Archive for November, 2007

Following the successful launch of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison at Bookmarks in central London on Wednesday 28 November when Andy, Moazzam Begg and Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve spoke to a packed house (photos to follow), Andy will be making the following appearances in December:

GLASGOW: Friday 7 December.
Masjid Al-Furqan, 19 Carrington Street, Glasgow. 7.30 pm.
With James Yee, Guantánamo’s wrongly imprisoned Muslim chaplain.
Organized by SACC (Scotland Against Criminalising Communities).

CAMBRIDGE: Sunday 9 December.
Talk and book signing at Libra Aries Bookshop, 9 The Broadway, Mill Road, Cambridge, CB1 3AH. 7 pm.
Contact: 01223 412411. Visit the website for further details and a map.

SHEFFIELD: Monday 10 December.
Arts Tower, Lecture Theatre 4, Sheffield University. 7 pm.
With Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo detainee and spokesman for Cageprisoners.
Organized by the Sheffield Guantánamo Campaign.
Contact: 07931 358784 or 07972 206218.

LONDON: Friday 14 December.
Talk and book signing at the London Guantánamo Campaign’s weekly “Shut Guantánamo” demonstration outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.
6 – 7 pm.

To mark the official launch on Wednesday of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), I’ve just posted the second of 12 additional chapters featuring stories that I could not include in the book, either for reasons of space (to keep the book at a manageable length) or, in some cases, because the information was not available at the time of writing.

This additional chapter complements Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 14 detainees not mentioned in the book, who were captured in the Tora Bora mountains, or in the city of Jalalabad, at the time of the US military’s much-hyped but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to kill or capture a significant group of al-Qaeda and senior Taliban leaders –- including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri –- who were holed up in the mountains in November and December 2001.

To mark the occasion of the book launch, I’d also like to thank the various organizations who have interviewed me over the last few weeks: in particular, the teams at the BBC World Service’s “The World Today” and “Outlook,” who interviewed me on October 10 and November 15, and Nihal and his young, enthusiastic crew at the BBC Asian Network, who welcomed me in Shepherd’s Bush on November 7. I’d also like to thank Press TV for their hospitality, and for familiarizing me on several occasions with the various traffic-choked routes to Ealing.

Thanks also to Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy for publicizing the book and the launch, Chris at ZNet for welcoming me on board, Mark Thwaite at the Book Depository for his review, in which he described the book as “shocking and vital,” the Canadian campaigning group Justice for Mohamed Harkat for highlighting the book’s publication, and Eleanor at the Care2 News Network for publicizing it to the network’s many readers. Thanks also to Marc Falkoff, editor of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, for mentioning me in a fascinating interview in the Pennsylvania Gazette, in which he talks at length about the plight of Abdul Farhan Abdul Latif, one of the 17 Yemeni detainees that he represents, and to Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and a savage critic of the cabal currently running the White House, who plugged The Guantánamo Files in a powerful article on CounterPunch, lamenting the decline of the United States.

Details of further promotional events for The Guantánamo Files –- in London, Glasgow, Cambridge and Sheffield –- will follow soon.

This introduction to The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, explaining how I came to research and write the book, and the significance of my findings, was published on the new British political blog Liberal Conspiracy, dedicated to “developing, shaping and spreading liberal-left ideas and values in Britain.” Information about the forthcoming book launch, on Wednesday 28 November, is included at the end of the article.

We are just seven weeks away from a particularly disturbing anniversary. On January 11, 2008, the Bush administration’s notorious “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for six years. For all this time, the prisoners –- or “detainees,” as the government insists on describing them –- have been held without charge or trial, and with no sign of when, if ever, they will be released from what Lord Steyn, the British law lord, memorably described as a “legal black hole.” Although 464 of these men have now been released –- or, in rather fewer cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments –- their stories remain largely unknown, as do those of the majority of the 310 detainees still held at Guantánamo.

In February 2006, when I first began researching the detainees’ stories, it was this combination of factors –- the exceptional flight from domestic and international law on the part of US administration, and the fact that almost nothing was known about the men imprisoned in Guantánamo –- that first prompted me to action. In the first weeks of my research I was restricted, like everyone else who had attempted to answer the question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” to news reports and interviews with released detainees, and trawls for information that were often based on little more than gossip and rumour. Those who had been before me, attempting to extract information from the prison’s fortress-like seclusion, were, primarily, teams at Alasra, a Saudi-based Arabic language website, the Washington Post and the British human rights group Cageprisoners.

