Ajmi chose a different path. Last March, he drove a truck packed with explosives onto an Iraqi army base outside Mosul, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and himself. It was the denouement of a nihilistic descent that his lawyers and family believe commenced at Guantanamo.
He was once a normal guy, it seems:
When Ajmi returned to Kuwait, "he was a ticking time bomb," said Mansur Saleh al-Ajmi, one of his younger brothers.
"Before he went to Afghanistan, he was a normal teenager. He spun the car around in circles. He smoked. People liked him," Mansur said. "After he came back from Guantanamo, he seemed like a completely different person. He stared all the time. You could not have a normal conversation with him. . . . It seemed as if his brain had been washed."
Wait a minute, so there was something in between his normal teenage life and his brain washed post-Guantanamo life? Wait, wasn't there something at the beginning of the article? Oh yes:
Ajmi insisted that he never traveled to Afghanistan, that he never fought with the Taliban -- that he had simply gone to Pakistan to study the Koran and that he was apprehended when he traveled toward the Afghan border to help refugees.
Ah, he didn't go directly from parking lot donuts in Kuwait to Guantanamo Bay. He went to Pakistan where he was captured! That might be a clue, no?
If I may be so bold, nobody travels from Kuwait to Pakistan to study mainstream, moderate Islam. Pakistan is an industrial park for jihadi indoctrination and training, and going there to study the Koran should indicate that perhaps, just maybe, it wasn't Ajmi's time in Guantanamo Bay that turned him into a suicide-bomber nutjob.
Indeed, his behavior in Gitmo wasn't exactly the stuff of wrongly accused victim stoically enduring bad American behavior:
In Ajmi's case, however, his behavior at Guantanamo -- his refusal to obey orders, his repeated throwing of his excrement, his hostility toward his attorneys -- struck his American lawyers as a sign of potential danger.
Indeed.
Ajmi chose a different path, to be sure. He took a path that many well-off young Islamic men with their own cars and no worries of physical need have taken in the last 30-40 years. A path that predates Guantanamo Bay. A path that predates the Iraq War. A path that predates America, if that isn't too hard to digest.
The Post article wants to blame somebody for Ajmi's path. The author supposes that someone is America. The author supposes that Ajmi's accusations about how Guantanamo Bay is run is more true than the more positive review that President Obama ordered.
My question is, if the people to blame for Ajmi's path lie within Islam itself, will the story author and all those nodding in agreement with him be as eager to punish the guilty? Just a thought. And yes, I already know the answer.
