Archive for July, 2007

In a belated attempt to win the PR battle over Guantánamo, a terrorism study center at West Point has produced a Pentagon-commissioned report, which attempts to refute the findings of a report published by the Seton Hall Law School in February 2006. Using the government’s own documents –- 517 Unclassified Summaries of Evidence from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals –- the team at Seton Hall, led by lawyers Mark and Josh Denbeaux, analyzed the Summaries and concluded that, according to the government’s own assertions, 86 percent of the detainees were not captured on the battlefield by US forces, but were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

Even these assertions are doubtful. As I demonstrate in The Guantánamo Files (and as is apparent from numerous other sources, including, most recently, the “Guantánamo whistleblower” Stephen Abraham), claims made by the government in the Summaries of Evidence were not necessarily accurate, and the percentage of detainees who actually had any involvement with al-Qaeda or committed any kind of hostile act against the US or its allies is even less than claimed.

Nevertheless, the fine patriots at West Point, while admitting that their report is a propaganda exercise, designed “to affect public attitudes,” and with conclusions that should “enhance our collective understanding of the threats facing the United States, its allies and its interests and how we respond to them,” have looked at the same documents and have produced what the New York Times has unquestioningly described as “a chilling portrait of the Guantánamo detainees,” claiming that 73 percent of them were a “demonstrated threat” to American or coalition forces, and that 95 percent were at least a “potential threat,” and included detainees who had “played a supporting role in terrorist groups or had expressed a commitment to pursuing jihadist violence.”

What nonsense. If this is the case, why have so many of these “threats” been released or cleared for release? In the three years since the 517 Summaries were compiled, 207 of the detainees studied have been released from Guantánamo. Almost all have been freed on their return to their home countries, and almost all have returned to civilian life. In addition, many –- as well as reporting credible stories of torture and abuse at the hands of the US authorities in Afghanistan and Guantánamo — have reiterated the stories that they maintained throughout their detention: that they were either innocent men, mostly sold to the US by bounty hunters and unscrupulous allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Taliban foot soldiers, who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight other Muslims –- those of the Northern Alliance –- before 9/11, as part of a long-running civil war.

Of the 310 detainees who have not been released, the administration itself admits that it intends to try 80 of these men before Military Commissions, that it intends to hold another 50 because they are too dangerous to be released but not dangerous enough to be tried (which law book did they find that in then?) and that the rest are “eligible for release” because they are “not or no longer a threat.”

Let’s have a look at that again, shall we? On the one hand, the administration commissions its boys to come up with a report stating that 73 percent of the detainees were a “demonstrated threat,” and 95 percent were a “potential threat,” and on the other hand the administration itself has released, or cleared for release, 75 percent of the detainees because they were “not or no longer a threat” (and that’s not counting the 201 detainees who were released before the tribunal process began). How are we supposed to take these clowns seriously?

As published on CounterPunch (as “Why the Pentagon’s Gitmo study is a joke”) and American Torture.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, the Guantánamo whistleblower, is in the news again. The civilian lawyer, who worked as a military intelligence officer for 26 years in the Army reserves and was decorated for his support of counter-terrorism efforts following 9/11, first came to prominence last month, when he became the first military insider to criticize, in public, the tribunals –- known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals –- which were held at Guantánamo to determine whether the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.”

In a declaration submitted in the case of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the tribunal process, which he described as severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature –- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.” Additionally, he averred that the process was designed to rubber-stamp the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

In the four weeks since Lt. Col. Abraham’s affidavit first attracted media attention, he has been subjected to a snide response from officials at the Department of Justice, and a malignant attempt at character assassination by Andrew McCarthy in National Review. In an “Opposition to Motion to File Declaration” in the Court of Appeals for the District Court of Columbia Circuit on July 6, the DoJ described Lt. Col. Abraham’s affidavit as “irrelevant,” claiming that his “criticisms of the intelligence agencies and the process of obtaining information from them reflects (sic) a fundamental misunderstanding of how the CSRT process is supposed to work,” and suggesting that, although his declaration “insinuates that the CSRT process was improperly slanted, there is absolutely nothing in the declaration to substantiate this innuendo.” For his part, McCarthy railed against Abraham’s “scant experience,” claiming that he had a “lack of direct knowledge about the vast majority of tribunals,” and attempted to deride him for being a civilian lawyer as well as an Army reservist.

