Archive for June, 2007

Who’s woken up to reality?

In a must-read article on Salon, Imperial presidency declared null and void, Sidney Blumenthal, former Clinton adviser and perspicacious commentator on the brutal follies of the Bush administration, tantalizingly points out that “one of the key framers” of the “war paradigm” –- the President’s post-9/11 power-grab, which gave him dictatorial powers, as wartime commander in chief, to make and enforce laws as he saw fit –- “confesses that he has abandoned his belief in the whole doctrine, though he refuses to say so publicly. If he were to speak up, given his seminal role in formulating the policy and stature among the Federalist Society cadres that run it, his rejection would have a shattering impact … But this figure remains careful to disclose his disillusionment with his own handiwork only in off-the-record conversations.”

Blumenthal also writes of “another Bush legal official, even now at the commanding heights of power,” who “admits that the administration’s policies are largely discredited. In its defense, he says without a hint of irony or sarcasm, ‘Not everything we’ve done has been illegal’.”

This is progress, of course (to put it mildly), but now we need NAMES …

Habeas denied: it’s official

On Wednesday, as reported by SCOTUSblog, Think Progress and almost no one else, DC Circuit judges, “after pondering the issue for more than two months … refused to delay any longer putting into effect its decision that Guantánamo Bay detainees have lost all rights to pursue habeas challenges to their prolonged imprisonment.” Habeas? Who cares? With the recent collapse of the Military Commissions, this latest abject surrender to the tyranny of last October’s Military Commissions Act leaves the 379 men still alive in Guantánamo’s isolation cells with no rights whatsoever, their fate entirely subject to the whims of the President.

Let’s forget, shall we, what Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush, way back in June 2004:

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.

Passing the buck

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald, in Capitol Hill struggles with closing Gitmo, reports on State Department legal adviser John Bellinger’s testimony before the US Helsinki Commission (on Security and Cooperation in Europe), in which he admitted, “We fully and acutely realize Guantánamo has become a lightning rod for criticism around the world,” but added, “Everyone will agree these people need to be detained –- somewhere.” Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings –- the chair of the Commission and a former judge who was impeached for corruption and perjury –- then weighed in with a suggestion of his own. “Guantánamo has to be closed, over and out,” Hastings declared. “But if Europe isn’t prepared to stand up and take their share, I believe they ought to mute some of their criticism.”

Fine words, Sir, but remind me again: what exactly was Europe’s role when Messrs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzales concocted the aberrant extra-legal experiment that is Guantánamo in the first place?

When the pot calls the kettle black

From Bangladesh, where released Guantánamo prisoner Mubarak Hashim –- arrested in a Pakistani street for no reason in December 2001 –- recently described how he was subjected to electric shocks and held naked in a freezing cold cell during his five years in Guantánamo, comes a perceptive letter in the Daily Star quoting US ambassador Patricia Butenis –- soon to depart for Baghdad, of all places –- saying, “Deaths in custody, mistreatment of the detainees, lack of clarity on who gets arrested and why, and so-called ‘secret detentions’ are all unacceptable.” The letter writer adds that these comments “will earn her the gratitude of the whole sane world who will no doubt applaud her courage –- provided, of course, that the quote refers to Guantánamo Bay. However, if it is a remark on Bangladesh, then one can only ignore her for being a part of the usual myopic vision exhibited by recent US governments.”

Touché!

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

As wild rumors of Guantánamo’s imminent closure spread like a mutant virus through the world’s media, courtesy of the Associated Press –- with Time’s White House Likely Closing Gitmo gaining my award as the most audacious of the hundreds of headlines parroting the AP’s original release –- my own take is that the only conceivable way that Guantánamo will be closing soon –- with the remaining 379 prisoners transferred to US custody on the mainland –- is if Dick Cheney is actually dead, and no one has bothered to tell us.

