Archive for July, 2008

The following inspiring interview with Sami al-Haj, who was released from Guantánamo on May 1, was conducted by journalist Silvia Cattori during Sami’s recent visit to Switzerland. It was translated into English by Sue Bingham, and was first published on the website of the British human rights organization Cageprisoners. This is a slightly edited version. Note: Sami has recently explained that his name is transliterated as Sami El-Haj, but I have stuck with the old spelling, as this is how he is more commonly known.

Standing straight and tall, an impressive and deeply introspective man, Sami al-Haj walks with a limp and the help of a walking stick. Neither laughter nor smiles light up the refined face of this man, old before his time. A deep sadness pervades him. He was 32 years old when, in December 2001, his life, like that of tens of thousands of other Muslims, became a horrific nightmare.

He endured horrendous suffering. Weakened by a hunger strike which lasted 438 days, set free on the 1st May 2008, he greets you attentively and with a gentle manner. He calmly tells you of a world whose paralysing, suffocating horror is beyond your comprehension.

“I came to Geneva, the city of the United Nations and freedom, to ask for the law to be respected, to demand the closure of the Guantánamo camp and secret prisons, and to demand that this illegal situation be brought to an end,” he says calmly. The word has been uttered. Everything is “illegal”; everything is false, manipulated, absurd and Kafkaesque in this war waged essentially against those of the Muslim faith.

In Guantánamo, spurred on by his passion for justice and his conviction that every journalist’s mission is to bear witness to what he sees, Sami al-Haj had the psychological strength to carry on, resisting the worse abuses and putting his own suffering to one side. His experiences were extremely painful but he was able, even in the worst moments, to cling to the hope that he would get out alive. And knowing that he had to observe everything in order to be able to tell the world helped him to bear the unbearable.

Moreover, it was through viewing this horrific place (which could have been his tomb) with the objective eye of the journalist that Sami al-Haj was able to survive and remain sane. Others, who were not as lucky as he was, died [see here and here] or became insane, and so were unable to recount their experiences.

With neither pencil nor paper, Sami al-Haj forced himself to memorise everything in order, even in a cage, to carry on his work as “an al-Jazeera journalist covering a story,” as he put it.

Today he is driven by the idea of bringing to the world’s attention these tens of thousands of prisoners who are still suffering inhuman treatment in the prisons of Guantánamo, Bagram and Kandahar [and Iraq]. He replies tirelessly and with good humour to all the journalists who interview him, hoping that his words will allow those who no longer have a voice to be heard.

Silvia Cattori: How do you feel, just a few short weeks after your liberation?

Sami al-Haj: I feel fine, thank you. When I see people committing themselves to saving human beings and fighting to defend their rights, it gives me great comfort. Of course, when I left Guantánamo, two months ago, I was in a very bad way. But now I feel better, discovering that people outside are fighting and not losing sight of the main goal — achieving peace and freedom for everyone.

Silvia Cattori: After those painful years spent in the camps, what are your strongest feelings and greatest hopes?

Sami al-Haj: Of course, I am happy to be free again. I have been reunited with my family, my wife and my son. For six and a half years he did not see me, and had to go to school without me. He waited for me and said, “Dad, I have missed you for so long! I was so unhappy, especially when I saw my school friends, with their fathers, and they asked me where my father was. I had no answer to give them. That’s why I asked my mum to take me to school in the car, because I didn’t want them to keep asking me that question.”

I said to my son, “Now, I could take you to school, but you must understand that I have a message to give, a just cause to defend. I want to fight for the cause of human rights, for those who have been deprived of their freedom. I do not want to fight alone. There are thousands of people who are standing up and fighting wherever human dignity is attacked. Do not forget that we are fighting for peace, to defend rights whenever they are denied, for a better future for you. Perhaps one day we will achieve this, and then I will be able to stay with you and take you to school.”

I do not know if he understood, because he is still very young, but he smiled at me. My wife did not want me to leave again either. But when I reminded her of the horrific situation those imprisoned in Guantánamo find themselves in, and that they also have a family, sons, daughters, a wife whom they miss terribly, and that if I do not fight these people will remain imprisoned even longer, she understood that I must carry on travelling, adding my voice to all the other voices, so that the detainees can return home as soon as possible. She gave me her full support. On the way to the airport she said to me, “I will pray for you.”

Silvia Cattori: So, by going to Afghanistan to film the massacres of civilians, victims of President Bush’s war, you yourself became one of his victims? Are you not afraid of what could happen to you again?

Sami al-Haj: For me, there is no question — I will continue my work as a journalist. I must continue carrying a message of peace, no matter what. For my part, I have spent six years and six months in prison, far from my family, but for others it was so much worse. I lost a very dear friend, a journalist with al-Jazeera: he died in Baghdad, killed when the hotel where he was staying was bombed. I also lost a colleague who was working with me at al-Jazeera, whom I consider a sister: she too died in Baghdad.

Many people have lost their lives because of this war. You must know that the Bush administration wanted to prevent coverage by the free media, like al- Jazeera, in the Middle East. The al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed.

In 2001, when I left my son and my wife to film the war initiated by the USA against Afghanistan, I had to expect finding death during a bombing raid. I went there fully aware of the risks. Every journalist knows that he is carrying out a mission and must be ready to sacrifice himself in order to bear witness to what is happening, through his films and writing. And to help people understand that war brings nothing but the death of the innocent, destruction and suffering. It is on the basis of this conviction that my colleagues and I went to countries at war.

