Archive for June, 2008

On Sunday, just two days after the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights — and as John McCain started a right-wing backlash by declaring, with Cheney-like hyperbole, that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country” — McClatchy Newspapers, whose 31 titles include the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, unveiled the timely results of an eight-month investigation into the stories of 66 of the 501 prisoners who have been released from Guantánamo since the prison first opened on January 11, 2002.

The results (in a series of articles, and in particular, through the prisoner profiles here) should be genuinely disturbing to anyone who still cherishes the illusion, persistently maintained by the administration, that the US military and intelligence services captured the majority of Guantánamo’s prisoners “on the battlefield,” that these men were thoroughly screened before ending up in Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst,” and that throughout their imprisonment they were treated humanely.

Reinforcing the findings that I reported, with a wider scope, in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, and the statistical analysis of the Pentagon’s own claims against the prisoners that featured in an influential 2006 report by the Seton Hall Law School, McClatchy’s reporters — led by Tom Lasseter — demonstrate that “the dozens of separate tales merge into one: Arrests — often without real evidence — brutality and mistreatment in US interrogations, years of their lives spent behind prison-camp wire in a system of justice that no American citizen would recognize.”

Although their focus is primarily on former prisoners from Pakistan and Afghanistan — including a few of the several dozen pro-American Afghan tribal leaders profiled in The Guantánamo Files, who were betrayed by rivals, and whose attempts to clear their names were shamefully ignored by the US authorities — the reporters also traveled to, or spoke by ’phone to ex-prisoners in nine other countries (Albania, Bahrain, France, Germany, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, the Russian Federation and the UK) to compile their report.

As well as confirming, from completely unrelated sources, that abuse in the US prisons in Afghanistan — primarily at Kandahar airport and Bagram airbase — was systematic, and that, for the most part, US forces had no idea who had ended up in their custody, the ex-prisoners also confirm that bounty payments offered by the US authorities added significantly to the failure to net worthwhile prisoners. To cite just one example, in the case of Abdul Haleem, a Pakistani known to the US authorities as Abdul Halim Sidiqi, who was freed in October 2006 after spending nearly five years attempting to persuade his captors that he was not, as they thought, a great leader who had “assembled some 2,000 Pakistani and Arab fighters to fight the United States and its allies,” Lasseter writes, “Like most other former detainees interviewed, Haleem wasn’t captured by US soldiers. He was rounded up by Afghan troops loyal to warlords who made a small fortune selling their prisoners to the American military. The higher the profile of the prisoner, the more money the warlords could demand. An al-Qaeda-affiliated commander, for instance, fetched a much higher price than an ordinary foot soldier.”

The stories uncovered by McClatchy’s reporters do not make for comfortable reading. Although they estimate that 52 percent of the men they interviewed had some sort of connection with militancy (these include Afghan conscripts, who had no choice), they also point out that only 11 percent appeared to have any connection “with high-level Taliban or insurgent leaders” — and al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks don’t even get a mention. These figures correspond roughly with the Seton Hall findings and also with the conclusions I drew in The Guantánamo Files: that, excluding a few dozen prisoners with genuine connections to al-Qaeda, around half the prisoners were completely innocent men, sold for bounties by opportunists or rivals, or seized through faulty intelligence, and the other half were Taliban foot soldiers, who had no knowledge of the workings of al-Qaeda, and were recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war against the Northern Alliance that began long before the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, the majority of the 273 prisoners who are still held in Guantánamo belong to one or other of these latter categories.

This is an important project, not only because it is thrusting the truth about Guantánamo into newspapers across the United States, but also because, even to those who are well-informed about the prison and the stories of those who have been held there, it reveals new stories that have never previously been reported at all. Although many of the 66 stories have been reported before — 45 are available in The Guantánamo Files, for example, and of these 45 men, three, Moazzam Begg, Murat Kurnaz and Mourad Benchellali, have written books about their experiences — others are reaching the world for the first time. Of the 21 stories not included in The Guantánamo Files, eight never made the final cut (for reasons of space), but the other 13 are genuinely new.