While life still beats in Cheney’s body I cannot imagine that he would countenance transferring prisoners to the mainland, where they would be unbearably close to hordes of interfering lawyers and their outrageous demands for habeas corpus rights and due process. The Military Commissions may have taken a massive hit two weeks ago, but the whole purpose of last autumn’s Military Commissions Act –- reestablishing the Commissions and stripping the Guantánamo detainees of their habeas rights –- was to ensure that the only kind of court that any of the detainees would ever face would be of the kangaroo variety: one that guaranteed that they would be found guilty of whatever they were accused of –- regardless of whether these accusations came from the coercion or torture of themselves or others –- and that neither they nor their lawyers would be allowed to demonstrate, in any way whatsoever, that coercion or torture had ever been used.

Closing Guantánamo would shatter the viability of Cheney’s all-consuming and malevolent dream: that a brand-new judicial system, based on unfettered executive power, can be used to condemn to life imprisonment –- and perhaps even execution –- anyone that the President thinks is guilty. I’d love to discover that the whole rotten edifice is about to crumble, but I’m pretty sure that Dick Cheney’s still alive.

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

Fears that the governments of both the US and the UK are conspiring to break international safeguards preventing the return of prisoners held without charge or trial to their home countries –- where they face a serious risk of torture and abuse –- have gained prominence in the last few days. On Saturday, I wrote on these pages about the case of Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, a Libyan prisoner in Guantánamo who is struggling to prevent his enforced return to the country of his birth, and on Tuesday the Pentagon announced that two Tunisian prisoners in Guantánamo, cleared for release since last year, had been returned to Tunisia on Sunday.

Zachary Katznelson, Senior Counsel at Reprieve, a London-based legal charity representing one of the Tunisians, Abdullah bin Omar, immediately denounced his client’s enforced repatriation, stating that he was “cleared by the United States –- found not to be a threat and not to have information about terrorism. But the US has not apologized and set him free after five years in Guantánamo. Instead, he has been shipped to Tunisia, where abuse and possibly torture await. What has happened to American justice? How are we any safer by sending cleared men back to notorious regimes in the dead of night?”

A 50-year old former railway engineer, bin Omar left Tunisia in 1989 because of religious persecution, and settled in Pakistan, where he was living when he was convicted by a Tunisian court, in absentia, and sentenced to 23 years in prison for belonging to Ennahda, a moderate Islamist political party and just one of the many valid organizations and worthy individuals persecuted over the last 20 years by the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He arrived in Guantánamo after being captured in Pakistan in April 2002, during a frenzied few months when all manner of innocent Arabs were rounded up in Pakistan, and was sold to the Americans for $5,000, although much of his subsequent story is unknown. He never took part in any tribunals in Guantánamo, and the US authorities only allowed Katznelson to meet him once, on 1 May 2007, when he “expressed severe concerns that were he to be returned to Tunisia, the authorities there would torture him to force him to confess or to become an informant.”

In the light of his story –- and the secretive Tunisian dictator’s well-reported history of political repression –- Katznelson was undoubtedly correct to point out that bin Omar “finds himself a guinea pig in a potentially deadly diplomatic experiment. The United States is so desperate to send people out of Guantánamo Bay, they are willing to ignore Tunisia’s horrific human rights record.” His opinion was reinforced by Jennifer Daskal, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, who noted, “the United States got diplomatic assurances from Tunisia –- a no-torture promise from a country with a documented record of torture. How are they enforced? Who is doing the monitoring?”