Now, after all these years in captivity, I can once again do something to help bring about peace. I am going to commit myself to this goal, until it is achieved. I am sure that one day, even if I do not personally reap the fruits, we will succeed in achieving peace and the respect of human rights, as well as the protection of journalists throughout the world. I am sure that we will see the day when journalists are no longer tortured or injured doing their job, defending people’s rights to information and highlighting human rights abuses.

Silvia Cattori: You said at the beginning that you are feeling fine. But after such a terrible experience, and given that you were released with no apology whatsoever from your torturers, how are you able to talk about all this without resentment or bitterness?

Sami al-Haj: Of course, what happened to me was very hard and my personal situation is difficult. But when I think of those who are still in Guantánamo, and their families that they miss very much and who have no news at all of them, I tell myself that my situation, as difficult as it is, is better than theirs.

I cannot forget that in Guantánamo I have left behind brothers who have been crushed, who have gone mad. I am thinking in particular of a Yemeni doctor who now lives naked in his cell because he has lost his mind.

Silvia Cattori: What kind of torture did they subject you to?

Sami al-Haj: All kinds of physical and psychological torture. As all the detainees were Muslim, the camp administration subjected them to many forms of harassment and humiliation linked to religion. With my own eyes I saw soldiers tearing up the Qur’an and throwing it in the toilet. I saw them, during interrogation sessions, sitting on the Qur’an until their questions were answered. They insulted our families and our religion. They made fun of us by pretending to ring our God, asking him to come and save us. The only Imam at the camp was accused of complicity with the detainees and was sent away, in 2005, for refusing to tell visitors that the camp respected religious freedom.

They beat us up. They taunted us with racist insults. They locked us in cold rooms, below zero, with one cold meal a day. They hung us up by our hands. They deprived us of sleep, and when we started to fall asleep, they beat us on the head. They showed us films of the most horrendous torture sessions. They showed us photographs of torture victims — dead, swollen, covered in blood. They kept us under constant threat of being moved elsewhere to be tortured even more. They doused us with cold water. They forced us to do the military salute to the American national anthem. They forced us to wear women’s clothes. They forced us to look at pornographic images. They threatened us with rape. They would strip us naked and make us walk like donkeys, ordering us around. They made us sit down and stand up five hundred times in a row. They humiliated the detainees by wrapping them up in the Israeli and American flags, which was their way of telling us that we were imprisoned because of a religious war.

When a detainee, filthy and riddled with fleas, is taken out of his cell to be submitted to more torture sessions in an attempt to make him collaborate, he ends up not knowing what he is saying or even who he is any more.

I was interrogated and tortured more than two hundred times. Ninety-five percent of the questions were about al-Jazeera. They wanted me to work as a spy within al-Jazeera. In exchange, they offered American citizenship for myself and my family, and payment based on results. I refused. I told them repeatedly that my job is a journalist, not a spy, and that it was my duty to make the truth known and to work for the respect of human rights.

Silvia Cattori: Today, can you find it within yourself to pardon your torturers?

Sami al-Haj: Of course I will pardon them if they close Guantánamo. But if they continue to cause suffering, I will go to the courts and take action against them.

Although I know that the Bush administration has done so much harm, I still think that it’s not too late for these people to make up for their mistakes.

A distinction must be made between the administration and the people. The Guantánamo detainees know that they have friends in America, like the lawyer who came to Guantánamo and fought for my case [Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the British-based legal charity Reprieve].

Silvia Cattori: Am I right in thinking that they were not able to break you?

Sami al-Haj: Because I am not alone, and there are people supporting me, this feeling gives me strength. In prison, I drew my strength from the belief that no free man can accept being in this position of inferiority and dehumanisation. You feel pain and sorrow but you are determined to keep alive the hope that there will be an end to it; and the idea that even in prison, it is possible to carry on your work as journalist, makes suffering easier to bear.

Silvia Cattori: When you were in Guantánamo, did you know that outside there where people who were fighting for you to be released?

Sami al-Haj: In fact I didn’t know about them, because in prison it is very difficult to receive news, even if you have a lawyer, because he is not allowed to tell you anything. Now I do know those who work for human rights, and those who do not agree with the Bush administration. I think that every day their voice becomes stronger.

Silvia Cattori: Your brother, when he saw you again, said that you looked like an old man. Is that how you feel?

Sami al-Haj: Personally, it is my heart that counts, and not my face or my body. I feel that my heart is as young as ever, and stronger than before.

Silvia Cattori: So it was a very painful experience, but in fact you have emerged from it with unforeseen benefits?

Sami al-Haj: That’s right. I have been able to reap some benefits from my time spent in Guantánamo. Before going there, I only had a small family. Now I have a large family as I have gained hundreds of friends from around the world. This is very positive: I may have lost six and a half years but now, I have more friends.

Silvia Cattori: Are you still considered an “enemy combatant”?

Sami al-Haj: I don’t know, but when they released me, they said, ”Now you are no longer a danger to America.”

Silvia Cattori: And your name is not on the “terrorist list” anymore?

Sami al-Haj: I don’t know. I think that for them, all the people they labelled as “terrorists” will remain so. And that now they are afraid of us because they made us suffer for no reason.

Silvia Cattori: Do you think CIA agents will still spy on you?

Sami al-Haj: Yes. The truth is that I have nothing against the country and its people. If the Bush administration makes amends for its errors, I will have nothing to complain about.

Silvia Cattori: Were you surprised when, as you were leaving, an officer from the Pentagon who saw you with a walking stick accused you of being manipulative?

