Who Rules the World? Reframings

by Noam Chomsky

Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.27 There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians. After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen Iraqi soldiers—“the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,” according to the Washington Post, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.28 All much as a reasonable person would expect.