A Danish detainee at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison who is scheduled to be sent home to freedom in coming days had ties to underground Muslim groups before his capture in Afghanistan in 2001, and his planned release has prompted alarm among some U.S. military officials knowledgeable about his case, according to a former Pentagon official.
Mark Jacobson, who until several months ago helped craft U.S. policy for detainees held at the prison, said that the release of Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane appears to be, in part, a reward to the Danish government for its support of the U.S. war in Iraq.
"I'm very surprised he's being released, because we all said he is a dangerous guy," said Jacobson, who was a special assistant for detainee policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense until last fall. "We kept saying to the Danes, 'We have concerns about him.' . . . There's still reason to be concerned about him."
Abderrahmane, 30, whose father is Algerian and who joined a pro-jihad movement in Denmark as a young man, had been interrogated by authorities in Algeria in 2001 about his radical associations before he traveled to Afghanistan, according to Danish media reports. He was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 in an area controlled by al Qaeda and the Taliban, U.S. officials said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61358-2004Feb22.html
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