By Dan Ephron - NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009
Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks had been a
guard at Guantanamo for about six months the
night he had his life-altering conversation with
detainee 590, a Moroccan also known as "the
General." This was early 2004, about halfway
through Holdbrooks's stint at Guantanamo with
the 463rd Military Police Company. Until then,
he'd spent most of his day shifts just doing his
duty. He'd escort prisoners to interrogations or
walk up and down the cellblock making sure they
weren't passing notes. But the midnight shifts
were slow. "The only thing you really had to do
was mop the center floor," he says. So
Holdbrooks began spending part of the night
sitting cross-legged on the ground, talking to
detainees through the metal mesh of their cell
doors.
He developed a strong relationship with the
General, whose real name is Ahmed Errachidi.
Their late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to
be more skeptical about the prison, he says, and
made him think harder about his own life. Soon,
Holdbrooks was ordering books on Arabic and
Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in
early 2004, the conversation turned to the
shahada, the one-line statement of faith that
marks the single requirement for converting to
Islam ("There is no God but God and Muhammad is
his prophet"). Holdbrooks pushed a pen and an
index card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi
to write out the shahada in English and
transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the words
aloud and, there on the floor of Guantanamo's
Camp Delta, became a Muslim.
