Archive for April, 2008

During my visit to the United States in March to promote my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, I was interviewed by Michael Ramadan Jones for Voices of Our World, a weekly show, with a global overview, that focuses on the stories of those oppressed or otherwise marginalized by the dominant world powers, and I’m pleased to report that this interview is now available online, as the first segment of a two-part show, “Tortured Logic,” broadcast this week, which also features Jameel Jaffer, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The show is available to download here, or here, where it’s listed under “April 27, 2008” and is “Show No. 0818.”

Mentioning this show has made me realize that I’ve failed to mention some other radio stations that have interviewed me in the last few months, some of which are also available online.

On February 23, 2008, I was interviewed on “This is Hell” with Chuck Mertz on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago. Chuck interviewed me in August 2007, and for my return visit we talked more about The Guantánamo Files, and inevitably, as the show fairly closely followed the administration’s announcement that six “high-value detainees” — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) — were to be charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, we also spoke about the use of torture by US forces, both in Guantánamo and in secret prisons run by the CIA, in which KSM and others were held before being transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. We also spoke about the problems facing other prisoners, who have been cleared for release, but cannot be returned to their home countries because of fears that they will be tortured. To listen to the show, click here, or visit the 2008 Archives here, and scroll down to the February 23 show. The interview starts about 24 minutes in, and lasts for about half an hour.

On March 7, 2008, just before my US trip, I was interviewed on “Wakeup Call” on Pacifica Radio’s WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. I was asked first about how the Spanish government had just been shamed into dropping its extradition request for Omar Deghayes and Jamil El-Banna, two British prisoners released from Guantánamo, whose extradition was requested as soon as they arrived home in December 2007. I was also asked about the charges against KSM and others, in which I was able to explain how the system of trials that these men will face — the Military Commissions, dreamt up by Dick Cheney and his advisers in November 2001 — are a woeful substitute for either the established US court system or the US military’s own judicial processes. Other topics included The Guantánamo Files in general, and the case of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, the Afghan prisoner who died of cancer in December, the front-page story about Hekmati that I co-wrote with Carlotta Gall for the New York Times, and the Times’ Editors Note that followed publication of the story. To listen to the show, click here, or visit this page, scroll down to “Wakeup Call,” and play or download the 6 am slot on Friday March 7, 2008. As with “This is Hell,” the interview starts about 20 minutes in, and runs for about 20 minutes.

On March 25, 2008, I had a fascinating interview (sadly not available online) with former Senator Burt Cohen, for his show “Portside,” on Portsmouth Community Radio, in which we talked, primarily, about the failures of US foreign policy in Afghanistan. We spoke, of course, about Guantánamo, because most of those held in the prison were captured — theoretically, at least — in connection with the US-led invasion of October 2001 and its aftermath, but we also talked about how the invasion itself was flawed, relying on warlords for its success, with no thought for how it was the brutality of the warlords that had encouraged the rise of the Taliban in the first place, and how the battle for “hearts and minds” was almost certainly lost within a year of the invasion, when the US administration shifted its attention to Iraq. For a flavor of what we talked about, have a look at this interview with Joshua Holland of AlterNet.

And finally, for now, I’d like to put out a mention of an interview that took place on February 4, 2008, when I was interviewed by Kevin Barrett for the brilliantly-named Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth. This was a wide-ranging two-hour interview (albeit punctuated by numerous ad breaks, including, I must admit, some rather hilarious “Survivalist” ads by a company specializing in dried meats and tinned foods), but it’s unfortunately only available to subscribers.

On Thursday April 24, I was invited to take part in the Riz Khan show on al-Jazeera, with released Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, and Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of Washington Monthly, whose latest issue features an extraordinary roll-call of politicians, military figures and other experts condemning the US administration’s use of torture. The show is based in Washington D.C., but I was interviewed in al-Jazeera’s studio across the river from the Houses of Parliament.

At the start of the show, Murat, who is here to promote his account of his horrendous five-year ordeal, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, spoke about the circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment, and Paul and I were then asked to talk about the use of torture, and the system of trials by Military Commission that was introduced in November 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers, including David Addington.