Rising above mudslinging, Stephen Abraham kindly provided me with details of his response to McCarthy’s article, which also serves as a riposte to claims made both by the DoJ and by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman, who chipped in recently, saying that, “In his capacity as database manager during his brief stint on active duty several years ago, Lt. Col. Abraham was not in a position to have a complete view of all the evidence used in the CSRTs, as well as the process as a whole.” On the contrary, the period that Abraham served as a part of the CSRT process –- from September 2004 to February 2005 –- was the period when almost all of the 558 cases were presented before tribunals (and was, therefore, not a “brief stint” at all), and his role was far more substantial than the DoJ’s mentions of “innuendo” would suggest.

“I was assigned to OARDEC from September 2004 to the end of February 2005,” Abraham explained. “During that time, I was personally involved in a wide range of activities relating to the CSRT process. This included serving as one of two intelligence officers tasked with validating the presence or absence of exculpatory evidence, working with research teams (“tiger teams”) compiling materials to be used in the CSRT hearing process, addressing matters raised involving the use of intelligence products, collecting and reporting data on the conduct of all CSRT hearings at all steps (from scheduling, assembling hearing packages, starting, conducting, and completing hearings, reporting the results, legal sufficiency review, and ultimate reporting of the results to Secretary of the Navy Gordon England).” He added, “Moreover, I was engaged in senior leadership meetings, included in a large volume of daily communications regarding the progress of the hearings, and participated in nearly daily discussions with the legal staff assigned to OARDEC relating to the conduct of the hearings in the context of federal court decisions as they were issued or applied to the proceedings.”

In interviews conducted over the last month for a New York Times front page article on Monday, Abraham reiterated his complaints, telling William Glaberson, “What disturbed me most was the willingness to use very small fragments of information,” and explaining how he grew “increasingly uneasy” over the six-month period that he worked with the tribunals. He explained that intelligence reports often “relied only on accusations that a detainee had been found in a suspect area or was associated with a suspect organization,” and that some reports described detainees as “jihadist” without providing any details. Expressing his profound dissatisfaction with this latter point, he told Glaberson, “As an intelligence agent, I would have written ‘junk statement’ across that.” He added that officials were “under intense pressure to show quick results,” and that he swiftly became concerned about the quality of the material used as evidence. “The classified evidence,” he said, “was stripped down, watered down, removed of context, incomplete, and missing essential information,” and, worryingly, “Many detainees implicated other detainees, and there was often no way to test whether they had provided false information to win favor with interrogators” (or, it should, be added, whether they had done so under duress).

Despite the DoJ’s criticism, it seems that Lt. Col. Abraham’s principled stand has already had a major impact on issues of pressing concern to the detainees in Guantánamo, whose last three years imprisoned without charge or trial have been based on decisions made during the CSRT process. Just three days after his affidavit was filed, the Supreme Court took the almost unprecedented decision to reverse a previous opinion regarding the Guantánamo detainees, agreeing to hear an appeal arguing that the tribunals were unjust and that detainees should have the right to challenge the basis of their detention in federal courts. Many lawyers contend that Abraham’s affidavit was a major factor in the Supreme Court’s decision.

What has also emerged in the last month is the identity of the detainee who was cleared by Abraham and his fellow tribunal members in the only CSRT for which he was chosen as a member, after which, having refused to rubber-stamp a deeply flawed process, he was never asked to take part in a tribunal again.

The detainee in question is Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan who was 39 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan towards the end of 2001. Al-Ghizzawi had been living in Afghanistan since the Russians left the country in 1989, and had settled comfortably in his new home. Married to an Afghan woman, he had a six-month-old daughter, and ran a shop that sold bread and honey. When the US-led invasion began, he took his wife and daughter to his wife’s parents’ home in the country, to escape the bombing raids, but was abducted by some locals, who were seduced by American offers of free money for life, publicized through leaflets dropped from planes which stated, “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life –- pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.” Sold to the Northern Alliance, he was, in turn, sold to the US military, and made his way to Guantánamo via US-run prisons in Afghanistan, where the orders handed down to the interrogators by the military decision-makers based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, were that every Arab should be sent to Guantánamo.