Sami al-Haj: The Pentagon officials claim that the Guantánamo detainees were criminals, but in fact 500 of them have now returned home. How could they have been allowed to leave if they really were criminals? They are still lying.

Silvia Cattori: Two other Sudanese men were released at the same time as you — Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Mohamed Ali. How are they now?

Sami al-Haj: The Sudanese government has treated them very well. They greeted all three of us personally at the airport. Despite the fact that the Americans had taken my passport, I was given a new one within two hours, and they did not prevent me from travelling outside Sudan.

Silvia Cattori: In Guantánamo, did the soldiers call you by your name or by your detainee number, “number 345”?

Sami al-Haj: They never called me by my name, just “three, four, five”, my prison number. Towards the end they called me “al-Jazeera”. Only the Red Cross officials called me by my name.

Silvia Cattori: Did these officials visit you often?

Sami al-Haj: When they were authorised to visit us, every two or three months. I talked to them and they brought me letters from my family.

Silvia Cattori: The Bush administration and the officers who had the job of torturing you knew that you were a good man, a journalist merely trying to expose the brutality with which they were treating the Afghan people, not a “terrorist.” Do you know why they treated you so badly?

Sami al-Haj: Most of the soldiers there were following orders from their superiors. They carried out torture with no conscience. But to be true to what happened I must say that some of them were good men. Some soldiers did use their brains.

Silvia Cattori: The CIA agents wrote a report on the torture in Guantánamo. When they were torturing you, did you feel that they were observing you, carrying out experiments on you?

Sami al-Haj: We were under the constant supervision of military psychologists. They were not there to treat us, but to take part in the interrogations, observing the tortured prisoners so that no detail of their behaviour would escape them. The interrogations were the responsibility of Colonel Morgan, a specialist psychiatric doctor. This colonel was stationed in Guantánamo from March 2002. He had served at the Afghan prison in Bagram from November 2001. He gave instructions to the officers who were torturing us, studied our reactions, then noted every detail in order to be able to adapt the torture techniques to each detainee, which had profound psychological consequences.

I spoke to them. I told them that the mission of a doctor is an honourable one, to help people, not torture them. They replied, “We are military personnel and we must follow the rules. When an officer gives me an order, it is my duty to carry it out, otherwise I will be imprisoned just like you. When I signed a contract with the army, I realised at the time that I must obey all orders.”

Silvia Cattori: Amongst the torture techniques used at Guantánamo, I see similarities with those used in Israel on Palestinian political prisoners. Sleep deprivation, for example, is their speciality.

Sami al-Haj: I think that most of the world’s intelligence services came to Guantánamo. I saw British and Canadians. They came to find out about the interrogation techniques, and also to supply the CIA and FBI with advice on how to torture and interrogate from what they had learned.

Silvia Cattori: Are you able to sleep easily?

Sami al-Haj: Not like before Guantánamo. I only sleep three to four hours now. Today, when I met people from the Red Cross, I asked them to help me to overcome my problems and recommend a doctor who could help me. Seven years is not a short period of time.

Silvia Cattori: Wasn’t going on hunger strike a kind of self-inflicted torture? Why did you do it for such long periods, while your jailers took advantage of it to inflict even more suffering and humiliation on you?

Sami al-Haj: Because we felt we couldn’t stay silent — we had to do something. That is the only way we had of making our voices heard. Going on hunger strike is of course a very painful way of taking action and is difficult to endure. But when your freedom is taken away you have to fight to restore it. It was our last resort for telling the Bush administration that a detainee has dignity, that he cannot live on bread alone and that freedom is more important.

Silvia Cattori: What was it like when they force-fed you?

Sami al-Haj: When there were more than 40 detainees on hunger strike, the administration of the camp tried to break our resistance by subjecting us to more torture. We were locked in cold rooms, stripped naked, and prevented from sleeping for long periods. Twice a day the soldiers tied us to a special chair. They put a mask over our faces and inserted a large tube into our noses, not into the stomach. The normal ration was two cans but they punished us by injecting 24 cans and six bottles of water. Having shrunk through long hunger strikes, the stomach cannot hold such quantities. They added products which induce diarrhoea. The detainee, now sitting on that chair for more than three hours, would vomit continuously. They left us in the vomit and excrement. When the session was over they would rip the tube out violently, and when they saw the blood flowing they laughed at us. As they use infected tubes which are never cleaned, the detainees suffer from untreated illnesses.

Silvia Cattori: Is it thanks to that long hunger strike that you were released?

Sami al-Haj: Not only because of that, but it was one of the factors that led the administration to release me.

Silvia Cattori: What should one make of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions, where he admits to organising more than 30 terrorist attacks in seventeen countries?

Sami al-Haj: It is possible that they tortured him to the point where he was no longer himself. I never met him because they put him in a special camp. An officer told me that he was very badly injured. I’m sure you can imagine — they subjected him to horrific torture.

Silvia Cattori: When America says that he is the “number 3 al-Qaeda terrorist,” does that bear any resemblance to the truth?

Sami al-Haj: Quite honestly I believe nothing that comes from the Bush administration. Because I was also accused of being a “terrorist.” And I know better than anyone what the truth is. Those people lie too much. I never believe a single word coming from that government. I know a prisoner who was tortured so much that in the end he said, “I am Osama Bin Laden.” He said what they wanted to hear so that the torture would end.

Silvia Cattori: So, is al-Qaeda a creation of the western intelligence agencies?

Sami al-Haj: As far as I’m concerned, I have never in my life met anyone who has said to me, “I belong to al-Qaeda.”

