Archive for April, 2010

Such is the hysterical disregard for the law in parts of the United States that when, on March 22, District Court Judge James Robertson ordered the release from Guantánamo of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a 38-year old Mauritanian who was once described as the “highest-value detainee at the facility,” Republican lawmakers were in uproar.

The Hill reported that Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, stated, “While Holder’s Justice Department should appeal this outrageous decision, I’m not holding my breath. Holder seems more intent on closing Guantánamo Bay than keeping terrorists locked up where they belong.” The Hill also reported that Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) sent a letter to Holder asking him to appeal the ruling, in which he wrote, “It is certainly possible, if not likely, that Mr. Slahi will re-engage in efforts to commit terrorist attacks against innocent Americans if allowed to go free. This ruling clearly puts the American people in danger and should not be allowed to stand.”

As it transpired, Eric Holder was not happy with the ruling either, and did not need to be slandered by Sen. Bond to issue his own complaint. Speaking from a meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, Holder said that, although “[w]e obviously respect the decision that the judge made, [h]opefully an appeals court will look at the evidence that we presented in the habeas proceeding and come to a contrary conclusion.”

The torture of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The reasoning behind Judge Robertson’s ruling is not yet clear, as his opinion has not been publicly released. Noticeably, however, Slahi was subjected to several years of torture, which began soon after he was taken in by the Mauritanian authorities on November 20, 2001, at the request of the Bush administration. “My country turned me over, shortcutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States,” he said in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004.

After he was seized, he was transferred by the US to Jordan — one of at least 15 prisoners rendered to Jordan by the CIA between 2001 and 2004 — where he was held for eight months, and where, he said, what happened to him was “beyond description” and he was tortured “maybe twice a week, a couple times, sometimes more.” He was then transferred to the US prison at Bagram in Afghanistan for two weeks, and arrived in Guantánamo on August 4, 2002.

As the “highest-value detainee” at Guantánamo — in the days before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees” were flown in from secret CIA prisons in September 2006 — Slahi was again subjected to torture, which included prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, death threats, and threats that his mother would be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped. This program, which was implemented in May 2003, and augmented with further “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, culminated, in August 2003, in an incident when Slahi was taken out on a boat, wearing isolation goggles, while agents whispered, within earshot, that he was “about to be executed and made to disappear.” As Der Spiegel explained in an article in 2008, “He was so terrified that he urinated in his pants.”

After this, as Slahi himself described it (in a letter to his lawyers dated November 9, 2006), “I yes-sed every accusation my interrogators made. I even wrote the infamous confession about me was planning to hit the CN Tower in Toronto based on SSG [redacted] advise. I just wanted to get the monkeys off my back.”

However, his treatment was so severe that, in May 2004, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marine Corps, who had been assigned his case as a prosecutor the year before, resigned rather than pursuing the case. In a meeting with the chief prosecutor, Army Col. Bob Swann, Lt. Col. Couch “told Col. Swann that in addition to legal reasons, he was ‘morally opposed’ to the interrogation techniques ‘and for that reason alone refused to participate in [the Slahi] prosecution in any manner.’”

By all accounts, Slahi’s torture ended as soon as he began cooperating. As Der Spiegel explained in 2008, and the Washington Post reported last week, after he “broke,” he became one of Guantánamo’s most cooperative prisoners, granted special privileges, including fast food and a small garden plot, and regarded as a source of invaluable information — even though more skeptical observers might conclude that the information provided by a man broken by torture might, in fact, be less than reliable.

However, it is improbable that whatever tortured confessions were extracted from Slahi — who has persistently maintained that he had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks — would have been enough for Judge Robertson to grant his habeas petition, unless it was, in addition, demonstrated to him that other sources alleging Slahi’s involvement with the 9/11 hijackers were also unreliable.

