The Daily Background

Yet another reason why President Obama’s vow to shut down the illegal Guantanamo Bay internment camp is so important: the Washington Post this morning reports of a case where a formerly mild Taliban detainee who fired his gun only once had been transformed into a vicious killer by the time of his release from the prison.

… 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.
[…]
“Guantanamo took a kid — a kid who wasn’t all that bad — and it turned him into a hostile, hardened individual,” Wilner said.

Despite Ajmi’s protestations of innocence and the investigative summary that noted he had not met anyone with al-Qaeda, the military seemed to be convinced he was a terrorist.

Essentially, they took this guy who everybody agrees now never should have been put into a place like Guantanamo, kept insisting that he was an al-Qaeda terrorist, and what do you know, he turned into one. You know the old saying… If you want something to be true hard enough, be careful what you wish for.

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