OTHER SIDE OF STORY: Gitmo detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel claimed in the Times yesterday that no one thinks he’s a threat — even though he was captured with al Qaeda forces. (
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WASHINGTON — Guantanamo Bay detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel penned an anguished op-ed for The New York Times yesterday about his suffering behind bars for 11 years — but there was no mention that he was allegedly picked up at Tora Bora in Afghanistan and is believed by US intelligence to have been among a group of hardened fighters protecting Osama bin Laden.
“I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here,” the Yemeni-born detainee said in the column, while he pleaded for release to his home country.
The 35-year-old — who claims to be suffering from mistreatment at Gitmo while he engages in a hunger strike — dismisses suspicions that he was a guard for bin Laden as “nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch.”
But a once-secret Pentagon document put out by WikiLeaks — and posted on a Times Web site chronicling all the detainees — paints a very different picture of Moqbel as a devoted member of al Qaeda’s fighting force in Afghanistan.
Moqbel was captured at Tora Bora with a group known as the “Dirty 30,” which included bin Laden bodyguards, according to the Defense Department memo dated March 4, 2008.
He trained at al-Farouq, a main al Qaeda training camp, and was identified as a staff member at an al Qaeda guest house. He was labeled a high risk by the US military.
“Anybody who was in the bin Laden entourage was a true believer,” counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson told The Post. “To be a coincidental visitor to Tora Bora at the time the Americans were bombing — it’s like being an accidental visitor to the moon at the time the Americans were going in 1969.”
In his op-ed, delivered by phone through his lawyers, Moqbel says a childhood pal told him he could earn $50 a month working at a factory in Afghanistan and claims that he didn’t have money to fly home and fled to Pakistan after the US invasion.
But the Department of Defense memo says “al Qaeda recruiter” Marwan Jawan recruited Moqbel and trained him to use an AK-47 assault rifle. According to the document, Marwan got him a passport and Moqbel got paid as a fighter at the front.
There’s even dispute about Moqbel’s hunger strike, part of a protest by 40 detainees against their prolonged imprisonment.
“If you saw the size of this dude, you would encourage him to eat some salad,” said an official familiar with the case.
The Pentagon confirmed one of Moqbel’s claims — that he hasn’t been charged or taken before a military tribunal. He’s being held as an “unlawful belligerent.”
“We will not comment on statements by detainees who are unencumbered by fact nor will we hold up detainees for public curiosity. Individual detainees who are not currently before a judge are simply not up for discussion,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale of the Defense Department.