Doubts about Slahi’s significance

Here the US authorities’ claims about Slahi begin to look rather dubious. Although the 9/11 Commission Report described him as “a significant al-Qaeda operative” who “recruited 9/11 hijackers in Germany,” the more detailed narrative, as revealed in the report, is less conclusive. Instead, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files:

[I]t was stated that Ramzi bin al-Shibh and three of the 9/11 hijackers — Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jeddah — were traveling on a train in Germany when they met a man named Khalid El-Masri, and “struck up a conversation about jihad in Chechnya.” El-Masri told them to contact a man named Abu Musab (Slahi’s alias) in Duisburg, but when they met him, he told them it was difficult to get to Chechnya because travelers were generally detained in Georgia, and advised them to go to Afghanistan for training instead.

As I also explained:

Slahi himself has disputed this story, denying an allegation that he “recruited for jihad,” but even if it were true, it proves only that he was a recruiter for a war in Chechnya that was regarded by many Muslims as a legitimate struggle, who sent would-be recruits for training in long-established training camps in Afghanistan, and does not connect him in any meaningful way to 9/11.

Despite this, the US authorities have persistently presented his activities in Germany as more significant than the 9/11 Commission Report suggested, choosing to ignore the official story — that the hijackers attracted bin Laden’s attention once they were in Afghanistan — and claiming that Slahi arranged for one of them “to meet Osama bin Laden, and that this individual then swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and became an important and influential al-Qaeda member.”

The US government’s star witness is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and as Der Spiegel explained in 2008, the recruitment story originally came from him. However, bin al-Shibh was also tortured in US custody, and, in addition, as Der Spiegel noted:

The German investigators familiar with the history leading up to the 9/11 attacks are more cautious in their assessment of Slahi’s position within al-Qaeda. They say that bin al-Shibh’s statements about Slahi recruiting the attackers has “legend status,” and that none of their information supports his assertions.

We will have to wait for Judge Robertson’s opinion to be released to discover whether these were his conclusions too, but it certainly seems possible, just as it also seems probable that the authorities’ attempts to implicate Slahi in all manner of other plots — in particular Ahmed Ressam’s plot to blow up Los Angeles airport in 1999 — are also overblown. Slahi said that he falsely confessed to being part of Ressam’s plot while being tortured in Jordan, and explained that, although he moved to Canada in 1998, hoping to find work as an electrical engineer, he returned to Mauritania in January 2000 because he was kept under constant surveillance by the intelligence services. “Wherever I went I had people right behind me at the market watching my butt,” he said in his tribunal at Guantánamo. “I said what the heck? This is not the life I want to live.”

Overlooked in the assertions that Slahi was a key figure in the 9/11 attacks, rather than, perhaps, a peripheral figure in jihadi circles, is a specific explanation for why the Americans asked the Mauritanian authorities to detain him in November 2001. As I also explained in The Guantánamo Files:

It was not as if he was an unknown quantity. As well as being questioned in Canada, he had been investigated in Germany, had been questioned in Senegal on his way to Mauritania in January 2000, and had also been questioned on two occasions by the Americans themselves: by three FBI agents and “another guy from the Department of Justice” in Mauritania in February 2000, and again in October 2001, when an American agent took part in an interrogation and, according to Slahi, threatened to bring in “black people” to torture him.

If he really had anything to hide, after all this, it seems unlikely that he would have so willingly waited around for the Mauritanian authorities to pick him up at his house on November 20, 2001, when his long ordeal began.

While Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story, stripped of its core allegations, begs questions about what kind of involvement with jihadi groups is necessary for a judge to deny a Guantánamo prisoner’s habeas corpus petition and hurl him back into ongoing detention without charge or trial, a case that followed Slahi’s a few days later demonstrated that being in Afghanistan at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and being in some sort of proximity to Arab forces fighting with the Taliban, was enough for a prisoner to lose their habeas petition.

A Taliban recruit loses his habeas petition

The prisoner in question, Mukhtar al-Warafi, a Yemeni who was 27 years old when he was seized in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, survived a massacre in a mud-walled fortress, Qala-i-Janghi, where hundreds of prisoners — mostly, but not all foot soldiers for the Taliban — had been taken after surrendering to the Northern Alliance. According to a statement read out by a military officer assigned to represent him at a review board at Guantánamo, al-Warafi studied medical procedures in Yemen, “had nothing to do whatsoever with the Taliban,” and went to Afghanistan “to help provide medical assistance to the poor and the public.”

