Archive for June, 2007

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the day that the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into force. Since 1998, it has been marked by the UN as the International Day in Support of the Victims of Torture, although there is, alas, little to celebrate. Read the rest of this entry »

Required reading this week is Barton Gellman and Jo Becker’s four-part series on Dick Cheney for the Washington Post, which highlights the Vice President’s role as the malevolent power behind the American imperial throne. While this is not exactly news to anyone with an inquiring mind, the authors –- in interviews with over 200 people who have worked for or against Cheney over the years –- have assembled some compelling new information to add to the already extensive list of the VP’s crimes. The first and second articles (published Sunday and Monday) recount, as the authors describe it, “Cheney’s campaign to magnify presidential war-making authority, arguably his most important legacy.”

Of particular interest are the passages which spell out, often more explicitly than previously reported, the role played by Cheney and his coterie of close advisors –- in particular, his long-time legal advisor and chief counsel David Addington, White House deputy counsel Timothy Flanigan and Justice Department lawyer John Yoo –- in the creation of five documents underpinning the administration’s response to 9/11, which, in various ways, sought to grant unfettered executive power to the President and attempted to discard international laws regarding the torture and abuse of prisoners. These were: the Authorization for Use of Military Force (18 September 2001), a secret memorandum authorizing the warrantless surveillance of communications to and from the United States (25 September 2001), Military Order No 1, authorizing the creation of “Military Commissions” to try al-Qaeda suspects and their accomplices (13 November 2001), the memorandum of 25 January 2002, referring to the Geneva Conventions as “quaint,” which surfaced in a Presidential announcement, on 6 February 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield, and the notorious “Torture Memo” of 1 August 2002, which sought to redefine torture as nothing less than organ failure or death.

To set the scene for the legal coup d’etat that took place in 2001 and 2002, Gellman and Becker describe the impromptu war cabinet in the bunker beneath the White House, where, on 11 September 2001, while the President was in Florida, reading ‘The Pet Goat’ to a group of children, Cheney impassively watched the aftermath of the attacks and then –- ignoring national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and State Department officials, who were in the room with him –- summoned Addington to begin “contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the president need for his response?” By that evening, Flanigan had also been recruited, and Yoo was soon to follow.

Gellman and Becker point out that it was Flanigan, with advice from Yoo, who drafted the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which gave the President the authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001” –- and they add a comment from Yoo (who, unlike Cheney and Addington, agreed to be interviewed), explaining that “they used the broadest possible language because ‘this war was so different, you can’t predict what might come up’.” In fact, as the authors point out, they “knew very well what would come next: the interception –- without a warrant –- of communications to and from the United States.” Although warrantless communications intercepts had been forbidden by federal law since 1978, Gellman and Becker point out that they were “justified, in secret, as ‘incident to’ the authority Congress had just granted” the President, in a memorandum that Yoo finalized on 25 September.

Completely bypassing Congress and the courts, the surveillance memo marked the first, but by no means the last occasion when Cheney and his advisors cut potential objectors out of the loop. Foremost among the first wave of the excluded was John Bellinger, the ranking national security lawyer in the White House, who reported to Condoleezza Rice. Bellinger should, in theory, have been included in all discussions about surveillance, but according to a senior government lawyer cited by Gellman and Becker, he was regarded with “open contempt” by Addington.

While Cheney had been working behind the scenes in the drafting of these documents –- fulfilling the nickname “Backseat,” which he had been given by secret service officials –- Gellman and Becker describe how, on 13 November 2001, under the cover of his regular weekly meeting with the President, he played the leading role in circulating and gaining approval for the presidential order –- Military Order No 1 –- which stripped foreign terror suspects of access to any courts, authorized their indefinite imprisonment without charge, and also authorized the creation of “Military Commissions,” before which they could be tried using secret evidence. Approved within an hour by only two other figures in the White House –- associate counsel Bradford Berenson, and deputy staff secretary Stuart Bowen, whose objections that it had to be seen by other Presidential advisors were only dropped after “rapid, urgent persuasion” that the President “was standing by to sign and that the order was too sensitive to delay” –- the order’s swift and unprecedented passage bore all the hallmarks of Cheney’s preferred modus operandi: that of an ultra-secretive control freak who, while serving the President, was actually running the show himself.

