but they can’t even follow this dirt bag.
I’ll bet the Isrealis don’t lose track of the palestinians they realease. Don’t fool yourselves, the Iraqis and the Afghans want us out. Either repress these people properly or leave them the hell alone.
One of the officers from Gitmo stated when interviewed something to the effect that, “If they weren’t terrorists when they got here, they probably will be if they ever leave.”
No kidding? You mean unjust treatment sometimes brings about such things?
#6 Agreed. At least one John McCain also agrees.
Nov 2005- “The people in this world that suffer more threats from terrorist attacks and get them every day are the Israelis,” McCain said Monday on NBC’s “Today” show. “The Israeli Supreme Court outlawed torture, outlawed cruel and inhumane treatment. And I have talked to Israeli officials, and they say they do very fine without it.”
Bush and cronies effectively stirred a hornets nest in the middle east with consequences we will pay for decades to come. The answer now is to bury it and perhaps that indeed is the answer.
# 9 Dallas said, “Bush and cronies effectively stirred a hornets nest in the middle east with consequences we will pay for decades to come.”
I know. And now Omama is saying that detainees outside the US don’t have constitutional rights. Continuing the same court arguments as BushCo. Is there something in the water at the White House?
As american prisons create better quality felons, our detainee prisons create new and better quality terrorists.
Total genius this Bush was, take someone off the streets, put him in prison with real terrorists, expose him to extremism, torture him, and give him all the more reason to make the leap to full blown terrorist idealogy.
#10 I believe the President of the United States is called President Obama.
Any policy that President Obama sees fit to cope with the disaster he inherited is something I’m confident in.
“Human rights cannot interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises,” Hillary Clinton said
I think the U.S. Gov’t continues to sink into the toilet. Moral high ground?
“Some of the people rounded up and sent to Gitmo weren’t hard-core terrorists and 9/11 conspirators. Some were low-level soldiers caught up at the beginning of the war.”
Soft core terrorists are still terrorists !
If somebody held me in prison without habeus corpus or legal representation and then tortured me I would be their enemy for life, if I ever got free. I would never cease my efforts to cleanse the world of the kind of evil monsters who would do such a thing.
What we did in response to 9/11/01 violated all our American principles of freedom and individual rights, and showed the world we don’t believe in any of them.
It’s sad to think a couple dozen dirty rag heads showed the world we are nothing but cowardly hypocrites who abandon their supposedly strongly held beliefs for the illusion of safety.
As Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both said “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”
Grow a spine people. The ideas that our nation was founded on are still good, it is ourselves that have become weak and deluded. How else can you explain our devolution to a people who think torture is OK.
I have absolutely no sympathy for a solider that was trained to kill people but “now” wants to move “up” to being a suicide bomber because he thinks he was tortured. Should we release murders and thieves that commit the same crime once they get out of prison because prison was so nasty? If these people were “lowly foot soldiers” and were tortured then let their government speak up for them and we’ll see if we can do something. What? They weren’t fighting for a country or government? There is no one to represent them? Well, then they choose their profession and their employer poorly.
We should put out the word that we are all for helping suicide terrorists finish their work. Let’s just do it with no casualties beyond the guys that want to commit suicide. We’ll get them all together and they can blow themselves up and other suicide bombers if they want. We could even show them a video of the 70 virgins they might expect once their finish killing themselves.
False cause fallacy, what is more likely is he belonged at Gitmo, and kept that fact secret.
What prison can turn someone into a suicide bomber, killing folks outside of prison, who didn’t imprison you?
Clearly the reasons for his acts were not caused by Gitmo and his actions an argument against gullible acceptance of their claims of innocence.
I imagine this guy consumed with hate, and probrably for lots of reasons. Seen from his point of view I imagine the people of the US must seem like invading demons from hell. I wonder if I could’ve lived his life and behaived any differently.
The universal context is a continous test of values at all levels. That which is meant to persevere will. Let’s hope the values reflected in our actions will permit our survival, and not contribute to our demise.
Indeed, the American news media is rife with stories of men, convicted of murder or rape and imprisoned long ago, being exonerated and released based on DNA evidence, only to see them go on to actually become rapists and murderers. Clearly it’s the system that corrupted them.
#10 I have been left wondering the same thing. Perhaps so many are guilty of war crimes in our government that Obama worries that he won’t have enough people left to run things if they all go to the Hague. . .