Home · Maps · About

view threaded

Gitmo "horror story"

Posted by orange blossom special on Fri Jun 20 18:56:49 2008

When U.S. guards frog-marched Abdul Salam Zaeef through the cellblocks of Guantánamo, detainees would roar his name, "Mullah Zaeef! Mullah Zaeef!"

Zaeef, in shackles, looked at the guards and smiled.

"The soldiers told me, 'You are the king of this prison,' " he later recalled.

Zaeef is the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, famous for his defiant news conferences after 9/11, in which he said the militant Islamist group would never surrender Osama bin Laden.

Pakistani intelligence officers dragged him out of his house in Islamabad in late December 2001 or January 2002 and took him to Peshawar. "Your Excellency, you are no longer Your Excellency," he recalled one of them saying.

Yet from mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Zaeef became a leader again. He helped orchestrate hunger strikes and exploit the missteps of a U.S. detention system that often captured the wrong men, mistreated them, then incarcerated them indefinitely without legal recourse.

The insurgency he helped launch in Guantánamo capitalized on the Americans' ignorance of Islamic customs and a pattern of interrupting prayers, shaving off prisoners' beards and searching their copies of the Quran.

U.S. officials didn't respond to repeated requests for comments about Zaeef's role at the camp, but former detainees from Europe to Central Asia spoke of him with reverence that bordered on hero worship.

"People would scream when they saw him: They said, 'We will send you our prayers,' " said Munir Naseer, a Pakistani.

A Kuwaiti bragged that he once lived in a cell next to Zaeef and touched his hand. An Afghan said that men in his cellblock relied on Zaeef's advice about everything from prayer to protest. A Jordanian said that Zaeef often brokered deals between the American military and angry detainees. A Chinese Uighur called Zaeef the "president of Guantánamo."

Post a New Response