So last night as I ate my riji and saag [rice and spinach], the Pakistani channel happened to be on. Views on News was on with Dr. Shahid Masood. Usually, I quickly switch over to something else cuz its usually boring with politicians being interviewed etc. But last night I caught the last 20 minutes of it. It was not a politican being interviewed this time, it was an ex-guantanamo bay detainee. Dr. Masood was sat on the floor at Qari Badruz-Zaman's house, listening with red eyes and a furrowed brow as the ex-detainee talked about the 3 and half years that were stolen from him at Cuba.

As I sat down to eat, the brother was saying how he found it strangely serene at times, at the camp, because they had lots of time to do 'ibaadah and dhikr. The inmates were in constant dhikr of Allaah and sharing Islamic 'ilm with each other. When asked about how they were treated, the brother said that taunts and insults were constantly hurled at them by the guards, and he noticed it was the yahoodi ones who insulted them most. The brother also mentioned how they had a bucket as a toilet and once a guard threw the Quraan into one of these buckets. This sparked off a 3-day hunger strike by the brothers until a senior guard told them it would be investigated...this happened a number of times.

There was alot of time to sit and think -- it wasn't like they had anything better to do -- they read Quraan, studied it, wrote stuff. One brother wrote a Tafseer of the Quraan in Pushto, he also wrote an approx. 15oo word poem called 'khawaga jibba' [literally sweet tongue/words...its pushto & can't be translated into english to get the exact meaning]. The brother that was being interviewed, when him and his bro were released, they managed to publish the books he wrote in captivity [I think..]..of course, the original copies were kept by the guards...they were not allowed to take anything with them when freed..

Another thing I remember about the interview is that the Qari talked about a dream one of the inmates had...he saw the prophet Isa [as]; he was carrying the Injeel in one hand and the Quraan in the other. In the dream, the brother walked towards Prophet Isa [as] in order to kiss his hand and greet him, but the Prophet [as] kept backing away..until someone told him 'this is an inmate of guantanamo bay', then prophet Isa [as] himseld rushed towards the brother in the dream and hugged him etc. He told the brother that the Chrisitians of today are misguided and will surely be punished. When the prophet Isa [as] shook the brother's hand, he immediatly woke up..and it was a winter's day but he was sweating profusely. One of his hands - the one that shook hands with the Prophet Isa [as] - smelt of a type of musk and the scent spread thru out the cell...and all 15 or so inmates in the cell went to rub his hands in order to get some perfume on themselves.

The bro went on to say how another inmate saw the Prophet Muhammad [saw] in his dream who said that 'you are of ahlul-badr', the bro asked 'but Rasoolullaah [saw], the battle of badr has passed..?'. The Prophet [saw] said that you camp x-ray detainees are among those Mujahideen who will be rewarded for Badr.

These are the bits and pieces I understood from the programme. The bro being interviewed spoke calmly and quietly..and, needless to say, he seemed to have alotta noor about him [wAllaahu a'lam].

You can read more about the forgotten detainees at Guantanamo Bay & find out how to help them and their families @ http://www.cageprisoners.com .

A Letter to the British People

I am sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the residents of London.

For a period of hours, you have lived through moments of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a member of your family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total honesty that we too grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you how much we hurt when we see desperation and pain on the face of another person. For we have lived through this situation – and continue to live through it every day – since your country and the United States formed an alliance and laid plans to attack Iraq.

The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of State of the United States, Condoleezza Rice, described the bombings as an act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and unanimously condemned the event.

I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to inquire: in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose name were our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In whose name did the British army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that in your name? Or in the name of religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or democracy?

What do you call the killing of more than two million children? What do you call the pollution of the soil and the water with depleted uranium and other lethal substances?

What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq – in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies of prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners – such as pulling off limbs, gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word “barbaric” adequately describe the behaviour of your troops in Iraq?

May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in al-Amiriyah and what happened in al-Fallujah, Tal‘afar, Sadr City, and an-Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain and we can’t? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the pain of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost his family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love.

