Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was born in Zanzibar in 1974. He was originally indicted for purchasing and transporting materials, including a 1987 Nissan Atlas Truck, used to make the bomb that was detonated outside of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam. He bought the cell phone that was used to coordinate the simultaneous attacks in Tanzania and Kenya. In 2004, he was apprehended in Pakistan. Ghailani spent time in the CIA black prisons before being taken to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. While his first language is Swahili, he also speaks English well enough to be able to forgo a translator at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. Incarcerated is the only word he didn’t understand. He apologized during the Tribunal to the United States for any harm done in the embassy bombings in 1998.

After listening to Ghailani’s Tribunal, I felt sympathy for him. Ghailani claims he had no idea that he was part of a plan to blow up the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi before the explosions went off. Was Al-Qaeda simply an employment opportunity? Was it like my working for FOX, a corporation with a political agenda I did not support? It was easy to slip into my old habit of seeing everything through the lens of economic necessity. Ghailani said at his Tribunal that he wanted some military training, as there was a lot of instability in Africa. He wanted to be able to protect himself. If the movies The Last King of Scotland or Hotel Rwanda have any truth to them, I can find some credibility in his statement. But if from 1999 until 2001, Ghailani lived in Liberia in order to buy diamonds for Al-Qaeda from the Revolutionary United Front, how can I construct a veil of innocence for him? The slave labor of African boys mined these diamonds from the rivers of Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world. Is Ghailani a man who got swept up in events or a man who knowingly killed and exploited other Africans? I will never know.