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The Guard Who Found Islam at Guantanamo	Firoz (Abu Usamah)
	Apr 07, 2009 09:13 PDT

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The Guard Who Found Islam
ref: http://www.newsweek.com/id/190357

Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks had been a guard at Guantánamo for
about six months the night he had his life-altering conversation with
detainee 590, a Moroccan also known as "the General." This was early
2004, about halfway through Holdbrooks's stint at Guantánamo with the
463rd Military Police Company. Until then, he'd spent most of his day
shifts just doing his duty. He'd escort prisoners to interrogations or
walk up and down the cellblock making sure they weren't passing notes.
But the midnight shifts were slow. "The only thing you really had to do
was mop the center floor," he says. So Holdbrooks began spending part of
the night sitting cross-legged on the ground, talking to detainees
through the metal mesh of their cell doors.

He developed a strong relationship with the General, whose real name is
Ahmed Errachidi. Their late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to be
more skeptical about the prison, he says, and made him think harder
about his own life. Soon, Holdbrooks was ordering books on Arabic and
Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in early 2004, the
conversation turned to the shahada, the one-line statement of faith that
marks the single requirement for converting to Islam ("There is no God
but God and Muhammad is his prophet"). Holdbrooks pushed a pen and an
index card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi to write out the
shahada in English and transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the words
aloud and, there on the floor of Guantánamo's Camp Delta, became a
Muslim.

When historians look back on Guantánamo, the harsh treatment of
detainees and the trampling of due process will likely dominate the
narrative. Holdbrooks, who left the military in 2005, saw his share. In
interviews over recent weeks, he and another former guard told NEWSWEEK
about degrading and sometimes sadistic acts against prisoners committed
by soldiers, medics and interrogators who wanted revenge for the 9/11
attacks on America. But as the fog of secrecy slowly lifts from
Guantánamo, other scenes are starting to emerge as well, including
surprising interactions between guards and detainees on subjects like
politics, religion and even music. The exchanges reveal curiosity on
both sides—sometimes even empathy. "The detainees used to have
conversations with the guards who showed some common respect toward
them," says Errachidi, who spent five years in Guantánamo and was
released in 2007. "We talked about everything, normal things, and things
[we had] in common," he wrote to NEWSWEEK in an e-mail from his home in
Morocco.

Holdbrooks's level of identification with the other side was
exceptional. No other guard has volunteered that he embraced Islam at
the prison (though Errachidi says others expressed interest). His
experience runs counter to academic studies, which show that guards and
inmates at ordinary prisons tend to develop mutual hostility. But then,
Holdbrooks is a contrarian by nature. He can also be conspiratorial.
When his company visited the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York,
Holdbrooks remembers thinking there had to be a broader explanation, and
that the Bush administration must have colluded somehow in the plot.

But his misgivings about Guantánamo—including doubts that the detainees
were the "worst of the worst"—were shared by other guards as early as
2002. A few such guards are coming forward for the first time.
Specialist Brandon Neely, who was at Guantánamo when the first detainees
arrived that year, says his enthusiasm for the mission soured quickly.
"There were a couple of us guards who asked ourselves why these guys are
being treated so badly and if they're actually terrorists at all," he
told NEWSWEEK. Neely remembers having long conversations with detainee
Ruhal Ahmed, who loved Eminem and James Bond and would often rap or sing
to the other prisoners. Another former guard, Christopher Arendt, went
on a speaking tour with former detainees in Europe earlier this year to
talk critically about the prison.

Holdbrooks says growing up hard in Phoenix—his parents were junkies and
he himself was a heavy drinker before joining the military in 2002—helps
explain what he calls his "anti-everything views." He has holes the size
of quarters in both earlobes, stretched-out piercings that he plugs with
wooden discs. At his Phoenix apartment, bedecked with horror-film
memorabilia, he rolls up both sleeves to reveal wrist-to-shoulder
tattoos. He describes the ink work as a narrative of his mistakes and
addictions. They include religious symbols and Nazi SS bolts, track
marks and, in large letters, the words BY DEMONS BE DRIVEN. He says the
line, from a heavy-metal song, reminds him to be a better person.

