Archive for July, 2007

On Thursday, in an overwhelming display of conservative paranoia and liberal befuddlement, the US Senate voted by 94-3 to approve an amendment by Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, the Senior Republican Senator for Kentucky and a champion of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard), declaring that prisoners in Guantánamo should not be transferred to facilities on the US mainland. McConnell’s amendment stated that detainees, “including senior members of al-Qaeda, should not be released to American society” or transferred into “facilities in American communities and neighborhoods.” According to Townhall.com, “The bill was titled in a way that [Senators] had to vote yes to vote no, and no to vote yes,” adding that, “Before the Democrats, who clearly hadn’t read the amendment, realized they screwed up, the vote was recorded.”

Having blind-sided the sleeping Democrats to such an extent that Townhall.com entitled its article, “The Night Mitch McConnell became the leader of the Republican Party,” McConnell spelled out his concerns in an outpouring of NIMBYist sentiment, ignoring the fact that the military brigs to which detainees would likely be transferred –- Fort Leavenworth and Charleston –- are located in Kansas and South Carolina, and raising the ludicrous specter of a bin Laden in every neighborhood. “Some in Congress have actually proposed that we require the President to move terrorist detainees held at Guantánamo Bay to the continental United States and keep them here,” he fulminated. “That means moving them into facilities in cities and small towns across America in states like California and Illinois and Kentucky. Well, I can guarantee you that my constituents don’t want terrorists housed in their backyards in Fort Knox, Fort Wright or anywhere else within the Commonwealth. I know I don’t.”

Senator McConnell, as featured in a Public Campaign Action Fund feature, complaining about his opposition to efforts to clean up elections, and his devotion to the interests of “pharmaceutical companies, big oil, and the credit card industry.”

Those pressing for the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo to the US mainland don’t want “terrorists” transferred to your backyards either, Senator, and no one is suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the handful of other dangerous men held in Guantánamo would end up on day release seeking out electrical components in a yard sale in suburban Louisville. We could argue endlessly about what will happen to the “hard-core” al-Qaeda members held in Guantánamo (up to 80 men, according to the government, but no more than three dozen, according to senior officials cited by the New York Times in June 2004, plus the “high value” detainees transferred in September 2006). What the proposal to close Guantánamo is really about, however, as Donald Rumsfeld’s replacement Robert Gates stated when he took the job of defense secretary in November (before he was muffled by Dick Cheney), is to overcome the fact that the current system of indefinite detention without trial has “become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate.”

Any move to amend the current situation would, of course, be fraught with problems –- a tsunami of civil litigation if the detainees were allowed access to the federal courts; rather less if the military brig option were pursued –- but a collective hissy fit by a group of (mostly) old men with no imagination beyond the parochial is no answer to the ongoing injustice of the Guantánamo regime. 365 men are currently held in Guantánamo, and not a single one of them has actually been found to be a “terrorist” in anywhere other than the recesses of the President’s brain, or in the tribunals at Guantánamo, in which, as former insider Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham recently explained, the gathering of materials was severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature,” which was often outdated and often “generic,” and the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Senator McConnell may wish to reflect that one of “terrorists” to whom he alludes –- a Yemeni named Mahmoud al-Mujahid, who is still in Guantánamo –- was judged as having an association with Osama bin Laden because he saw him on TV. “I have never physically seen Osama bin Laden,” al-Mujahid explained to his tribunal. When pressed that he had “admitted to knowing Osama bin Laden” during prior interrogation, he again explained, “I never knew Osama bin Laden. When the interrogators kept bothering me with this question, I told them, ‘I saw him five times, three on al-Jazeera, and twice on Yemeni news.’ After this they kept after me really hard. I told them, ‘OK, I know him, whatever you want. Just give me a break.’”

[Note: For confirmation of just how dopey the Democrats were on Thursday evening, check out this short report from –- ulp –- National Review Online, in which Kathryn Jean Lopez, noting that those voting in favor of the amendment included Senators Jeff Bingaman, Sherrod Brown, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Sheldon Whitehouse, declared that this was “strange, given that just last week, all those Senators co-sponsored an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, amendment number 2125, directing the President to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, transfer all detainees from the facility, while providing that no detainee ‘may be transferred to a facility that is located outside the continental United States.’” Sad but true. Admittedly, McConnell’s “Sense of the Senate” amendment is “non-binding,” but even so only Robert Byrd, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders voted against it. Wake up, please, Democrats.]

[Additional note: After this article was published on Counterpunch, Katherine Hughes, who has reported extensively on the existence of a secretive new prison for Arab/Muslim prisoners, the special Communication Management Unit (CMU) in Terre Haute, Indiana, wrote, “I read your article and thought you might be interested in this piece of information from Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an inmate of the CMU. In a June 25 letter he wrote, ‘We have all sorts of rumors going on here that this place will close by December to accommodate the GITMO people when their prison is closed. Who knows?’” For more information about the CMU and the wrongful imprisonment of Dr. Dhafir, the head of a Muslim charity, see Katherine's recent article in Washington Report On Middle Eastern Affairs (WRMEA). It's worth it.]

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 “Narcolepsy on Gitmo detainees”).