In Guantánamo, I met most of the detainees because the policy of the guards was not to allow the prisoners to live together for a long time in the same cell. They transferred us every week. So we got to know other people. The men I met there are all peaceful people.

Since I left, I have spoken to over a hundred of them. Those who were married have picked up their lives again and the others have got married.

Silvia Cattori: Do those who draw strength from prayer have a better chance of escaping madness?

Sami al-Haj: Of course! If you feel that someone is there with you, especially God, you will be patient and always aware that God is more powerful than human beings. I must pray to God and thank him. I must also thank all those who supported me. I think that even if I spent my whole life saying thank you, I would not manage to thank them all. Now, through my work concentrating on human rights, perhaps I will be able to contribute to making other people’s lives happier.

Silvia Cattori: I feel that the media and the NGOs in this country have not given the importance that was due to defending the rights of these Muslim prisoners. For a long time denouncing the abuses committed against them was seen as a sign of sympathy for the “terrorists.” Did you know that the leaders of Reporters Without Borders, for example, whose mission is to protect journalists, were criticised for waiting five years before talking about your case?

Sami al-Haj: Unfortunately people believed whatever the Bush government told them. Now they know this wasn’t true, they will put the record straight. As I have already said, if someone makes a mistake, it’s not a problem: the problem lies in pursuing the mistake.

If journalists do not feel concerned when other journalists are imprisoned carrying out their job, perhaps one day those very journalists will find themselves in prison and there will be nobody to defend them. We must work together, taking up each and every case. So if we find out that a journalist has been imprisoned it is our duty to support them, no matter what their colour or religion.

As a journalist, I want to commit myself to supporting journalists who work to defend rights and freedom. There is an enormous amount of work to do. We must stop at nothing to ensure the liberation of those who are locked away in Guantánamo and the countless secret prisons where the Bush government is depriving tens of thousands of others of their rights.

That experience in Guantánamo affected us profoundly. What I want to focus on is the need for and the importance of the defence of human rights. After all the damage that has been done, everyone now feels more concerned, I think. It is not acceptable to abandon these people who are suffering. We have an urgent responsibility to show solidarity with them.

Al-Jazeera hopes to work with the free media to gather information relating to human rights and freedoms. I ask all journalists to cooperate with us in this. There were more than 50 nationalities in Guantánamo — it is a worldwide issue, and not just about individual detainees.

It is shameful that in our society, innocent people who have been sold find themselves locked in cages, and that this violation of basic rights should be the doing of a country which claims to be the guarantor of rights and freedoms.

I feel no hatred. We respect the citizens of the USA. It is their present government which should take responsibility for the consequences of these actions.

Human rights and security are inseparable — there can be no security without the respect of fundamental rights.

Silvia Cattori: You are right to call on decent people and journalists not to accept the violation of international laws and the cruel and degrading treatment of human beings. But this policy could not have lasted if it had not had the tacit support of the superpower governments — it was with their consent that those labelled “enemy combatants” were tortured. The Patriot Act, for example, passed after the 11th September in the US, was supported by all the European countries. It was within the framework of these secret agreements that CIA and FBI agents were able to kidnap and torture thousands of innocent men like you in Europe.

Sami al-Haj: I want to say this to you: I do not believe in the actions of governments. Because any government, in any country, prefers to govern without confronting the people’s real problems. It may, at times, speak out in support of a certain cause, but in reality it does not support it. It is only for opportunistic political reasons that governments speak out. And they may even, through political expediency, claim to support something in which they do not believe. Forget governments, because they have their own agenda. Yes, we must keep working hard to defend the rights and freedoms of everyone.

Silvia Cattori: Is it fair to conclude that the “terrorists” as presented to us by the Bush administration and the media do not exist?

Sami al-Haj: I can assure you that the Guantánamo detainees that I met are not “terrorists.” I had the opportunity to talk to them and get to know them — they are pacifists.

Silvia Cattori: So you were arrested, then, because it had to be proven to the other European countries that the Muslim “terrorists” really existed?

Sami al-Haj: We were arrested after the attacks of the 11th September, for which no one has yet been able to find those responsible. President Bush did not want to say, “I have made mistakes, I was not able to maintain national security.” He said, “We are going to start a war against terror.” The outcome is that he has brought security to no one.

He bombed Afghanistan, sent soldiers to wage war against whole nations, but did not arrest the people that he set out to arrest. He paid the Pakistanis in return for starting to arrest people and hand them over to his administration.

Eighty-nine percent of the prisoners in Guantánamo were bought, for hard currency, from the Pakistani authorities. Where did they find them? They found them in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

Silvia Cattori: These prisoners were then tortured with the promise that it would end if they accepted becoming spies for the CIA? What a terrifying system!

Sami al-Haj: Yes. Let’s wait for President Bush to leave power. When he has left his seat, I am sure that many people will have something to say about his wrongdoing.

Silvia Cattori: Your testimony is very important. Your youth has been destroyed. And yet you have the magnanimity to transform this disaster into something constructive. You refuse to see yourself as a victim. You are truly amazing! So many prisoners must be hoping for help from people like you.

Sami al-Haj: We must work hard, so that all those who continue to support the Bush administration feel ashamed of their actions. At that point, no one will help them. And when no one helps them, they will stop.

The whole Guantánamo episode is a huge black stain. The Bush administration tried to deceive the public by saying we were terrorists. But the great majority of those men who were imprisoned are innocent, like me.

Silvia Cattori: Thank you for giving us this interview.

Andy Worthington 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).