The notorious US PsyOps leaflet offering Afghan villagers money for life in exchange for handing over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

The story of what subsequently happened to Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi adds unprecedented weight to Stephen Abraham’s concerns, particularly about the administration’s obsession with confirming detainees’ “enemy combatant” status at all costs. Reiterating complaints made in his affidavit, Abraham told Glaberson, “Anything that resulted in a ‘not enemy combatant’ [verdict] would just send ripples through the entire process. The interpretation [was], ‘You got the wrong result. Do it again.’” Once the interfering intelligence officer –- and, presumably, his obdurate colleagues –- had been sacked, the administration convened a second tribunal for al-Ghizzawi, which duly found that he was an “enemy combatant” after all. Over two years later, he remains in Guantánamo, suffering from hepatitis ‘B’ and, possibly, liver cancer, and reportedly the victim of malingering on the part of the medical staff, because he refuses to admit that he was a terrorist and not a shopkeeper.

Although al-Ghizzawi’s case demonstrates, succinctly, Stephen Abraham’s assertions about the authorities’ reliance on vague and unsubstantiated evidence and the ruthless pursuit of verdicts confirming the detainees’ status as “enemy combatants,” his is only one of several cases in which CSRTs were reconvened after dissenting tribunal members had made decisions that were unpalatable to the administration.

In the cases of 18 Uyghur detainees (Muslims from an oppressed outpost of the People’s Republic of China), who were captured on the Pakistani border after fleeing a run-down hamlet in the Tora Bora mountains, where they had been living for several months until it was destroyed in a US bombing raid, the CSRTs determined that –- although their stories were almost identical –- some were “enemy combatants” and others were not. Five of the men were released in May 2006 (and sent to a UN refugee camp in Albania, because the administration had fears for their safety if they returned to China), but the others remain in Guantánamo, and two of them, Anwar Hassan and Hammad Mohammed, went through a process remarkably similar to that of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi.

Cleared by a CSRT, Hassan was subjected to a second tribunal, on the orders of Matthew Waxman, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, when he too had his status indiscriminately revised. His lawyers, Angela Vigil and George Clarke, noted that, “[c]ontrary to the government’s suggestion,” the change of determination between the first and second CSRTs was not based on “additional classified information,” (of which there was none) but seemed, instead, to have been based solely on “communications” from Matthew Waxman “pressing for [a] reversal” of the first CSRT determination.

Ahmed Adil, Adil Abdul Hakim and Abu Bakr Qassim, three of the Uyghurs released from Guantánamo, speaking to the BBC from their new home in Tirana in January 2007.

Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represents six of the Uyghur detainees, recently told me that his interest –- and that of other lawyers –- in Abraham’s revelations was “no academic quibble on our part.” Citing just a few cases –- those of Haji Bismullah, an Afghan, and the Uyghurs he represents, whose cases were chosen for the DoJ’s response to Abraham’s affidavit –- Willett explained, “We now know there was a massive amount of exculpatory evidence. Senior Afghan officials provided detailed evidence to US generals showing that Bismullah, a US ally, had been the victim of intertribal grievances.” He added, “Military officials told our Uyghur clients they were innocent in 2003, before there were CSRTs. So getting the exculpatory evidence in front of the panels seems more than trivially important.”

Willett is undoubtedly correct. With the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling on Friday that the government must hand over “classified” information relating to the detainees, and the Supreme Court due to start reviewing their rights in the fall, there is certainly nothing trivial about the plight of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, the discrepancies in the status of the Uyghur detainees, or the exclusion of exculpatory evidence relating to an Afghan ally who was shopped to US forces by a rival who knew that they would fail to investigate the background to his story, and there are, moreover, many other cases in Guantánamo with eerie similarities to the stories mentioned above.