From the website Ferghana.ru comes news of a former Guantánamo detainee, Abdul-Karim Ergashev, who was sold to gullible US forces by an unscrupulous Afghan official, and who “intends to slap US President George W Bush and the Pentagon with an injury claim.” 42-year old Ergashev (also known as Abdulrahmon Rajabov) travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 to search for his brother, and, at the time of his capture, was staying with Uzbek refugees, who had fled their homeland to escape the brutal regime of President Islam Karimov, often taking their entire families with them.

Abdul-Karim Ergashev at his home in January 2005.

“I was a driver in their camp,” Ergashev explained. “Everyone scattered when the Americans invaded Afghanistan and bombardments began. I wanted to go home too but couldn’t because I did not have any papers or even money. Closer to the end of winter [2001], I drifted to the town of Tahor and the rais or chairman of a nearby village offered me a job. He said I would become his personal driver. I said “Why not?” It was a chance to earn my fare back. The man said the auto was waiting in one of the kishlaks (settlements) in Mazar-e-Sharif and we went there to collect it. The man brought me to some household and asked me to wait while he went and fetched the keys. The Afghani police broke into the building as soon as he left. They had me handcuffed and blindfolded in no time at all and turned me over to the waiting Americans. The Americans had been waiting nearby, you know. They ordered me to don a special blue coverall marking me as a POW. It occurred to me then that they had deliberately left me in the house in order to sell me to the Americans as a terrorist or Talib … I was taken to the city of Bagram where I was imprisoned with very many others for March-May 2002. It was Kandahar after that and finally Guantánamo, in September that year.”

Describing the situation in Afghanistan at the time of Ergashev’s arrest, in the months following the US-led invasion in October 2001, the reporter for Ferghana declared, “The Americans paid $5,000 for a Talib soldier and twice that for [an] officer. The Afghani police found it quite to their liking. When they discovered that there was nobody else to be sold to the US Army, they turned on pedestrians. As a matter of fact, some men the Americans ended up with were mental cases.”

This is not the first time that Ergashev has been in the news. In January 2005, he spoke to Radio Free Europe, describing, in detail, what had happened to him during the two and a half years that he had spent in US custody, until his release from Guantánamo in April 2004. He explained that US military interrogators had used psychological pressure to force him to falsely confess to fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan: “They told me you have ties to the al-Qaeda and the Taliban. I said I don’t know al-Qaeda; the Taliban I know were in control of most of Afghanistan. I didn’t think the Afghans would hand me over to the Americans and that the Americans would take me to Guantánamo. I [still] don’t know why. I didn’t understand what the Americans wanted from me.”

Describing what happened to him during his time in Guantánamo, Ergashev said that he was often kept in solitary confinement, and added that whenever a detainee clashed with the authorities the other prisoners would be punished for it. He also claimed that he suffered from a liver ailment during his detention, but was denied “consistent medical care,” and said that after his release he had been diagnosed with hepatitis C. “I was sick and I asked to see a doctor,” he explained. “The soldier told me tomorrow. The next day I told another soldier that I’m feeling worse. He also said, ‘tomorrow.’ After three days I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I told the soldier, ‘three days has passed, why are you lying to me?’ but he told me, ‘no more talk.’ So I threw some water on his face. After that, several persons came, chained and stripped me but they didn’t beat me. They left me only in my underwear in a [cold] cell with iron walls.”

Although Radio Free Europe stated that Ergashev was “receiving medical care” in Tajikistan in January 2005, Ferghana’s reporter described him as still suffering from “grave health problems,” and determined to sue President Bush because the US authorities had shown themselves to be “absolutely indifferent” to his plight and “disinclined to offer him any recompense or aid.”

Despite Ergashev’s suffering, we at least know that he is still alive. In the case of three other Tajik ex-prisoners –- one released in August 2005, and two of the three men released in February 2007 –- we don’t even know their identities. The US authorities never reveal the names of the prisoners they release, and no news reports have surfaced to indicate who they are, or how they are being treated in Tajikistan. Stripped of their identities from the moment they were first taken into US custody, it is as though they have ceased to exist.

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

Following the recent announcement that 16 detainees had been returned to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, the world’s media were swift to pick up on the story of one of these men: Juma al-Dossari, a joint Bahraini-Saudi national, who had attempted to commit suicide on at least 14 occasions in Guantánamo, and whose poignant laments –- and blood-curdling narratives of his imprisonment –- had been released to the public by his lawyers, after being declassified by the Pentagon.

But what of the other 15 detainees? After analyzing a list of names released by Arab News, liaising with lawyers and drawing on research I conducted while writing my book, The Guantánamo Files, I can reveal that the stories of the other 15 men represent a microcosm of Guantánamo’s many failures, both in terms of the sometimes spectacularly unreliable allegations against the men, which were used to justify their long detention without charge or trial, and their status as extra-legal “unpeople.”

Despite the administration’s attempts to create an illusion of transparency at Guantánamo, the regime is so generally inscrutable that eight of the 15 men had no legal representation at the time of their release, and had never seen any non-military personnel except representatives of the Red Cross, and the stories of three of the eight are completely unknown. Readers can google Saud al-Mahayawi, Saad al-Zahrani and Khalid al-Zaharni and will find numerous mentions of their names and Internment Serial Numbers (ISNs) –- the dehumanizing replacements for names by which all the Guantánamo detainees are known –- but will find no other information whatsoever. Having refused to take part in any of the tribunals in Guantánamo, these men have returned to their homes as spectral as they were for 2,000 days in captivity.