On Monday July 28, the US Department of Defense announced that it had transferred three prisoners — a Qatari, an Afghan and a prisoner from the United Arab Emirates — to their home countries from the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Adding that they “were determined to be eligible for transfer following a comprehensive series of review processes,” the DoD also claimed that the men’s release from Guantánamo is “a demonstration of the United States’ desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary,” which “underscores the processes put in place to assess each individual and make a determination about their detention while hostilities are ongoing — an unprecedented step in the history of warfare.”

While critics might point out that holding prisoners without an effective screening process, labeling them all as “enemy combatants,” to be held without charge or trial, transporting them halfway round the world to an illegal offshore interrogation center, and depriving them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions might also be regarded as “an unprecedented step in the history of warfare,” what is distressing about this latest batch of releases (which brings the total number of prisoners released to 506) is that two of the men — those from Afghanistan and the UAE — have left Guantánamo as unknown as they arrived: ghost-like and anonymous, and not even identified by the Internment Serial Numbers which replaced their names for the last five or six years of their life.

As some sort of compensation, however, the third prisoner — Jarallah al-Marri, Guantánamo’s sole Qatari prisoner — has been identified, and his story is fascinating for various reasons. Married with children, al-Marri was 28 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001 at a time when around a third of Guantánamo’s total population (at least 250 prisoners) were captured. As I explain in my book The Guantánamo Files, many of these men were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, economic migrants or drifters enticed by rumors that the Taliban were crafting a “pure Islamic state in Afghanistan.” Others — al-Marri included — had been encouraged to travel to Afghanistan “to participate in the jihad,” as described in al-Marri’s tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 or 2005. However, not all of these men were aware of the reality of the jihad, and al-Marri was one of many who stated that he had been tricked.

Arriving in Afghanistan just days before the 9/11 attacks, al-Marri admitted that he had met people in Saudi Arabia who had arranged his trip to Afghanistan, and also admitted attending the al-Farouq training camp (a camp for Arabs, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11). However, he only arrived at the camp on September 10, and left the following day, without receiving any training, when the camp was shut down. After hiding out at various locations in Afghanistan — including a stint in the mountains near Kabul — he said that “an individual in Afghanistan arranged for [him] to be smuggled across the border into Pakistan,” and that he “crossed the border on a motorcycle, using a gate at which the smuggler seemed to know the guard.” He was then seized “while taking a bus from one town to another in Pakistan … after a guard boarded the bus and questioned [him] on his nationality.” At no point was he accused of raising arms against US forces, and in his tribunal, at which he authorized his Personal Representative to speak on his behalf, after requesting the services of a lawyer, he explained, “I never fought anyone. I did not want to continue because it was wrong.”

In statements made to interrogators, al-Marri elaborated on his misgivings about the situation in Afghanistan. He said that he “was misled” about the jihad and explained that he did not realize, until he was in Afghanistan, that it “was a battle of Muslim against Muslim.” He also stated that he “learned after his arrival in Afghanistan that the Taliban were not as good as he was told,” and made a point of adding that “he had second thoughts and wanted to return to Qatar after learning that the al-Farouq camp was owned by Osama bin Laden.” In addition, when questioned about al-Qaeda, he made a point rarely mentioned by other prisoners: that he did not hear the name “al-Qaeda” until after his capture, because “al-Qaeda, along with all the fighters and trainees, were called Mujahideen.”

Despite the fact that he did not undertake military training in Afghanistan, and never raised arms against US forces, al-Marri was treated abysmally in Guantánamo. In 2005, his lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, reported that “Mr. al-Marri has been in solitary confinement for over 16 months and often goes as long as 3 weeks without being allowed outside his cell for recreation. The lights in Mr. al-Marri’s cell remain on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and he has been denied adequate bedding and clothing. Mr. al-Marri is able to sleep only 2 hours a night, and his physical and mental health have deteriorated significantly.”

In summer 2005, he was one of at least 200 prisoners who undertook a mass hunger strike to protest about their daily living conditions and the injustice of their seemingly endless imprisonment without charge or trial. As a result, although he only weighed 122 pounds (8 stone 10 pounds) on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped to 105 pounds (7 stone 7 pounds) and he was hospitalised and placed on an IV, his situation complicated by a deteriorating heart condition. He explained to Jonathan Hafetz that “the government had a nurse make sexual advances towards him while he was lying in his hospital bed in a vain attempt to convince him to give up his hunger strike.”

What has not been made clear about Jarallah al-Marri’s case is his relationship with his brother Ali, a legal US resident who was seized by the FBI in Peoria, Illinois in December 2001 and has been held in complete isolation as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland since June 2003, without charge or trial. Although the government alleges that Ali al-Marri was part of a US-based al-Qaeda sleeper cell, references to him are scant in the documentation relating to Jarallah, and relate primarily to the grand jury indictment of May 2003, in which he was accused of “making false statements to the FBI” in relation to the 9/11 attacks. What is curious is that Jarallah was released from Guantánamo just two weeks after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, although Ali has some vague right to appeal his untested designation as an “enemy combatant,” the President’s dictatorial powers, granted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, remain intact, and he has the right to imprison any American, either citizens or residents, and hold them forever without charge or trial if he believes them to be “enemy combatants.”

The timing of Jarallah’s release may be coincidental, particularly as Jonathan Hafetz explained to me that he was cleared for release after an administrative review in April, and it may be that, in an attempt to reduce the population of Guantánamo in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights, his repatriation — and those of his unknown fellow prisoners — was a straightforward process, which enabled a quietly desperate administration to prevent a few more prisoners from challenging the basis of their detention in the District Courts in the coming months.

