Al-Jazeera's been receiving calls from a Guatanamo Bay inmate.

Octavia Nasr
CNN Senior Middle East Editor
AC360° Contributor

What’s up with Al-Jazeera’s phone? It’s been getting some interesting calls lately. On Monday the all news Arab network received a call from a Guantanamo Bay inmate who alleged that he continues to be badly treated at the US facility although he’s expected to be released soon. According to Al-Jazeera, the inmate called Sami al-Hajj, Al-Jazeera’s cameraman who spent about six years at Guantanamo before being released in 2008. The entire conversation sounded surreal and melodramatic, a combination of a phone conversation and a phone interview. Centering mainly on the idea that treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo remained bad and even worsened after President Barack Obama took office. “Since Obama took charge he has not shown us that anything will change,” al-Qurani said.

In the interview, Mohammad al-Qurani claimed that he suffered abuse at the hands of his guards. He said in one instance, when he refused to leave his cell, the guard used tear gas to force him out. Al-Qurani then added that when he complained, the commander laughed and told him that the officer was “doing his job.” Al-Jazeera posted a translated transcript of the conversation on its website.

According to Al-Jazeera’s translation al-Qurani claimed that the alleged mistreatment “started about 20 days” before Barack Obama became U.S. president and “since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day.”

Al-Jazeera also spoke withGuantanamo spokesman, Navy Lt-Cmdr Brook DeWalt, who said, “I have no record of authenticity of this.. It is an alleged phone transcript. We don’t have any evidence supporting or substantiating any of these claims.”

The transitional Camp Iguana where al-Qurani and others set for release are kept offers inmates several privileges such as phone calls to vetted numbers, videos, exercise, and group prayer. Apparently, this one vetted number landed al-Qurani on the most watched Arabic network to claim recent abuse for millions of viewers to hear.

On Tuesday, Al-Jazeera called a man it identified as a “Somali pirate” by the name of Adham Warsamah. The man claimed that his group seized two freighters on Tuesday “in response to American and French rescue efforts that killed 3 pirates just days earlier. According to Al-Jazeera, Warsamah was speaking from the Gulf of Aden. He boasted in a hurried voice, “We increased our operations and went farther this time.” He said that there are five or six different groups of pirates responsible for attacking ships that pass through the Gulf of Aden. There is no central piracy leadership coordinating attacks, he said, but “we cooperate among each other.” The high frequency in Somali pirate attacks along shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden has left questions over how pirates decide on their attack. “We don’t attack every ship we see,” Warsamah said. “We don’t go into international waters searching for ships. And we don’t follow any ships into international waters. But sometime we go farther than our shores,” he said.

In answer to a question about whether Somali pirates are funded by groups outside Somalia, Warsamah said they were not. “We ask boats to follow to certain locations but there are none (outside groups),” he said. “There are groups inside Somalia that help us in certain ways,” he added.

The poor connection coupled with lack of lucidity on the part of the "pirate" made for an added element to this week’s melodrama on the Arabic network. Will there be more incoming or outgoing phone calls from unusual places with unusual characters? I guess we’re going to have to wait and see.