I leave the final word to Stephen Abraham, who first wrote to me three weeks ago, in response to an article I had written in which I also mentioned other insiders who had criticized the tribunal process (though not in public). “While I was and continue to be constrained in terms of what can be said,” he wrote, “your article very well pointed out issues that permeated the entirety of the process and, more fundamentally, highlighted the degree to which so many panels (or majorities) were unwilling or unable to peer below the veneer of the evidence.” He added, “There were few instances where the validity of the information was questioned; rather, the presumption was that information, whether detailed or summarized, no matter what the source, was valid, and in the face of which not even denials carried much weight.”

As the Guantánamo story rolls on to the Supreme Court once more, many dozens of detainees –- in addition to Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, Haji Bismullah and the Uyghurs –- will be grateful that Stephen Abraham had the courage to step forward to highlight the “junk statements,” “generic” intelligence and bullying that characterized the tribunals in Guantánamo.

***

A footnote to Andrew McCarthy’s National Review article concerns his assertion that the 93% “conviction” rate in the CSRTs –- 520 out of the 558 cases considered –- compares favorably with the DoJ’s overall conviction rate on the US mainland in 2004: 90% out of 83,391 cases. If the Guantánamo results were fair, this statistical analysis could be applauded, but the truth is that, in addition to the 38 detainees released through the CSRTs, 201 detainees were released before the CSRTs began, 169 more have been released through the annual reviews that followed them (the Administrative Review Boards, or ARBs), and, according to figures divulged by J Alan Liotta, the director of the Office of Detainee Affairs in the Department of Defense, another 225 are eligible for release. That’s a rather less respectable 19% “conviction rate”, which becomes even less acceptable with the realization that, of the remaining 144 detainees, only 80 are scheduled to be tried by Military Commissions and the remaining men are in an extra-legal limbo, considered too dangerous to be released, but not dangerous enough to be tried (another arrant novelty conjured up by an administration bent on replacing laws with half-baked and indefensible propaganda).

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

As published on the Huffington Post.

On Friday, the day after a craven/comatose Senate rejected even the merest mention of plans to transfer Guantánamo detainees to prisons on the US mainland, judges in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit advanced the detainees’ faltering legal status by ordering the government to hand over classified information relating to them, frustrating attempts by the Department of Justice to insist that the court should only be given the information included in their hearings at Guantánamo, and not, as the New York Times described it, the “more expansive” information the government might have collected on a detainee.

The court’s decision relates to the first cases filed under a provision in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for “limited appeals court review” of the tribunals at Guantánamo (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals), which were convened to assess whether or not the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” and which have been widely condemned as kangaroo courts, because the detainees were not allowed legal representation, and were not allowed to either see or hear the “classified evidence” against them.

Noting, as the Times put it, that “Congress said the appeals court’s review of the combatant status hearings was limited to determining whether the Pentagon followed its own procedures, and whether an enemy combatant finding was supported by a preponderance of the evidence,” the appeal court judges said that a meaningful review of the tribunals would not be possible “without seeing all the evidence, any more than one can tell whether a fraction is more or less than half by looking only at the numerator and not the denominator.” Writing rather less obliquely, the judges explained, “Counsel [the government] simply cannot argue, nor can the court determine, whether a preponderance of the evidence supports the Tribunal’s status determination without seeing all the evidence. Therefore, we must presume counsel for a detainee has a ‘need to know’ all Government Information concerning his client, not just the portions of the Government Information presented to the Tribunal.”

Sabin Willett, a lawyer who represents six Chinese Muslim detainees in Guantánamo (and whose case was one of those considered by the Court of Appeals), called the ruling “a resounding rejection of the government’s effort to hide the truth,” but what’s perhaps more interesting, in the long run, is whether the “more expansive” evidence concealed by the government will be anything more than a mirage. It has long been known that the unclassified “evidence” against the majority of the detainees consists of almost every shred of hearsay and of false allegations obtained through bribery, coercion and torture that the government could muster, and in the murmurs that have occasionally seeped out after lawyers have reviewed the “classified evidence,” the most shocking revelation about the Pandora’s Box of “classified evidence” is that it contains nothing of substance whatsoever.

