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Terry Holdbrooks arrived at Guantánamo detention camp in the summer of 2003 as a
godless 19-year-old with a love of drinking, hard rock music and tattoos. By the
time he left Cuba the following year, he had alienated his army colleagues, won
the respect of the detainees and, most astonishingly, converted to Islam in a
midnight ceremony in the presence of one of the detainees, who had become his
mentor.
When I meet Holdbrooks, now 26 and named Mustafa Abdullah, he is wearing a black
Muslim cap, a thick beard and long-sleeved traditional robes that almost obscure
the tattoo on his right arm that reads "by demons be driven".
Holdbrooks grew up in Arizona, the only son of junkie parents who split up when
he was seven years old. He was raised by his ex-hippie grandparents. Tired of
being poor, determined not to follow in his parents' footsteps and keen to see
the world, Holdbrooks signed up for the military. He was stationed with the
253rd Military Police Company, mostly doing administrative support work, when he
was told he was to be deployed to Guantánamo.
During a two-week training course, the new guards took it in turns to act as
detainees, and were also taken to Ground Zero. "We were not taught anything
about Islam," he says. "We were shown videos of 11 September and all we kept
being told was that the detainees were the worst of the worst they were
Bin
Laden's drivers, Bin Laden's cooks, and these people will kill you the first
chance they get."
Holdbrooks skims over the words, as if he is quoting from his forthcoming
memoir, Traitor? "I was questioning things from day one," he says. "The first
thing I saw was a kid who is all of 16 who had never seen the ocean, didn't know
the world was round. I am sitting there thinking, what can he possibly know
about the war on terror, what could he possibly know?"
Holdbrooks' duties at Guantánamo including cleaning, collecting rubbish, walking
up and down the block to ensure detainees weren't passing anything between cells
and ferrying them to and from interrogations. There were plenty of opportunities
for communication. Holdbrooks's friendliness towards the detainees they called
him "the nice guard" earned him unwelcome attention from his fellow guards.
"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of
them
were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks,
racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had
stopped talking to them altogether. There were frequent physical
altercations:
"One time one of them said to me, 'Hey, Holdbrooks, you know what we are
going
to do today? We are going to skull-**** the Taliban out of you you're a
sympathiser and we don't like that." That led to another fist fight."
While the guards indulged in alcohol, **** and sports, Holdbrooks says he needed
to learn how the detainees could endure abuse and still smile, while he was
utterly miserable.
"I knew nothing about Islam prior to Guantánamo," he says, "so this was a
complete culture shock to me. I wanted to learn as much I could, so I started
talking to the detainees about politics, ethics and morals, and about their
lives and cultural differences we would talk all the time." What began as
curiosity turned to disciplined study, with Holdbrooks spending at least an hour
a day learning about Islam and talking in chatrooms online. Among those he
talked to were the Tipton trio of British Muslims who featured in Michael
Winterbottom's docudrama, The Road to Guantánamo; another was a man the other
detainees referred to as the General Moroccan-born Ahmed Errachidi, who had
lived in Britain for 18 years, working as a chef, and spent five and a half
years in Guantánamo accused of attending al-Qaida training camps. (He was later
released and cleared of any wrongdoing.)
"We'd talk for hours and hours," Holdbrooks says. "We'd talk about books, about
music, about philosophy: we would stay up all night and talk about religion."
Finally, six months into his time at Guantánamo, Holdbrooks was ready. On 29
December 2003, in the presence of Errachidi, he repeated the shahada, the
statement of faith that is the sole requirement for converting to Islam: "There
is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet". The Guantánamo guard was now a
Muslim.
He stopped drinking and even gave up music, because his interpretation of Islam
suggested that this, too, was unacceptable. "It was not easy praying five times
a day without my colleagues finding out," he says. "I told them I had to go the
bathroom a lot."
Converting to Islam made Holdbrooks even more unhappy about his work he felt
he was worse off than the detainees. "They were having a lot more fun than I
was. The Tipton trio were always playing tricks on the guards and the
interrogators. The detainees had a lot of freedom in their confinement: I had
all the freedoms they didn't have, but I was a slave to what the army wanted me
to do."