Both of us, it was clear, are hopeful that whoever leads the next administration will follow through on their promise to close the prison, and will put an end to the extraordinary flight from domestic and international law that has been engineered by the White House’s current occupants. Paul, I was happy to note, echoed the American people’s widespread revulsion at the use of torture, extraordinary rendition and imprisonment without charge or trial that I noted during my visit to the United States last month.

To watch the show on YouTube, click here.

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

Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, has been held without charge or trial as a “high-value detainee” for over six years, first in secret CIA custody, and then in Guantánamo, while battles have raged within the administration over his supposed significance. Drawing, in particular, on the story of former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, makes the case that Zubaydah’s importance has been wildly exaggerated.

A recent article in the Washington Post, Out of Guantánamo and Bitter Toward Bin Laden, which was based on an interview with former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi (released in 2006), was noteworthy as much for what it did not reveal as for what it did.

Khalid al-Hubayshi. Photo by Faiza Saleh Ambah.

In the article, Faiza Saleh Ambah began by explaining how “A calling to defend fellow Muslims and a bit of aimlessness took Khalid al-Hubayshi to a separatists’ training camp in the southern Philippines and to the mountains of Afghanistan, where he interviewed for a job with Osama bin Laden.”

Part of this story was previously known from al-Hubayshi’s long years in Guantánamo, as Detainee 155, when he admitted to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) in 2004 that he had trained in the Philippines and had also trained at the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan in 1997. He also said that he moved to Afghanistan in 2001, joining a “private small camp” outside Jalalabad, which was subsequently closed down by the Taliban. Throughout, he presented himself — with some eloquence — as a freedom fighter who focused on particular struggles that various Muslims around the world had with non-Muslim oppressors (the model that was largely superseded by bin Laden’s declaration of global jihad in 1998).

It was for this reason, he said, that he trained at Khaldan, which was not associated with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda at the time, and it was also for this reason that he returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and joined the camp near Jalalabad. He insisted, “I wasn’t a member of al-Qaeda or on the front lines with the Taliban because I don’t believe in what they are doing. I believe what the Taliban did in Afghanistan was ethnic war [and] al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization.”

He also explained, “I think Osama bin Laden is wrong. He just wants to be famous. He doesn’t care how he does it, killing people, killing Muslims, or destroying countries. I think he got what he wanted — to be famous. I don’t need to meet him. I don’t understand the politics. People look at the vision of Osama bin Laden and believe America is their enemy. They don’t understand what is going on or what happened in Afghanistan in 1980 [when the Soviet invasion began].”

This opinion of bin Laden, it transpired from al-Hubayshi’s interview with Faiza Saleh Ambah, was true, but rather lacking in context. In the interview he admitted that, although he had certainly become disillusioned with the inter-ethnic fighting in Afghanistan — “I was not there … to help Afghans fighting Afghans for political gain,” he said, adding, “If I was going to die, I wanted to die fighting for something meaningful” — his return to Afghanistan in May 2001, and what he subsequently did there, was both more complicated and more compromised than he had admitted at his tribunal.

He explained that, while attempting to return home in 1999, he had been arrested and imprisoned by the Pakistanis, who confiscated his passport. After his release, he used a false passport to travel to Yemen, and was smuggled back into Saudi Arabia, where he resumed his job at a utilities company. Two years later, however, when he learned that he was “wanted for questioning by the Saudi authorities,” he obtained another false passport and fled to Afghanistan, where, he said, he noted that “al-Qaeda’s influence had spread and the organization had become more like a corporation … with company cars and many safe houses,” and the Taliban “had also grown more powerful.”

After becoming “adept at making remote-controlled explosive devices triggered by cellphones and light switches,” he admitted that an associate of bin Laden, who was “impressed by his skills,” asked him “to join al-Qaeda, or at least meet with bin Laden.” He recalled that he “spent half an hour with bin Laden at a converted military barracks near the city of Kandahar,” where the two men “sat on carpets in bin Laden’s office and shared a fruit platter.”