Holdbrooks—TJ to his friends—says he joined the military to avoid
winding up like his parents. He was an impulsive young man searching for
stability. On his first home leave, he got engaged to a woman he'd known
for just eight days and married her three months later. With little
prior exposure to religion, Holdbrooks was struck at Gitmo by the
devotion detainees showed to their faith. "A lot of Americans have
abandoned God, but even in this place, [the detainees] were determined
to pray," he says.

Holdbrooks was also taken by the prisoners' resourcefulness. He says
detainees would pluck individual threads from their jumpsuits or prayer
mats and spin them into long stretches of twine, which they would use to
pass notes from cell to cell. He noticed that one detainee with a bad
skin rash would smear peanut butter on his windowsill until the oil
separated from the paste, then would use the oil on his rash.

Errachidi's detention seemed particularly suspect to Holdbrooks. The
Moroccan detainee had worked as a chef in Britain for almost 18 years
and spoke fluent English. He told Holdbrooks he had traveled to Pakistan
on a business venture in late September 2001 to help pay for his son's
surgery. When he crossed into Afghanistan, he said, he was picked up by
the Northern Alliance and sold to American troops for $5,000. At
Guantánamo, Errachidi was accused of attending a Qaeda training camp.
But a 2007 investigation by the London Times newspaper appears to have
corroborated his story; it eventually helped lead to his release.

In prison, Errachidi was an agitator. "Because I spoke English, I was
always in the face of the soldiers," he wrote NEWSWEEK in an e-mail.
Errachidi said an American colonel at Guantánamo gave him his nickname,
and warned him that generals "get hurt" if they don't cooperate. He said
his defiance cost him 23 days of abuse, including sleep deprivation,
exposure to very cold temperatures and being shackled in stress
positions. "I always believed the soldiers were doing illegal stuff and
I was not ready to keep quiet." (Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon
spokesman, said in response: "Detainees have often made claims of abuse
that are simply not supported by the facts.") The Moroccan spent four of
his five years at Gitmo in the punishment block, where detainees were
denied "comfort items" like paper and prayer beads along with access to
the recreation yard and the library.

Errachidi says he does not remember details of the night Holdbrooks
converted. Over the years, he says, he discussed a range of religious
topics with guards: "I spoke to them about subjects like Father
Christmas and Ishac and Ibrahim [Isaac and Abraham] and the sacrifice.
About Jesus." Holdbrooks recalls that when he announced he wanted to
embrace Islam, Errachidi warned him that converting would be a serious
undertaking and, at Guantánamo, a messy affair. "He wanted to make sure
I knew what I was getting myself into." Holdbrooks later told his two
roommates about the conversion, and no one else.

But other guards noticed changes in him. They heard detainees calling
him Mustapha, and saw that Holdbrooks was studying Arabic openly. (At
his Phoenix apartment, he displays the books he had amassed. They
include a leather-bound, six-volume set of Muslim sacred texts and "The
Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam.") One night his squad
leader took him to a yard behind his living quarters, where five guards
were waiting to stage a kind of intervention. "They started yelling at
me," he recalls, "asking if I was a traitor, if I was switching sides."
At one point a squad leader pulled back his fist and the two men traded
blows, Holdbrooks says.

Holdbrooks spent the rest of his time at Guantánamo mainly keeping to
himself, and nobody bothered him further. Another Muslim who served
there around the same time had a different experience. Capt. James Yee,
a Gitmo chaplain for much of 2003, was arrested in September of that
year on suspicion of aiding the enemy and other crimes—charges that were
eventually dropped. Yee had become a Muslim years earlier. He says the
Muslims on staff at Gitmo—mainly translators—often felt beleaguered.
"There was an overall atmosphere by the command to vilify Islam."
(Commander Gordon's response: "We strongly disagree with the assertions
made by Chaplain Yee").

At Holdbrooks's next station, in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he says things
began to unravel. The only place to kill time within miles of the base
was a Wal-Mart and two strip clubs—Big Daddy's and Big Louie's. "I've
never been a fan of strip clubs, so I hung out at Wal-Mart," he says.
Within months, Holdbrooks was released from the military—two years
before the end of his commitment. The Army gave him an honorable
discharge with no explanation, but the events at Gitmo seemed to loom
over the decision. The Army said it would not comment on the matter.