All this changed in a two-month period, from March to May, when the Associated Press, which had requested documents relating to the detainees under Freedom of Information legislation, but had been turned down by the Pentagon, took the government to court and won. The released documents contained, for the first time, the names and nationalities of all the detainees, and their ISNs –- the Internment Serial Numbers by which they were all identified, having been shorn of their identities as part of the dehumanizing process of detention and interrogation. Also released were 8,000 pages of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which had been convened to assess whether, on capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” and the annual Administrative Review Boards, convened to assess whether the detainees were still a threat to the United States and/or still had ongoing “intelligence value.”

The tribunals were instigated in the wake of a momentous Supreme Court decision, in June 2004, that Guantánamo –- leased from Cuba since 1903, and chosen as a prison location because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts –- was in fact US sovereign territory, and that the detainees had the right to challenge the basis of their detention. These tribunals were, of course, both a lamentable and an illegal response to the Supreme Court ruling. Although the justices’ decision allowed the detainees, for the first time, to seek legal representation, they were not allowed lawyers in their tribunals, which were also criticized for relying on classified evidence that could have been –- and in some cases clearly was –- obtained through torture, coercion and bribery, either of other detainees in Guantánamo or of various “high-value” suspects held in a shadowy network of secret prisons run by the CIA.

These transcripts, and those of the subsequent review boards, were, however, the only means whereby the detainees were allowed to tell their own stories, and it was through a detailed analysis of these documents –- transcribed and cross-referenced with the names, nationalities and ISNs of the detainees –- that I was able to put together, for the first time, a chronology of the circumstances of each detainee’s capture, whether in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, crossing the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or in 17 other countries where they were seized and subjected to “extraordinary rendition.”

As I gave voices to the previously mute detainees, I also came to understand how it was that so many of the men appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11. Although many were Taliban foot soldiers, they were largely recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war with the Northern Alliance, which began long before 9/11, and there were, moreover, many hundreds of completely innocent men –- humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, religious students, entrepreneurs, economic migrants and drifters –- who were sold to the Americans for bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, or by unscrupulous citizens and villagers.

In the cases of the Afghans, who comprised over a quarter of the prison’s population, Taliban conscripts, forced to join the Taliban on pain of death, jostled with farmers, taxi drivers and pro-American, pro-Karzai soldiers and political leaders. Taking advantage of the gullibility of the US military and its Special Forces, whose intelligence gathering capabilities, in this as in so much of the “War on Terror,” were sorely lacking, most of these men were betrayed by rivals or swept up during raids based on untrustworthy tip-offs.

This is not to say that there were no dangerous prisoners amongst those who ended up in American custody. Several dozen of the detainees, at least, were members of, or actively affiliated with al-Qaeda, and it’s probable that, amongst those claiming to be nothing more than Taliban foot soldiers, there were some who were committed to Osama bin Laden’s global, anti-American jihad. However, the correct venue for these allegations to be tested was –- and still is –- in a court of law, not in a dangerously novel prison environment where, in the name of extracting information from uncooperative detainees (with no consideration of whether they were not forthcoming because they had no information to give), torture became a substitute for the skilled gathering of intelligence, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution were shredded with impunity, and the rigged tribunals – the basis of my research – were instigated, based largely on “confessions” by other detainees, in an attempt to disguise the manifest failures of the whole malign experiment.

*****

Andy’s book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, is published by Pluto Press. The official launch takes place on Wednesday November 28 at Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE. All are welcome and admission is free, but please call Bookmarks on 020 7637 1848 to reserve a place.

Andy will be joined for the launch by released British detainee Moazzam Begg and Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel for Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees. As well as discussing the book, they will be talking about the plight of the six British residents still held in Guantánamo, conditions in the prison today, and attempts by the US and UK governments to bypass international safeguards preventing the return of men to regimes where they face the risk of torture.

Following up on my exclusive report yesterday about the former Guantánamo detainee Adel Abdul Hakim and his application for permanent asylum in Sweden, his lawyer Sabin Willett, who first alerted me to Adel’s story, has kindly allowed me to reproduce a talk that he gave to the Swedish Helsinki Committee’s War & Peace Seminar in Stockholm on November 19, the day before Adel filed his application. Like Sabin’s other comments over the last few years on Guantánamo and the plight of his clients, it is both eloquent and emotionally engaging, with a controlled and well-directed fury aimed at those in charge of his own country –- the United States –- who have turned their back on rules observed “in all civilized nations,” which, he is “ashamed to say,” are “no longer rules honored in my country.”

