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| Home Front: WoT |
| Yet more on the Iraqi Gitmo detainee |
| 2005-03-31 |
| Among the few details made public about the Iraqi is that he is 39 and has been held at Guantanamo Bay since October 2002, three months after he was reported captured in Pakistan. The assertion that the Iraqi was involved in a plot against embassies in Pakistan is not further substantiated in the document. It states only that he traveled to Pakistan in August 1998 with a member of Iraqi intelligence "for the purpose of" striking at embassies with chemical mortars. The CIA-led Iraq Survey Group that spent months in Iraq investigating its weapons programs wrote in its final report last September that an insurgent group in Iraq had managed to build nine chemical mortars in 2003 using malathion pesticide, although they apparently were not used. Malathion is in a highly toxic class of pesticides that affect the central nervous, cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The Pentagon document on the Iraqi detainee says that from 1997 to 1998 he "acted as a trusted agent for Osama bin Laden, executing three separate reconnaissance missions for the al-Qaida leader in Oman, Iraq and Afghanistan." The document makes no mention of the Iraqi's alleged activities after August 1998, except to say that in November 2000 the Taliban issued him a Kalishnikov rifle, and he was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Khudzar, Pakistan in July 2002. According to the summary of evidence, a Taliban recruiter in Baghdad persuaded the Iraqi to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban in 1994. It says he served in the Iraqi infantry from 1987-89. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |