Osama's cook begs to be taken to Gitmo

Hat tip: Blackfive

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Osama Bin Laden's cook, Haji Mohamad Akram, was captured by the Afghanistani Hazara tribe last week. Akram said the majority of the Al-Qaeda men including Osama Bin Laden fled to Iran after the Tora Bora bombings last November/December. Akram stated he did not want to go and was abandoned while saying prayers.

He is begging for the US to take him away from the Hazara tribe who he claims beats him every night.

For the interviews, Hazara leader Ali Akbar Qasmi escorted Mr. Akram out of a back room of his house into his small, dark living room. Sitting in shackles near a pot-belly stove, his bloodied nostrils plugged with cotton, he begged to be handed over to US investigators - even sent "to Cuba" if necessary - and promised to disclose important information to US officials.

In fact, Mr. Qasmi had placed a call to the US Embassy in Kabul earlier this week. He says a US official there told him that they were terribly busy and it would help if he could hold them a "week or two."

A US intelligience base in Afghanistan expressed great interest in taking the Saudi chef, along with another Saudi financier and a Kurdish member of Al Qaeda into custody.

Akram's had this to say about Bin Laden:

He goes on to criticize bin Laden - although he mentions that bin Laden once sent him to Detroit, Mich., for medical treatment - and expresses hope that the US will do better by Afghanistan than bin Laden did. "One mistake that Osama made is that he only bought pickup trucks for the Taliban, and provided some rupees for their front lines. He was never seriously interested in the welfare of the Afghan people. Now that Al Qaeda is gone, the US should help the Afghans, the poor have suffered too much."

Check out Blackfive's interesting exit strategy.