GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.
U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however -- after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers -- he'd made connections to high-level militants.
In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 "most wanted" playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- with Osama bin Laden at the top -- Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.
A McClatchy Newspapers investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam -- thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them -- and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.
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Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the prisoners, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.
Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, acknowledged that senior militant leaders gained influence and control in his prison.
"We have that full range of [Taliban and al-Qaeda] leadership here; why would they not continue to be functional as an organization?" he said in a telephone interview. "I must make the assumption that there's a fully functional al-Qaeda cell here at Guantanamo."
Afghan and Pakistani officials also said they were aware that Guantanamo was churning out new militant leaders.
"A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now, because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?" Issa Khan, a Pakistani former detainee, said in an interview in Islamabad. "Many people who were in Guantanamo are now working with the Taliban."
In interviews, former U.S. Defense Department officials acknowledged the problem, but none of them would speak about it openly because of its implications: U.S. officials mistakenly sent a lot of men who weren't hardened terrorists to Guantanamo, but by the time they were released, some of them had become just that.
Requests for comment from senior Defense Department officials went unanswered.
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However, dozens of former detainees, many of whom were reluctant to talk for fear of being branded as spies by the militants, described a network -- at times fragmented, and at times startling in its sophistication -- that allowed Islamist radicals to gain power inside Guantanamo:
* Militants recruited new detainees by offering to help them memorize the Quran and study Arabic. They conducted the lessons, infused with firebrand theology, between the mesh walls of cells, from the other side of a fence during exercise time or, in lower-security blocks, during group meetings.
* Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders appointed cellblock leaders.
* Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders at Guantanamo issued rulings that governed detainees' behavior.
The recruiting and organizing don't end at Guantanamo. After detainees are released, they're visited by militants who try to cement the relationships formed in prison.
"When I was released, they [Taliban officials] told me to come join them, to fight," said Alif Khan, an Afghan former detainee whom McClatchy interviewed in Kabul. "They told me I should move to Waziristan," a Taliban hotbed in Pakistan.
