Former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi

Debra Burlingame is currently on NPR radio discussing former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi.

Click here to view more about him.

In case you missed this show, I will post the audio late this evening so please stop back.

Update 3:22 PM, Eastern:

The link to the NPR article and audio (download available at 6 PM) is here.

In addition, Debra Burlingame provided me a copy of her letter to the Editor of the Washington Post that she sent and has yet to be published:

While the proximity of fellow militants at Guantanamo Bay may have reaffirmed Abdullah al-Ajmi’s dedication to his religious fanaticism, the record and his own words reflect that he arrived at the detention center a hardened Islamist. Indeed, he risked imprisonment in his own country by deserting the Kuwaiti army to go to Afghanistan in anticipation of U.S. military action after the 9/11 attacks.

Tom Wilner, al-Ajmi’s lead Shearman & Sterling attorney, professes not to understand why the U.S. chose to release his client in 2005. Mr. Wilner’s 1.5 million dollars in fees, paid by the government of Kuwait–an important oil industry client of Shearman & Sterling–covered not only Mr. Wilner’s work in the courtroom but also his lobbying efforts on behalf of al-Ajmi in the halls of Congress and at the State Department. It is an outrage for Mr. Wilner to now claim that our military forces at JTF-GTMO, whose average age is 22, are to blame for his client’s radicalism. The chief contributing factor in the deaths of the 13 people al-Ajmi killed and the 42 others he maimed in a suicide attack three years after his release was Mr. Wilner’s own relentless efforts to politicize Guantanamo and set al-Ajmi free.

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