These stories — of eleven Pakistanis and two Afghans — are emerging now for one particular reason: the reporters’ hard work in tracking them down. The majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo went through an administrative review process (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) to determine whether, according to laws passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” who could be held without charge or trial. The entire process was corrupt, not only because it was reliant upon secret evidence that was withheld from the prisoners, but also because even its unclassified evidence was appallingly generalized and generic, as a former insider, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, explained last year, in a court submission that is credited with swaying the opinion of the Supreme Court.

Despite these failings, it is largely through these reviews, whose transcripts were released to the public in 2006 and 2007, that the prisoners had the opportunity to tell their stories. The 13 men whose stories were unknown until now, however, were among the 200 prisoners released before the tribunal process began, and the Pentagon has never been obliged to reveal any information whatsoever about its reasons for holding them. Unless they spoke to the media on their release — or were traced afterwards by lawyers, human rights groups or reporters — their stories returned to their towns and villages with them.

It is to the credit of McClatchy’s reporters that these stories have finally surfaced to add more pieces to the Guantánamo jigsaw, and, crucially, to give voice to those who were brutalized, dehumanized and dismissed as “the worst of the worst.”

The 13 previously unknown prisoners are as follows:

Pakistanis: Asadullah Jan (ISN 47), Munir Naseer (ISN 85), Tariq Khan (ISN 97), Ijaz Khan (ISN 135), Hafiz Liaquat Manzoor (ISN 139), Hamoodullah Khan (ISN 145), Israr ul Haq (ISN 515), Mohammed Omar (ISN 540), Saji Ur Rahman (ISN 545), Abdul Majid Mahmoud (ISN 624) and Mohammed Irfan (ISN 1006).
Afghans: Mohammed Saduq (ISN 512) and Noor Habib (ISN 626).

As published on the Huffington Post.

Those who cherish the United States’ historical adherence to the rule of law — myself included — were delighted to hear that the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush (PDF), that the prisoners at Guantánamo “have the constitutional right to habeas corpus,” enabling them to challenge the basis of their detention, under the terms of the 800-year old “Great Writ” of habeas corpus, which prohibits the suspension of prisoners’ rights to challenge the basis of their detention except in “cases of rebellion or invasion.”

That this decision was required at all was remarkable, as it was almost four years ago, on 29 June 2004, that the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, that Guantánamo — chosen as a base for the prison because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts — was “in every practical respect a United States territory,” and that the prisoners therefore had habeas corpus rights, enabling the prisoners to challenge the basis of their detention.

The difference between then and now is that, in Rasul v.Bush, the Supreme Court ruled only that the prisoners had statutory habeas rights, and, following the ruling, the executive responded in two ways that completely undermined the Supreme Court’s verdict.

The first of these — as lawyers began applying to visit prisoners to establish habeas cases — was the establishment of Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) at Guantánamo, which were set up, ostensibly, to review the prisoners’ designation as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial. In reality, they were a lamentable replacement for a valid judicial challenge. Although the prisoners were allowed to present their own version of the events that led up to their capture, they were not allowed legal representation, and were subjected to secret evidence that they were unable to see or challenge.

Last June, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, who worked on the CSRTs, delivered a damning verdict on their legitimacy, condemning them as the administrative equivalent of show trials, reliant upon generalized and often “generic” evidence, and designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” Filed as an affidavit in Al Odah v. United States, one of the cases consolidated with Boumediene, Lt. Col. Abraham’s testimony was regarded, by legal experts, as the trigger that spurred the Supreme Court, which had rejected an appeal on behalf of the prisoners in April 2007, to reverse its decision and to agree to hear the cases. The reversal was so rare that it had last taken place 60 years before.

The executive’s second response to Rasul was to remove the prisoners’ statutory rights, persuading the third strand of the American power base — the politicians in Congress — to pass two hideously flawed pieces of legislation: the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which originated as an anti-torture bill conceived by Senator John McCain, was hijacked by the executive, who managed to get an amendment passed that removed the prisoners’ habeas rights, although the legislation was so shoddy that it was not entirely clear whether the prisoners had been stripped of their rights entirely, or whether pending cases would still be considered. What was clear, however, was that the DTA limited any review of the prisoners’ cases to the DC Circuit Court (rather than the Supreme Court), preventing any independent fact-finding to challenge the substance of the administration’s allegations, and mandating the judges to rule only on whether or not the CSRTs had followed their own rules, and whether or not those rules were valid.