Certainly, the case against him would, I am sure, appear dismally weak when scrutinized by a proper court rather than the mockery of justice served up at Guantánamo, where, as noted by former insider Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, the tribunal system was designed merely to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ designation as “enemy combatants,” without any meaningful way for them to challenge the “evidence” against them. Jonathan Hafetz also wondered if his release was timed to avoid a court showdown over a motion regarding the destruction of evidence relating to Jarallah, which, he stated, “was presumably about to go forward.”

I can’t help wondering, however, if Jarallah’s release was not also timed to remove a potential witness from his brother’s case, one who might have exculpatory evidence proving that Ali was a legitimate student in the United States, and that the case against him, which is based solely on information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during the first few months of his torture in secret CIA custody in spring 2003, is nothing more than a web of lies spun by a prisoner who, as torture victims do, told his captors whatever they wanted to hear to get the torture to stop.

My thanks to Scott Horton and the Antiwar Radio crew, who have gone to the effort of putting images to our recent interview and have made the whole package available on YouTube. For my fourth Antiwar Radio interview, Scott and I ran through the issues relating to Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” in the week that the Omar Khadr interrogation tapes were released, District Judge James Robertson gave the go-ahead for Salim Hamdan’s trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed, in the case of Qatari citizen and US resident Ali al-Marri, that the elected President of the United States is in fact a dictator, empowered to seize Americans (citizens as well as residents) and hold them forever without charge or trial, so long as, somewhere in the recesses of the President’s mind, he has designated them as “enemy combatants.”

Just another week in the law-free zone that is the “War on Terror” …

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).

On June 12, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners at Guantánamo had constitutional habeas corpus rights, it was not immediately clear if the decision would have an impact on the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, the alternative legal system for trying “War on Terror” prisoners that was stealthily established in November 2001 (bypassing the Justice Department, the State Department and the National Security Agency) by Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief counsel David Addington.

Logic dictated that Boumediene would extend to those facing trial by Military Commission, because, under the terms of the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which was passed by Congress after the Supreme Court struck down the first version of the Commissions as illegal in June 2006, prisoners could only be put forward for trial by Military Commission if they had been designated as “enemy combatants” in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), the administrative review process established at Guantánamo in 2004.

As with justice, however, logic is in short supply in the executive’s approach to terror suspects, who have been deprived of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, tortured, coerced or bribed to make false confessions, and, essentially, designated as “enemy combatants” by Presidential whim alone, with the intention, in most cases, of holding them forever without charge or trial.

So here’s the problem: In Boumediene, the Supreme Court ruled that the habeas-stripping provisions of the MCA and its predecessor, 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which provided for limited review of the prisoners’ CSRTs, did not provide an adequate substitute for habeas, and instructed the lower courts to allow the prisoners’ habeas cases to proceed. This process is now underway, as I reported here, but those facing trial by Military Commission were not necessarily included, even though their cases involve the same problems relating to habeas, the DTA and the MCA as all the other cases.

On July 3, lawyers for Salim Hamdan, one of 20 prisoners facing trial by Military Commission, raised this unresolved issue, filing legal papers asking District Judge James Robertson to delay the start of Hamdan’s trial, and arguing that he should be allowed to challenge his detention in a federal court, based on the Supreme Court’s Boumediene verdict. In a 46-page court filing, his lawyers wrote, “This case raises the question of whether the constitutional right to habeas corpus can be rendered illusory by subjecting an individual to an unconstitutional trial by military commission. Trying Hamdan under a dubious regime whose very legality has been called into question would reduce the legitimacy of the proceedings in this country and in the eyes of the world.”

Last Thursday, Judge Robertson heard oral arguments from government lawyers and from Hamdan’s civilian lawyer, Neal Katyal. Robertson and Katyal had met before. In 2004, in what the New York Times described as “a theatrically timed federal court injunction,” Judge Robertson called a halt to the Commissions, on the basis that the CSRTs did not reach the level of a “competent tribunal,” as demanded by the Geneva Conventions. He also ruled that, until a “competent tribunal” determined that Hamdan was not a Prisoner of War (PoW), as defined and protected by the Geneva Conventions, he had the right to be tried under the same judicial system as US soldiers, and added that, even if he was determined not to be a PoW, the Military Commissions as they stood were inadequate and would not be allowed to proceed until their rules were revised to accord with the federal laws governing the trial of soldiers. In a final blow to the administration, Judge Robertson specifically addressed Hamdan’s detention in Guantánamo, ruling that he was not to be held indefinitely in solitary confinement and should be returned to the rest of the prisoner population.

This was a significant victory for Hamdan, of course, and although it only lasted until July 2005, when it was overturned by the Court of Appeals, that decision ultimately led all the way to the Supreme Court, where Hamdan gained his second victory in June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the ruling that finally derailed the first version of the Commissions.

Last week, however, Hamdan’s run of significant court victories came to an end, after a two-hour hearing with Judge Robertson in which both sides put their cases. Defending the process, and Hamdan’s eligibility for the trial, lawyers for the government said, as the Christian Science Monitor explained, that the Commission process “was created by Congress and features an impartial judge and jury, as well as a ‘full panoply’ of trial rights.” In a court filing, Justice Department lawyer Alexander Haas declared, “Such rights for an alien charged with war crimes are utterly unprecedented and far exceed the protections given to the defendants [in prior war crimes tribunals].”