The following conversation took place, according to al-Hubayshi. “What are my duties toward you, and what are your duties toward me, if I join with you?” he asked, to which bin Laden replied, “That you don’t betray us and we don’t betray you.” He added that bin Laden also offered him a plot of land, but said that he refused the offer to join al-Qaeda, explaining that bin Laden’s fight “had changed from defending Muslims to attacking the United States. I wasn’t convinced of his ideology. And I wanted to be independent, not just another minion in this big group.”

After returning to his independence — presumably at the small camp near Jalalabad that he talked about in his tribunal — al-Hubayshi said that he was training Chechen fighters on 9/11, and that a month later, when the US-led invasion began, the Afghans “blamed us … and forced us out of the city at night. We slept by the river for two weeks.” Later, he was drawn once more into bin Laden’s orbit when another of his associates came and took him and some of the other men to the Tora Bora mountains, for what, it seems, was touted as a glorious showdown with the Americans.

“Bin Laden was convinced the Americans would come down and fight,” al-Hubayshi said. “We spent five weeks like that, manning our positions in case the Americans landed.” He added, however, that as the airstrikes moved closer, and as the Americans’ Afghan allies advanced on their positions, bin Laden abandoned the fight and fled. Faiza Saleh Ambah wrote that al-Hubayshi “remains bitter about what he considers bin Laden’s betrayal: calling the fighters to Tora Bora and then abandoning them there.” “The whole way to Cuba,” he explained, “I prayed the plane would fall. There was no dignity in what he made us do.” He also said that he was “sorry that Muslims carried out the Sept. 11 attacks because they targeted civilians.” “That was wrong,” he explained. “Jihad is fighting soldier to soldier.”

While this entire report fills in some rather large gaps in al-Hubayshi’s testimony in Guantánamo — and also provides some apposite insight into his opinion of bin Laden — what was missing from Faiza Saleh Ambah’s interview was any mention whatsoever of another allegedly pivotal figure in al-Qaeda: Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian-born facilitator of the Khaldan camp, and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006.

In the interview, the only mention of Khaldan was that al-Hubayshi “learned to fire anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft machine guns, anti-tank weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and became an expert in explosives,” whereas his comments in Guantánamo about his relationship with Abu Zubaydah struck me as enormously significant while I was researching The Guantánamo Files, and remain so to this day, as they cast important light on a fierce debate within the US administration, which has raged since shortly after Zubaydah was captured in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad in March 2002.

Contrary to claims made by the administration and the CIA — which, as described in Time magazine shortly after his capture, indicated that he was “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit” — the story that emerged in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine, was that Zubaydah was nothing like the pivotal figure that the CIA had supposed him to be, and had actually turned out to be mentally ill.

Investigating his diary, analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, explained to one of his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” According to Suskind, the officials also confirmed that Zubaydah appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations, and was, instead, a minor logistician.

And yet, as Suskind also reports, so misplaced was the CIA’s belief in Zubaydah’s importance that when they subjected him to waterboarding and other forms of torture, and he “confessed” to all manner of supposed plots — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty — “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target … The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

Last December, when there was a brief uproar over the destruction by the CIA of videotapes showing the “enhanced interrogations” of Zubaydah and another “high-value detainee”, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, Dan Coleman spoke out once more about Zubaydah, telling the Washington Post that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA cast doubt on the credibility of Zubaydah’s confessions. “I don’t have confidence in anything he says,” Coleman explained, “because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted. He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him. The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much.”

Coleman also revisited the rift that developed between the FBI and the CIA when CIA operatives began holding him naked in his cell, “subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music,” explaining that FBI operatives who witnessed this said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This guy’s a Muslim. That’s not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?”

Reiterating his skepticism about Zubaydah’s supposed importance, Coleman said that he “was a ‘safehouse keeper’ with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” that his diaries were “full of flowery and philosophical meanderings, and made little mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda,” and that he and others at the FBI had concluded, by looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Zubaydah had suffered years earlier, that he had severe mental problems. “They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone,” Coleman explained, referring to other al-Qaeda operatives, adding, “You think they’re going to tell him anything?”