Based on an opinion written by John Yoo on 6 November –- that the President did not need approval from Congress or the federal courts for his actions –- the draft for Military Order No 1 sidelined Attorney General John Ashcroft, who, we are told, angrily confronted Cheney –- to no avail –- on November 10, after learning that the draft “gave the Justice Department no role in choosing which alleged terrorists would be tried,” and completely bypassed both Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice. Gellman and Becker report that Powell asked, “What the hell just happened?” after seeing news of the order announced that evening on CNN. In addition, Cheney made sure that his own role was concealed: the draft that was passed to Berenson in the White House –- previously approved by Addington and Flanigan –- made no mention whatsoever of his role in its creation.

With the President’s right to capture and imprison anyone apparently guaranteed, Cheney and his advisers turned their attention to the treatment of prisoners. Cheney’s opening gambit, the day after Bush signed Military Order No 1, was to tell the US Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not “deserve to be treated as prisoners of war.” The authors point out, however, that this was a decision that the President had not yet made, and that it was another ten weeks before he “ratified the policy that Cheney had declared”; namely, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.

While a struggle over the treatment of prisoners raged within the administration, Gellman and Becker reveal that, shortly after Guantánamo opened, a CIA delegation came to the White House to explain, as John Yoo put it, that they were “going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees,” if interrogators were obliged to confine themselves to treatment permitted by the Geneva Conventions. It was, said Yoo, “the first time that the issue of interrogations” surfaced among high-ranking White House officials, and Gellman and Becker explain that, “From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive’s will to resist.” It was, they reveal, Addington who then wrote the notorious memorandum dismissing the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” –- to which the rather less articulate Alberto Gonzales put his name –- in which the Conventions’ “strict limits on questioning of enemy prisoners” were seen as hindering attempts “to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists,” and it was Addington who, two weeks later, provided the President with the words for his deliberately vague promise, on 6 February, that detainees would be treated “humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles” of the Geneva Conventions.

The pinnacle of Cheney’s revolutionary sadism was the “Torture Memo” of August 2002, and Gellman and Becker once more bring new information to bear on its development, confirming the suspicions of those who have studied this period closely that the new “no limits” policy actually came into being after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad on 28 March 2002. John Yoo explained that he was summoned to the White House after CIA officers asked “what the legal limits on interrogation are.” The resulting opinion –- that the definition of torture could be reinterpreted to mean suffering that was “equivalent in intensity” to the pain of organ failure or death –- was issued on 1 August, signed by assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and widely credited to Yoo, but in conversation with Gellman and Becker, Yoo revealed that Addington, Flanigan and Gonzales had all contributed to the opinion, and that Addington was responsible for another of the memo’s radical claims: that, as Commander in Chief, the President could authorize torture if he felt that it was necessary, and that Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Yoo also confirmed that a second opinjon was signed off on 1 August, which, unlike the first –- leaked after the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 –- has never been made public, and an unnamed source cited by the authors explained that it contained a long list of techniques approved for use by the CIA, which included waterboarding, but apparently drew the line at threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

The final twist in the dirty saga of how Cheney and his advisors brought torture out of the closet and into the mainstream is, surprisingly, provided by John Yoo, who admitted to Gellman and Becker that he “verbally warned” lawyers for Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that “it would be a risky policy to permit military interrogators to use the harshest techniques, because the armed services, vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the tools or exceed the limits.” “I always thought that only the CIA should do this,” he said, “but people at the White House and at DoD felt differently.”

With even Yoo admitting doubts, the spotlight on torture’s advocates remains firmly fixed not only on the semi-invisible Dick Cheney, but also on the even less visible figure of David Addington. Gonzales, throughout, is dismissed as a fool, Bush is barely visible, and Flanigan, who left the White House in December 2002, dropped off the radar after taking up commercial work and becoming embroiled in the Jack Abramoff scandal, which scuppered his nomination as deputy Attorney General in 2005, but Gellman and Becker’s exposure of the roles played by Cheney and Addington in rebranding the United States as a torture-wielding dictatorship will hopefully encourage a few more of their fellow citizens to scrutinize the power behind the President’s fading throne.