Saad al-Zahrani (from Cageprisoners)

Fortunately, the stories of eleven of the men are known, because they agreed to take part in the tribunals and administrative hearings that have been conducted at Guantánamo since July 2004, when, in an attempt to stave off the Supreme Court’s ruling that the detainees had the right to challenge their detention in the US courts, the administration introduced Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), legally corrupt alternatives to real trials and due process in which, in exchange for being able to tell their stories, they were refused legal representation, and were not allowed to see or hear classified evidence against them, which, as has steadily been revealed over the last three years, could be based on hearsay, or on false confessions obtained through bribery, coercion or torture.

Released under Freedom of Information legislation in spring 2006, these transcripts –- and those of their successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), convened to assess whether the detainees still constitute a threat to the US and its allies, or have ongoing “intelligence value” –- are often the only means by which the detainees’ stories are known.

The tribunal transcripts reveal that three of the men had no connection with militancy whatsoever. Abdul Rahman al-Juad, a student who was 21 years old at the time of his capture, had been in Afghanistan on a humanitarian aid mission. Having collected 10,000 Riyals (around $2,700) at various mosques in his hometown, he travelled between Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad, distributing the money to the poor and needy, and was in Jalalabad when he heard that Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, which was when he decided to leave the country (without his passport, which was back in Kabul), subsequently paying a guide to take him over the mountains to Pakistan.

When he handed himself in to the Pakistani authorities on the border, he was promptly delivered (or sold) to the Americans, who eventually decided that he had been raising money for al-Haramain, a blacklisted Saudi charity (al-Juad denied the allegation), and claimed that one of his aliases was found on a list of captured al-Qaeda members on a computer hard drive “associated with a senior al-Qaeda member.” Al-Juad replied that he never used an alias, adding, “After I turned myself in and was detained in Pakistan, there were people taking my picture. I never saw my picture on the Internet, but the interrogator told me it is on the Internet. If it is, I have no idea how it got there.”

Two other men –- 34-year old Muhammad al-Jihani and 22-year old Yahya al-Silami (also captured on the Pakistani border) –- had been teaching the Koran in Afghanistan. A grumpy al-Jihani revealed little in his tribunal, responding to the question, “Did you have a place to do that? Did you already contact the mosque or something where you were going to teach?” by saying, “All these questions are in my files. Go back to the file and read the file,” but al-Silami was more forthcoming.

After explaining that a friend in Mecca had given him a contact in Khost, where he taught the Koran for four months, he said that he fled to Pakistan, after the US-led invasion began, by following a group of Afghan refugees to the border, and was arrested on arrival, having lost his passport in a river on the way. Al-Silami was one of 30 detainees accused of being Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards in a notorious example of confessions obtained through torture. The man who made the allegation –- and later retracted his “confession” –- was Mohammed al-Qahtani, an alleged “20th hijacker” for the 9/11 attacks, who was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” for several months at the end of 2002. In response to the allegation, al-Silami denied a claim by the US authorities that all 30 bodyguards “were told the best thing they could tell US forces when interrogated was they were in Afghanistan to teach the Koran,” and also refuted another allegation, which he said was made by a Yemeni detainee whom he described as “mentally unstable and on medication,” that he was “identified as the Emir of a group of 10-15 fighters guarding a river crossing leading to the Tora Bora camp.”

The other eight detainees were nominally part of the military training camp system in Afghanistan, in which, as a result of pro-Taliban fatwas issued by radical clerics, and the supportive activities of facilitators, tens of thousands of young men made their way to Afghanistan to support the Taliban in their civil war with the Muslims of the Northern Alliance. In reality, however, the men largely proved to be unsuccessful jihadi recruits: one failed to attend a training camp at all, three failed to complete their training through illness, and two were severely disillusioned.

The first to be captured, Fahad al-Qahtani, was just 19 at the time. Recruited for jihad and aided in his travel by a facilitator, he explained, “I went for jihad to Afghanistan, but when I got there I changed my mind. I saw some things there that were against my religion … Things like worshipping a cemetery where people have died. That has nothing to do with our religion, worshipping graves.” Refuting allegations that he attended al-Farouq, the main camp for Arabs, and that Osama bin Laden visited while he was there, he insisted that he spent most of his time in a house in Kabul that was “a cooking facility for the [Taliban] front line,” and then fled with others to Kunduz, the last Taliban bastion in the north, “until we were surrounded and there was an agreement to have all the Arabs delivered to Mazar-e-Sharif.”

Delivered, with several hundred others, to Qala-i-Janghi, a nearby fort, he survived a US-led massacre, which took place after some of the prisoners started an uprising, by somehow escaping from the fort without being killed. “I was present but did not participate in the fighting,” he explained. “I escaped during the fighting and turned myself in one day after. I went to the market to turn myself in. I met people in the market who were in the army of [General] Dostum [one of the leaders of the Alliance]. That is where I was when I was recaptured … Dostum sold me to the Americans … They put me in jail and I was tortured by Afghans and made to say things. I was moved to Kandahar. When I got to Cuba I told the interrogators the real story.” Despite apparently telling the truth, the most extraordinary piece of “evidence” against al-Qahtani emerged in Guantánamo, when it was shamelessly alleged that he “admitted under duress that he was an al-Qaeda (sic) and had met Osama bin Laden.”

Northern Alliance soldiers pick through the corpses of slain Taliban fighters at the Qala-i-Janghi fort, November 2001. © Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images.