Largely unnoticed, although featured in my book, are two more analyses of Zubaydah’s role that reinforce the opinions expressed by Dan Coleman and Ron Suskind: those of Khalid al-Hubayshi, and of Zubaydah himself, during his CSRT in Guantánamo last spring.

Al-Hubayshi explained that, far from being a mastermind, Abu Zubaydah was responsible for “receiving people and financing the camp,” that he once bought him travel tickets, and that he was the man he went to when he needed a replacement passport. He also suggested that Zubaydah did not have a long-standing relationship with bin Laden. When asked, “When you were with Abu Zubaydah, did you ever see Osama bin Laden?” he replied, “In 1998, Abu Zubaydah and Osama bin Laden didn’t like each other,” adding, “In 2001, I think the relationship was okay,” and explaining that bin Laden put pressure on Zubaydah to close Khaldan, essentially because he wanted to run more camps himself.

The echoes with Zubaydah’s own account are uncanny. In his CSRT, Zubaydah said that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.” He also said that his interrogators promised to return his diary to him — the one that contained the evidence of his split personality — and explained that their refusal to do so affected him emotionally and triggered seizures.

Speaking of his status as a “high-value detainee,” he said that his only role was to operate a guest house used by those who were training at Khaldan, and confirmed al-Hubayshi’s analysis of his relationship with bin Laden, saying, “Bin Laden wanted al-Qaeda to have control of Khaldan, but we refused since we had different ideas.” He explained that he opposed attacks on civilian targets, which brought him into conflict with bin Laden, and although he admitted that he had been an enemy of the US since childhood, because of its support for Israel, pointed out that his enmity was towards the government and the military, and not the American people.

I await the development of Abu Zubaydah’s story with interest. Just a month ago, his lawyers, Brent Mickum and Joe Margulies, followed Coleman and Suskind’s lead by filing an unlawful detention suit arguing that their client is insane, and I’m fascinated to know what they — and others who are wondering why, if Zubaydah was so important, he was not charged in February in connection with the 9/11 attacks along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five others — will make of the testimony of Khalid al-Hubayshi, who, as Faiza Saleh Ambah reported, is now a world away from his previous life as a would-be soldier and US prisoner, happily married and working at the utilities company from which he twice escaped to pursue his dreams of jihad.

As published on Anti-war.com, ZNet, the Huffington Post, AlterNet and American Torture.

Since last June, when Omar Khadr, a Canadian prisoner at Guantánamo, was first hauled up before a Military Commission — the novel system of “terror trials” conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — he has rarely been out of the news. Just 15 years old at the time of his capture, Khadr’s treatment has been widely condemned, not just because the trial system is weighted in favor of the prosecution, and is empowered to accept secret evidence obtained through torture or coercion, but also because of his age. As his lawyers have pointed out, “No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers as war criminals.”

Omar Khadr is not, however, the only prisoner at Guantánamo who was just a child when he was captured. Almost entirely overlooked is Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, who was just 14 when he was captured in October 2001. Unlike Omar, Mohammed is one of at least 120 prisoners who will almost certainly never face charges, and who are left, instead, in severe isolation in Guantanamo, with no opportunity whatsoever to bring their cases to the attention of the wider public.

And yet Mohammed’s story is one of the saddest in the prison’s long and unjust history. Although he was born in Saudi Arabia, his parents are from Chad, so he was never granted citizenship, and was prevented from having the same opportunities as Saudi nationals. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, but was not allowed to finish secondary school, and was selling religious paraphernalia to pilgrims attending the Hajj, when a Pakistani friend advised him to travel to Pakistan to learn how to repair computers so that he could establish a business in Saudi Arabia.

In order to pursue his dream, Mohammed visited the Chadian embassy, and exaggerated his age to obtain a passport. Only those aged 18 or over are allowed to travel without their parents, so he boldly declared that he was 20. With a valid three-month visa for Pakistan, he took his savings and bought an airline ticket to Karachi.

Soon after arriving, in October 2001, he was praying in a mosque, when it was suddenly surrounded by police, who arrested everyone inside. Most were released, but he was taken to a prison where, for 20 days, he was hung by his wrists, suspended so that only the tips of his toes touched the ground, and was beaten if he moved.