As with Slahi, the opinion of the judge in his case, Royce C. Lamberth, has not yet been released, but it is certain that Judge Lamberth will not have been convinced by al-Warafi’s story, and will not have accepted his statement that, although he admitted traveling to Khawaja Ghar in Afghanistan and carrying an AK-47, he said that he had it for self-defense and that it was given to him by a doctor he worked with at a clinic, nor his statement that he provided first aid at the al-Ansar clinic in Kunduz, for all types of people, but not “to wounded soldiers.”

I am not yet in any position to say whether I think Judge Lamberth made the correct call in Mukhtar al-Warafi’s case, but as with other cases where peripheral figures involved with the Taliban have been consigned to indefinite detention as a result of losing their habeas petitions, I must reiterate that each of these results does nothing to justify the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror.”

Instead, rulings like these demonstrate only that, in defining who can legitimately continue to be held at Guantánamo, the Executive, lawmakers, the Supreme Court and the lower courts have all allowed an unjustifiable situation to prevail in which minor foot soldiers are still being equated with terrorists. This is in spite of the fact that it is patently obvious that the former should, all along, have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, rather than being flown halfway around the world to an experimental interrogation camp where large numbers of them were, in one way or another, subjected to variations of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” to which Mohamedou Ould Slahi was subjected.

To critics of the habeas cases, like the Brookings Institute’s Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney, the seeming discrepancy between the ruling in the cases of Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mukhtar al-Warafi will only reinforce the opinions they voiced in an op-ed for the Washington Post back in February, when they claimed that judges were making wildly different rulings because, when “[t]he Supreme Court asserted jurisdiction over Guantánamo in summer 2008,” the justices “coyly refrained from giving any guidance on the myriad important questions that the cases it authorized would predictably generate.”

Wittes and Chesney want Congress to establish new rules, but, in a letter to the Post, David Cole of the Center for Constitutional Rights demolished this argument, pointing out that that “their complaints are predicated on a naive view of both the judicial process and the legislative process, and their prescription is unlikely to solve the ‘problem’ they identify.”

Cole continued:

No one should be surprised that different judges reach different results on difficult legal issues. That’s why we fight about judicial appointments and why we have an appellate process that facilitates uniform rules.

Nor is legislation likely to reduce the disagreements. First, it is wildly optimistic to think that this Congress could agree on a detention standard. Second, the inquiries involved — such as assessing whether statements are voluntary or coerced, how far the “taint” from a coerced statement extends to other evidence, or whether an individual poses a threat that warrants preventive detention — are not susceptible to bright-line rules, but require careful case-by-case application of standards. It’s a job for judges, not Congress.

Cole is undoubtedly correct. However, what these recent rulings have shown is not that anyone should have a problem with judges reaching different verdicts, but that in ordering the release of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, but not the release of Mukhtar al-Warafi, the problems are not with the judges, who can discern whether there is any evidence or not, but with the fundamental confusion between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This confusion is enshrined in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which provides the basis for detaining those associated with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

If no proof was found that Mohamedou Ould Slahi was associated with al-Qaeda, that should be enough to secure his release. If, on the other hand, Mukhtar al-Warafi was associated with the Taliban, on the very fringes of al-Qaeda activity in Afghanistan during the US-led invasion, I cannot see how that justifies his ongoing detention.

There are, we are told, a number of terrorists in Guantánamo — as many as 35, according to the recommendations made by President Obama’s interagency Task Force, regarding those who should be put forward for trials. On last week’s evidence, however, neither Mohamedou Ould Slahi nor Mukhtar al-Warafi qualify as terrorists, and neither, I believe, should continue to be held.

POSTSCRIPT: The unclassified opinion in the Slahi ruling is now available (PDF), and I will be writing an update soon.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout. You can Digg the original here.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (February 2010).

The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “War on Terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “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.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. 

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the President. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like” …

Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI 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, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated 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.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report (PDF), based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “War on Terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.