Another disillusioned recruit was 22-year old Mazin al-Oufi, a former traffic policeman who said that he went to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 to support –- but not to fight for –- the Taliban government. “I went with good intentions,” he explained, “and then realized bad things were happening and I wanted to get out.” Captured after crossing the Pakistani border, he told his tribunal in Guantánamo that he had no connection whatsoever to Salah al-Awfi, a name that had, according to the US authorities, turned up on a computer hard drive seized during raids on al-Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan. He was also one of many detainees accusing of being a terrorist because he owned a Casio F-91W watch, a model that the authorities claimed was used as a timer in bombs. Although he admitted owning the watch he was incredulous about the accusation. “Millions and millions of people have these types of Casio watches,” he said. “If that is a crime, why doesn’t the United States arrest and sentence all the shops and people who own them?”

Of the three detainees who failed to complete their training because of illness, two –- 22-year old Bandar al-Jabri and 28-year old Humoud al-Jadani –- explained that they wanted to receive military training so that they could fight in Chechnya. Al-Jabri, who insisted that he “did not graduate from the training camp” and “had to stop training because he was experiencing asthma attacks,” admitted that he had received training from the Taliban, but denied being a member, and added that he had never fought against either the Northern Alliance or the US. Al-Jadani, an airline steward, admitted that he had trained at al-Farouq and had attended two lectures by Osama bin Laden, but said that he too became ill, and both men were arrested after crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

A more comprehensive story was told by 27-year old Ghanim al-Harbi, who said that he went to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 because he “felt the need to defend myself and my family.” He explained that some of his family members had been killed or imprisoned during the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, and had subsequently moved to Saudi Arabia, and that, in 2000, when it was felt that the Iraqi leader was causing problems again, he decided that he should learn to defend himself. When his attempts to join the Saudi navy came to nothing, his quest led him to Afghanistan. He admitted training at al-Farouq, but added, “I never completed my training because I became ill. Every week I had to travel to Kandahar to receive medical treatment or I was at the camp hospital.”

Explaining the circumstances of his arrest, al-Harbi said that, after leaving al-Farouq, he went to Kabul and hired a guide to help him leave the country by Jalalabad, but that, when the guide realized that he was unable to help him cross the border, he took him to the Tora Bora mountains and turned him over to a group of 65 Arabs who were also heading for the border. He said that he stayed for a month with this group, and described them as civilians rather than fighters. “Some of them were teachers,’ he explained, “some of them were running away from the war and were just regular civilians who were trying to get to the Pakistan embassy so they could get back to their homes.” The group finally managed to recruit two guides to take them to the Pakistani border, but as they passed through a village the whole area was targeted in a huge US bombing raid, in which 60 to 70 of the villagers died, “40 of the Arabs with me were killed and 20 were injured,” and al-Harbi himself suffered serious injuries to his stomach and one of his legs. He added that he “stayed three days in a valley with the other wounded before a group of Afghanis picked them up,” and was then taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where he stayed for six weeks until he was handed over (or sold) to the Americans.

The detainee who failed even to attend a training camp, Bandar al-Otaibi, a 21-year old mechanical engineering student, explained that he went to Afghanistan for a month’s vacation with a friend because “I watched a lot of Hollywood movies and wanted to learn how to use pistols as a hobby.” While this seems rather implausible, he backed it up by saying, “Since there was no place to learn how to use a weapon in my country unless you are a soldier my friend suggested that we go to Afghanistan during the school break and learn. I had tried to apply to a military college but was not accepted because I was underweight.”

After arriving in Afghanistan, two weeks before 9/11, he said that he met up with another Saudi and that the two of them stayed in guest houses in Kandahar and Jalalabad, but did not train at al-Farouq because “we were told that they would not bring us to the training camp because they didn’t know us.” As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, he said that he fled to the mountains, leaving his friend behind, and was captured by Afghan villagers. “Afghans kidnapped me and others and demanded money to be released,” he explained. “Some of the others were able to buy their freedom … but I didn’t have any money so I was kept in captivity.”

The last two stories to be discussed are those of Muhammad al-Qurashi and Bijad al-Otaibi. Neither took part in their tribunals, but it may be assumed that many of the allegations against them –- contained in the “Unclassified Summary of Evidence” for their cases, also released to the public in 2006 –- were revealed as inaccurate, leading to the authorities’ decision to release them. Al-Qurashi, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of travelling to fight with the Taliban after his high school graduation in May 2001, and of training at “a facility used to train and house Taliban soldiers who fought on the Bagram front lines.” It was also alleged that his name was found “on an undated letter which listed probable al-Qaeda members incarcerated in Pakistan, along with materials linked to al-Qaeda.” This meager fodder was supplemented by claims relating to his behavior in Guantánamo: that he had “struck guard force personnel on multiple occasions,” had threatened an officer by saying, “I will cut your throat,” and had “encouraged other detainees to harass guard force.”

Al-Otaibi, who was 30 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of stating that he traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, that he was trained at a camp near Kabul, and that he fought on the front lines until ordered to surrender to General Dostum at Mazar-e-Sharif. Like Fahad al-Qahtani, he was then imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, where he was one of 86 men who survived in the basement of the fort for a week, despite being bombed and flooded. His story may or may not be true, but it was probably more reliable than the claim that he knew Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, described as one of Osama bin Laden’s “closest commanders and the person in charge of al-Qaeda fighters in the Afghani Northern Front” (captured in 2006 and sent to Guantánamo in April 2007) and that, moreover, he knew al-Iraqi “very well” and was, in fact, an assistant commander in the Taliban’s “Arab Brigade.”