Sabin’s speech

Jag vill tacka alla våra nya vänner i Sverige för att de har bjudit Adel och mig till detta seminarium. Hans återförening med sin familj igår var ett fantastiskt ögonblick. [I would like to thank our many new friends in Sweden for inviting Adel and me to this seminar. His reunion with family yesterday was a wonderful moment.] But it will be better if I proceed in English.

Guantánamo has many faces. The face of the prison, so familiar from the photographs. The faces of political sponsors, like Vice President Cheney, who told the world that it holds killers picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan, or former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who famously called the prisoners “Among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

For this American lawyer, Guantánamo has a different face –- the face of the prisoner I first met in an isolation cell in July 2005, where he was chained to the floor. The face of an innocent, who never was a soldier, never was a terrorist, but was swept up in the madness post 9-11. Adel’s face.

There are still more faces of Guantánamo, of families left behind, of children who cannot remember a father soon to enter his seventh year in the Guantánamo prison. Children not so different from yours, or mine. Perhaps Guantánamo’s ultimate face is the face you never see –- the 320 men still in the prison. Regulations forbid us from photographing them. The state knows that what the world cannot see, it forgets. That it will accept all manner of propaganda, of lies, of empty rhetoric, of social engineering so long as it is spared a glimpse of the human face. The state knows that Abu Ghraib was never intolerable until there were photographs.

Even in this audience, I wonder who you think is at Guantánamo. In your heart. Terrorists, right? Enemies? Surely. Here we believe in human rights and in fair treatment, in fair and open trials, for everyone, but in our hearts, we all believe they must be, well, dangerous, right?

We forget that propaganda has power even on us. So let’s look at the numbers. And in doing so let’s accept military allegations at face. Let’s ignore everything the prisoners and their lawyers say. So how many men does the military allege that it captured on battlefields? Five percent. How many does the military say engaged in a single act of hostility? Fewer than half. In six years, how many have been charged with a crime –- any crime? (Remember, at all relevant times, terrorism has been a crime). Ten. Just ten. Of those, how many have been convicted? One. And that one wasn’t an Arab, by the way. The Australian David Hicks would have done or said anything to get out of there. He will be home at New Year’s.

How strong is propaganda’s reach? Even the sponsors of this seminar refer in the materials to Adel as a “terror suspect.” Yet no one, no US soldier, prosecutor or politician, has ever suspected Adel –- ever –- of involvement in terrorism.

How did this happen? How did we get it so wrong?

Leaflets had a lot to do with it. The slide shows you one. What does the smiling fellow say? “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams … You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces 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.”

The US dropped these all over northeastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, in late 2001. How many did we distribute? Leaflets are “dropping like snowflakes in December in Chicago,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

In 2001, Pakistanis who got these leaflets turned in Adel and seventeen companions to US Forces for $5,000 a head, quite a lot of money in that part of the world. These men are Uighurs, a Muslim minority group from central Asia. Their republic was overrun by Mao Tse Tung in 1949. Ever since, Uighur poets and patriots have argued for independence. Under the law of Communist China, this is known as “terrorism.”

Many Uighurs have fled communist oppression. But since 9/11, Communist China had been exploiting our “war on terror,” urging that its political dissident Uighurs were terrorists. The State Department’s annual China report said this was wrong, but in the summer of 2002, the US had begun its massive effort to prepare for an invasion of Iraq. It needed UN support. That summer the Chinese, who sit on the Security Council, and the US cut a deal. The Chinese would not object to the US invasion of Iraq. The Americans would agree to a list of concessions, including branding the Uighurs as terrorist. That was the summer that Adel was sent to Guantánamo, and President Jiang came to Texas to meet President Bush.

So Adel sat in Guantánamo. And sat. In mid-2004, the US Supreme Court ruled that the men in Guantánamo had access to the U.S. courts –- a decision Congress would revoke two years later. But at the time the Bush administration was terrified someone might learn the facts. It hastily convened military review panels to rubber-stamp the men as “enemy combatants.” Secret proceedings, without evidence or lawyers. They put the Uighurs through this. A senior official confessed to the New York Times that this was a sham.