Back in Phoenix, Holdbrooks returned to drinking, in part to suppress
what he describes as the anger that consumed him. (Neely, the other
ex-guard who spoke to NEWSWEEK, said Guantánamo had made him so
depressed he spent up to $60 a day on alcohol during a monthlong leave
from the detention center in 2002.) Holdbrooks divorced his wife and
spiraled further. Eventually his addictions landed him in the hospital.
He suffered a series of seizures, as well as a fall that resulted in a
bad skull fracture and the insertion of a titanium plate in his head.

Recently, Holdbrooks has been back in touch with Errachidi, who has
suffered his own ordeal since leaving the detention center. Errachidi
told NEWSWEEK he had trouble adjusting to his freedom, "trying to learn
how to walk without shackles and trying to sleep at night with the
lights off." He signed each of the dozen e-mails he sent to NEWSWEEK
with the impersonal ID that his captors had given him: Ahmed 590.

Holdbrooks, now 25, says he quit drinking three months ago and began
attending regular prayers at the Tempe Islamic Center, a mosque near the
University of Phoenix, where he works as an enrollment counselor. The
long scar on his head is now mostly hidden under the lace of his Muslim
kufi cap. When the imam at Tempe introduced Holdbrooks to the
congregation and explained he'd converted at Guantánamo, a few dozen
worshipers rushed over to shake his hand. "I would have thought they had
the most savage soldiers serving there," says the imam, Amr Elsamny, an
Egyptian. "I never thought it would be someone like TJ."

_____

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Freedom;] Western Liberalist Ideologies In The Light Of Islam

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www.kitaabun.com <http://www.kitaabun.com/>