He was then sold to the Americans, who were offering bounty payments of $5,000 a head for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and was transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, where, like every other prisoner sent to the makeshift prison, he was subjected to systematic brutality.

Imprisoned in a barbed wire pen with five other prisoners, he was beaten during interrogations, and on several occasions had freezing cold water thrown over him during the night. He reported that one particular soldier “would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he’d cut it off.”

He was then flown to Guantánamo, but unlike three Afghan boys (released in January 2004), who were held separately from the adult population, and treated with something approaching the appropriate care of juvenile prisoners, he has never received any preferential treatment as a juvenile, and has, instead, been subjected to torture and abuse as severe as almost any other prisoner.

He has been hung from his wrists on 30 occasions (an experience he described as worse than in Pakistan, because his feet did not even touch the ground), and has also been subjected to a regime of “enhanced” techniques to prepare him for interrogation — including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions — that clearly constitute torture.

On one occasion, a heavily-armoured riot squad — the Initial Reaction Force (IRF), used to quell even the most minor infringements of the rules — slammed his head into the floor of his cell, breaking one of his teeth, and on another occasion an interrogator stubbed out a cigarette on his arm.

As a result of this violence he has become deeply depressed, and has attempted to commit suicide on several occasions, by slashing his wrists, trying to hang himself, and, on one occasion, by running head-first into the wall of his cell as hard as he could.

Despite all his suffering, and the lack of evidence against him, no attempt has been made to address the clear deterioration of his mental health, and he has been held in some of the prison’s harshest cell blocks, where prisoners are held, for 22 or 23 hours a day, in solid metal cells with no windows and no opportunity to socialize with their companions.

Although the violence against him continues unabated (he is regularly set upon by the IRF teams, because of his frustrations with the regime), he will almost certainly be released if the government of Chad engages in serious negotiations with the US government. In August 2007, lawyers from Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents Mohammed and 30 other Guantánamo prisoners, visited Chad to meet members of his family, and to present his case to the government. They received assurances from President Deby and the Foreign Ministry that they would act on his behalf, but the negotiations appear to have stalled, in part because the government has been caught up in a well-publicized struggle against rebel forces.

This week, a representative of Reprieve is visiting Chad in an attempt to resurrect the struggle for Mohammed’s freedom. He takes with him evidence that, when it comes to securing the release of prisoners, the most significant factors are public pressure and diplomatic negotiations. Last December, after two years of stonewalling on the part of the Americans, the Sudanese government secured the release of two of its innocent citizens, simply by refusing to give up. If it wishes, the government of Chad can do the same for Guantánamo’s forgotten child.

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

As published exclusively in the Daily Star, Lebanon.

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, examines a recent statement from the US military that appears to have been issued for propaganda purposes, and explains how its timing seems designed to deflect attention from recent negative publicity relating to the proposed trials of Guantánamo prisoners.

In what appears to be nothing more than propaganda masquerading as news, the US military has announced, as Reuters described it, that it will “televise the Guantánamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the US mainland.”

Five of the six prisoners charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks. From the top: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash.

Army Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s system of trials by Military Commission, stated, “We’re going to broadcast in real time to several locations that will be available just to victim families,” adding that the footage would be “beamed to closed-circuit television viewing sites on military bases at Fort Hamilton in New York, Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Fort Meade in Maryland and Fort Devens in Massachusetts.”

While there seems little doubt that Col. Morris is sincere, it’s also apparent that the trial under discussion will not be taking place anytime soon, and that announcements of broadcasts designed to appeal to the families of 9/11 victims are premature, to say the least, and more judiciously regarded as attempts to shore up the disputed legitimacy of the Commission process.

Conceived by Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001, as an alternative to either the US court system or the US military’s own judicial processes, the Military Commissions have been heavily criticized for allowing the possibility of withholding evidence from the accused and of using evidence obtained through torture. This latter provision was later dropped, but the possibility of using evidence obtained through coercion remains at the discretion of the government-appointed military judge, and it should also be noted that this is an administration that has found it notoriously difficult to differentiate between acts of torture and acts of coercion.

