I just read this particular article. Quite interesting, I must comment. Is Islam really a terrorist religion? If yes, why did this Guantanamo guard convert to Islam and also clearly doubted post 9/11 actions of U.S. I am sure this guy is happier now after finding Islam. He gets to pray 5 times a day and try doing the right deeds. 
Quite unlike Dick Cheney who is in a wheel chair because of several heart attacks. God speaks in mysterious ways!
The Guard Who Found Islam
By Dan Ephron | NEWSWEEK
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.
Read the full article here.
