Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
A remarkable eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad. The 5-part investigative series is reported by Tom Lasseter.
Links to the full articles are provided below and I strongly recommend that you read the full articles. McClatchy has posted numerous related reports, video diaries and an archive of documents reviewed in its investigation for this series at its web site www.mcclatchydc.com. It is a compendium of the war crimes of the Bush administration. Highlighted snippets from the 5-part investigative series follows below.
Contact your television and newspaper editors and demand that they report this remakable piece of investigative journalism.
Part 1
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/15/2008 | America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
* * *
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three
continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and,
according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has
wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis
of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty
payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local
officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate
knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed
thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other
records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were
low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary
criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan
government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local
officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the
United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom
they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and
interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way
stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
Much more after the Continuation…
Part 1 (Cont.)
* * *
The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies
fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who
went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a
school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
* * *
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special
rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal
court challenge, it’s impossible to know how many of the 770 men who’ve
been held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy
combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva
Conventions’ protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and
Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration’s attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to
contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress
forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these
petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive
judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the
court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy
and two acts of Congress that codified it.
* * *
McClatchy’s interviews are the most ever conducted with former
Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee
backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but
not as comprehensively.
* * *
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration
officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center
that many of the prisoners there weren’t "the worst of the worst." From
the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of
the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the
population didn’t belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence
indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with
militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were
Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or
adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al
Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any
terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any
indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and
defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the
prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were
of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
* * *
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the
secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy’s findings. The
defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson,
refused to speak with McClatchy.
* * *
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said
McClatchy’s conclusions squared with their own observations.
* * *
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at
Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials
that many of them didn’t belong there, a former White House official
said.
Despite the analyst’s findings, the administration made no further
review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that
all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group
of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called
themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the
administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with
few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed
President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international
treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited
detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend
themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council
members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution
for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and
in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees
spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on
prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
* * *
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six
detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who’ve been at
Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks;
they dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in
question after the high court’s ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
Part 2
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/16/2008 | U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases
U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases
* * *
Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram
was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting
in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious
punishment.
The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on
detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at
Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at
Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.
* * *
The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse
that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been
reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times,
which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the
mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo,
hasn’t previously been revealed.
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al
Qaida’s 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees
had little or no connection to al Qaida.
Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten
regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy
interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them.
Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.
Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing
the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops
have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and
no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two
detainees who died after American guards beat them.
In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S.
detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former
detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with
U.S. soldiers who’d served as detention camp guards and reviewed
thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights
reports.
The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee
treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration
official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss
McClatchy’s findings.
The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy
investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles
outside Kabul. The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the
summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used
techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale
abuses.
* * *
The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers
beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they
hung by their wrists.
Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He’d been
hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and
had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the
Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.
* * *
The only American officer who’s been reprimanded for the deaths of
Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring, who commanded
the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring
of 2003.
* * *
[T]he charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand.
* * *
The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand,
admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in
the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.
Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to
private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting
and maiming Dilawar.
* * *
Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at
Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was
uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the
detainees." He didn’t go into detail.
"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.
Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down
on detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry
over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
* * *
The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said,
may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of
war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of
detainees.
The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.
At Bagram, however, the rules didn’t apply. In February 2002,
President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida
detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva
protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum
standard for humane treatment.
* * *
Bush’s order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such
rules under the military’s basic law, the Uniform Code of Military
Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that
troops on the ground didn’t know what was allowed.
In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration
created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more
likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
* * *
In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war
crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.
* * *
Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this
article. In response to a series of questions and interview requests,
Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:
"The Department of Defense policy is clear — we treat all detainees
humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional
detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this
country."
No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.
* * *
A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal —
known as the "Fay-Jones Report" for the two generals who authored it —
found that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence
personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of
detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or
participated in abuse themselves.
The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.
Part 3
Militants found recruits among Guantanamo’s wrongly detained
* * *
A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.
Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.
The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.
* * *
In a classified 2005 review of 35 detainees released from Guantanamo, Pakistani police intelligence concluded that the men — the majority of whom had been subjected to "severe mental and physical torture," according to the report — had "extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA."
* * *
In interviews, former U.S. Defense Department officials acknowledged the problem, but none of them would speak about it openly because of its implications: U.S. officials mistakenly sent a lot of men who weren’t hardened terrorists to Guantanamo, but by the time they were released, some of them had become just that.
Requests for comment from senior Defense Department officials went unanswered. The Pentagon official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, declined interview requests even after she was given a list of questions.
However, dozens of former detainees, many of whom were reluctant to talk for fear of being branded as spies by the militants, described a network — at times fragmented, and at times startling in its sophistication — that allowed Islamist radicals to gain power inside Guantanamo.
* * *
American officials tried to stop detainees from turning Guantanamo into what some former U.S. officials have since called an "American madrassa" — an Islamic religious school — but some of their efforts backfired.
The original Guantanamo camp, Camp X-Ray, was little more than a collection of wire mesh cells in which detainees were grouped together without much concern for their backgrounds.
In April 2002, U.S. officials shifted the detainees to Camp Delta, which grew to include a series of camps organized by security level.
* * *
The idea was that detainees who presented graver threats and were uncooperative would be separated from those with looser ties to international terrorism.
* * *
"The communications network there is like the communications network in any jail," Stimson said. "When Americans are in captivity, they respect rank. … I suspect it’s no different down there."
Buzby, the Guantanamo commander, said that he, too, suspected that information flowed freely between militant leaders and their men at Guantanamo’s camps.
"It would be foolish to not believe that there is a hierarchy of information being passed up and down the chain of command," Buzby said.
Part 4
Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret
The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn’t the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.
It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.
The Supreme Court now has struck down many of their legal interpretations. It ruled last Thursday that preventing detainees from challenging their detention in federal courts was unconstitutional.
The quintet of lawyers, who called themselves the “War Council," drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.
* * *
The international conventions that the United States helped draft, and to which it’s a party, were abandoned in secret meetings among the five men in one another’s offices. No one in the War Council has publicly described the group’s activities in any detail, and only some of their opinions and memorandums have been made public.
* * *
Only one of the five War Council lawyers remains in office: David Addington, the brilliant but abrasive longtime legal adviser and now chief of staff to Cheney. His primary motive, according to several former administration and defense officials, was to push for an expansion of presidential power that Congress or the courts couldn’t check.
Alberto Gonzales, first the White House counsel and then the attorney general, resigned last August amid allegations of perjury related to congressional hearings about the firings of U.S. attorneys.
The Defense Department in February abruptly announced the resignation of William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel, amid sharp public criticism by military lawyers that he failed to ensure a just system of detainee trials at Guantanamo.
Even some conservatives have condemned former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo for what many called sloppy legal work in drafting key memorandums about detention policy. He’s now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
The last and least known member of the group, Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy to Gonzales, withdrew his nomination to be deputy attorney general in 2005 amid mounting questions in the Senate about his role in drafting the administration’s legal definition of torture and other issues.
All five refused to answer questions from McClatchy for this story. Only Flanigan gave a reason, saying that he doesn’t discuss past clients, in this case the U.S. government. Yoo previously has denied any connection between his work and detainee abuse.
The quintet did more than condone harsh treatment, however. It created an environment in which it was nearly impossible to prosecute soldiers or officials for alleged crimes committed in U.S. detention facilities.
* * *
The U.S. said it was continuing to follow the rule of law but at the same time it sidestepped any international treaties that could create problems for soldiers or officials, said Rodley, a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee.
The legal architecture, he said, hinged on the notion that "The treaties that were relevant to U.S. criminal law were not relevant. That was the trick."
The administration, in other words, set out to circumvent any law that might have restricted Bush’s detainee and interrogation programs.
A handful of legal opinions opened the way to the abuses documented in McClatchy’s investigation.
* * *
"In wartime, it is for the president alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy," [John] Yoo wrote.
Now it appears that reinterpreting the law to lift legal protections for detainees could backfire. On May 13, the Pentagon announced that it was dropping all charges against Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi man held in Guantanamo who’s accused of planning to take part in the 9-11 attacks as the "20th hijacker."
* * *
The five lawyers on the War Council met every few weeks behind closed doors in Gonzales’ or Haynes’ office to plot legal strategy, according to Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department lawyer.
Several other former U.S. officials confirmed that the group was the driving force for White House policy on detainees.
Fears of future prosecution motivated many officials in the administration, Goldsmith said in his book "The Terror Presidency," published last year. The five lawyers saw legal opinions drafted by Yoo and others in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as a shield, Goldsmith wrote, that would make it hard to convict someone of acting on legal advice from the premier legal office in the administration.
* * *
The military’s lawyers were among those who were most concerned about what the new policies would mean for soldiers in the field.
Though not well known to the public, the Judge Advocate General’s corps prides itself on defending the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military’s law book, which demands strict discipline and moral behavior in wartime. The legal officers are fond of saying that military commanders can depend on two people for honest advice: their chaplains and their JAG lawyers.
The military legal community complained, to little avail, that the policies hatched with the consent of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were replacing decades of U.S. military policy on handling detainees.
When they protested, the War Council shut them out.
* * *
"John Yoo wanted to use military commissions in the manner they were used in the Indian wars," Romig said. "I looked at him and said, ‘You know, that was 100-and-something years ago. You’re out of your mind; we’re talking about the law.’ "
The military commissions that the U.S. used against Native Americans during the mid-19th century were often ad hoc and frequently resulted in natives being hanged or shot.
"As they viewed it, due process is legal mumbo jumbo," said Romig, who’s now the dean of Washburn University’s law school. "They wanted to get them, get the facts and convict them. … If you’re caught as a terrorist, you’re presumed guilty and you have to prove you’re innocent. It was crazy."