As I bring this article to a close, astute readers will notice that I have only mentioned 15 detainees so far. Such is the obfuscation surrounding Guantánamo –- and the authorities’ inability to transliterate Arabic names –- that one of the detainees, referred to by Arab News as Abdullah al-Zahrani, has not yet been identified, as his name bears no resemblance to any of the detainees’ names recorded by the Pentagon. This, again, is a familiar story. Lawyers for Bandar al-Otaibi, for example, pointed out that it was difficult to identify him on the list of released detainees because, for five and a half years, he was obstinately referred to by the authorities as Abdullah al-Tayabi.

While this is, perhaps, a good note on which to leave the released detainees to be reunited with their families, I must add one final observation. Heartening though it is that these 16 men –- none of whom were among the “worst of the worst” –- have finally been released, it remains apparent that the process by which they were released remains as arcane and impenetrable as ever, and that no statement will be forthcoming to explain why some of the other 60 Saudi detainees –- some of whom were also either innocent or inept –- are still in custody. As the Supreme Court prepares, once more, to debate whether the detainees should be given habeas rights (which were shamefully removed in last year’s Military Commissions Act), the cases of the 16 Saudis released this week demonstrate, yet again, that imprisonment without charge or trial, brutal treatment in detention, forced confessions, hearsay and innuendo are poor substitutes for due process.

As published on the Huffington Post.

Military psychologists and torture

In Rorschach and Awe (great title!), a must-read article in Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban explores how two military psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen –- trained in the secretive SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which conditions soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands –- were largely responsible for “reverse-engineering” the techniques to provide the core of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” so beloved by Bush and his cronies that the President boasted about them when he announced the delivery of 14 “high value” detainees –- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah –- to Guantánamo in September 2006.

At the heart of the article, which deals with the “interrogation” of Abu Zubaydah –- a supposed leader of al-Qaeda who was actually nothing more than an administrative assistant with mental health issues –- is the revelation that Zubaydah’s great confession about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s role as the architect of 9/11 came about not through SERE-influenced torture applied by the CIA, but through old-fashioned rapport-building conducted by the FBI. As Eban describes it, the CIA’s modus operandi –- with the complicity of medical professionals –- was “to conduct a psychic demolition in which they’d get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death,” whereas, without resorting to torture, “America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.”

There’s much, much more in the article and I urge you to read it.

Disillusioned CIA agents spill the beans

Meanwhile, over in the Guardian, in what happens to be an allied story, Suzanne Goldenberg reports from America that CIA officials who were “deeply opposed to the secret transfer of terror suspects to interrogation centres across Europe” cooperated with a recent Council of Europe investigation into the CIA’s undisclosed network of jails. Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who produced the report on “extraordinary rendition,” told a European parliament committee that he had “received information about the secret programme from dissident officers within the upper reaches of the CIA.”

Goldenberg spoke to three former CIA officers who explained that Marty was “correct about the deep divisions within the CIA,” although Vincent Cannistraro, a former counter-terrorism chief, doubted that he would have met serving officials, but admitted that, as Goldenberg described it, “the depths of anger within the CIA remained real.” “There are people who decided to take early retirement,” Cannistraro said, explaining that there were a couple of “relatively senior officials whose upward career was blocked because of their lack of wholehearted endorsement of the programme.” Another ex-CIA officer, Larry Johnson, endorsed Marty’s claims. “I know officers who thought this was wrong-headed,” he said, “who thought this was counterproductive and who stayed away from it. So the fact that there are some people getting up and publicly expressing their concern and dissent is not surprising.”

Expect more beans to be spilled as the long, slow countdown to the end of Bush’s ignominious Presidency approaches.

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

In March, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the most high-profile al-Qaeda terror suspect in US custody, “confessed” during his tribunal in Guantánamo that he was the architect of 9/11 and had also played a part in 30 other plots (both real and conceptual), there were mixed responses. No one tried to deny Mohammed’s main claim to infamy –- the 9/11 attacks –- but those who had paid attention to his story knew that there were doubts about the veracity of all his claims, because he was a notorious show-off, and valid complaints were made that, by sidestepping the normal legal channels, the authorities had allowed him to portray himself as a “freedom fighter” –- comparing himself to George Washington, who, he said, would have been considered an “enemy combatant” if he had been captured by the British –- rather than revealing him for what he actually was: a vile, mass-murdering criminal.

Other commentators, who bothered to scrutinize the 26-page transcript of his tribunal, were even more alarmed. In parts of the transcript (some of which was redacted), Mohammed mentioned that he was tortured by the CIA, and added that, as a result, he had made false allegations against other people in US custody:

Tribunal President: What I’m trying to get at is … any statement that you made was it because of this treatment, to use your word, you claim torture. [Did] you make any statements because of that?
[The discussion then wandered, before returning to the issue].
Tribunal President: People made false statement[s] as a result of this?
Detainee: I did also.
Tribunal President: Uh-huh.
Detainee: I told him, I know him, yes … This I don’t know him, I never met him at all.

With the administration refusing to declassify the redacted passages from Mohammed’s testimony, it’s impossible to come up with a comprehensive list of those accused by him, and to investigate whether or not there is any truth in allegations made by a man who was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including the reviled torture method known as waterboarding, during the three and a half years that he was held in secret prisons by the CIA before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.

