Details Emerge on a Brazen Escape in Afghanistan

By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
Published: December 4, 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - The prisoners were considered some of the most dangerous men among the hundreds of terror suspects locked behind the walls of a secretive and secure American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Their escape, however, might as well have been a breakout from the county jail.

According to military officials familiar with the episode, the suspects are believed to have picked the lock on their cell, changed out of their bright orange uniforms and made their way through a heavily guarded military base under the cover of night. They then crawled over a faulty wall where a getaway vehicle was apparently waiting for them, the officials said.

In a videotape delivered to the Pakistan bureau of the Arab-language satellite television station Al Arabiya, Mr. Kahtani boasted about the preparations for the escape, suggesting that they had been painstaking.

"We decided to escape on Sunday because that is the day off for the nonbelievers," he said on the tape, which was broadcast Oct. 18. "To escape we studied the plan very carefully."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/international/asia/04escape.html?pagewanted=2

this isn't a setup of some kind. Perhaps the escapees were "turned" while in custody and were actually intentionally released w/ the daring breakout as a cover story, in order to become double agents inside Al-Qaeda?

It would explain what the article characterizes as an inexplicable escape. Of course, I'd never bet against simple occupational incompetence and administrative lapses either.

On edit:

I should have read the entire article before posting, because it has this paragraph towards the end:



There you have it, officially proposed and officially denied. Now I'm convinced that what really happened was the army screwed-up and is now doing damage control by suggesting they're double agents, thus trying to destroy the escapees' credibility, assuming of course that their cohorts read the NY Times.