In the fall of 2006, following a second momentous decision in the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the justices ruled that the proposed trials by Military Commission for those held at Guantánamo (which also relied on the use of secret evidence) were illegal under domestic and international law, the executive persuaded Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which reinstated the Military Commissions and also removed any lingering doubts about the prisoners’ habeas rights, stating, explicitly, “No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.” In a further attempt to stifle dissent, the MCA defined an “enemy combatant” as someone who has either engaged in or supported hostilities against the US, or “has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the secretary of defense.”

The wheels of justice revolve so slowly that it has taken over a year and a half since the passing of the MCA for the Supreme Court to stamp its authority on the conceits of both the executive and Congress, and cynics can argue that all of this could have been avoided if the Supreme Court had insisted on the prisoners’ Constitutional habeas rights in June 2004. Nevertheless, Thursday’s ruling — however belatedly — comprehensively demolishes the habeas-stripping provisions of both the DTA and the MCA.

In no uncertain terms, Justice Anthony Kennedy, delivering the Court’s majority opinion, ruled that the “procedures for review of the detainees’ status” in the DTA “are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus,” and that therefore the habeas-stripping component of the MCA “operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.” These judgments, which should soundly embarrass the nations’ politicians, could hardly be more clear, and although it is uncertain how the administration will respond in its dying days, it seems unlikely that the executive will be able to prevent a slew of habeas cases, which have, effectively, been held in a kind of legal gridlock for years, from progressing to court.

The only other obvious recourse, which will also help the prisoners to escape from the intolerable legal limbo in which they have been held for up to six and a half years, is that the administration will suddenly develop a previously undreamt-of diplomatic dexterity, and will make arrangements for the release of a large number of the 273 remaining prisoners without having to endure the acute embarrassment of justifying, in a proper courtroom, the hearsay, the innuendo, the generic information masquerading as evidence, and the fruits of torture, coercion and bribery that it has used to imprison these men for so many years.

Since 9/11, sadly, justice in the US has moved so slowly that on occasion it has appeared to be dead, but Thursday’s verdict is a resounding triumph for the importance of the law as a check on unfettered executive power and the caprice of politicians. As Justice Kennedy stated in his opinion, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” He added, “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is,’” a quote from an 1803 ruling, in which the Supreme Court explained its right to review acts of Congress, which, of course, reinforces the supremacy of the separation of powers that lies at the heart of the United States Constitution.

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).

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

The long awaited Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush, about whether or not the prisoners at Guantánamo have a Constitutional right to habeas corpus — the right to challenge the basis of their otherwise endless detention without charge or trial, which was granted by the Supreme Court in June 2004, but taken away by Congress in 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act and 2006’s Military Commissions Act — has just been announced, and the United States’ highest judges have ruled, by 5 to 4, that Congress “had not validly taken away habeas rights.”

At present, SCOTUSblog is one of the few outlets to report the story, as follows:

“In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantánamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights.

“The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” the individuals at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered by the District judges.”

More to follow soon. I’m reading the ruling NOW.

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

Where: Trafalgar Square, in front of the National Gallery
When: 3 pm, Sunday 15 June
Who: Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, former Guantánamo prisoners, Barney the Dinosaur and other special guests

On Sunday 15 June, US President George W. Bush is visiting London as part of his valedictory world tour, and will be having tea with the Queen and dinner with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents over 30 Guantánamo prisoners, is using this opportunity to highlight the suffering of Binyam Mohamed, the London resident who remains in Guantánamo Bay. The US military has announced that it wants to put him through its discredited Military Commission process, and a final decision will be made in the next two weeks. The commission system is so corrupt that Col. Morris Davis recently quit as the chief military prosecutor, because of the system’s many flaws, one being that evidence derived from torture was going to be used against the prisoners.

Nothing could be more true of Binyam, who was taken to Morocco where his genitals were razor-bladed for 18 months. After that he was rendered to more abuse in the CIA-run “Dark Prison” in Kabul, where he was tortured psychologically, hung up and subjected to incredibly loud music for 20 days at a time. He has been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay since September 2004.

The timing of President Bush’s visit to London is fortuitous but only if his supporters can make sure that he gets the message. The “Bring Back Binyam” initiative starts at 3 pm outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and Reprieve is working towards a finale outside the Southbank Centre, where Massive Attack are hosting a series of Reprieve events as part of Meltdown 2008, at 4.30pm.

