Tonight I was checking out BAG Notes. One of the posts was the pic above. The Guantanamo Reunion story was touching.
A former Gitmo guard, Brandon Neely, looked up some former detainees on Facebook. He started corresponding with two. The BBC got wind of it and flew him to the UK to meet Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul.
From the New York Times:
Guantánamo Reunion, by Way of BBC
“New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Mr. Neely, an Army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Mr. Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC, which will be shown on Tuesday. Mr. Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantánamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Mr. Rasul, Mr. Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.”
Searching the BBC site I found two short videos.
From the BBC:
Guantanamo guard reunited with ex-inmates
“Why would a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard track down two of his former captives - two British men - and agree to fly to London to meet them?
“You look different without a cap.”
“You look different without the jump suits.”
With those words, an extraordinary reunion gets under way.
The last time Ruhal Ahmed met Brandon Neely, he was “behind bars, behind a cage and [Brandon] was on the other side”.”
Watching that cap/jump suit comment exchange made me tear up a little.
Posted by Vixen as News at 10:40 PM CST