Spencer Ackerman: Wages Of Sin, We Keep Paying

a href="http://thinkprogress.org/attackerman/2008/05/08/thenextzawahiricomesfromgtmo/">Attackerman - Commentary of Spencer Ackerman » Wages Of Sin, We Keep Paying: There once was an Islamic extremist who was radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Egyptian peace treaty with Israel. After the assassination of Anwar Sadat — in which his role was, at most, peripheral — he was arrested by the Egyptian security forces and tortured extensively. From then on, his course was clear: it was death to the enemies of Islam, and he appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. Torture will do that to you.

Last month, someone detained for three years in Guantanamo Bay before his 2005 release was part of a suicide bomb attack in Mosul. Abdullah Salim Ali al-Ajmi was a Kuwaiti. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Ajmi is one of several former Guantánamo detainees believed to have returned to combatant status, said another American military spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon. “Some have subsequently been killed in combat and participated in suicide bomber attacks,” he said.

Note the verb returned. I don’t have any additional information on Ajmi. But the Times says he was picked up in Afghanistan in 2002 — when we were paying Northern Alliance warlords for anyone they gave us who they said was al-Qaeda, and when our intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan was ad hoc and meager. Ajmi, obviously, was never charged with anything, and his release in 2005 is a de facto admission that he probably never belonged there in the first place.

In other words, a strong prima facie case can be made that Ajmi didn’t “return” to the battlefield. The experience of being hooded and goggled and flown half a world away in the belly of a C-130; of being caged under the hot sun in the chain-link-and-wood sarcophagus of Camp X-Ray and then the panopticon of Camp Delta — and I have seen it with my own eyes; of being always at the mercy of the Quick Reaction Force and the Joint Detentions Operations Group and the interrogators; and never having a clear and open and fair path to argue for your freedom for years — that is the sort of thing that makes a man plot revenge. To deny that is to deny human nature.

I’m not saying Ajmi was an innocent. I’m not saying Guantanamo gave him a license to murder. And I’m certainly not saying that his victims deserved to die because he spent three years in Guantanamo.

What I’m saying is that a completely forseeable consequence of Guantanamo Bay is the creation of terrorists. Or, to be more nuanced, arbitrary and indefinite detention, which in itself is torture, is the sort of thing that makes a person already angry at the western world and willing to maybe help the Taliban out on a thing or two decide: That’s it: ain’t no half stepping. No sleep till suicide bomb. How do we know this? It’s the story of Ayman al-Zawahiri.