This morning, someone pseudonymously posted a link on Seth Dillingham’s site claiming that Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef — the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan — had been tortured to death during his confinement at the Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, Cuba.
I’d never heard this claim, before, though apparently Seth had.
The story turns out to be false. The Balochistan Post — an anti-American Pakistan-based newspaper — originally published a story in late July 2002 claiming that relatives of Zaeef said he had been tortured to death while in the custody of the Americans. This story was picked up by quite a few Middle Eastern newspapers.
But on August 5, 2002, the Balochistan Post retracted its story and admitted that Zaeef was not only alive, but had sent a letter to his family through the International Red Cross. As Seth notes, the newspapers that pick up on the Zaeef-is-dead story never bothered to pick up on the later correction, so the story has been floating around the Internet that Zaeef was tortured to death while in U.S. custody.
The Balochistan Post story should have been taken with a huge grain of salt since the BP is an extremely anti-American, pro-Islamist newspaper that doesn’t hide its agenda at all. In its Zaeef-is-dead story, this is how the PB described Zaeef’s arrest (emphasis added), “Pakistani authorities later handed him over to their masters and they bundled him to Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba along with hundreds of other Afghan, Pakistan and Arab prisoners.” Yet, this story was reported without any critical comments or analysis on a number of left wing weblogs.