Saifullah Paracha

Recently, however, I was reminded of these doubts when the human rights group Cageprisoners issued a press release after statements by one of the Guantánamo prisoners ensnared in KSM’s web –- the 59-year old Pakistani Saifullah Paracha –- were declassified by the US military. The press release made for bleak reading, revealing that the health of Paracha, who has suffered three heart attacks in US custody –- two in Bagram, and one in Guantánamo –- “has seriously deteriorated and could lead to his premature death if his pre-existing heart, prostatic and diabetic disease are not treated urgently.”

Paracha’s lawyer, Gaillard T. Hunt, suggested that “his medical treatment is at best incompetent and at worst negligent,” and painted a distressing picture of his client’s prospects, pointing out that several of his brothers and sisters have died of cardiac problems before reaching the age of 65, and that Paracha himself “has been having fainting spells, so we know the problem is worsening.” Hunt went on to explain, “He couldn’t submit to a cardiac catheterization at Guantánamo because the rules require all prisoners in the hospital to be shackled to the four corners of the bed. The cardiologist said this was dangerous for a heart patient, but the prison administration would not compromise. The statements filed in court to assure us that Paracha is getting proper treatment are not signed by the doctors. We have to assume the doctors are as disturbed by the situation as we are. The doctors told Paracha that they were acting as military men first, as doctors second.”

This will come as no surprise to those who regard with skepticism the administration’s claims that the Guantánamo prisoners receive medical attention that is “as good as or better than anything we would offer our own soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines,” as Brigadier General Jay Hood, the commander of the Joint Task Force in Guantánamo, declared in 2005. As ex-detainee Moazzam Begg explained (and my own research has confirmed), “Often, as was the case during my time in US custody, prisoners’ level of medical treatment would be dependant upon their level of cooperation with interrogators. Simply put, failure to comply could mean failure to receive treatment.” What’s even more disturbing, however, is a comment by Hunt that could easily be overlooked. “Paracha is not the worst case,” he said. “There are people at GTMO literally dying from lack of treatment.”

Given that the recent suicide of a Saudi detainee, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, received relatively little press coverage –- and nothing like the international outrage that greeted the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006 –- it may well be that the administration believes that it can weather a few more deaths without having to face a tsunami of criticism, but while this may be possible in terms of PR, morally it would be a disaster. Four men have already died in Guantánamo –- their names besmirched in reports issued by the Pentagon after their deaths, even though they had never been tried or convicted of any crime –- and the same process of demonization would undoubtedly occur were Saifullah Paracha also to die in Guantánamo.

The authorities would declare that he was an al-Qaeda member, who was captured by American operatives as he flew to Bangkok for a business trip on 5 July 2003, and they would assert –- as they already have in his tribunal in Guantánamo –- that he met Osama bin Laden, made investments for al-Qaeda members, translated statements for Osama bin Laden, joined in a plot to smuggle explosives into the US and recommended that nuclear weapons be used against US soldiers. They would also mention that the eldest of his four children, Uzair, was convicted by a US court in November 2005 on five charges, including providing material support to al-Qaeda (related to the supposed plot to smuggle explosives into the US, in which his father was also accused), and was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in July 2006, although they would fail to mention that one of his lawyers, Edward Wilford, told the court that the government’s claims stemmed from a false confession Uzair Paracha gave after he was “subjected to 72 hours of interrogation without being told that he could consult a lawyer or speak with his parents.”

What they would also fail to mention is that Saifullah Paracha is a philanthropist, who helped refurbish a 300-bed hospital and established secular schools rather than madrassas in Karachi –- explaining to his tribunal that “We are emphasizing secular education, because you need a formal education to get a livelihood” –- and a staunchly pro-American businessman, who studied at the New York Institute of Technology, lived in the United States in the 1980s and was running a successful clothes exporting business –- with clients including K-Mart and Wal-Mart –- at the time of his capture, in partnership with a New York-based Jewish entrepreneur. They would not point out that anyone with half a brain would realize that a genuine al-Qaeda member would never, under any circumstances, enter into a business deal with a Jewish entrepreneur.

They would also fail to mention that Paracha accepted that he did indeed met Osama bin Laden –- on two occasions, at meetings of businessmen and religious leaders in Pakistan in 1999 and 2000, which had nothing to do with terrorism –- and that after one of these meetings, when he made the mistake of thinking that it would be a good idea to ask bin Laden to contribute to a TV program about Islam, he was approached by KSM, and through him met Ammar al-Baluchi and Majid Khan, all of whom introduced themselves as businessmen. Also overlooked would be Paracha’s persistent denials of all the other allegations against him, and the fact that he unequivocally told his tribunal, “I believe in the Koran, that killing one innocent person is equivalent to killing all humanity. I believe in that, and practice that.”

The authorities would possibly acknowledge a chain of arrests that led from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (captured in Rawalpindi on 1 March 2003) to Saifullah Paracha, via Majid Khan, captured in Karachi on 5 March 2003, Iyman Faris, an American of Kashmiri origin, who was detained in Ohio on 15 March 2003, and Uzair Paracha, seized by the FBI in New York on 28 March 2003. No doubts, however, would be raised about the integrity of KSM’s initial tip-off, or the effects of coercion on all those ensnared in the web.