In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The Government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the Government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the Government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the US government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the US embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, Uruknet and New Left Project.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK (February 2010). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (July 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (June 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (Fouad al-Rabiah, September 2009), UK Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In The Case Of Shaker Aamer, The Last British Resident In Guantánamo (December 2009), Shaker Aamer: UK Government Drops Opposition To Release Of Torture Evidence (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

On Tuesday, I was delighted to be invited to a TV studio on a boat on the Thames to take part in “Crosstalk” on Russia Today, hosted by Peter Lavelle. The other guest, who, I believe, was not obliged to endure the most miserable wind and rain to reach the equivalent studio in Washington D.C., was Charles “Cully” Stimson, formerly the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration, and now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. A video of the 25-minute show is available below via YouTube:

The title of the program was “Morphing injustice,” which, in plain terms, involved discussing the closure of Guantánamo. Although the intention, clearly, was that sparks would fly, “Cully” and I had a certain amount of mutual respect for each other, and found ourselves largely involved in discussing key elements of the US detention policies in the “War on Terror,” and putting across our respective points of view.

Although sparks flew on occasion, I felt that I had ample opportunity to explain why I have devoted four years to campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo, and demanding that the prisoners be either charged or released – which, essentially, involves an ongoing attempt to highlight the incompetence that led to so few genuine terrorist suspects being captured, and the lamentable introduction of torture as a key component in the interrogation process – and I believe that “Cully” also had the opportunity to present his opinions.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised that he agreed with me that some of the Uighur prisoners should have been brought to live in the US last year, that serious mistakes were made in rounding up prisoners in the first place, and that there are fundamental problems with much of the supposed evidence against the prisoners, which was, for the most part, extracted from the prisoners themselves, or from their fellow prisoners, under circumstances that included torture, coercion or bribery.

I disagree with him about the legal justification for holding prisoners neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, and also doubt the extent to which sensitive intelligence material plays a part in anything more than a handful of cases, but I found the debate worthwhile, and would be happy to discuss these topics with him again, and I’d like to thank RT for giving us the opportunity to have this debate.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The following interview, conducted by email, was published on the website Celebrity Dialogue, run by blogger Zeeshan Kureshi, which describes itself as being “dedicated to bringing forward those who have made a difference in our world.”

Celebrity Dialogue: Andy, we really appreciate the time you took out of your busy schedule for Celebrity Dialogue. First of all, let’s start from your early life. Tell us about your childhood, education etc.

Andy Worthington: I grew up near Hull, in the north of England, and studied English Language and Literature at New College, Oxford University more years ago than I care to remember.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did it all begin: your journey as a journalist and historian?

Andy Worthington: My journey began when I became fascinated by the ancient sacred sites of England in 1996. I then undertook a number of long-distance walks through the countryside of southern England in the summer of 1997 and 1998, visiting these sites, which I then attempted to write up as a book.

Celebrity Dialogue: One of your previous books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, what was it about?

Andy Worthington: The process of writing a book about these long-distance walks was ultimately unsuccessful, but it led to me focusing on one particular part of the story — the Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic annual event that I had visited in my youth — and writing, instead, a social history of Stonehenge, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, in which I explained how, over the course of over 100 years, archaeologists and the State had come up against an extraordinary array of other people with claims on England’s most famous prehistoric monument: Druids, student revellers, free festival goers, anarchists, hippies, new age travellers, green activists, feminists, anti-nuclear protestors, anti-road protestors and land reformers. This then led to a second book, The Battle of the Beanfield, about a critical confrontation between a convoy of travellers and green protestors and the might of Margaret Thatcher’s police in a field in Wiltshire in June 1985, and from there, having conducted research into civil liberties, human rights and the law, I was in a good position to move onto a more challenging topic: Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did you get interested and involved in the Guantánamo detention camp?