These are not the only cases in which the rights of prisoners cleared for release from Guantánamo are being trampled on by two administrations desperate to wash their hands of their own failings. On Saturday, the Times (in the UK) ran an affecting, if slightly misleading article about the former Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed Errachidi, who was flown back to Morocco on 27 April. A 41-year old chef, who suffers from bipolar disorder and has a history of mental breakdowns, Errachidi had been living in the UK, where he had been granted indefinite leave to remain, for 16 years, working in hotels and restaurants. However, in September 2001, with an impetuousness that is a hallmark of those suffering from the illness that afflicted him, he set off for Pakistan on a hare-brained mission to buy silver jewelry to sell in Morocco to raise money for an essential heart operation for one of his two young sons. Sidetracked by the humanitarian crisis that followed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he took a bus to Afghanistan –- “to help the poor children and the women, and to partake in their calamity,” as he later told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director –- but soon discovered that there was nothing he could do to help the Afghan people, and returned to Pakistan, where he was promptly captured by bounty hunters and sold to the US military for $5,000.

For the next five years and five months, Errachidi was subjected to some of the more egregious excesses of the administration’s post-9/11 detention system. First he was “rendered” back to Afghanistan and held for 19 days in the “Dark Prison,” the CIA’s vile torture dungeon near Kabul, where, as well as enduring brutal interrogations, rotten food and dirty water, prisoners were held in total darkness, hung on the walls by their wrists and blasted with music 24 hours a day. He was then transferred to the military-run prison at Kandahar airbase, where Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a chief interrogator in Afghanistan, who later wrote a book about his experiences (The Interrogator’s War, with the journalist Greg Miller), recalled interrogating him. Regarding his mental illness as a ruse, Mackey wrote, “The only thing that gave this claim even a modicum of credibility was the fact that he managed to name the pharmacological drug he was taking.”

After another 26 days at the prison in Bagram airbase, where, Errachidi said, he was “tortured and interrogated in his own hell,” because someone –- presumably another prisoner –- claimed that he had received military training at the Khaldan camp near Khost in August 2001, he was transferred to Guantánamo, where his mastery of English, and his refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, meant that the prison authorities named him “The General.” Unable to understand that he had gained a reputation as an authority figure among the prisoners because of his language skills and his willingness to speak out about the prisoners’ treatment, the authorities concluded that his status confirmed the allegations about his “al-Qaeda training” that had been made in Afghanistan. “The cook has become the General,” Errachidi told Clive Stafford Smith, who related his story in his recent book Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons. “In the minds of the Americans, the crack of an egg has become the explosion of a bomb.”

Held in isolation for two of his five years in Guantánamo, Errachidi was repeatedly interrogated about his alleged training in Afghanistan, even while suffering mental breakdowns. During February and March 2004, he became psychotic and was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, but his interrogations continued, even though there was nothing to be gained from his claims that he was Jesus Christ, that Osama bin Laden was his student, and that a giant snowball was about to envelop the earth. He was only cleared for release after his lawyers found the documentation to prove that he had been working at the Westbury Hotel in London’s Bond Street when he was supposed to have been training at Khaldan.

Even then, however, Errachidi’s troubles were far from over. In February 2007, his lawyers were informed that both he and another British resident, Ahmed Belbacha, had been “approved to leave Guantánamo, after diplomatic arrangements for their departure had been made,” because they had been “cleared by a panel of military officers whose job was to determine whether a prisoner represented a threat to the US or its allies and whether there were other factors that could form the basis for continued detention, including intelligence value and any law-enforcement interest.”

Belbacha, like Errachidi, was innocent of any wrong-doing. A former professional footballer in Algeria, he had worked as an accounts clerk for a government-owned oil company, but had been repeatedly threatened by Islamic extremists. After escaping to the UK in 1999, he settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, where he found a job as a waiter in a hotel. In autumn 2001, he took a month’s vacation to visit Damascus, Tehran and an Afghan refugee camp, but was captured in Pakistan and falsely accused of attending a training camp in Jalalabad and meeting Osama bin Laden on two occasions, even though, at the time, he was waiting to hear from the British government if his application for asylum had been successful. With a grim irony, his application was turned down, but he was granted exceptional leave to remain in the UK in June 2003, when he had already been in Guantánamo for over a year.