The Commissions have also stumbled from one disaster to another. Dismissed as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, they were resuscitated by Congress just a few months later, but were then struck down by their own judges in June 2007, on the grounds that the legislation that had revived the process — the Military Commissions Act — had authorized the judges to try “illegal enemy combatants,” whereas the process at Guantánamo that had supposedly made the prisoners eligible for trial — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, themselves heavily criticized for relying on secret evidence obtained by dubious means — had only declared that the prisoners were “enemy combatants.”

Although this issue was resolved just a few months later, in a hastily-convened appeals court, the Commissions have never, even briefly, escaped from the deep shadows cast over their legitimacy by their own government-appointed military defense lawyers, who have maintained, from the moment that they first investigated the new trial system in any detail, that the Commissions are, to quote just a few examples, “implements for breaking the law” by concealing evidence of torture (Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, who represented Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, in the Supreme Court case that threw out the first system of Military Commissions), and rigged, ridiculous, unjust, farcical, and a sham (Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who represents the Canadian Omar Khadr).

Currently mired in controversy in the case of Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was captured — and, it was recently revealed, may not have killed the US soldier whose murder is the key charge against him — the Commissions have fared no better in any of the other pre-trial hearings that have taken place recently. Lawyers for Salim Hamdan have fought tenaciously to establish that he had no insider role in al-Qaeda and should therefore have rights as a Prisoner of War, and in the last month three other prisoners have resorted to disrupting their pre-trial hearings through a combination of non-cooperation and pleas for justice that have done little to reassure the wider world that the process is either valid or fair.

As I reported last month, the first of the three to boycott the process was Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who, like Omar Khadr, was also a juvenile when he was seized after allegedly throwing a grenade at a vehicle carrying two US soldiers and an Afghan translator. Dragged from his cell to attend his hearing, he told the judge in his case, Col. Ralph Kohlmann, “My right has not been given to me. I have not violated any international law. There are many accusations against me … they don’t make any sense … I am a human being.” He added that he “continued to be treated unjustly and interrogated, and that he wanted the ‘whole world’ to know it.”

Jawad was followed by Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi, a Saudi captured in Azerbaijan and rendered to Guantánamo via Afghanistan, who is accused of plotting attacks on shipping for al-Qaeda. After al-Darbi refused to take part in the Commission process, explaining that it lacked legitimacy, his military-appointed lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles pointed out that he had no choice but to accept his client’s actions, which, as the Associated Press put it, he described as the result of a “reasoned decision.”

Although the judges in the Commissions attempted to insist that the lawyers “must carry on with their defense even if their clients boycott,” Lt. Col. Broyles was adamant, as he told reporters, that al-Darbi’s decision “should mean … that I sit very quietly, answer the judge’s direct questions and that’s it.” He added that his role in al-Darbi’s forthcoming trial was now equivalent to that of a “potted plant,” and that he would “almost certainly” file a challenge against any order demanding that he defend his client against his wishes.

Lt. Col. Broyles’ criticism is more significant than it may at first appear, as it highlights a conflict of interest that is genuinely troubling to defense lawyers called upon to defend clients who subsequently refuse their services. Under the terms of their military contracts, they are supposed to follow orders and insist on defending the men, even though they refuse counsel, but as civilian lawyers they could have their licenses revoked if they attempt to defend clients who have fired them.

This conflict of interest has arisen in the Commissions before. In their first incarnation, before the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, two of those charged –- Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni whose pre-trial hearing is expected imminently, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, a Saudi who has not yet been charged under the new system –- refused to be represented by the lawyers assigned to them: Major Tom Fleener and Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who now represents Omar Khadr.

In an article in GQ last summer, Major Fleener and Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler both explained that they were unable to find any justification for the administration’s insistence that the prisoners were not allowed to represent themselves. As Sean Flynn noted, “The right to self-representation [has] been a codified tenet of American law for 217 years. Under established rules, whether a man can competently defend himself is irrelevant; he need only be competent to make the decision to represent himself.” Kuebler believed that al-Sharbi was competent to make that decision. “Therefore,” Flynn continued, “Kuebler believed he had an ethical obligation to step aside. A lawyer can’t force himself upon an unwilling client, and no credible court would ever allow such a thing. To do so would be to replace a vigorous defender with a prop, an actor in a charade that only mimicked a proper trial.”