When Romig objected to pushing the boundaries of interrogation procedures during meetings in late 2002 or early 2003, he recalled that civilian defense officials replied that the time for law had passed.
* * *
Romig said that he and other military officers asked, "Do you realize the implications of what you’re saying?"
Like many in the military, Romig doubted the quality of intelligence gathered by physical coercion.
* * *
In June 2006, over the objections of the White House, the Supreme Court ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions was applicable to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Four months later, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which said that no foreign unlawful combatant subject to trial by military commission could invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights, and that no U.S. court or judge has jurisdiction to hear cases in which such detainees contest their incarceration.
The bill also rewrote part of the U.S. legal code on war crimes, changing the definition of a war crime from conduct that "constitutes a violation of Common Article 3" to the much higher standard of "a grave breach of Common Article 3."
Within that new definition, it excluded "pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions," meaning harsh treatment that’s allowed by the Bush administration’s legal interpretations.
Among those whom Bush thanked at a bill-signing ceremony were Cheney — Addington’s main backer in the White House — and Gonzales.
Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees have the right to challenge their detention before federal judges, striking down that section of the Military Commissions Act. The 5-4 decision said the law applied to everyone: "From an early date it was understood that the king, too, was subject to the law."
The policies hatched in the offices of Gonzales, Addington and Haynes muddied decades of U.S. military policy on handling detainees.
Part 5
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/19/2008 | Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo
Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo
When U.S. guards frog-marched Abdul Salam Zaeef through the cellblocks of Guantanamo, 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.
* * *
[F]rom mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo 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.
* * *
Zaeef wasn’t like many of the other prisoners whom the U.S. and its Afghan allies had swept up. A few years earlier, he’d flown into the Kandahar Airfield as a senior government official. Now he was there as a prisoner.
* * *
Wahid Mujdah, a former Taliban diplomat, said Zaeef was "very, very close" to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "who had a lot of confidence in him."
As Zaeef told a reporter: "I did not join the Taliban, I helped start it."
* * *
The rules at Guantanamo, Zaeef said, reminded him of Bagram. The men weren’t supposed to talk in their cells. They were supposed to say "please" and "sir" when they addressed the guards. In Guantanamo, however, the guards weren’t beating the men, he said, and prisoners could speak up.
"After a month, we decided we could not accept these extremist measures. We must react," Zaeef said. "So we began shouting to each other. The soldiers came and asked if we were talking to each other. We said, ‘Yes, we are not dogs.’ We began throwing water at them, spitting at them; we said, ‘If you want to kill us, fine.’ "
A high-ranking officer came and spoke to the detainees, Zaeef said. The rules were rescinded. It was a victory in a game of inches.
* * *
In a way, Zaeef said, he was encouraged by what he saw. Interrogators raised their voices from time to time, but they never hit him. Detainees were able to pass messages from one end of a cellblock to the other, and to call out greetings and reports of their last interrogations, none of which the guards could understand.
Slowly, Zaeef realized that it was the sort of place where a man could wage a campaign.
* * *
Zaeef joined a small group of Taliban and al Qaida leaders who were issuing orders and gathering reports; because he spoke fluent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, he could serve as a conduit among Arab, Pakistani and Afghan detainees. His English gave him further power, allowing him to represent those groups in conversations with U.S. military officers.
"We chose the leaders of the blocks," Zaeef said. "If the detainees had any problems, they had to speak with the block leader, who would talk with the block NCO" — the senior enlisted military-police soldier on duty — "and if they could not resolve the issue, they would send a message to us, the leaders of the camp."
U.S. military officers at Guantanamo acknowledged that detainees organized themselves into groups.
* * *
Cellblock leaders began spreading messages to the men around them: We must not tolerate these conditions; it’s time for a hunger strike. Rumors that guards had mistreated the Quran often accompanied the messages.
Zaeef claimed to a reporter that he’d witnessed several instances of Quran abuse. However, an Afghan former detainee who was at Guantanamo said the stories that Zaeef and others spread — such as soldiers stomping on a Quran — were lies.
The hunger strikes were reported all over the world.
* * *
Men such as Zaeef responded by growing more assertive. They wanted more than small wins.
In June 2005, detainees at Guantanamo staged their biggest hunger strike yet: As many as 100 men refused to eat.
* * *
Zaeef was released that September.
He’s been home for more than two years now, under house arrest by the Afghan government, which relaxes and tightens its control according to his public remarks. Calling on a radio program for the Taliban to regain at least part of their ruling power, for instance, meant that he wasn’t permitted to receive visitors for several weeks.
* * *
Asked whether his time at Guantanamo had changed him, Zaeef said that it only further convinced him that America was the enemy of Islam.
He gets regular news reports about the Taliban’s brutal campaign to reassert itself in southern Afghanistan.
So, as he did for more than 1,000 days in Guantanamo, he sits and waits for his next chance at power.
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