For more on Guantánamo and US torture policies, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

For the background on Dick Cheney’s rise to power, I recommend John Nichols’ Dick: The Man Who Is President (New Press, 2004), published in paperback in 2005 as The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney. This is a review that I wrote for the website Nth Position:

The man at the heart of investigative reporter John Nichols’ powerful and disturbing portrait of the Vice-President of the United States –- a man here revealed as the true power behind George W. Bush’s façade; the CEO of the USA; the most powerful man in the world –- is, astonishingly, almost invisible. Despite having a CV that apparently explains his rise to power –- as an aide to three presidents, the youngest ever White House chief of staff, the second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, a cabinet secretary and the CEO of a giant corporation –- Dick Cheney is a “shadowy Zelig figure” with a “Wizard of Oz-like penchant for remaining behind the curtains of authority”. In his introduction, helpfully entitled “The evil genius in the corner”, Nichols reveals that Cheney’s pursuit of anonymity has been so unrelenting that Secret Service officials used to call him “Backseat”.

“Backseat” launched his political career inauspiciously, “holding the button bag” for the governor of Wisconsin while the civil rights movement raged, and while his contemporaries were occupying student campuses. His early life was undistinguished. He dropped out of Yale, ran up a few drink-driving offenses, and strenuously avoided the Vietnam draft, deferring it on four occasions. Nichols notes, acidly, that his first child was born “Precisely nine months and two days after Selective Service eliminated special protections [from the draft] for childless married men”.

Handing out badges for a state governor may have been a humble start, but it was sufficient to get Cheney to Washington, working for moderate Republican senator Bill Steiger. He then met rising star Donald Rumsfeld, who so impressed Richard Nixon that the President soon employed him as a counselor in the White Horse. Cheney got to go along too, and Nichols points out that he immediately began studying Nixon’s tactics. He was already planning for the distant future, admiring in particular the President’s “moves to make the executive branch the dominant player in the federal government”.

Just before Watergate, Cheney got lucky again. Rumsfeld –- now suspected of being “slimy” and of having “liberal” tendencies –- was transferred to NATO, and Cheney took a job with a firm advising investment banks. As neither was implicated in the fallout from the Watergate scandal, they were soon back in the White House, this time working for Gerald Ford, with Rumsfeld as chief of staff and Cheney as his deputy. Together the two men removed obstacles to power. Robert Hartman, a moderate who was close to the President –- and who correctly identified them as “the little Praetorians” –- was sidelined, Henry Kissinger was demoted, and when they managed to obtain the resignation of defense secretary James Schlesinger, Rumsfeld took over his job and Cheney –- by default –- became the youngest ever White House chief of staff.

One of his occasional disasters followed. As the man directly responsible for the electoral campaign that failed to get Ford re-elected, he should have been damaged goods politically, but with his cloak of invisibility intact he simply retreated back to Wyoming –- his bolt-hole on the few occasions when his rise to power was temporarily put on hold –- where he duly resurfaced a few year later as a senator.

Cheney’s time in the House of Representatives revealed his political instincts to be as rabidly reactionary as ever. In his ten years as a senator, he was consistently one of its most right-wing members. He voted against the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. He voted against nutrition programs for children, against the Equal Rights Amendment and against a call for the release of Nelson Mandela. Nichols talked to Mandela, who recalled that “when the notoriously secretive and closeted Dick Cheney was forced to record his true sentiments, he stood consistently on the side of the most reactionary, racist and repulsive forces on the planet”, an opinion echoed by Robert Hartman, who commented that “whenever his private ideology was exposed, he appeared somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld, or, for that matter, Genghis Khan”.

Despite his voting record, Cheney has only once –- after his nomination as vice-presidential candidate in 2000 –- been called to account for his right-wing tendencies. Nichols blames the media, suggesting that the widespread ignorance regarding Cheney’s ideological extremism is “ample evidence of the collapse of serious journalism in the United States”, although it’s also clear that the illusion that Cheney managed to project shielded him from the critical gaze of most of his fellow senators. Time and again the Dick Cheney that colleagues on both sides of the House recall was, in the words of an article in a Philadelphia newspaper, a “friendly, gentlemanly candidate”, and one, moreover, who was “not an ideologue”.

Protected by this widespread inability on the part of others to see beyond his cordial front, Cheney assiduously pursued his own interests. He took a seat on the committee responsible for mining and drilling issues, where he “began collecting substantial campaign donations from the oil and gas industries”. He also chaired the Policy Committee, doing boring but essential work in the most vital link between Congress and the White House, where, despite serving in the House of Representatives, he continued to prepare for future office by fighting “to undermine the ability of the legislative branch to hold the executive accountable”.