Despite both men’s innocence, the Foreign Office callously refused to accept them back. “We’re not making any moves with these individuals or the other British residents at Guantánamo,” a spokesman said in March. “Because they are not British citizens, we’re not providing any consular or diplomatic assistance.” When asked how he imagined they might ever be able to leave Guantánamo, the official replied, “It has got nothing to do with us.”

The outline of Errachidi’s story was well covered in the Times article, and Sean O’Neill, who interviewed him in Tangier, reported sympathetically on his long years of wrongful imprisonment. Where he was misled, however, was in accepting Errachidi’s explanation that he was now a free man. As O’Neill described it, “The Red Cross had asked him before he left Guantánamo if he would not rather stay than go back to Morocco where there was a risk of torture. He found the question insulting and says that in his homeland the police received him with kindness, courtesy and mint tea. After seven days, he was sent home to his family in Tangier.” What Errachidi failed to mention was that, before being returned to his family, he was arrested on terrorism charges and brought before a court on 2 May. Although the charges were dropped after representations by Moroccan lawyers acting on information provided by Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith told the BBC immediately afterwards that the Moroccan Interior Minister had announced that Errachidi would face new charges, relating to “membership of an unauthorized group,” in a trial that was scheduled to begin in July, and Zachary Katznelson confirmed to me on 19 June that this was still the case.

Morocco has a mixed record when it comes to dealing with its Guantánamo prisoners. Of the nine men returned prior to Errachidi, all but two are reportedly at liberty, although it has taken them many years to escape from the courts and prisons of their homeland, and there is a very real fear that Errachidi will suffer the same fate. Three of the five men transferred to Morocco in August 2004, for example, were only finally cleared of the “terrorist” charges against them in January this year, and three other men –- transferred in February 2006 and sentenced to between three and five years in prison in November 2006 for “membership of a criminal gang” and “falsifying documents” –- had to wait until last month for an appeal court to dismiss all the charges against them.

In the meantime, while Ahmed Errachidi waits to hear from the Moroccan courts, Ahmed Belbacha remains in Guantánamo, unsure whether, in the wake of the UK’s refusal to accept him, he will be returned to Algeria, where, according to Zachary Katznelson, the Algerian intelligence services have stated that they cannot ensure that he will be safe from their own personnel. In Belbacha’s case, what makes the British government’s intransigence all the more shocking is that, having insisted for five years that they would not act on behalf of British residents in Guantánamo, they had already broken their own rules, accepting the return to Britain, four weeks before Ahmed Errachidi was sent to Morocco, of Bisher al-Rawi, a 37-year old British resident from a wealthy Iraq family, who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1984 and had come to Britain with his family. Having retained his Iraqi citizenship in the hope that the family might one day be able to reclaim their property in Iraq, al-Rawi –- who was kidnapped by CIA agents while undertaking a business venture in the Gambia, rendered to the “Dark Prison,” and held in Bagram and Guantánamo for over four years –- was freed because the British government could no longer disguise the fact that he had actually been working for the British intelligence services at the time of his arrest, and that –- with a callousness that beggars belief –- MI5 had, at the same time, fed false information about him to their American counterparts.

While al-Rawi has been reunited with his family, however, his business partner and fellow British resident, Jamil El-Banna, who has also been cleared for release, remains incarcerated in Guantánamo, and is yet another victim of the latest attempts by the Americans and the British to return prisoners to countries where they are at risk of torture and abuse. A 45-year old Jordanian refugee with a British wife and five children, El-Banna came to Britain in 1994 and was granted refugee status in 2000. His problems stem from the fact that, unlike al-Rawi, he refused to be enlisted by MI5, and has continued to do so in Guantánamo, where British and American agents have persistently tried to recruit him, using a mixture of bribery and threats to his family.

