Gulalai, wearing sunglasses and standing next to Karzai in the photo, gets a pink two-story stucco ranch house in Los Angeles. Whole communities of Somali and Bosnian Muslims have been brought to the U.S. and plunked en masse in middle America. Where are the communities of Christians who are facing violent persecution in Syria, Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere in the Muslim world being settled? Can they even get into the U.S. at all?
“Mystery surrounds move of Afghan ‘torturer in chief’ to U.S. amid allegations of spy agency abuse,” by Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, April 28, 2014 (thanks to Halal Pork Shop):
In Afghanistan, his presence was enough to cause prisoners to tremble. Hundreds in his organization’s custody were beaten, shocked with electrical currents or subjected to other abuses documented in human rights reports. Some allegedly disappeared.
And then Haji Gulalai disappeared as well.
He had run Afghan intelligence operations in Kandahar after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 and later served as head of the spy service’s detention and interrogation branch. After 2009, his whereabouts were unknown.
Because of his reputation for brutality, Gulalai was someone both sides of the war wanted gone. The Taliban tried at least twice to kill him. Despite Gulalai’s ties to the CIA and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, United Nations officials and U.S. coalition partners sought to rein him in or have him removed.
Today, Gulalai lives in a pink two-story house in Southern California, on a street of stucco homes on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
How he managed to land in the United States remains murky. Afghan officials and former Gulalai colleagues said that his U.S. connections — and mounting concern about his safety — account for his extraordinary accommodation.
But CIA officials said the agency played no role in bringing Gulalai into the country. Officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security would not comment on his relocation or immigration status, citing privacy restrictions. Gulalai and members of his family declined repeated inquiries from The Washington Post….