Cheney got lucky again when George Bush was elected, landing the job of defense secretary when the President’s first choice, John Tower, turned out to be an “unhinged alcoholic”. It was in this position that his ambitions finally began to be fulfilled. Nichols observes that, as the last defense secretary of the Cold War era, Cheney was “handed a unique opportunity to guide not just the US, but the world away from the brink of nuclear holocaust, away from excessive military spending that was bankrupting superpowers and client states alike, and away from the fear-mongering that had manipulated the peoples of the planet into seeing one another as threats rather than as neighbors”.

Cheney, of course, was not for peace. While Colin Powell talked of “running out of enemies”, Cheney saw them everywhere. And he not only wanted enemies; he wanted to profit from them too. He was one of the chief architects of the radical neo-conservative manifesto, the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance –- which later resurfaced as the Project for the New American Century –- in which it was stated that “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and western access to the region’s oil”.

So it was that, in the face of demands for a “peace dividend”, Cheney managed to hold onto the defense budget. Although obliged to cut the numbers of soldiers to save costs, he arranged for the military’s logistical operations to be privatized, handing $210 billion to contractors whose CEOs were close friends. One of the chief beneficiaries of Cheney’s generosity with the public purse was Halliburton. Nichols points out that Cheney arranged for Brown and Root Services, a Halliburton subsidiary, to be paid $8.9 million to produce reports nominating itself to take over military operations, and in the years that followed the gravy train began to roll, delivering billions of dollars to Halliburton and other companies run by Cheney’s cronies. When Bush unexpectedly lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton, Cheney simply moved to Halliburton, where, in his five years as CEO, he collected a salary totalling $44 million, while Halliburton continued to cash in on the reforms that he himself had pushed through Congress, receiving contracts from the Clinton administration totaling $2.2 billion for operations in the Balkans, and even $109 million for the disastrous campaign in Somalia.

The last stage in this extraordinary story begins with the complex and patient maneuvring that led to Cheney’s nomination as vice-presidential candidate. He insinuated himself into the heart of the Bush family as early as 1995, when George W. Bush became governor of Texas, and he was on hand when the plan to groom him as a presidential candidate first emerged. As Bush Junior’s ineptitude first became apparent –- Nichols quotes a memorable interview in which he was unable to name the leaders of Pakistan, India, Taiwan and Chechnya –- Cheney was the man that Bush Senior approached to find a suitable vice-presidential candidate to be “in charge of the kid’s government”. Typically, Cheney whittled away at the prospective candidates, finding fault with all of them, until finally, as he had planned all along, George W. Bush was astonished to discover that “the best candidate might be sitting next to me”.

Since coming to power Cheney’s commitment to his agenda has been unwavering. As soon as victory was confirmed, he rented an office in Washington and began drafting policies and securing top-ranking positions for his long-standing allies. Rumsfeld went to defense, and other neo-conservatives were drafted into positions of power and authority: Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, John Bolton as an undersecretary of state, and John Ashcroft as the attorney general. Blatantly disregarding any potential conflicts of interest, Cheney headed the National Energy Policy Development Group, appointing all 63 members, all of whom came from industry, and pushed through a new energy policy that proposed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, to build 1,300 new coal-fired power plants, to provide $33 billion in subsidies and tax cuts to encourage increased nuclear, oil and coal production, and to lay 18,000 miles of fuel pipeline “across what remained of the American wilderness”.

Companies in which Cheney is a board member –- including Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin and Procter and Gamble –- have all benefited from his new position, as have generous donors to the Republican cause –- including super-corrupt energy giant Enron –- and he continues to hold stock options in Halliburton that are worth over $10 million, and every year since 2000 has received “deferred salary payments” that are almost the same as his “official” salary as VP. Moreover, the market he created has continued to grow. In 2002, it was worth $150 billion to outside contractors, and in 2003, after the Vice-President managed to secure $87 billion “to maintain the occupation of Iraq and other military adventures abroad”, Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq alone were worth $11 billion.

Regime change in Iraq –- for oil, money and power –- was something that Cheney had first proposed to George Bush Senior during the 1991 Gulf War –- when it was turned down –- but it was an idea that he clung to over the following years. The events of September 11, 2001 finally allowed him to reinstate his violent dream, even though, as Nichols comments, “It was going to be a tough connection to make. Osama bin Laden and his followers hated Saddam Hussein, a secularist whose government included Christians and women, and Saddam feared the fanatical religionists as he did all movements that might organize opposition to his oppressive regime”.

