Which raises the obvious question, how are detainees smuggling audio recordings and pictures out of Gitmo?
Via Long War Journal:
An audio message to the Syrian people purportedly from a current Guantanamo detainee has been released online by jihadist forums, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. The message is reportedly from Fayiz al Kandari, a Kuwaiti who has been held at Gitmo since 2002. American intelligence officials have identified al Kandari as an al Qaeda propagandist who was allegedly close to Osama bin Laden.
“The people’s morale is high, praise be to Allah,” al Kandari says in the message, according to a translation provided by SITE. “The only thing that is making us sad is the situation in Syria. By Allah the Great, we are crying for them and we are giving supplications for them, and our cries are with them. We aren’t forgetting them in our prayers.”
In an apparent reference to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, Al Kandari says “if my staying here [in Guantanamo] forever would free them [the Syrian people] from that criminal. . . I would have chosen that.”
It is unclear how al Kandari was able to release his message from captivity.
American intelligence officials at Guantanamo previously determined that al Kandari is a “high” risk to the US and its allies and recommended that he remain in US custody.
According to a leaked Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) threat assessment dated Apr. 15, 2008, these same officials found that al Kandari was “a committed member of al Qaeda who served as [an] advisor and confidant to Osama bin Laden.”