In an attempt to pave the way for his enforced return to Jordan, which, as in the case of Abdullah bin Omar and his home country, he left because of religious persecution, the British government has resorted to claiming that his leave to remain in the UK has expired. Last week, in a parliamentary written reply, the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, had the nerve to state, “Mr Banna was recognized as a refugee by the UK in 1997 and was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2000. That leave has now lapsed.” One of El-Banna’s son’s, 10-year old Anas, promptly delivered a letter to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, in which he declared, “I hope you won’t say that my Dad isn’t British so you can’t help him. My Dad was treated unfairly and kidnapped and even if he isn’t British, we, his five children, are. I hope you won’t say that my dad was away from the country for more than two years. My Dad was only out of the country because he was locked up over there.” El-Banna’s solicitor, Irene Nembhard, added, “As a refugee recognized by the UK, his status does not lapse. He has a legal entitlement to return to the UK.”

As with the cases of Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, Abdullah bin Omar, Ahmed Errachidi and Ahmed Belbacha –- and others whose stories will no doubt surface in the months to come –- it remains to be seen whether justice will triumph, when the governments of both the US and UK have so little regard for international treaties, and are dedicated, instead, to demonstrating a voracious appetite for sacrificing individuals to cover up their own mistakes.

For more on Guantánamo, “extraordinary rendition,” and the prisons at Kandahar and Bagram, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on CounterPunch.

Return to Abu Ghraib

Don’t miss Seymour Hersh’s essential article, The General’s Report, in this week’s New Yorker, based on interviews with former US army general Antonio Taguba. Ordered by the Pentagon to investigate abuses at Abu Ghraib by the 800th Military Police Brigade, Taguba was belittled by Rumsfeld and his acolytes after the report was published –- and was ultimately forced out of his job, even though he had not pointed out the culpability of senior officials because it was not in his remit. “They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told Hersh. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal –- that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

More important is the following passage:

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These MP troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

And this:

“There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff” –- the explicit images –- “was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

An eye for an eye, an ‘enemy combatant’ for an ‘enemy combatant’

Over at Tomdispatch, in Blowback, Detainee-Style, Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, notes how the US administration has lost the high moral ground in the case of four Iranian-American scholars and activists held as “detainees” in Iran, and “accused of being spies and/or employees of the US government intent on fomenting dissent and disruption within Iran.”

Sounds familiar? Greenberg explains why:

In numerous ways, the US has robbed itself of the right to proclaim the very principles by which these prisoners should be defended. Though President Bush and his spokespersons may not see it, their past policies have set a trap for the government –- and for Americans generally. More than five years after setting up Guantánamo, and then implementing national security strategies based upon torture, secret prisons, and illegal detentions, the Bush administration has managed to obliterate the moral high ground they now seek to claim in relation to Iran.

And this:

At the inception of the war on terror, the Bush administration broke the very rules it now accuses the Iranians of breaking. As part of a high-stakes stand-off with countries associated with Islamic fundamentalism, it was the Bush administration that first collected individuals, some guilty of crimes, some simply swept up in the chaos –- initially off the Afghan battlefield and then off the global one. Often, they did so with very little knowledge of, or care about, whom they were rounding up. They incarcerated these prisoners for long periods without releasing their names or, often, their whereabouts; they refused to give them the established rights of prisoners of war; they defied the united protests of allies around the world; and they sought to justify this whole policy with the term “detainee.”

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak

And on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, The Prison Poets Of Guantánamo Find a Publisher gives a welcome boost to Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, an 84-page anthology of poems by 17 Guantánamo prisoners. Edited by Marc Falkoff, an English Literature graduate, law professor and attorney for 17 Guantánamo prisoners from the Yemen, this slim but attractive volume will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press. Here’s a sample, by imprisoned al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj (translated from Arabic), describing the US authorities’ unsuccessful attempts to recruit him to spy on his al-Jazeera colleagues:

The oppressors are playing with me,
As they move freely around the world.
They ask me to spy on my countrymen,
Claiming it would be a good deed.
They offer me money and land,
And freedom to go where I please.
Their temptations seize
My attention like lightning in the sky.
But their gift is an empty snake,
Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom.