In response, Neal Katyal’s brief stated, “The Government notes that the public has a strong interest in the prompt, effective, and efficient administration of justice. Hamdan could not agree more. But … rushing to try him just weeks after the Supreme Court has upended the foundations for his commission and acknowledged his right to habeas will lead to confusion, inefficiencies, and uncertainty.” He added, “All he wants is a fair trial. If individuals merely being detained have a right to challenge their detention, then detainees who are set to be tried must have an even stronger right to challenge a trial that may result in life imprisonment or death.”

Judge Robertson, however, had other ideas. Siding with the government, who had also declared, “The purpose of constitutional habeas is to test the legality of detention, not to challenge a trial in advance” (even though there were obvious chicken-and-egg conclusions to be drawn from the statement), Judge Robertson agreed that, under the terms of the MCA, Hamdan’s lawyers were required to wait until a verdict was reached in the trial before raising constitutional challenges. Curiously, however, he made no mention of how ironic it was that he had ended up defending a much-criticized piece of legislation that had only come about because of the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the original Commission system in which he, of course, had played a major part.

And so, on Monday, despite having twice secured significant legal victories, Salim Hamdan was brought from his cell to face the first full US war crimes trial since the Second World War. Noticeably, however, the administration refrained from trumpeting the proceedings as the 21st century’s answer to the Nuremberg Trials, even though comparisons with the Nazi war trials have often featured in the government’s rhetoric.

Perhaps this was because of Col. Morris Davis. The Commissions’ former chief prosecutor, Col. Davis resigned in October 2007, complaining that his superiors had politicized the process, and explaining that he could not continue in his job because he refused to take part in trials that allowed evidence obtained through torture. In February 2008, Col. Davis reported that, during a discussion of the Nuremberg Trials with the Defense Department’s chief counsel William J. Haynes II, in which Davis noted that there had been some acquittals, which had “lent great credibility to the proceedings,” Haynes told him, “We can’t have acquittals. We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.”

Or perhaps it was because, in the absence of Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg’s convenors did not respond by putting one of his drivers on trial instead.

The government alleges that Hamdan was more of a player in al-Qaeda than merely part of the motor pool, and it’s possible, I suppose, that his trial will reveal who is telling the truth. More likely it will reveal more about the sleep deprivation (50 days straight) that Hamdan endured, the sexual humiliation, the prolonged isolation, and the cruel effect of all this treatment on his mind, as well as more about an explosive revelation by the former FBI interrogator and “al-Qaeda expert” Ali Soufan, who explained on the trial’s second day that Guantánamo, as the Associated Press described it, “is the only place in the world where he has not informed suspects of a right against self-incrimination.” “The way it was explained to us,” Soufan said, “is Guantánamo Bay is an intelligence collection point.”

Salim Hamdan at his trial by Military Commission, July 22, 2008. Sketch by court artist Janet Hamlin.

Judge Allred, presiding over the case, has already stated that he will rule out testimony obtained coercively while Hamdan was held in Afghanistan, but it seems unlikely that he will be able to explain how Hamdan’s treatment in Guantánamo was justified — and how it continues to be justified. It also seems unlikely that Judge Allred will be able to explain why, after being imprisoned for almost as long as the Second World War, Salim Hamdan is not in fact a Prisoner of War, protected from sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, prolonged isolation and sustained interrogation by the Geneva Conventions, and entitled to ask, as a prisoner who can be held until the end of hostilities, if it is really feasible for the government to declare that it is engaged in a “war” that might last for generations.

This, I think, is the conversation we should be having, but it will clearly not happen until something else forces the collapse of the administration’s foolish and unjust substitute for a fair trial.

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 the Huffington Post, CounterPunch and AlterNet.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: reports on Hamdan’s trial and his sentence, British torture victim secures UK court victory, progress report September 2008, another Afghan charged, Omar Khadr turns 22, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 pre-trial hearings, and two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure.

On Sunday July 13, I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel discussion, following a special preview screening at the Curzon Cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue, of Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal by acclaimed film-maker Errol Morris. The event was organized by the Frontline Club, an excellent journalists’ club (and restaurant) in Paddington, which holds regular events, mostly on “frontline” topics that are not covered adequately in the mainstream media.

Morris’ film focuses, specifically, on the Military Police soldiers working at the prison’s “hard site” — Tiers 1A and 1B of Saddam Hussein’s old torture prison — where the supposed “high-value” prisoners were held, although in this, as in every other facet of the “War on Terror,” the “intelligence” that had led to their capture was not necessarily reliable.

The soldiers — none of whom received specific training as prison guards in wartime — were instructed not merely to guard the prisoners but also to subordinate their roles to the requirements of Military Intelligence and visiting representatives of the CIA by “softening up” the prisoners for interrogation. The ironic upshot, of course, was a regime of abuse that did more than almost anything else to blacken the name of the US occupiers in Iraq.

As well as featuring in-depth interviews with many of the soldiers who were later charged and imprisoned for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which humanizes them (although not always in a flattering manner), the film also focuses on the “evidence” that led to their convictions: the notorious photos taken by three of the soldiers, which have been the most horrifically iconic images of the “War on Terror” since they were first broadcast by CBS in April 2004.

Morris’ great achievement is to examine the stories behind the photos by talking to those involved, and what he discovered not only propels the viewer into the claustrophobic horrors of Abu Ghraib, but also allows the participants in that horror to explain how the photos came about, and what they actually portray.