Now most of the Uighurs were rubber-stamped as enemy combatants with everyone else. But a strange thing happened. Some nameless, honorable military officers rebelled against the political command. They cleared five of the Uighurs. Adel was one of them. The officers cleared him, and then the government kept the fact secret and sent him back to his cell.

The following spring, my law firm took the first two Uighur cases for Adel and his friend. The government had kept their innocence secret, and we didn’t learn of it until July 2005, when at last we met them at the base.

It was soon after that that I spoke for the first time to Kavser, Adel’s sister, who is here today. I’ll never forget that call. I do not speak Uighur, but weeping is the same in every language. For long years she had supposed her brother was dead.

In the US courts, a furious court battle ensued. A key hearing was scheduled for May 8, 2006. On May 5, the government sent Adel and four companions to Albania. So I got on an airplane and flew to Milan, and thence to Tirana, and on Monday morning, I took his photograph. Adel’s beard had grown long in Guantánamo. Adel had exchanged GTMO for an Albanian refugee center in the midst of an epic slum. There was no Uighur community for support. In Europe only Moldava is poorer. Still, he was out of the prison.

For the men left behind, conditions have worsened gravely. In the new Camp 6, men are held in solitary –- even men who have been cleared for release. No window, no sunlight, no fresh air, no companions. For two hours in twenty-four, which might be during day or night, a man is shackled and led to a 3 x 4 meter space, surrounded by concrete walls two stories high. In effect, a chimney. Occasionally, the sun may be glimpsed above the wire mesh above the chimney, but often “rec time” is at night.

For the other 22 hours, a man is entirely alone. He eats alone. He prays alone. At night he lies alone listening to the roar of the HVAC. There is no difference between one hour and the next, between today and tomorrow, between yesterday and forever. No one touches this man, except MPs wearing rubber gloves. Did you ever spend 22 hours alone in a room? With the shades pulled, and no phone or TV or radio or computer or i-Pod or book or magazine or companion? Don’t try it for longer than a day. After that, the studies say, people soon begin to go mad.

“It is like we are underground here,” one man said to me. He thought he was already entombed. Another sent a message to his wife: “Tell her to remarry.” A third said he was hearing voices. His foot tapped uncontrollably against the floor. His face was inexpressibly sad. He had only one question for me: “Sabin, why do they hate us so much?”

I leave that question to the historians.

Now I suppose it would be irrelevant in a discussion of Guantánamo to digress with law, but it is a core principle of international law that a soldier of the enemy is no criminal. He has broken no law. You may hold him as a prisoner only so long as the shooting war lasts. You must treat him with honor, as you would treat your own soldier.

If we suspect an enemy soldier is also a criminal –- say, a terrorist complicit in the murder of civilians –- then he is to be treated like one. Charged, represented by counsel, tried with evidence in an open proceeding, before a court. Terrorism is, of course, a crime. If you think you have a terrorist, charge him and try him. If a person is neither of these things –- if he is a civilian, as Adel is, as the other Uighurs are, then he must be released immediately. Those are the rules under the Geneva Conventions. They are the rules in all civilized nations. I am ashamed to say they are no longer rules honored in my country.

The fact is that my government has made a hash of things. Most dishonorable of all, we have left the mess for others to clean up. In the days when my Grandfather served in the U.S. Navy, we Americans could claim to have helped clean up the messes of others. Now the tables have turned, and his grandson comes to Europe, to ask you to help remedy the errors of my generation.

It is a dark time, and the dark time is not over. Yet there are fleeting glimpses of sunshine. Your ministry granted a four-day visa, and the sun rose again for these people yesterday at Arlanda, when after so many years these people embraced again.

Perhaps the most important contribution to yesterday’s joyful reunion was that of six-year-old Fatima, Kavser’s daughter. It was to save her from China’s compulsory abortion policy that Kavser and her husband Abdulatif fled western China seven years ago. The Chinese seized Abdulatif in retaliation, and so a young mother with two children under four and another on the way wandered destitute on the streets of Islamabad. And it was Sweden –- again, Sweden! –- that gave these people refuge. Adel came to Kavser last evening; but Fatima had led her journey here. So in a very real way it was Fatima who brought these people together at Arlanda last night. I’m reminded that in a few weeks, when my own tradition revisits an ancient message of peace, we will reread the words, “And a little child shall lead them.”