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

Yesterday I reported here on the release of four Yemeni prisoners, and told the stories of two of these men: Sadeq Mohammed Said, captured after crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after being injured in a bombing raid, who may or may not have acted as a courier for the Taliban, and Fawaz Naman Hamoud, a young man with a severe psychiatric illness, who was recruited to fight with the Taliban because he was told that “only the jihad places had magic things inside.” Today the Yemen Observer confirmed the identities of the other two: 27-year old Hani Abdu Shu’alan and 26-year old Ali Saleh.

Shu’alan, who was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in July 2001, of staying in various safe houses associated with the Taliban, and of being in Tora Bora during the US air campaign, told his tribunal that he was a student who went to Afghanistan to find a job and save money, after being told about the possibilities by a sheikh at his local mosque. He explained that he found work as a chef’s assistant near Kabul, and was only passing through Tora Bora on his way to Pakistan after the war started. He added that he traveled with many other people, and that he handed himself in to the Pakistani authorities on arrival.

Saleh did not take part in any tribunals in Guantánamo, and his story is available only through the two-page Unclassified Summary of Evidence for his Administrative Review Board –- the annual reviews set up to assess whether prisoners should still be regarded as “enemy combatants” –- in which it was alleged that he traveled to Afghanistan “in support of the jihad,” but also because, in June 2000, he “heard from friends that the Taliban … would provide a home for those who chose to live there.” It was also alleged that he joined the Taliban on 9/11 and fought with them on the front lines near Bagram, that he was present at the al-Farouq training camp when Osama bin Laden visited and gave a lecture, and that he owned some notebooks filled with pictures of weapons and tools and words in French and Arabic describing various materials used in explosives.

Whilst it’s impossible to know if any of these allegations were true, an additional allegation –- that he was “recognized by a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” –- is one of the more worrying claims made against prisoners in general, as it has been demonstrated in many cases –- and as I discuss in depth in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison –- that these “senior al-Qaeda” figures, whether in Guantánamo itself, or in other secret prisons, may well have been shown a photo album of prisoners in Guantánamo, and asked to come up with stories about them, while being interrogated under duress.

Saleh also probably did himself no favors for many years in Guantánamo by refusing to condemn the 9/11 attacks. This is not to say that he approved of them, but those judging him noted that he “stated that he could not judge if the 9/11 terrorist attacks were wrong, because he is not an Islamic scholar, and said, ‘They were just following the directions of the scholars. That is what we do.’” Under the factors favoring release or transfer, it was reiterated that he wanted to move to Afghanistan because he was unhappy with the quality of his life and wanted to find a wife, and it was also stated that he said that he didn’t like firing a Kalashnikov.

Why these men in particular were chosen for release remains one of Guantánamo’s many mysteries. With the exception of Sadeq Said, they are not among the five men still in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release since at least 2006, although the Yemen Observer possibly shed some light on the arcane by-ways of the administration’s decision-making process by pointing out that a Yemeni security official told them, “Three of the four men were among the Yemeni detainees who met with the Yemen security delegation that visited Guantánamo last year.”

What remains clear, however, is that even with these releases, 94 Yemenis remain in Guantánamo, many of whom had no involvement whatsoever with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda. For these men –- who include humanitarian aid workers and missionaries captured in Afghanistan, and students captured in Pakistan –- the truth of their detention, behind the wall of bluster raised by the US authorities, who maintain that many are still held because their government will not cooperate fully with them regarding transfers and continued detention, may in fact have more to do with comments reported in the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence for two particular Yemeni prisoners, who were told that one of the reasons for their continued detention was because their government was not perceived as being cooperative enough in the “War on Terror.”

You’d be hard pushed to find a better demonstration that the “War on Terror” is as much about political maneuvring as it is about guilt and innocence.