Major Fleener faced a similar problem in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. He told Flynn, “The concept of compelled representation has always bothered the crap out of me. You just don’t force lawyers on people. You don’t represent someone against his will. It’s never, ever, ever done.” Flynn then explained, “The reason it’s never done is that it undermines the concept of a fair trial. When a man’s life or liberty is at stake, he gets to decide who will speak for him. That’s the way American courts work, have always worked. To eliminate that right is to begin to transform a trial into a pageant.”

On April 10, when a third prisoner refused legal representation in his trial by Military Commission, what appeared to be a trend began to attract the interest of the world’s media. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner accused of working as an al-Qaeda operative, told Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, the judge at his pre-trial hearing, that “he did not want a lawyer and would not attend future hearings because he did not consider the court legitimate,” as the AP described it. “I do not recognize the justice or the lawfulness of this court,” he said, adding, “What is happening in your courts is in fact a sham, which aims solely that the cases move at the pace of a turtle in order to gain some time to keep us in these boxes without any human or legal rights.” As the AP report continued, “He later removed the headphones used to hear the translator and said he would participate no further, declining to answer the judge’s questions,” and saying, “I will leave the field and you can play as you want to play.”

Although Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal advisor to the Commissions’ convening authority, attempted to shore up the ailing process, pointing out that the Commissions’ rules “provide for the process to move forward whether or not the accused chooses to participate,” and defending the trials as “extraordinarily fair by any norm” and providing “substantial protections,” attorney Neal Sonnett, who monitors the Commissions for the American Bar Association, explained why proceeding with trials without the defendants being present would be potentially fatal for their perceived legitimacy. “If all these cases are going to proceed with empty chairs,” he said, “what has already been called a kangaroo court will just be highlighted as really a kangaroo court.”

It later transpired that al-Qosi’s defense lawyer, Navy Reserves Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, had not even been able to meet her client. As Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, she had asked the judge “to help her gain access to [al-]Qosi’s cell to try to persuade him — face to face — to accept her services. The judge refused. Prison camp commanders have said such access is against Pentagon policy.”

With the judge insisting that the case proceed as planned, and Cmdr. Lachelier left to consult the California bar to discover whether, as with the concerns of Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler, Major Tom Fleener and Lt. Col. Broyles, her license will be at risk for representing someone who fired her, the time was clearly ripe for a morale-boosting exercise by the authorities, which is where, I presume, the idea for the statement about televising the 9/11 trials arose.

What makes the announcement particularly premature is that those who have been studying the Commissions’ recent progress — or lack of it — know that the major obstacle preventing even the pre-trial hearings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices from proceeding is the fact that they do not yet have the required legal representation. Just last month, Col. Steve David, the Commissions’ chief defense lawyer, explained that, unlike the prosecution, which has a full roster of 30 lawyers, he has only nine lawyers on duty, who are already struggling to cope with their caseload.

It was, however, also ironic that the military’s announcement almost immediately backfired when one of the few military lawyers assigned so far — Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, who was recently appointed to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — added his own criticisms of the Commission process to the ever-growing list of insider complaints. As Reuters described it, Capt. Prince “said he doubts the defendants can get a fair trial in the Guantánamo court because it accepts hearsay evidence that may have been obtained through cruel and dehumanizing means,” and also pointed out that the Geneva Conventions ban “acts of violence or intimidation.”

He also explained, in Reuters’ words, that, “if the trials are indeed fair, then broadcasting them widely would prove that to the world, but he worried about setting a precedent by televising what he suspects will be show trials,” and added, “I can just imagine American soldiers and sailors and airmen being subjected to similar show trials worldwide.”

With his talk of show trials — and his fears that members of the US military are liable to be subjected to US-influenced show trials in future — Capt. Prince joins an ever-growing list of military defense lawyers who understand that the Military Commissions are both unjust and counter-productive. It is, as I have stated before, time to shut the system down and move trials to the US mainland.

As published on the Huffington Post, Anti-war.com, CounterPunch and AlterNet.