You don’t know our martyrs, but we know them. You don’t remember them, but we remember them. You don’t cry over them, but we cry over them.

Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of the boy Ahmad Jabir Karim? Or Sa‘id Shabram?

Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories. There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake.

We don’t hate the British people or other peoples of the world. This war was imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defense of ourselves. Because we want to live in our homeland – the free land of Iraq – and to live as we want to live, not as your government or the American government wish.

Let the families of those killed know that the responsibility for the Thursday morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies. Stop your war against our people! Stop the daily killing that your troops commit! End your occupation of our homeland!

Iman al-Saadun

The Independent
The Reality Of This Barbaric Bombing
Friday, 8th July 2005, by Robert Fisk

If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us think insurgency won’t come to us?

"If you bomb our cities," Osama bin Laden said in one of his recent video tapes, "we will bomb yours." There you go, as they say. It was crystal clear Britain would be a target ever since Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. We had, as they say, been warned. The G8 summit was obviously chosen, well in advance, as Attack Day.

And it’s no use Mr Blair telling us yesterday that "they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear". "They" are not trying to destroy "what we hold dear". They are trying to get public opinion to force Blair to withdraw from Iraq, from his alliance with the United States, and from his adherence to Bush’s policies in the Middle East. The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush - and Spain’s subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives - while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali.

It is easy for Tony Blair to call yesterdays bombings "barbaric" - of course they were - but what were the civilian deaths of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the children torn apart by cluster bombs, the countless innocent Iraqis gunned down at American military checkpoints? When they die, it is "collateral damage"; when "we" die, it is "barbaric terrorism".

If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq, what makes us believe insurgency won’t come to us? One thing is certain: if Tony Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism" in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain - fight them there rather than let them come here, as Bush constantly says - this argument is no longer valid.

To time these bombs with the G8 summit, when the world was concentrating on Britain, was not a stroke of genius. You don’t need a PhD to choose another Bush-Blair handshake to close down a capital city with explosives and massacre more than 30 of its citizens. The G8 summit was announced so far in advance as to give the bombers all the time they needed to prepare.

A co-ordinated system of attacks of the kind we saw yesterday would have taken months to plan - to choose safe houses, prepare explosives, identify targets, ensure security, choose the bombers, the hour, the minute, to plan the communications (mobile phones are giveaways). Co-ordination and sophisticated planning - and the usual utter ruthlessness with regard to the lives of the innocent - are characteristic of al-Qa’ida. And let us not use - as our television colleagues did yesterday - "hallmarks", a word identified with quality silver rather than base metal.

And now let us reflect on the fact that yesterday, the opening of the G8, so critical a day, so bloody a day, represented a total failure of our security services - the same intelligence "experts" who claim there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none, but who utterly failed to uncover a months-long plot to kill Londoners.

Trains, planes, buses, cars, metros. Transportation appears to be the science of al-Qa’ida’s dark arts. No one can search three million London commuters every day. No one can stop every tourist. Some thought the Eurostar might have been an al-Qa’ida target - be sure they have studied it - but why go for prestige when your common or garden bus and Tube train are there for the taking.

And then come the Muslims of Britain, who have long been awaiting this nightmare. Now every one of our Muslims becomes the "usual suspect", the man or woman with brown eyes, the man with the beard, the woman in the scarf, the boy with the worry beads, the girl who says she’s been racially abused.

I remember, crossing the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 - my plane turned round off Ireland when the US closed its airspace - how the aircraft purser and I toured the cabins to see if we could identify any suspicious passengers. I found about a dozen, of course, totally innocent men who had brown eyes or long beards or who looked at me with "hostility". And sure enough, in just a few seconds, Osama bin Laden turned nice, liberal, friendly Robert into an anti-Arab racist.

And this is part of the point of yesterday’s bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims (let us not mention the name Christians), to encourage the very kind of racism that Tony Blair claims to resent.

But here’s the problem. To go on pretending that Britain’s enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" which Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has locked us into. Just before the US presidential elections, Bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?"

Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.