When I met Fatima yesterday, she wore the pink dress and tiara of the fairy godmother. It seemed only right.

Please welcome my client and friend, Adel Abdul Hakim.

Adel and Fatima.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press).

On Tuesday November 20, Adel Abdul Hakim, a former Guantánamo detainee from Xinjiang province in the People’s Republic of China, took another step towards reconstructing his shattered life by applying for asylum in Sweden.

The 33-year old, an ethnic Uyghur from a state where the repression of his people is widespread, made his claim for permanent resident status during a visit from Tirana, the capital of Albania, where he had been living, in a UN refugee camp, since his release from Guantánamo with four other Uyghurs in May 2006. After negotiations conducted by his US lawyers, various NGOs and lawyers in Sweden, he had been granted a four-day visa, to attend a human rights conference, and, finally, to be reunited with his sister and her family, who are part of a large Uyghur community in Sweden, one of the leading countries in the world in fulfilling international obligations to accept refugees.

Adel Abdul Hakim embraces his sister Kavser at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport on November 19 after arriving from Tirana, Albania, his home for the last 18 months.

The five men –- and 13 of the other 17 Uyghurs, who are all still in Guantánamo, despite having been cleared for release –- had fled the well-chronicled oppression in their homeland, and were living in a ruined village in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001. Although they indulged in nothing more sinister than renovating the settlement’s ruined buildings, and occasionally firing a bullet from their only weapon, an aging AK-47, while dreaming of rising up against their oppressors, they were targeted in a US bombing raid –- in which several of their companions died –- and were then captured by enterprising Pakistani villagers after making their way to the Pakistani border.

They were subsequently sold to the Americans, who soon realized that they were not involved with al-Qaeda, but who decided to hold them for their supposed intelligence value. In The Interrogator’s War, a book written by a former military interrogator at the US-run prisons in Afghanistan, the author, writing under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey, explained that the arrival of the Uyghurs triggered a frenzy of activity in the upper echelons of the administration. “[T]he requests for follow-up questions flooded in from Washington,” Mackey wrote, “and every query that came in made it clear that US intelligence was starting from practically zero with this group.”

After their transfer to Guantánamo, the US authorities obligingly allowed Chinese intelligence operatives to visit the prison to question the men, which was, understandably, an experience that some of them found disturbing. Dawut Abdurehim, one of those still held at Guantánamo, said after the visit that he was vaguely threatened, but reported that “some other Uyghurs had conversations with bad, dirty language,” in which they were told by the Chinese delegation that, “when we go back to the country, we’d be killed or sentenced to prison for a long time.” It later became clear that the US administration’s cooperation with the Chinese authorities, which included branding the Uyghur separatist movement (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement) as a terrorist organization, was intimately tied to securing China’s support –- or lack of opposition –- to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Despite this arrangement, it was the very real threat that the men would be tortured or even killed if they were returned to China that led to the US administration seeking out a third country that would accept the men after they had been cleared of all wrong-doing in the tribunals at Guantánamo –- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals –- which were established to determine whether, on capture, they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.” Despite the US administration’s best efforts at cajoling or bribing other countries to accept the men, however, Albania –- a Muslim country, but one of the poorest states in Europe –- was the only country that could be prevailed upon to accept them.

Although Adel and his companions found their new life in Albania frustrating, as there are no other Uyghur speakers and there was also no prospect of work, they were fortunate to have been cleared and released. Their 13 companions not only remain in Guantánamo, but some were also subjected to multiple tribunals, as the administration revealed another facet of Guantánamo’s prevailing injustice by reconvening tribunals when they produced what was regarded as the wrong result.

For Adel, at least, the opportunity to rebuild his life in earnest is now a possibility. It is, for the moment, the one bright light in the stories not only of the Uyghurs, but of all the other dispossessed men, captured and imprisoned through chronic failures of intelligence, many of whom are, sadly, still languishing in Guantánamo. It remains to be seen whether this development will open a new avenue for the release of some of the other innocent men (as many as 70, according to some estimates), who are also fearful of returning to their home countries, and whose continued presence in Guantánamo provides a major obstacle to the administration’s stated plans to wind down much of the prison’s operation.

Note: I am immensely grateful to Sabin Willett, one of Adel’s lawyers, for informing me about Adel’s visit to Sweden (see his brief report here). For more on the Uyghurs, see my newly published book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Also published on the Huffington Post, ZNet and CounterPunch.