The odd case of Terry C. Holdbrooks
Olga sent me a recent article about Terry C. Holdbrooks who I wrote about last month in a post about Guantanamo guards. I wanted to check out his story so I asked the good folks at POW Net to get his records for us. Well, they came back and I know even less about him than I did before I asked for his records. He was in the 463rd MP company who were in Guantanamo during the period he claims he was there, but other than that his record is a big blank. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself – this how his Form 2-1 looked when I got it;
It’s almost all blackened out. Well, here’s the story he tells Newsweek;
At Holdbrooks’s next station, in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he says things began to unravel. The only place to kill time within miles of the base was a Wal-Mart and two strip clubs—Big Daddy’s and Big Louie’s. “I’ve never been a fan of strip clubs, so I hung out at Wal-Mart,” he says. Within months, Holdbrooks was released from the military—two years before the end of his commitment. The Army gave him an honorable discharge with no explanation, but the events at Gitmo seemed to loom over the decision. The Army said it would not comment on the matter.
Yeah, there are plenty of Muslims in the Army who don’t get harassed and tossed out early. The way his record looks and the way the Army isn’t commenting makes me think he was up to something. If you read my first post about him, you’ll notice he demeans Christians and the United States because we’re mostly Christians.
Holdbrooks tones it down for Newsweek making himself seem more of a sympathetic character than he did for the UC Davis Human Rights Project on Guantanamo.
Oh, yeah, I have my doubts about his claim that he was discharged two years early. According to his FOIA, he did three years;
But it was an odd number of months. As near as I can tell from his Form 2-1, he went to basic and AIT at Leonard Wood in December 2002, the his unit and Guantanamo from July 2003 – June 2004 and then he was discharged October 2005. The Army blocked out his Duty MOS so I don’t know what his job was while he was stationed at Leonard Wood, but if he was acting as nutty as it seems he was acting at Guantanamo (I’m sorry but all night chats with prisoners is just nutty), I’m sure the Army was a little reticent about letting him patrol the post with a loaded handgun and a badge. And hanging out at WalMart isn’t normal behavior, either.
Anyway, maybe someone from his unit can fill in the blanks for us.
Category: Antiwar crowd, Terror War, Usual Suspects
From the Newsweek article: “But then, Holdbrooks is a contrarian by nature. He can also be conspiratorial. When his company visited the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Holdbrooks remembers thinking there had to be a broader explanation, and that the Bush administration must have colluded somehow in the plot.”
Troofer first, Muslim second, American…ehh whatever.
yeah, this is where they lost me.
as a side note, only people who were not at the WTC that day claim that it was the gov’t conspiracy. I have yet to hear this ‘troof’ from anybody who was there…
[…] several years ago. Of course, you’re wondering if he was a actually a Gitmo guard, and we wrote about him four years ago and got his records. So yeah, he was a guard at that camp. I also had some email conversations with […]