Undeterred, Cheney insisted, with monotonous regularity, that Saddam had “a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization”, that he had reconstituted chemical weapons programs, and that he was trying to produce nuclear weapons. He also insisted that Iraq had been involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and that suicide pilot Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. When no evidence whatsoever emerged to support any of Cheney’s claims –- even after his regular and unprecedented visits to the CIA, where he was known to demand, “Why doesn’t your intelligence support what we know is out there?” –- he turned to an “independent intelligence unit” that Rumsfeld had conveniently established in the Pentagon, where the spurious case for war was safe from dissenting voices.

If there was any doubt left that Cheney was the power behind the throne, this should have been demolished when he emerged briefly from the shadows –- as he had for a whole week in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 –- to run things personally. On this occasion he appeared on live TV in March 2003 to make the official case for war, running through the conspiracy theories and assuring the American public that the Iraqi people would “welcome us as liberators”. And if even this was not enough, final confirmation was provided by Paul O’Neill, a Cheney appointee to the Treasury who had resigned in disgust. O’Neill found a White House in which Cheney –- the leader –- had embraced “brazen ideology” that was “not penetrable by facts”, while Bush –- sidelined and stupefied –- was “like a blind man in a room of deaf people”.

This is a book that I’d urge anyone vaguely interested in the baleful powers that shape the modern world to buy. It is, as Studs Terkel has commented, “A farce noir, lethally funny. A revelatory work”. What Nichols can’t explain, of course, is what happened to shape a mild-mannered young man called Dick Cheney into a power-crazed fanatic. Significantly, the only poignant moments in the entire book are when Nichols describes Cheney’s parents. Both were staunch Democrats, and his father, who worked for the Soil Conservation Service, followed the visionary lead of its founder, Hugh Hammond Bennett, who declared that “no man should have the right, legally or otherwise, to recklessly or wilfully destroy or unnecessarily waste any resources on which public welfare is dependent”.

What did Cheney think when, in 2000, his father pointedly told him, “you can’t take my vote for granted?”

What does Dick Cheney see when he looks in the mirror?

Overlooked in the reports about Guantánamo detainee Abdullah bin Omar, a Tunisian who, on Sunday, was sent back to the country of his birth, where there are fears that he will be subjected to torture and abuse, is the story of the other Tunisian who, shackled and bound, shared a US plane with him. Unlike bin Omar, who was represented by lawyers who have done their best to publicize his case, there was no one to speak out for 38-year old Lofti Lagha, and no way of knowing if he too faces persecution on his return. Even his identity has so far remained concealed, revealed neither by the US or Tunisian authorities.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, in June 2004, that the prisoners in Guantánamo had the right to challenge their detention in the US courts (a right that was taken away by Congress last October), around 200 detainees availed themselves of this hard-won opportunity, but for some reason –- either because he did not trust American lawyers, or because he found no way of establishing contact –- Lofti Lagha was not one of them. Like hundreds of other men in Guantánamo without legal representation, the only people he met for five and a half years who were not part of the US administration that imprisoned him without charge or trial were, on occasion, representatives of the Red Cross, and, almost certainly, representatives of the intelligence services of his home country – in his case, a secretive, repressive regime dominated, for 20 years, by the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Although Lagha was not one of Guantánamo’s completely voiceless prisoners –- a dubious accolade reserved for 22 detainees whose names, reprinted from lists released by the Pentagon last year, can be found on page after page of the internet, but for whom no story whatsoever has been reported –- all that exists in the public domain to mark his 2,000-day imprisonment are three pages of notes from the Unclassified Summary of Evidence for his Administrative Review Board hearing in 2005 –- convened to assess whether he should still be regarded as an “enemy combatant” –- which, like his earlier tribunal, he did not attend.

What can be gleaned from this jumble of biographical details, conflicting claims and unsubstantiated allegations masquerading as evidence is that Lagha served in the Tunisian army as a young man, and then, allegedly, “stole a boat to enter Italy illegally with an Egyptian and another Tunisian,” where he used a false ID card. In Milan, where he seems to have settled, it was claimed that he “associated with various Tunisians” at a cultural center (which is hardly surprising), and that “among those who frequented the cultural center” was “at least one individual that belonged to a terrorist network that ensures financial support to terrorist groups while also actively recruiting for Osama bin Laden-sponsored training camps in Afghanistan.”

It was also noted that he “frequented elements of the Jamaat-al-Tablighi” (sic). A vast worldwide missionary organization with millions of members, Jamaat-al-Tablighi –- founded in India in the 1920s –- declares itself non-political but has caused concern in the West because of its rigorous conservatism, although none of the criticism levelled at it has come close to the hyperbole used in Guantánamo, where, as in the “evidence” against Lagha, it is regularly described as “a Pakistan-based Islamic missionary organization,” which is “used as a cover to mask travel and activities of terrorists including al-Qaeda.”

