Well, this sure sounds like some good news…
During his 14-month stay, he went to the beach only a couple of times – a shame, as he loved to snorkel. And though he learned a few words of Spanish, Asadullah had zero contact with the locals.
He spent a typical day watching movies, going to class and playing football. He was fascinated to learn about the solar system, and now enjoys reciting the names of the planets, starting with Earth. Less diverting were the twice-monthly interrogations about his knowledge of al-Qaida and the Taliban. But, as Asadullah’s answer was always the same – “I don’t know anything about these people” – these sessions were merely a bore: an inevitably tedious consequence, Asadullah suggests with a shrug, of being held captive in Guantanamo Bay.
On January 29, Asadullah and two other juvenile prisoners were returned home to Afghanistan. The three boys are not sure of their ages. But, according to the estimate of the Red Cross, Asadullah is the youngest, aged 12 at the time of his arrest. The second youngest, Naqibullah, was arrested with him, aged perhaps 13, while the third boy, Mohammed Ismail, was a child at the time of his separate arrest, but probably isn’t now.
Tracked down to his remote village in south-eastern Afghanistan, Naqibullah has memories of Guantanamo that are almost identical to Asadullah’s. Prison life was good, he said shyly, nervous to be receiving a foreigner to his family’s mud-fortress home.
The food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and his warders were kind. “Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don’t have anything against them,” he said. “If my father didn’t need me, I would want to live in America.”
Asadullah is even more sure of this. “Americans are great people, better than anyone else,” he said, when found at his elder brother’s tiny fruit and nut shop in a muddy backstreet of Kabul. “Americans are polite and friendly when you speak to them. They are not rude like Afghans. If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer _ or an American soldier.”
(emphasis added)
(hat tip to norm’s blog)
A.L.:
WOW! Thanks for scrounging that up for us.
Jeeze, the nightmarish conditions at Gitmo that the ACLU, Amnesty International, et al keep griping about sounds like my vacation in Cancun, except my vacation was shorter and I didn’t get a free education out of it. The food was great, too – but I probably paid more than Asadullah & Naqibullah did for theirs. (And, since one dude in another article recently complained about the music, I had to listen to some bad rap once or twice on my vacation, too).
This is so terrible?
Well, ok, ok: I watched fewer movies and spent more time on the beach, but otherwise. . .
Anyhow, hopefully Asadullah will become an *Afghan* soldier, and help make Afghanistan the kind of place where he and his fellows can live the life and have the kind of opportunities we enjoy. That’d be even better.
I hope I’m not considered too bloodthirsty if I hope that the terrorists at Gitmo (as opposed to those accidentally caught in the net) aren’t having as good a time as this guy had.
or an American soldier
I don’t know whether to laugh or fling up my hands in horror and exclaim, “What have we done??”
😉
I’m guessing the military guys at Gitmo (which, BTW, is where I was born!) probably figured “this poor kid’s brain has been messed up by the Taliban. Let’s set him straight and teach him a little bit about the world.
Result: a kid who would rather admire Americans than kill them.
See if you can get some info on when Bush was forced to work for Project PUSH or Project PULL or pull my finger back in 1973.
Keep up the good work!
By the way, about 9 months ago, before I knew about you and this site, I started calling these kind of blogs, “Wind Defenders.”
Defending the wind, a waste in the wasteland. A noncreative, zero contribution to the world.
I read the whole thing, and have mixed feelings. Glad that the boys were treated well and retain fond memories of their stay.
An the other hand, was there necessary to send these teenagers to a maximum-security prison camp ?
They were already been questioned in Afghanistan, and it was probably already clear that they didn’t know anything of use. Why keeping them for over an year ?
I bet that if the police arrested a 12-old from your neighborhood and kept him in prison for 14 months without charge, there would be uproar.