PDA

View Full Version : WaPo on Gitmo Detainee Who Returned to Jihad: Was It Gitmo’s Fault?



red states rule
02-23-2009, 09:38 AM
In the liberal world, it is always the fault of the US that terrorists become terrorists


From Captive To Suicide Bomber

Accused of Being Little More Than a Low-Level Taliban Fighter, Abdallah al-Ajmi Was Held by the U.S. for Nearly Four Years. After His Release, He Blew Up an Iraqi Army Outpost. Did Guantanamo Propel Him to Do It?


By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2009; Page A01

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.

The scraggly beard that his young son once loved to play with had been shaved off, leaving only an exiguous moustache. His curly, shoulder-length locks had been clipped down to a crew cut. Gone, too, were the crisp, white headdress he often wore and any semblance of the good humor once familiar to his family. He was sullen and angry -- still bitter about being locked up for almost four years at the high-security U.S. detention center on the southeastern coast of Cuba.

"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.

The Easter Sunday blast killed 13 Iraqi soldiers, wounded 42 others and left a 30-foot-wide crater in the ground. It remains the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/21/AR2009022101234.html?hpid=topnews