Binyam Mohamed

"Some press reports have repeated the claim that Mohamed went to Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks for the purpose of kicking his drug habit. This is a flimsy alibi, to say the least. Why would anyone go to the heroin capital of the world to get away from drugs? In fact, there is no doubt that Mohamed traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 to receive training in an al Qaeda camp. Mohamed admitted this to the personal representative assigned to handle his case at Guantánamo. Mohamed did not testify at his hearing at Guantánamo, but his personal representative submitted a memo on his behalf. The memo indicates that Mohamed "admitted items 3A1-4 on the UNCLASS summary of evidence." That is a reference to the unclassified summary-of-evidence memo that was prepared by the US government for Mohamed's case.

The items Mohamed admitted include the following:
         
          1. The detainee is an Ethiopian who lived in the United States from 1992 to 1994, and in London, United Kingdom, until he departed for Pakistan in 2001.

          2. The detainee arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June 2001, and traveled to the al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, to receive paramilitary training.

          3. At the al Farouq camp, the detainee received 40 days of training in light arms handling, explosives, and principles of topography.

          4. The detainee was taught to falsify documents, and received instruction from a senior al Qaeda operative on how to encode telephone numbers before passing them to another individual.

At a minimum, therefore, we know that Mohamed has admitted being an al Qaeda-trained operative.

Mohamed claims that he was not going to use his skills against America. Mohamed told his personal representative that "he went for training to fight in Chechnya, which was not illegal." In 2005, Mohamed's lawyer echoed this explanation in an interview with CNN. "He wanted to see the Taliban with his own eyes," Mohamed's lawyer claimed. "I am not saying he never went to any Islamic camp," the lawyer conceded, but he "didn't go to any camp to blow up Americans."

There are obvious problems with this quasi-denial.

The al Farouq training camp was responsible for training numerous al Qaeda operatives, including some of the September 11 hijackers. Al Qaeda used the al Farouq camp to identify especially promising recruits who could take on sensitive missions. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, this is what happened with members of al Qaeda's infamous Hamburg cell. Some of the future 9/11 suicide pilots also first expressed an interest in fighting in Chechnya, but ended up being assigned a mission inside the United States."

{part of article only}

{blaming anything on Obama concerning this case is absurd, but George W. Bush has very little to do with it either}