Readers should also note, however, that the appeal court’s decision includes what the Times referred to as “significant victories for the government”; in particular, a decision “allowing the Pentagon to limit the subjects that the lawyers can discuss with detainees and authorizing special Pentagon teams to read the lawyers’ mail and remove unauthorized comments.” This is disturbing news. Ever since lawyers were first allowed access to the detainees in the wake of the Supreme Court’s verdict in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, the administration has done everything in its power to disrupt the process, from intimidating prisoners to obstructing the lawyers themselves.

One lawyer noted that several prisoners told him “they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be,” the recently released detainee Juma al-Dossari reported that several interrogators told him that his lawyers were liars, and Fouad al-Rabia, a Kuwaiti who is still held in Guantánamo, was told that “if he complained to his lawyers about conditions at Guantánamo Bay he would be kept there for life.” As long ago as October 2004, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, responding to lawyers’ complaints, ordered the Pentagon to stop eavesdropping on lawyer-client conversations, which she described as a “bedrock” American principle, and in the last year the pressure on lawyers has increased markedly.

In the wake of the suicides of three men in Guantánamo in June 2006, the authorities illegally confiscated large amounts of lawyer-client correspondence, and, outrageously, accused Clive Stafford Smith (whose legal charity, Reprieve, represents several dozen detainees at Guantánamo) of inciting the suicides. Then, in April this year, the administration floated proposals that have resurfaced in amended form in the appeal court’s decision on Friday: to restrict lawyers to only three meetings with their clients, and to be allowed to read their correspondence. In a court filing, the Department of Justice alleged that attorney access via the mail system had “enabled detainees’ counsel to cause unrest on the base” by informing detainees about “military operations in Iraq, activities of terrorist leaders, efforts in the War on Terror, the Hezbollah attack on Israel and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison,” a claim which led Barry M. Kamins, the President of the New York City Bar association, to write to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, declaring, “This is an astonishing and disingenuous assertion,” and to point out that “many detainees have been held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods and have lost hope of a fair hearing to demonstrate their innocence.”

Although the plans appeared to have been dropped, after an outcry by legal groups and complaints in Congress, when Rear Admiral Harry H. Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, conceded that they were measures drawn up in the wake of the suicides that were “no longer warranted,” and the Department of Justice admitted that it was “no longer seeking to incorporate a three-visit threshold for the number of counsel visits,” the cases on Friday brought them lumbering back to malignant life. Here, once more, were the allegations of lawyers fomenting unrest by writing about current affairs, and the government’s assertions that “such information can ‘incite detainees to violence’ or cause ‘unrest’ such as a riot, hunger strike, or suicide –- as, indeed, it has done in the past.”

While the lawyers insisted that, as established by a legal precedent, the attorney-client privilege was intended to “encourage full and frank communication between attorneys and their clients and therefore promote broader public interests in the observance of law and the administration of justice,” their assertions were, rather disturbingly, overruled by the judges, who, “[w]ithout expressing any view as to whether the attorney-client privilege applies in this context,” agreed with the government that “past breaches” by “some counsel for detainees” justified the government’s proposal to “narrow the topics about which all counsel may correspond with a detainee and to hold all counsel accountable by screening the legal mail they send to their detainee clients.”

The Court of Appeals is to be applauded for its demands that the government release all information relating to the detainees, but its evidence-free backing of the government’s claims that lawyers have stirred up trouble in Guantánamo in the past, and its approval of plans to limit the subjects available for discussion between lawyers and their clients, and to employ human snooper dogs to monitor their mail, should be resisted as yet another shabby attempt by a paranoid administration to undermine the “bedrock” American principle of lawyer-client confidentiality, and to prevent detainees from exercising what, in some cases, is their only lifeline to sanity: a meeting with a human being who is not a part of the military machine that has kept them imprisoned without charge or trial for five and a half years.

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

As published on CounterPunch (as “Gains and losses at Gitmo”).