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& Islamic Online Bookshop

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The Guard Who Found Islam ref:
<A
href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/190357">http://www.newsweek.com/id/190357</A>
 Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks had been a guard at Guantánamo for
about six months the night he had his life-altering conversation with detainee
590, a Moroccan also known as "the General." This was early 2004, about halfway
through Holdbrooks's stint at Guantánamo with the 463rd Military Police Company.
Until then, he'd spent most of his day shifts just doing his duty. He'd escort
prisoners to interrogations or walk up and down the cellblock making sure they
weren't passing notes. But the midnight shifts were slow. "The only thing you
really had to do was mop the center floor," he says. So Holdbrooks began
spending part of the night sitting cross-legged on the ground, talking to
detainees through the metal mesh of their cell doors. He developed a
strong relationship with the General, whose real name is Ahmed Errachidi. Their
late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to be more skeptical about the prison,
he says, and made him think harder about his own life. Soon, Holdbrooks was
ordering books on Arabic and Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in
early 2004, the conversation turned to the shahada, the one-line statement of
faith that marks the single requirement for converting to Islam ("There is no
God but God and Muhammad is his prophet"). Holdbrooks pushed a pen and an index
card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi to write out the shahada in English
and transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the words aloud and, there on the
floor of Guantánamo's Camp Delta, became a Muslim. When historians look
back on Guantánamo, the harsh treatment of detainees and the trampling of due
process will likely dominate the narrative. Holdbrooks, who left the military in
2005, saw his share. In interviews over recent weeks, he and another former
guard told NEWSWEEK about degrading and sometimes sadistic acts against
prisoners committed by soldiers, medics and interrogators who wanted revenge for
the 9/11 attacks on America. But as the fog of secrecy slowly lifts from
Guantánamo, other scenes are starting to emerge as well, including surprising
interactions between guards and detainees on subjects like politics, religion
and even music. The exchanges reveal curiosity on both sides—sometimes even
empathy. "The detainees used to have conversations with the guards who showed
some common respect toward them," says Errachidi, who spent five years in
Guantánamo and was released in 2007. "We talked about everything, normal things,
and things [we had] in common," he wrote to NEWSWEEK in an e-mail from his home
in Morocco. Holdbrooks's level of identification with the other side was
exceptional. No other guard has volunteered that he embraced Islam at the prison
(though Errachidi says others expressed interest). His experience runs counter
to academic studies, which show that guards and inmates at ordinary prisons tend
to develop mutual hostility. But then, Holdbrooks is a contrarian by nature. He
can also be conspiratorial. When his company visited the site of the 9/11
attacks in New York, Holdbrooks remembers thinking there had to be a broader
explanation, and that the Bush administration must have colluded somehow in the
plot. But his misgivings about Guantánamo—including doubts that the
detainees were the "worst of the worst"—were shared by other guards as early as
2002. A few such guards are coming forward for the first time. Specialist
Brandon Neely, who was at Guantánamo when the first detainees arrived that year,
says his enthusiasm for the mission soured quickly. "There were a couple of us
guards who asked ourselves why these guys are being treated so badly and if
they're actually terrorists at all," he told NEWSWEEK. Neely remembers having
long conversations with detainee Ruhal Ahmed, who loved Eminem and James Bond
and would often rap or sing to the other prisoners. Another former guard,
Christopher Arendt, went on a speaking tour with former detainees in Europe
earlier this year to talk critically about the prison. Holdbrooks says
growing up hard in Phoenix—his parents were junkies and he himself was a heavy
drinker before joining the military in 2002—helps explain what he calls his
"anti-everything views." He has holes the size of quarters in both earlobes,
stretched-out piercings that he plugs with wooden discs. At his Phoenix
apartment, bedecked with horror-film memorabilia, he rolls up both sleeves to
reveal wrist-to-shoulder tattoos. He describes the ink work as a narrative of
his mistakes and addictions. They include religious symbols and Nazi SS bolts,
track marks and, in large letters, the words BY DEMONS BE DRIVEN. He says the
line, from a heavy-metal song, reminds him to be a better
person. Holdbrooks—TJ to his friends—says he joined the military to avoid
winding up like his parents. He was an impulsive young man searching for
stability. On his first home leave, he got engaged to a woman he'd known for
just eight days and married her three months later. With little prior exposure
to religion, Holdbrooks was struck at Gitmo by the devotion detainees showed to
their faith. "A lot of Americans have abandoned God, but even in this place,
[the detainees] were determined to pray," he says. Holdbrooks was also
taken by the prisoners' resourcefulness. He says detainees would pluck
individual threads from their jumpsuits or prayer mats and spin them into long
stretches of twine, which they would use to pass notes from cell to cell. He
noticed that one detainee with a bad skin rash would smear peanut butter on his
windowsill until the oil separated from the paste, then would use the oil on his
rash. Errachidi's detention seemed particularly suspect to Holdbrooks.
The Moroccan detainee had worked as a chef in Britain for almost 18 years and
spoke fluent English. He told Holdbrooks he had traveled to Pakistan on a
business venture in late September 2001 to help pay for his son's surgery. When
