McClatchy: Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo

[babylonsister]

Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo

By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers



KABUL, Afghanistan — 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.

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.

The Pakistanis handed him over to U.S. troops, who he said threw a sack over his head and pushed him into a helicopter. The Americans flew him to a warship, where he was held for about a week in a small cell that reminded him of a dog kennel, he said.

"I was afraid about what would happen to me," Zaeef said in an interview in Kabul, wearing slightly crooked gold-rimmed glasses and speaking in a near-whisper. "I didn't know if it was a dream or not. I never imagined this would happen to me."

Yet from 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.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38888.html

[leftchick]

1. , Zaeef said that it only further convinced him that America was the enemy of Islam

this is how they keep their war on terra going forever. GITMO is run to keep the 'terrorist' production permanent.

<snip>

The guards overtook him, dragged him off and shaved him. But for Zaeef, that wasn't the point: He'd resisted.

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.