The news that Abdullah Mehsud, a 32-year old Taliban commander released from Guantánamo in March 2004, has killed himself with a hand grenade after being cornered by security forces in Pakistan, has unleashed a wave of belligerent bombast from right-wing commentators. Leaving aside the fact that he was reportedly killed in March 2005, bloggers such as those at Eye on the World have used his death as an occasion to announce, “To all the liberal do-gooders who cry out for human rights for the terrorists locked up in Guantánamo Bay, I just want to ask, ‘what do you have to say about this zero who returned to a life of murder and was killed after getting released by the Yanks?’ I mean, according to your lot, he was wrongly incarcerated.”

The truth, however, is that, had the US administration not behaved with such arrogant unilateralism, neither Mehsud nor the handful of other released detainees who returned to the battlefield would have been freed from Guantánamo in the first place. Mehsud came to prominence in October 2004, after two Chinese engineers working on a dam project in Waziristan were kidnapped, when he spoke to reporters on a satellite phone and said that his followers were responsible for the abductions. He went on to explain that he had spent two years in Guantánamo after being captured in Kunduz in November 2001 while fighting with the Taliban. At the time of his capture he was carrying a false Afghan ID card, and throughout his detention he maintained that he was an innocent Afghan tribesman. He added that US officials never realized that he was a Pakistani with deep ties to militants in both countries, and also told Gulf News, “I managed to keep my Pakistani identity hidden all these years.”

Mehsud was not the only Taliban commander released by mistake. Mullah Shahzada, who was released in May 2003, gave the Americans a false name and claimed that he was an innocent rug merchant. “He stuck to his story and was fairly calm about the whole thing,” a military intelligence official told the New York Times. “He maintained over a period time that he was nothing but an innocent rug merchant who just got snatched up.” After his release, Shahzada seized control of Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan, recruiting fighters by “telling harrowing tales of his supposed ill-treatment in the cages of Guantánamo,” and masterminded a jailbreak in Kandahar in October 2003, in which he bribed the guards to allow 41 Taliban fighters to escape through a tunnel. His post-Guantánamo notoriety came to an end in May 2004, when he was killed in an ambush by US Special Forces. Another Afghan Taliban commander, Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, who was released in March 2004, was killed six months later in Uruzgan by Afghan soldiers, who believed that he was leading the Taliban forces in the province.

Here’s the rub, however. While right-wing commentators, back in 2004, seized on the release of Mehsud, Shahzada and Ghaffar as evidence that no one should ever be released from Guantánamo, a rather different interpretation was offered by Gul Agha Sherzai, the post-Taliban governor of Kandahar, who pointed out that Shahzada would never have been freed if Afghan officials had been allowed to vet the Afghans in Guantánamo. “We know all these Taliban faces,” he said, adding that repeated requests for access to the Afghan prisoners had been turned down. Sherzai’s opinion was reinforced by security officials in Hamid Karzai’s government, who blamed the US for the return of Taliban commanders to the battlefield, explaining that “neither the American military officials, nor the Kabul police, who briefly process the detainees when they are sent home, consult them about the detainees they free.”

Do I need to spell that out again? Abdullah Mehsud, Mullah Shahzada, Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar and at least three other Taliban commanders –- Mullah Shakur, and two men known only as Sabitullah and Rahmatullah –- were released, and returned to the battlefield, because the US authorities were so blinkered, arrogant and stupid that they refused to allow their allies in Afghanistan to have any involvement in screening the prisoners to ascertain who was actually dangerous. How dumb can you get?

This article draws on passages in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

The following is a declassified letter from a Guantánamo detainee named Abdul Aziz, who has been held in US custody without charge or trial for over five and a half years. Abdul Aziz traveled to Afghanistan in late September 2001, after taking his final exams at the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University in Riyadh, to search for his brother, and to persuade him to return home. He was caught up in the chaos surrounding the fall of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, and, despite never undertaking any kind of military training or raising arms against the Northern Alliance or the US-led coalition, was treated brutally in US custody in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantánamo.