Andy Worthington: I was interested from the moment Guantánamo opened, and we saw the dehumanized prisoners, shackled, kneeling in their orange jumpsuits, and subjected to sensory deprivation. I then followed the stories of the released British prisoners, in 2004 and 2005, and their accounts of torture and abuse, and, in the summer of 2005, began trying to find out who was held at Guantánamo. As the US government had not yet been obliged to release the names and nationalities of the prisoners, this involved tracking down news reports relating to released prisoners, reading interviews with released prisoners, and drawing on largely speculative prisoner lists compiled by the Washington Post and the British human rights group Cageprisoners, but it was enough to get me started.

Celebrity Dialogue: Tell us about your book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. What motivated you to write this book?

Andy Worthington: In spring 2006, following the initial research described above, I got lucky. The Pentagon lost a lawsuit brought by the Associated Press and was obliged to release the first ever prisoner list, plus 8,000 pages of documents providing the allegations against the prisoners and transcripts of the tribunals and review boards held at Guantánamo — a largely sham process designed to demonstrate that the prisoners were “enemy combatants,” who could be held without rights. However, these tribunals and review boards at least allowed the prisoners to tell their side of the story, and it was through a four-month analysis of these documents — a process that no one else undertook, to my surprise — that I was able to establish a chronology of the men’s capture, and a context for their capture, whether in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or in other countries, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and held in secret prisons. This, together with other information — including how the majority of the men were seized not by Americans but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments were widespread — enabled me to understand, and to demonstrate, that the overwhelming majority of the men were not terrorists, but were, instead, either completely innocent men or low-level Taliban recruits, mainly from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, who had been persuaded to take the side of the Taliban against other Muslims (in the Northern Alliance) in Afghanistan’s long-running civil war. Moreover, it seems clear that many of these men had not advanced beyond basic training, and others had served only as cooks or guards.

Celebrity Dialogue: You have researched so much about the Guantánamo Bay prison, yet you haven’t been to that place. How does it feel?

Andy Worthington: To be honest, it feels fine. I regret, in some ways, missing out on the Military Commissions — the trials that took place at Guantánamo in 2007-08 — because at those trials journalists could actually see the prisoners and hear the proceedings, whereas otherwise they are given a PR tour, and are told that the authorities are running a lawful, humane facility, even though the men are held without charge or trial and no one is allowed to speak to any of them. The only people who genuinely have insightful access to the prison are the lawyers (and their translators), who actually get to meet the men.

Celebrity Dialogue: If given a chance, would you like to visit the detention center personally?

Andy Worthington: As above, only if someone flew me out there to report on a trial, and I’m hoping that no further trials will take place at Guantánamo, and that those whom the administration wants to try — just 35 of those still held — will be tried in federal courts in the US.

Celebrity Dialogue: After meeting some of the former prisoners up and close, did you find them to be the “beasts” media has portrayed them to be?

Andy Worthington: Of course not. When the men were largely seized randomly, and were, in most cases, sold to their US captors, it’s extremely difficult to find anyone who would qualify as a dangerous person in any sense. Of the men I have met — mostly the British ex-prisoners, but a few others, including former al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj — what has impressed me the most is not just that they were seized by mistake, but that they have, in most cases, survived their ordeal in the most extraordinary manner, through their faith, and through the support network of the prisoners themselves.

Celebrity Dialogue: How did your personal relationship develop with some of the former prisoners you came to know during your quest in this case?

Andy Worthington: The people I have come to know the best are a former prisoner who does not live in the UK, with whom I have been in contact for several years, and two of the British ex-prisoners: Moazzam Begg, who read a draft of my book before publication, and Omar Deghayes, who was still in Guantánamo at that time. Omar and I are currently spending a lot of time together, taking the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” on a UK tour, and it is a real pleasure to be getting to know him better, and to be able to start working together on publicizing the stories of those who are still held at Guantánamo.

Celebrity Dialogue: You are the co-director of the documentary, “Outside the Law: The Stories from Guantánamo.” Tell us how you got involved in this project.

Andy Worthington: I proposed the idea of a documentary to a good friend, Polly Nash, around the time The Guantánamo Files was published. I thought that some of the central arguments of the book would translate well to film, and Polly agreed. We secured some seed funding from the college where she teaches — the London College of Communication — and established that we could tell the story most effectively through interviews with a handful of particularly knowledgeable individuals with whom I was in contact; primarily, the lawyers Tom Wilner in Washington D.C. and Clive Stafford Smith in the UK, and former prisoners Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes. I also took part in the film, and there are also appearances by solicitor Gareth Peirce, former Guantánamo chaplain James Yee, and Shakeel Begg, an Imam in London.

