Could ISIS appeal to Guantanamo detainees?

The World
In this photo, reviewed by a U.S. Department of Defense official, handcuffs hang in Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base April 27, 2010.

American intelligence officials who were once trying to figure out if the detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison were al-Qaeda and what role they played, have now a new task at hand: Trying to figure out what the detainees think about ISIS.

Carol Rosenberg, reporter for the Miami Herald who has reported on Guantanamo since 2001, says detainees at the prison have been learning about the group from sources like newspapers and television.

"Their information is from the media made available to them by the US military," she says.

The cultural adviser at Guantanamo told Rosenberg that the detainees, just like anyone else, are interested in politics, the Middle East and what’s going on back home. But so far, it's been hard to gauge how much the detainees are supportive of ISIS.

“[He said] some are for it and some are against it,” adding that “they’re kicking it around inside the detention center.”

Lawyers for some of the detainees told Rosenberg that their clients are very much ready to go back to their normal, pre-jihad lives. Especially the ones who ended up in Guantanamo at a very young age.

“They want to get married, have kids, maybe even get a job. They want to go back to their families,” Rosenberg says. “I don’t think that ISIS is necessarily a family friendly organization.”

But she agrees that it's not surprising that lawyers would say that about their clients.

On the other hand, Rosenberg adds that some detainees have become more and more angry every day that they spent locked up in an American prison.

“I imagine that some of these guys, if they got to Gitmo not particularly liking the Americans, they might really hate us now,” she says.

Rosenberg says the irony of it all is that the military made the decision to give detainees access to news and English classes because they wanted to give them distractions.

"They wanted to give them some other pursuits," she says. "They understood that they needed to socialize them."

But what they have been seeing on the news is the rise of ISIS. According to Rosenberg, the rise of ISIS will not help in closing down Guantanamo, which President Barack Obama has pledged to do.

"I think that some members of Congress look at Guantanamo and see it as the perfect location to get and keep [...] ISIS members as well as former al-Qaeda members," she says.

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