From Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia, via Guantánamo

[seemslikeadream]

"I was asking them, from the beginning: 'If the American citizenship is what is keeping me here, then take it. Take it!'" Yaser E. Hamdi (with his father, Esam Himdy)
By JOEL BRINKLEY
Published: October 16, 2004
UBAYL, Saudi Arabia

YASER E. HAMDI, a high school honor student from a privileged Saudi background, was a sophomore in college, majoring in marketing, when he took off for Afghanistan during the summer of 2001.

His father, who spells his name Himdy, says it was just one of those things young men do, to find themselves or to satisfy a yearning for adventure. "Boys like to try things new," Mr. Himdy said. "He had never traveled outside Saudi Arabia before. He decided to show, 'I am a man.' "

As a friend of Mr. Hamdi said in an interview, "His agenda was to take a sabbatical from school and try to get his head straight, to live in a strict Islamic environment with other young men like himself."

Apprehended in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Kalashnikov rifle in hand, Mr. Hamdi became an unlikely test subject for the Bush administration's policy of declaring people seized on the battlefield to be "enemy combatants" who could be locked away indefinitely with no access to the court system.

At home now, after nearly three years in American military prisons, much of it in solitary confinement, Mr. Hamdi insists that he was an innocent bystander who got swept up in events he could not have predicted - the Sept. 11 attacks and consequent invasion of Afghanistan.

more
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/16/international/middleeast/16profile.html

[sisenor]

1. WHO IS SURPRISED THAT HAMDI IS BACK IN SAUDI ARABIA?

If the Saudis asked Bush, he would marry off his daughters to King Faizal, or whatever the name is of that decrepit old man.