This claim sounds implausible, but Holdbrooks says he is referring to their
freedom of thought: he was impressed by the independence he saw in the
detainees, compared to his fellow guards. This still seems a rather self-pitying
analysis, particularly when he goes on to describe how he had seen detainees
being tortured. "It was my job to take prisoners to interrogations, so sometimes
I would sit and watch," he says. "I would see detainees who would be locked up
for hours in horrible positions for hours upon hours upon hours, in a room
that might be 50 degrees or 60 degrees.
"There was one man who had defecated on himself and this ogre of an interrogator
would douse water on him and then ask him if he was going to talk, and he would
say he had nothing to talk about, and I remember thinking, what good is this
going to accomplish? You cannot abuse and torture people and expect to get
results that are accurate and credible."
In the summer of 2004, Holdbrooks left Guantánamo and was later discharged from
the army on the grounds of a "general personality disorder". The alcohol problem
that had plagued him before enlisting returned, and when his marriage dissolved,
he sought solace in the old comforts of drinking, casual sex and music. "I was
having nightmares about my time in Guantánamo," he says, "and I spent the best
part of three years just trying to drink Guantánamo out of my mind."
Today, Holdbrooks is a practising Muslim again, but he does not seem to be
at
peace. There is a blankness in his gaze that hints at the scars his
childhood
and Guantánamo have left on him.
Why had this hard-living Arizona boy embraced Islam? The question needles me
throughout our conversation. It is only when, towards the end, Holdbrooks
reveals that his favourite words are "structure", "order" and "discipline" that
the pieces fall into place. Holdbrooks's life had been a search for order: the
regimentation of army life had appeared to offer structure, and when it let him
down, he turned to religion.
Holdbrooks has more in common with his former colleagues than he realises: their
allegiance to the army is matched by his adherence to faith. "Islam is a very
disciplined, regimented faith and it requires a great deal of effort and
conviction," he says. "I've had an unbelievable fascination with structure and
order for as long as I can remember: structure, order and discipline I just
love them."
join this group on yahoo
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bepaki/
godless 19-year-old with a love of drinking, hard rock music and tattoos. By the
time he left Cuba the following year, he had alienated his army colleagues, won
the respect of the detainees and, most astonishingly, converted to Islam in a
midnight ceremony in the presence of one of the detainees, who had become his
mentor.
When I meet Holdbrooks, now 26 and named Mustafa Abdullah, he is wearing a black
Muslim cap, a thick beard and long-sleeved traditional robes that almost obscure
the tattoo on his right arm that reads "by demons be driven".
Holdbrooks grew up in Arizona, the only son of junkie parents who split up when
he was seven years old. He was raised by his ex-hippie grandparents. Tired of
being poor, determined not to follow in his parents' footsteps and keen to see
the world, Holdbrooks signed up for the military. He was stationed with the
253rd Military Police Company, mostly doing administrative support work, when he
was told he was to be deployed to Guantánamo.
During a two-week training course, the new guards took it in turns to act as
detainees, and were also taken to Ground Zero. "We were not taught anything
about Islam," he says. "We were shown videos of 11 September and all we kept
being told was that the detainees were the worst of the worst they were
Bin
Laden's drivers, Bin Laden's cooks, and these people will kill you the first
chance they get."
Holdbrooks skims over the words, as if he is quoting from his forthcoming
memoir, Traitor? "I was questioning things from day one," he says. "The first
thing I saw was a kid who is all of 16 who had never seen the ocean, didn't know
the world was round. I am sitting there thinking, what can he possibly know
about the war on terror, what could he possibly know?"
Holdbrooks' duties at Guantánamo including cleaning, collecting rubbish, walking
up and down the block to ensure detainees weren't passing anything between cells
and ferrying them to and from interrogations. There were plenty of opportunities
for communication. Holdbrooks's friendliness towards the detainees they called
him "the nice guard" earned him unwelcome attention from his fellow guards.