Moving on to Lagha’s reasons for leaving Italy, it was alleged that he travelled to Afghanistan in early 2001, when he was “sent by the head of a terrorist network for military training,” although it was also alleged that he travelled in April 2001 “after being inspired to perform jihad” by a recruiter at a mosque in Italy, and it was also claimed that he travelled with a companion who was a “member of a terrorist network and a convicted terrorist.” According to US military intelligence, his Italian contact put him in touch with a Tunisian in the eastern city of Jalalabad, who had previously run the Durunta training camp, and this man in turn introduced him to two other Tunisians, a “reported” member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and another connected to Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an Afghan militia commanded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a renegade warlord heavily funded by the Americans in the 1980s, but now described as a terrorist who “ran terrorist training camps in Afghanistan” and “staged attacks in an attempt to force US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.”

Captured after crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, it was alleged that, after his arrest, Lagha “told others that he was coming from the mountains of Tora Bora,” although this does not prove that he was in Tora Bora with Osama bin Laden’s men, and it may be that, like countless others (many of whom are still in Guantánamo), he was passing through the mountains on his way to Pakistan. The most risible allegation of all was that he “saw members of the Taliban while in Afghanistan,” a predicament that only a blind man could avoid.

Lagha’s own explanation for his presence in Afghanistan is found in a section of the “evidence” described as “factors favouring release or transfer,” in which it was noted that he said that he went to Afghanistan as a tourist, that he spent his time “fishing and recreating” in Jalalabad, and that once the war started he left Afghanistan. He insisted that he never trained in a camp in Afghanistan, never took up arms against the Americans or anybody else, and added that he “thinks al-Qaeda’s belief system strange and that they are not good.”

Extracting reasons for his release from the garbled semi-narrative presented by the US authorities is, of course, all but impossible. Were his acquaintances really whom the authorities said they were, or was the whole story revealed as a tissue of lies? Did he, perhaps, rat on his fellows to escape Guantánamo, or did the authorities let him go because they concluded that they had drained him of all possible intelligence value? We may never know. What can be stated with absolute certainty, however, is that attempting to glimpse a flicker of the truth through a fog of innuendo is a poor substitute, after five and a half years, for an older, swifter, and far more effective system: a court of law, with proper charges, transparent evidence, prosecution and defense attorneys, and a judge and a jury.

[Note: the Pentagon refers to Lagha as Lufti bin Swei Lagha].

For more on Guantánamo, and the stories of the Tunisian detainees, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Published as a CounterPunch exclusive.

[Note: Mr. Lagha’s first name is spelled incorrectly. It is “Lotfi” not “Lofti.”]

Demonstrating either that the administration’s left hand does not know what the right hand is doing –- which would be apt –- or, more probably, that they don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, the foolish rumors of Guantánamo’s imminent closure, which I mocked here this morning, were comprehensively swept away a few hours later when the Department of Defense announced that it had transferred a brand-new detainee –- “a dangerous terror suspect” –- from Afghanistan to Guantánamo.

Guantánamo’s 777th detainee is Haroon al-Afghani, who, according to the DoD, was “captured as a result of our ongoing efforts in the Global War on Terror.” The DoD also declared that he was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan, and has admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL),” and reported that there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), an anti-US militia led by renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, ironically, was one of the major recipients of billions of dollars of American money in the 1980s, which was channeled to him through his supporters in Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI. According to the DoD, al-Afghani “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangahar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and “is assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

No details of al-Afghani’s capture were provided –- either the date or the location –- probably to prevent the kind of furore that arose after senior al-Qaeda operative Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was transferred to Guantánamo in April, when the administration let slip that he had been held for several months by the CIA –- in one of the secret prisons that the President declared empty on 6 September 2006 –- but from the DoD’s comment that he “admitted serving as a courier for al-Qaeda,” it’s clear that wasn’t picked up yesterday, and probable that he was held for some time in one of the many US-run prisons in Afghanistan.

Expect months to go by before we learn any more, when he will go through a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), which will confirm that he was an “enemy combatant” –- as designated by the President when he was captured –- so that he can progress to trial by Military Commission, if –- and it’s a big if –- the administration can actually breathe life into their Frankenstein-like substitution for a real court of law.

For more on Guantánamo, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.