Conceived, in some cases, as providing “evidence” of what the soldiers were required or encouraged to do, the photos certainly chronicle the abuse of prisoners — the notorious human pyramid of naked prisoners, for example, which was followed by a sickening session in which the prisoners were forced to masturbate — although other photos, which seem to capture other forms of creative abuse, actually record the guards’ attempts to restrain some of the many violent prisoners with severe mental health problems who were placed in their care.

The film also reveals that some of the most notorious photos — the hooded man, for example, standing on a box in a pose reminiscent of the Crucifixion, with wires trailing from his fingers — was put in that position partly for the benefit of the cameras, and partly as a failed attempt to “soften him up” for interrogation, as required. The soldiers reveal that the wires were not electrified, and also explain that the prisoner in question — a man named Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh (although he is not named in the film, and there has been confusion about his identity) — was soon discovered to be one of the many prisoners seized by mistake. They state that he subsequently became part of a team of prisoners, trusted by the guards, who were regularly allowed out of their cells to help with the cleaning of the cell blocks.

The effect of all these explanations is, frankly, disconcerting. On the one hand, the viewer is encouraged to question his or her assumptions about photos that seem to show sadistic abuse when this was not apparently the case, but on the other hand some of this abuse was all too real. Where the film fails, I think, is in its unwillingness to keep reminding the viewers that, although sadism was part of at least some of the guards’ approach to their work, their behaviour was only possible because those responsible for defining the parameters of their mission — at the highest levels of government — had shredded the Geneva Conventions, the rules prohibiting physical violence or torture in the Army Field Manual, and the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory.

Though often brutal, the guards were not merely, as the President described them, a “few bad apples,” and nor was the abuse the result of “Animal House on the night shift,” as former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger described it in a report on the abuse that failed to look up the chain of command for explanations. Their actions were, instead, the direct result of telling soldiers, who are trained to follow orders and to observe the Geneva Conventions, that the Conventions no longer apply, that their orders are to indulge in behaviour that was previously regarded as illegal, and that, moreover, they are to use their imaginations to find new ways of indulging in behaviour that was previously regarded as illegal. This is not to excuse their crimes, or to deflect attention from the manner in which they were corrupted in their mission (à la Lord of the Flies, or, perhaps more accurately, the Stanford Prison Experiment); it is, instead, meant to keep in mind the biggest villains of all — in the White House and the Pentagon.

After the film was shown, Richard Watson of the BBC’s Newsnight moderated the panel discussion, in which Tom Porteous, the UK Director of Human Rights Watch, Leanne Macmillan, the Director of Policy & External Affairs for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and myself, as the author of The Guantánamo Files and a representative of the legal action charity Reprieve, answered questions from an audience that was clearly engaged with the issues raised in Morris’ film. We also dealt with additional questions from Richard Watson himself, who, in the absence of anyone willing to put the US government’s case for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and sanctioning the use of torture, occasionally played Devil’s Advocate in true BBC fashion.

The questions focused largely on torture — how it is defined, what steps the US administration took to redefine torture (as the inflicting of pain that “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”), and why it is both morally corrosive and counter-productive as a method of gathering reliable intelligence. The questions also included an interesting detour into the Baha Mousa scandal, in which British soldiers murdered a hotel worker in their custody, overriding prohibitions against torture and abuse in the British army, and demonstrating, it seems, that signing up as a US ally in the “War on Terror” also involved signing up to the whole sordid package of abrogation from the Geneva Conventions, and the resuscitation of torture.

While fascinating in and of themselves, however, the lines of questioning also highlighted the film’s weaknesses, as mentioned above. Beyond hints dropped by various players in the scandal, the film refuses to focus on the abuse in a wider context; in other words, to spell out clearly how the drivers of the post-9/11 policy of detention and interrogation — in particular, Vice President Dick Cheney, his legal counsel David Addington, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush — had, through a series of secret memos, deliberately excluded the prisoners from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, had approved the use of torture, had specifically imported harsh interrogation techniques — or the lack of restraints on harsh interrogation techniques — to Abu Ghraib from Guantánamo and from the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and had, moreover, granted seemingly limitless freedom to the CIA and other agencies to behave however they wanted.

In the film, the soldiers describe how the unaccountable CIA agents brought in “ghost prisoners,” who were never accounted for, and some of the film’s most shocking scenes concern the “ghost prisoner” Manadel al-Jamadi, who died while in CIA custody and was then packed in ice and stored in a cell on the block, while the agency and those in charge of the military operations worked out how to dispose of the corpse. As a kind of forensic exercise, one of the soldiers took photos of the corpse; actions for which she was later charged. Significantly, the charges were dropped when it became apparent to the authorities that pursuing them would bring the murder — and the CIA’s actions — out into the open. To this day, however, although the photographer was convicted for conspiracy, dereliction of duty and cruelty and maltreatment relating to the rest of her actions while on duty at Abu Ghraib, no one from the CIA has been charged in connection with the murder. In a detailed investigation for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer concluded that it was possible that, “under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws.”

In conclusion, then, it may be that sidelining the bigger picture was required to create the claustrophobic atmosphere that defines Standard Operating Procedure. Behind the big-budget graphics and technical wizardry that punctuate the film — in which the backers, Sony, seem perversely delighted by Morris’ focus on the Sony cameras that were used to take the photos — the viewer is trapped in Abu Ghraib with little to focus on beyond the abuse, the photos and the soldiers who took them. It works well as a sordid and distressing chamber piece, but I’d be sorely disappointed if viewers left the cinema unaware of the puppet masters who set up the whole malign experiment in the first place, and who have never been called to account.

As published on Nth Position.