A young Afghan held for six years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rejoined his family in southern Kabul late Monday, ending an odyssey that came to symbolize many of the problems of the Bush administration's war on terror detention policies.
Mohammed Jawad, who may have been as young as 12 when he was arrested in 2002 for allegedly throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers, pronounced himself "very happy" but tired after a day in which he arrived in Afghanistan on a U.S. military flight — in shackles and blindfolded, according to his lawyer.
He then met with both the country's attorney general and President Hamid Karzai before he was driven to his family's rented brick home in a modest Kabul neighborhood by the Afghan attorney general himself.
"I am very happy that I am back home with my family," Jawad said, before he begged off answering questions, saying he had a headache.
Jawad's journey home began in October, when a U.S. military judge in Guantanamo ruled that Afghan police had threatened to kill both Jawad and his family during his interrogation if he didn't confess to throwing a grenade that injured two reservists from California and their Afghan interpreter. Those threats constituted torture, Army Col. Stephen Henley said, ruling that the confession therefore wasn't admissible as evidence.
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