"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of
them
were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks,
racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had
stopped talking to them altogether. There were frequent physical
altercations:
"One time one of them said to me, 'Hey, Holdbrooks, you know what we are
going
to do today? We are going to skull-**** the Taliban out of you you're a
sympathiser and we don't like that." That led to another fist fight."
While the guards indulged in alcohol, **** and sports, Holdbrooks says he needed
to learn how the detainees could endure abuse and still smile, while he was
utterly miserable.
"I knew nothing about Islam prior to Guantánamo," he says, "so this was a
complete culture shock to me. I wanted to learn as much I could, so I started
talking to the detainees about politics, ethics and morals, and about their
lives and cultural differences we would talk all the time." What began as
curiosity turned to disciplined study, with Holdbrooks spending at least an hour
a day learning about Islam and talking in chatrooms online. Among those he
talked to were the Tipton trio of British Muslims who featured in Michael
Winterbottom's docudrama, The Road to Guantánamo; another was a man the other
detainees referred to as the General Moroccan-born Ahmed Errachidi, who had
lived in Britain for 18 years, working as a chef, and spent five and a half
years in Guantánamo accused of attending al-Qaida training camps. (He was later
released and cleared of any wrongdoing.)
"We'd talk for hours and hours," Holdbrooks says. "We'd talk about books, about
music, about philosophy: we would stay up all night and talk about religion."
Finally, six months into his time at Guantánamo, Holdbrooks was ready. On 29
December 2003, in the presence of Errachidi, he repeated the shahada, the
statement of faith that is the sole requirement for converting to Islam: "There
is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet". The Guantánamo guard was now a
Muslim.
He stopped drinking and even gave up music, because his interpretation of Islam
suggested that this, too, was unacceptable. "It was not easy praying five times
a day without my colleagues finding out," he says. "I told them I had to go the
bathroom a lot."
Converting to Islam made Holdbrooks even more unhappy about his work he felt
he was worse off than the detainees. "They were having a lot more fun than I
was. The Tipton trio were always playing tricks on the guards and the
interrogators. The detainees had a lot of freedom in their confinement: I had
all the freedoms they didn't have, but I was a slave to what the army wanted me
to do."
This claim sounds implausible, but Holdbrooks says he is referring to their
freedom of thought: he was impressed by the independence he saw in the
detainees, compared to his fellow guards. This still seems a rather self-pitying
analysis, particularly when he goes on to describe how he had seen detainees
being tortured. "It was my job to take prisoners to interrogations, so sometimes
I would sit and watch," he says. "I would see detainees who would be locked up
for hours in horrible positions for hours upon hours upon hours, in a room
that might be 50 degrees or 60 degrees.
"There was one man who had defecated on himself and this ogre of an interrogator
would douse water on him and then ask him if he was going to talk, and he would
say he had nothing to talk about, and I remember thinking, what good is this
going to accomplish? You cannot abuse and torture people and expect to get
results that are accurate and credible."
In the summer of 2004, Holdbrooks left Guantánamo and was later discharged from
the army on the grounds of a "general personality disorder". The alcohol problem
that had plagued him before enlisting returned, and when his marriage dissolved,
he sought solace in the old comforts of drinking, casual sex and music. "I was
having nightmares about my time in Guantánamo," he says, "and I spent the best
part of three years just trying to drink Guantánamo out of my mind."
Today, Holdbrooks is a practising Muslim again, but he does not seem to be
at
peace. There is a blankness in his gaze that hints at the scars his
childhood
and Guantánamo have left on him.
Why had this hard-living Arizona boy embraced Islam? The question needles me
throughout our conversation. It is only when, towards the end, Holdbrooks
reveals that his favourite words are "structure", "order" and "discipline" that
the pieces fall into place. Holdbrooks's life had been a search for order: the
regimentation of army life had appeared to offer structure, and when it let him
down, he turned to religion.
Holdbrooks has more in common with his former colleagues than he realises: their
allegiance to the army is matched by his adherence to faith. "Islam is a very
disciplined, regimented faith and it requires a great deal of effort and
conviction," he says. "I've had an unbelievable fascination with structure and
order for as long as I can remember: structure, order and discipline I just
love them."
join this group on yahoo
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bepaki/