Uzair Paracha

And yet there are, I believe, very real doubts that any of these men –- apart from KSM –- had any involvement with al-Qaeda or terrorism. In the case of Uzair Paracha, for example, the authorities secured a conviction on the basis that, as the Department of Justice described it, he “agreed with his father, Saifullah Paracha, and two al-Qaeda members, Majid Khan and Ammar al-Baluchi, to provide support to al-Qaeda by, among other things, trying to help Khan obtain a travel document that would have allowed Khan to re-enter the United States to commit a terrorist act.”

Paracha did not dispute that, on the advice of his father, he had foolishly attempted to secure an immigration document for Khan, as a favor for a fellow Pakistani, and that as a result he “posed as Khan during telephone calls with the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” and also called Khan’s bank, attempted to gather information about his immigration paperwork via the internet, and agreed to use Khan’s credit card to make it appear that he was in the United States, when he was actually in Pakistan.

Crucially, however, he denied stating, as the DoJ attempted to assert, that he “knew from his father” that Khan and al-Baluchi “were al-Qaeda,” that the two men “wanted to give Paracha and his father between 180,000 and 200,000 United States dollars to invest in their company as a loan,” that he “knew the money was al-Qaeda money and that al-Qaeda wanted to keep the money liquid so they could have it back at a moments notice,” and that he “felt it was implied that he had to perform tasks” for Khan and al-Baluchi “on behalf of al-Qaeda because of the money being loaned to their business.”

Although he was not allowed to call Majid Khan or Ammar al-Baluchi as witnesses (both men were, at the time, in secret CIA custody), they were allowed to present statements to the court, in which they both asserted that Paracha had no knowledge of any purported al-Qaeda connections, and before the trial another of his lawyers, Anthony Ricco, was so confident that he said that his client was manipulated into helping Khan and was looking forward to a trial to prove that he had no criminal intent. He described Paracha as “a very bright, but, I say, a very naive young man,” and added that he did not expect to have to contest the allegation that Paracha knew that Khan was in al-Qaeda.

Once Uzair Paracha was convicted –- prompting Ricco to note that he had rejected a plea deal that would have led to a lesser sentence because he believed he was innocent, and to complain that it was difficult to clear defendants in terror trials because the US government “was at war with al- Qaeda” –- his story was supposed to be forgotten, but the tangled web spun by KSM reappeared in March and April 2007 during the tribunals that were held to determine whether the 14 “high value” prisoners transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006 –- including KSM, Majid Khan and Ammar al-Baluchi –- had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” and could be put forward for trial by Military Commission.

After KSM’s electrifying testimony, the media largely lost interest in the transcripts that were subsequently released –- waking up only when another of the prisoners, Waleed bin Attash, claimed responsibility for the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 –- but the story resurfaced in Majid Khan’s tribunal, and, almost incidentally, in the tribunal of Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of KSM who was accused of working with Khan on the explosives plot, but who explained that he was “just a person … introduced through KSM.”

A legal US resident, whose parents live in Maryland, Khan had recently got married and his wife was pregnant at the time of his capture. He was seized in Karachi, just four days after the capture of KSM, at the house of his brother Mohammed, who was also captured, and later released, along with his wife and his baby daughter. In his tribunal, nine allegations were presented, all but one of which –- a rather incomprehensible claim that a computer hard drive “seized from a residence where munitions were discovered contained linkages to media seized from the detainee’s residence” –- came from the allegations relating to Uzair Paracha (as described above), and statements that were allegedly made by Iyman Faris, and Khan’s own father and brother.

Iyman Faris

Kashmir-born Faris, who became a US citizen in 1999, and had been living in Columbus, Ohio, where he was working as a trucker, was convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda for his role in an alleged plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, and was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in October 2003. On the surface, his conviction seemed straightforward. With a failed five-year marriage behind him, and an attempt to commit suicide that involved him being counseled by an imam and given psychiatric evaluation, he appeared to be perfect fodder for terrorist recruitment.

Arrested on 19 March 2003, by two FBI agents and an anti-terror officer, who reportedly confronted him with testimony from KSM and the results of an intercepted telephone call, it was alleged that he visited Pakistan and Afghanistan from 2000 to 2001, meeting Osama bin Laden at some point, and that, on his return to the US, he learned of a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, which involved cutting through its cables with blowtorches, and a second plot that involved derailing a train in Washington DC. According to the US government, Faris’ role in the plots went no further than asking a friend where he could purchase welding equipment, and researching the structure of the bridge on the internet. He apparently concluded that the operation was unfeasible, and sent a message to Pakistan to abandon the plots, stating, “The weather is too hot.”

Although Faris pleaded guilty to the charges, on 1 May 2003, it was not revealed until after the trial that, after his arrest, he had actually been recruited by the FBI as a double agent, and had been moved to a safe house in Virginia where he was instructed to stay in touch with his contacts in Pakistan. Another twist came on 25 September, just before Faris was due to be sentenced, when he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming that, although he had met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan, he had refused to be recruited as a member of al-Qaeda, and had concluded that Mohammed had fed false information to the US authorities as revenge. The appeal was disallowed, but both of these issues raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of his conviction, and, specifically, about his part in the terror web spun by KSM.