he crossed into Afghanistan, he said, he was picked up by the Northern Alliance
and sold to American troops for $5,000. At Guantánamo, Errachidi was accused of
attending a Qaeda training camp. But a 2007 investigation by the London Times
newspaper appears to have corroborated his story; it eventually helped lead to
his release. In prison, Errachidi was an agitator. "Because I spoke
English, I was always in the face of the soldiers," he wrote NEWSWEEK in an
e-mail. Errachidi said an American colonel at Guantánamo gave him his nickname,
and warned him that generals "get hurt" if they don't cooperate. He said his
defiance cost him 23 days of abuse, including sleep deprivation, exposure to
very cold temperatures and being shackled in stress positions. "I always
believed the soldiers were doing illegal stuff and I was not ready to keep
quiet." (Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said in response:
"Detainees have often made claims of abuse that are simply not supported by the
facts.") The Moroccan spent four of his five years at Gitmo in the punishment
block, where detainees were denied "comfort items" like paper and prayer beads
along with access to the recreation yard and the library. Errachidi says
he does not remember details of the night Holdbrooks converted. Over the years,
he says, he discussed a range of religious topics with guards: "I spoke to them
about subjects like Father Christmas and Ishac and Ibrahim [Isaac and Abraham]
and the sacrifice. About Jesus." Holdbrooks recalls that when he announced he
wanted to embrace Islam, Errachidi warned him that converting would be a serious
undertaking and, at Guantánamo, a messy affair. "He wanted to make sure I knew
what I was getting myself into." Holdbrooks later told his two roommates about
the conversion, and no one else. But other guards noticed changes in him.
They heard detainees calling him Mustapha, and saw that Holdbrooks was studying
Arabic openly. (At his Phoenix apartment, he displays the books he had amassed.
They include a leather-bound, six-volume set of Muslim sacred texts and "The
Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam.") One night his squad leader took
him to a yard behind his living quarters, where five guards were waiting to
stage a kind of intervention. "They started yelling at me," he recalls, "asking
if I was a traitor, if I was switching sides." At one point a squad leader
pulled back his fist and the two men traded blows, Holdbrooks
says. Holdbrooks spent the rest of his time at Guantánamo mainly keeping
to himself, and nobody bothered him further. Another Muslim who served there
around the same time had a different experience. Capt. James Yee, a Gitmo
chaplain for much of 2003, was arrested in September of that year on suspicion
of aiding the enemy and other crimes—charges that were eventually dropped. Yee
had become a Muslim years earlier. He says the Muslims on staff at Gitmo—mainly
translators—often felt beleaguered. "There was an overall atmosphere by the
command to vilify Islam." (Commander Gordon's response: "We strongly disagree
with the assertions made by Chaplain Yee"). At Holdbrooks's next station,
in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he says things began to unravel. The only place to
kill time within miles of the base was a Wal-Mart and two strip clubs—Big
Daddy's and Big Louie's. "I've never been a fan of strip clubs, so I hung out at
Wal-Mart," he says. Within months, Holdbrooks was released from the military—two
years before the end of his commitment. The Army gave him an honorable discharge
with no explanation, but the events at Gitmo seemed to loom over the decision.
The Army said it would not comment on the matter. Back in Phoenix,
Holdbrooks returned to drinking, in part to suppress what he describes as the
anger that consumed him. (Neely, the other ex-guard who spoke to NEWSWEEK, said
Guantánamo had made him so depressed he spent up to $60 a day on alcohol during
a monthlong leave from the detention center in 2002.) Holdbrooks divorced his
wife and spiraled further. Eventually his addictions landed him in the hospital.
He suffered a series of seizures, as well as a fall that resulted in a bad skull
fracture and the insertion of a titanium plate in his head. Recently,
Holdbrooks has been back in touch with Errachidi, who has suffered his own
ordeal since leaving the detention center. Errachidi told NEWSWEEK he had
trouble adjusting to his freedom, "trying to learn how to walk without shackles
and trying to sleep at night with the lights off." He signed each of the dozen
e-mails he sent to NEWSWEEK with the impersonal ID that his captors had given
him: Ahmed 590. Holdbrooks, now 25, says he quit drinking three months
ago and began attending regular prayers at the Tempe Islamic Center, a mosque
near the University of Phoenix, where he works as an enrollment counselor. The
long scar on his head is now mostly hidden under the lace of his Muslim kufi
cap. When the imam at Tempe introduced Holdbrooks to the congregation and
explained he'd converted at Guantánamo, a few dozen worshipers rushed over to
shake his hand. "I would have thought they had the most savage soldiers serving
there," says the imam, Amr Elsamny, an Egyptian. "I never thought it would be
someone like TJ."
<HR>

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href="http://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?products_id=2450"><IMG
title=" Sacred Freedom;] Western Liberalist Ideologies In The Light Of "
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href="http://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?products_id=2450">Sacred Freedom;] Western Liberalist Ideologies In The Light Of
Islam </A></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV class=Section1>
Ma'Salama 
<A href="http://www.kitaabun.com/">www.kitaabun.com</A>
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
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Classical and Contemporary Muslim & Islamic Online
Bookshop<o:p></o:p>
APY LTD<o:p></o:p>
PO BOX 8448<o:p></o:p>
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0116 276 9964<o:p></o:p>
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