Abdul Salam Zaeef: the "king" of Guantánamo

Kabul (Tom Lasseter) June 18.— When U.S. guards frog-marched Abdul Salam Zaeef through the cellblocks of Guantanamo, detainees would roar his name, "Mullah Zaeef! Mullah Zaeef!"

Zaeef, in shackles, looked at the guards and smiled. "The soldiers told me, «You are the king of this prison»," he later recalled.

Zaeef is the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, famous for his defiant news conferences after 9-11, in which he said the militant Islamist group would never surrender Osama bin Laden.

Pakistani intelligence officers dragged him out of his house in Islamabad in late December 2001 or January 2002 and took him to Peshawar. "Your Excellency, you are no longer Your Excellency," he recalled one of them saying.

The Pakistanis handed him over to U.S. troops, who he said threw a sack over his head and pushed him into a helicopter. The Americans flew him to a warship, where he was held for about a week in a small cell that reminded him of a dog kennel, he said.

"I was afraid about what would happen to me," Zaeef said in an interview in Kabul, wearing slightly crooked gold-rimmed glasses and speaking in a near-whisper. "I didn't know if it was a dream or not. I never imagined this would happen to me."

Yet from mid-2002 till September 2005 at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Zaeef became a leader again. He helped orchestrate hunger strikes and exploit the missteps of a U.S. detention system that often captured the wrong men, mistreated them, then incarcerated them indefinitely without legal recourse. The insurgency he helped launch in Guantanamo capitalized on the Americans' ignorance of Islamic customs and a pattern of interrupting prayers, shaving off prisoners' beards and searching their copies of the Quran.

U.S. officials didn't respond to repeated requests for comments about Zaeef's role at the camp, but former detainees from Europe to Central Asia spoke of him with reverence that bordered on hero worship.
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The rules at Guantanamo, Zaeef said, reminded him of Bagram. The men weren't supposed to talk in their cells. They were supposed to say "please" and "sir" when they addressed the guards. In Guantanamo, however, the guards weren't beating the men, he said, and prisoners could speak up.

"After a month, we decided we could not accept these extremist measures. We must react," Zaeef said. "So we began shouting to each other. The soldiers came and asked if we were talking to each other. We said, 'Yes, we are not dogs.' We began throwing water at them, spitting at them; we said, 'If you want to kill us, fine.' "

A high-ranking officer came and spoke to the detainees, Zaeef said. The rules were rescinded. It was a victory in a game of inches.

As the months passed, Zaeef recovered his strength. He said that he began to look around the camp more on his daily trips to interrogations or medical checkups.

In a way, Zaeef said, he was encouraged by what he saw. Interrogators raised their voices from time to time, but they never hit him ...

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