Majid Khan

Further doubts about Faris’ case –- and that of Majid Khan –- came in April 2007, when Faris was called upon by Khan to explain the allegations relating to him in the Summary of Evidence for his tribunal, in which it was alleged that, on a visit to Khan’s family’s home in Maryland, Faris stated that Khan “spoke to him about the fighting and struggle in Afghanistan,” and that on a subsequent visit Khan told him that he had met KSM in Pakistan, and that he referred to him as “uncle.” It was also alleged that Khan told Faris of “his desire to martyr himself against President Musharraf” by “detonating a vest of explosives inside a building.”

In response, Faris explained that he had visited the Khans’ house to “invest in the family business,” and categorically denied all the allegations, stating, “There was no discussion other than religious duty and what he likes to do in life, like work in construction and not in his father’s [financial] business,” emphasizing that “there were never any discussions regarding the fight in Afghanistan –- ever,” and responding to the allegation about the Musharraf plot by stating, “This is an absolute lie.” When asked, “Were you coerced, tricked or deceived into making any statements about Majid Khan?” Faris delivered his most devastating statement. “Yes,” he said, “by FBI. If I don’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they were going to take me to GITMO [Guantánamo].”

Writing from Guantánamo, Saifullah Paracha also refuted the claims against Majid Khan (and, by extension, against both himself and his son Uzair), confirming that he did not know that either Khan (or Ammar al-Baluchi, who introduced Khan to him in Pakistan) were members of al-Qaeda, insisting that he never discussed a loan with him –- “I never discussed any financial matters with Majid Khan” –- and reiterating that he only agreed to ask Uzair to help Khan as a favor to a fellow countryman: “I was told he had an issue with US Immigration and wanted to keep his bank account in the USA active, which I asked my son to assist him with as a fellow Pakistani.”

The only other allegations against Khan, as noted above, were reportedly made by one of his brothers, who, according to the US authorities, “stated the detainee was involved with a group that he believed to be al-Qaeda, and as of December 2002 was involved in transporting people across the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and points elsewhere,” and his father, who allegedly “stated the detainee recently began to be influenced by anti-American thoughts and became extremely religious in his behavior.”

Although Khan’s brother had not responded by the time of his tribunal, his father Ali mounted a vigorous defense of his son, querying the statements that were supposed to have been made by himself and his son, asking, “Where and when did we make these statements that you claim we made? Who did we make these statements to, exactly? The government has refused to give us this information. Anything we may have said … was simply out of shock because we knew [he] had disappeared and was pure speculation based on what FBI agents in the United States told us and pressured us to say.”

He continued: “If you think that he did something wrong, show me the evidence. Charge him with a crime and give him a fair trial in a real court. This tribunal is not a real court … It is only for show and the outcome has probably already been decided.” Crucially, he added, “Anything that he may have confessed to, or that other prisoners may have said about him, should also be considered with suspicion because these statements were probably tortured or coerced out of them. Under these circumstances, how could anyone believe what the government says about my son?”

In passages, which, remarkably, were not redacted, Ali Khan then described Majid’s torture at the hands of US and Pakistani agents, explaining that “after eight days of interrogation by US and Pakistani agents,” his son Mohammed was allowed to see Majid, who “looked terrible and very, very tired,” and proceeded to explain to his brother that “the Americans tortured him for eight hours at a time, tying him tightly in stressful positions in a small chair until his hands, feet and mind went numb,” that they “re-tied him in the chair every hour, tightening the bonds on his hands and feet each time so that it was more painful,” and that they “beat him repeatedly,” subjected him to sleep deprivation, and, when not being interrogated, held him in a small, mosquito-infested cell, which was “totally dark, and too small for him to lie down in or sit in with his legs stretched out.”

In Ali’s testimony, the most devastating statement was the following: “This torture only stopped when Majid agreed to sign a statement that he was not even allowed to read,” although he also noted that the torture resumed when he “was unable to identify certain streets and neighborhoods in Karachi that he did not know,” and critics of US behavior should read the whole of his testimony, as it also includes claims by Mohammed Khan that both he and Majid were held in a prison where two of KSM’s children, “aged about six and eight,” had been held before their father’s capture, where they were “denied food and water,” and had “ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding,” and that “Americans once stripped and beat two Arab boys,” aged 14 and 16, who were then “thrown like garbage onto a plane to Guantánamo” (it’s more likely that they were actually sent to Bagram), and also held women prisoners, including some who were pregnant and “forced to give birth in their cells.”

While this article only scratches the surface of the “tangled web” woven by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in CIA custody, I hope it illuminates the possibility that the plots and networks trumpeted by the US authorities may not be quite what they seem. It’s possible that everything the authorities claim is true, but my interpretation, reading between the lines, is that, through the informal social networks of the various business communities in Pakistan –- which, as Saifullah Paracha pointed out in Guantánamo, are based on traditional notions of hospitality, even though, in the political chaos of modern-day Pakistan, it is “very difficult for any civilian to determine who is who” –- he, his son Uzair and Majid Khan were caught up in the orbit of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and that their subsequent torture, abuse and imprisonment are the result of naïve trust rather than any connection whatsoever with terrorism.

Even murkier are the stories of Iyman Faris and Ammar al-Baluchi, and behind them all, towering like a malign colossus, and with fingers reaching into all corners of Pakistani society and its vast diaspora through his successful disguise as a legitimate businessman, is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his many false allegations –- made during his torture at the hands of the CIA –- that the US administration would rather bury than acknowledge.

For more on Guantánamo and the “high-value” detainees, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on CounterPunch (as “Gitmo’s Tangled Web”) and American Torture.