Word: qahtani
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...roughly 500 detainees held at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, none is more notorious than Mohammad al-Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker." Only weeks before 9/11, he tried to enter the U.S. illegally in Orlando, Fla., while the plot's leader, Mohammad Atta, waited to pick him up in the airport parking lot. As the Pentagon has said, "Had al-Qahtani succeeded in entering the U.S., it is believed he would have been on United Airlines Flight 93, the only hijacked aircraft that had four hijackers instead of five [and the one that ended up crashing...
...Last June, TIME published excerpts from a highly classified, 84-page log minutely detailing al-Qahtani's interrogation at Guantanamo. Now, as an increasing number of detainees mount legal challenges to their incarceration, TIME is making the record of al-Qahtani's treatment available to the public in its entirety (except for some names which have been redacted) for the first time. Back in June 2005, the Pentagon insisted that al-Qahtani had provided vital intelligence, focusing on key al-Qaeda leaders and some 30 fellow prisoners at Guantanamo whom he identified as Osama bin Laden's bodyguards...
...Gutierrez's first interview with al-Qahtani on December 13, he initially refused to speak with a lawyer. Gutierrez says that she donned a "hejab" - a headcovering designed to shield him from a face-to-face encounter with his female lawyer out of respect for his sensitivities as a religious Muslim - and eventually managed to arrange their first conversation. In a room barely large enough for three chairs and a small table, Al-Qahtani appeared in an orange jump-suit, his legs shackled. A slight man in his mid 30s with short black hair and a beard, he was initially...
...Gutierrez's December meetings with al-Qahtani took place at Guantanamo's Delta Camp 5, which the military calls a "maximum security, semi-permanent, hardened facility." Thick cement walls loom over the tropical landscape. Inside are two-story cellblocks branching out from a guard station. Thick metal doors seal tiny cells; no one but Military Police can see in or out except for surveillance on closed-circuit television...
...Gutierrez's second round of meetings with al-Qahtani in January took place at Guantanamo's Camp Echo. More than a dozen single-story huts of cement block are set apart from the rest of the prison. Each cell is sealed off from the others and divided down the middle - the prisoner lives on one side and is brought into the other half only for interrogation or visits with a lawyer. At 8 a.m. a warning siren sounds, followed by the playing of the American national anthem...