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Gitmo Guard: Why I Embraced Islam

Terry Holdbrooks sympathized with the detainees, and was soon bounced from the army

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 7, 2009 2:13 PM CDT

(Newser) – Terry Holdbrooks didn’t know anything about Islam when he was assigned to guard the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The lone son of junkie parents, raised by his ex-hippie grandparents, he liked hard drinking, hard rock, and tattoos. But once there he became intensely curious about Islam, wondering how the detainees could keep smiling in the face of Guantanamo’s abuses, he tells the Guardian. Six months later he’d converted, in a secret ceremony with the detainees.

Holbrooks saw prisoners “locked up in horrible positions for hours upon hours,” but insists that the detainees “were having a lot more fun than I was,” because they could openly defy their persecutors. He hated the other guards, who he describes as “ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks, racists, and bigots.” The army soon discharged Holdbrooks, citing a “general personality disorder.” Today, he’s a practicing Muslim. Why? It’s the “structure, order and discipline,” he explains. “I just love them.”

[Images (2)]

[Quotes (4)]

The sun rises over the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, Nov. 19, 2008. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

A Guantanamo guard stands inside a doorway at the Camp six detention facility on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Sunday, May 31, 2009. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, Pool)

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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? - Terry Holdbrooks

One time one of them said to me, 'Hey, Holdbrooks, you know what we are going to do today? We are going to skull-fuck the Taliban out of you — you're a sympathiser and we don't like that.' - Terry Holdbrooks, on the other guards

It was not easy praying five times a day without my colleagues finding out. I told them I had to go the bathroom a lot. - Terry Holdbrooks

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 I remember thinking, what good is this going to accomplish? - Terry Holdbrooks

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COMMENTS

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Showing 3 of 49 comments

Aelius28

Oct 9, 2009 6:22 AM CDT

@newsrmandan, I did answer those questions. They weren't answered on this article, as you didn't ask them on this article, I assume you got your comments mixed up. But anyway, you say that YOU don't claim those things about Jesus, you say that Jesus claimed those things. You cannot reasonably say that, because the Gospels were first written down decades after Jesus ever existed, so they were really just passing on what they had heard. It's about the farthest thing away from eyewitness testimony you can get, and it's generations after the fact so it's not even accurate to paraphrase what Jesus might have said IF he existed. Even if Jesus did say the things you claim he did, so what? He could have been fucking crazy, you ever consider that? There are thousands of people today, RIGHT NOW, who will claim that they are the second coming of Jesus, that their religion is the true one, or some other crazy religious claim. Why don't you believe them, applying the same standard that you apply to Jesus: "well he said so".

Snarfeh

Oct 8, 2009 12:20 PM CDT

"Theirs is a false religion." That right there is what is wrong with religion.

Snarfeh

Oct 8, 2009 12:16 PM CDT

@osu - Narrow-mindedness is not limited to religious fundamentalists. We are all guilty of it at some point and/or on some topics.

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Gitmo Guard: Why I Embraced Islam