I found his comments on the “library” at Guantánamo to be an extraordinarily eloquent insight into the all-pervading repression of the regime at the prison. Unlike convicted criminals on the US mainland, who watch TV and have regular access to reading and writing materials, the prisoners in Guantánamo –- who have never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted –- are deprived of almost all “comfort items” to relieve the crushing monotony of their daily lives and the desperate uncertainty of their fate, and Abdul Aziz’ comments on the deliberate paucity of reading matter for the detainees is as damning, in its own way, as the stories related in the forthcoming book Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, which reveal how, in order to express themselves, and to shake off –- albeit temporarily –- the dehumanizing regime of mental and physical isolation, detainees scratched poems onto Styrofoam cups and passed them from cell to cell when the guards were not looking.

It also strikes me that, by failing to provide educational possibilities to the detainees –- offering English lessons, for example –- and by providing them with almost nothing to read except the Koran, the authorities in charge of Guantánamo are not only demonstrating the meanness of their spirit, but are also doing absolutely nothing to bridge the gap between their own culture and those of the detainees, reinforcing the bellicose aspects of the “War on Terror” at the expense of bridge-building exercises that would not only provide a shred of humanity, but would also provide opportunities to break down cultural barriers through mutual understanding.

This is the text of Abdul Aziz’ letter, as first reproduced on Cageprisoners:

“I was meeting with my attorney in Guantánamo Bay. After conversing about some legal questions related to my case, we turned to the issue of the Delta Camp library in Guantánamo, and about the false propaganda being spread by the camp administration about that library.

“Some people think that the Gitmo camp library is a big hall with large drawers, well-organized shelves, shiny marble floors, state-of-the-art electronic catalog system for a rich library in which the detainees browse morning and evening, choosing the best of the available books in all fields and sundry sciences, in many different languages –- just like that magnificent library I used to walk through five years ago when I was a student at Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University in Riyadh, conducting my scholastic research work at the time.

“The truth, as all will attest, is that the Gitmo camp library is nothing more than two small gray boxes with which guards walk around in some cell blocks, carrying them above their heads to protect themselves from the burning sun, or, at best, dragging them on a dolly with two little wheels. Inside the two boxes, there are no more than a combination of old, worn-out books, with their covers and some of their leaves torn by rain and other adverse factors that surround these two boxes. Furthermore, they are the same books that have been passed by the detainees for years. Arabic-speaking detainees are given access to a collection of boring works of fantasy fiction in addition to books filled with atheism and possibly attacks on Islam and some of its precepts. After continuous, arduous efforts by detainees and their counsel, one religious book was finally allowed in Camp 4 [the camp for the ‘most compliant’ detainees] for each 40 detainees.

“Afghani detainees, on the other hand, are provided with several literary works in Pashto and Farsi. These books have not changed since the itinerant box library was formed some years ago. If we look at the books that are available in the other common camp languages, we will not fail to see a book or two in each language –- worn out and covered with cobweb[s]. The opposite –- and shining –- side of this itinerant box is the majority of reading material available in English, which is not spoken or read by the overwhelming majority of inmates. You will surely find books about American history and the founding fathers. The detainees can do no more than turn these books this way and that and enjoy their shiny covers, not knowing what the books are about or gaining any knowledge of their contents.

“In addition, you will find worn-out copies and old issues of National Geographic. A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of that magazine from the ruins of books in that dilapidated box and was astonished that the issue I picked up was dated 1973 –- over 30 years ago. I asked the itinerant box carrier (the librarian, as the administration likes to call him) if I could have a more recent issue, dated 2000 or above. Evidently tired of carrying these boxes and walking around with them, he replied very calmly, ‘You have five more minutes to choose the books you want. This is all we have.’ I thanked him for performing this arduous task and making this strenuous effort, placed that magazine on top of the stack of books in the box, and told him as nicely as I could, ‘please take my number off the check-out list. As of today, I will have no need for your plentiful library.’ He smiled broadly, looked at his wrist watch, carried his box on his head, and retreated to where he came from.”

[Note: For security reasons, Abdul Aziz does not wish to be identified by his surname].

The “library” in action.

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

As published on the Huffington Post.