Throughout this initiative, Reprieve will dramatize the torture-by-music that Binyam and other prisoners have suffered. Barney the Purple Dinosaur will be making a personal appearance, as the theme tune to this popular children’s show has been one of the US torturers’ favourite pieces of torture music. Reprieve is also hoping to involve other creative “cartoon characters”: Katy the Kangaroo Court, and even Roger the Razor Blade. Cosmetics firm Lush, who have been supporting the work of Reprieve, have kindly agreed to bring along their massive “Fair Trial My Arse” orange underpants, to highlight the nature of the unjust process that Binyam is facing. Brighton’s Save Omar campaigners — having effortlessly shifted their focus to Binyam’s plight — will be turning up with their typical creative energy, and Reprieve will also be supported by Cageprisoners and the London Guantanamo Campaign.

Reprieve notes that supporters of Binyam don’t have to sing the Barney theme song (although they’re welcome to), and also suggests that supporters can dress up in any outfit that they think dramatises Binyam’s torture over the past six years.

For further information, please contact Reprieve on 020 7353 4640.

Yesterday, Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents over 30 prisoners in Guantánamo, issued a detailed and devastating report, Human Cargo: Binyam Mohamed and the Rendition Frequent Flier Programme, which presents compelling evidence of the rendition and torture of one of its clients, the British resident Binyam Mohamed.

Binyam’s horrific story has been in the public domain since 2005, when his lawyers first revealed his account of his 18-month torture in Morocco at the hands of proxy torturers working on behalf of the US, but the US administration has never seen fit to investigate the allegations.

Reprieve is submitting a more detailed version of the report to Representative Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who is campaigning assiduously to uncover the truth about the administration’s “extraordinary rendition” policies, but is making a version of the report available to the public in an attempt to expose the extraordinary cover-up that has been taking place for years regarding Binyam’s renditions and the horrendous torture to which he was subjected, not only in Morocco, but also in the “Dark Prison,” a secret CIA-run prison near Kabul.

There is an urgency to this mission, as Binyam has just been put forward for trial by Military Commission, on long-discredited charges of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city, and there is a limited window of opportunity for Susan Crawford, the retired judge and associate of Vice president Dick Cheney, who is the Commissions’ “convening authority,” to proceed with the charges, or, as Reprieve hopes, to be persuaded to drop them, to prevent the full horror story from emerging in a trial at Guantánamo to embarrass both the American and the British governments.

In the report, Reprieve calls for a “full and open Congressional investigation into the crimes that have been committed against Binyam Mohamed,” and demands that the US administration “turn over all evidence of Binyam’s torture in Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo to his lawyers, including photographs of his injuries,” which are known to be in the possession of the authorities, “interrogation logs and any other relevant material.” The organization, which recently filed a lawsuit seeking the release of relevant information that is held by the British government relating to its stated knowledge of Binyam’s rendition from Pakistan to Morocco, and its provision of materials relating to Binyam’s life in London that was used by his Moroccan torturers, also reiterates its call for British officials to provide “all information in their files about their involvement in the rendition and torture of Binyam Mohamed,” and also calls for a “full and public enquiry into British collusion in this process.”

The report not only revisits Binyam’s torture testimony, but also provides detailed analysis of the rendition flights that transported him around the world, and (in the full version) the identities of the CIA operatives and private contractors who undertook these grisly missions. In this it overlaps with the story of Khalid El-Masri, the innocent German who was seized by mistake in Macedonia (because his name resembles that of a man who reportedly aided the 9/11 hijackers) and rendered to the “Dark Prison,” until the CIA realized that it had made a mistake, when he was flown to Albania and abandoned. This week, El-Masri and his lawyers in Germany announced that they were suing the German government “to force it to issue extradition orders against 13 American intelligence agents involved” in his rendition to torture.

The difference, of course, is that Khaled El-Masri is no longer a prisoner in the “War on Terror” — although he continues to suffer enormously as a result of his horrific ordeal — whereas Binyam has now been held for over six years, and faces a trial in a system that is so legally deficient that it was described by Lord Steyn, one of Britain’s senior law lords (now retired), as nothing less than a “kangaroo court.”

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).

As published on Indymedia.