Celebrity Dialogue: Lately, you have been busy touring different locations for the screening of your documentary. Where have you been so far?

Andy Worthington: In early February, Polly and I went to Oslo to take part in the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Film Festival, and since then we have had several screenings in London — at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre, at the National Film Theatre, at LSE, SOAS, UCL and South Bank University. We have also taken it to Oxford, Bradford, Norwich, Canterbury, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and have many more screenings lined up for the coming months, including the London International Documentary Festival. Full details can be found here.

Celebrity Dialogue: What was the response that you received from the general public during the screenings?

Andy Worthington: The response has been very positive. People are very impressed with the humanity of Omar, in particular, whom I regard as the heart of the film, and his combination of inner strength and vulnerability very powerfully brings home to people the human tragedy of Guantánamo. In addition, we have received support for the campaign to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, who is also featured in the film. The last British resident in Guantánamo, Shaker was cleared for release in 2007, but continues to be held not because of anything that he did, but because he has relentlessly stood up for the prisoners’ rights. People are also particularly engaged right now, because of recent revelations, in the UK courts, of British complicity in the torture of Shaker Aamer and the other man featured in the film, Binyam Mohamed.

Celebrity Dialogue: Are there any other places you would like the documentary to be screened?

Andy Worthington: As mentioned above, we have just been accepted as part of the London International Documentary Festival, at the end of April, and we are hoping that other film festivals will take the film. We’re also in discussions with distributors, and are especially looking at ways of getting the film out to American audiences, where its message is particularly important. We’re also interested in screenings being facilitated in as many countries as possible, and are pleased that a few people have recently volunteered to translate the film into other languages. We’re also encouraging people to put on their own screenings, by buying a DVD from the website of the production company, Spectacle.

Celebrity Dialogue: Which television channels have aired it so far?

Andy Worthington: None, although we are in discussions with a few people. Personally, I’d love it to be shown on TV in the Middle East and in Pakistan.

Celebrity Dialogue: In addition to spreading awareness about the plight of those who are suffering at the hands of governments, what else can be done?

Andy Worthington: Spreading awareness is extremely important, but public pressure is also significant. In the UK, this involves sending letters to government ministers, contacting MPs, organizing and attending protests. In addition, sending letters to the prisoners themselves lets them know that the world has not forgotten them, and also makes them less likely to be subjected to abuse in custody.

Celebrity Dialogue: Do you see hope for the Guantánamo prisoners and others like them around the world?

Andy Worthington: I always try to see hope. President Obama has lacked courage in closing Guantánamo — both in comprehending the full extent of the mistakes made by the Bush administration, and in fighting back against his opponents, who are playing an unprincipled political game with questions of national security. However, although there are questions still to be answered about how the US treats terrorist suspects in future, and whether the application of the Geneva Conventions will be unconditionally restored for prisoners seized in wartime, I think it’s fair to say that Guantánamo is, above all, regarded as a failed experiment that needs to be brought to an end. Sadly, however, there is still some way to go before this can become a reality, and I am discouraged, and even dismayed by the refusal of US lawmakers to offer new homes on the US mainland to cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, by the revival of the Military Commission trial system as an alternative to federal court trials, and, in particular, by the decision to continue holding other prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, because they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the evidence against them is untrustworthy. Endorsing Bush-era indefinite detention is a terrible thing for the Obama administration to be proposing.

Celebrity Dialogue: In your opinion, how can governments be stopped from illegal detention and torture?

Andy Worthington: Again, by public pressure. We need to campaign to make sure that people — including politicians — accept that torture is illegal, fundamentally unreliable and morally corrosive, and to roll back the casual way in which it has been accepted over the last decade. And we can, in addition, support lawyers and judges who are committed to outlawing these practices and holding those responsible to account, and, as always, we can continue to educate others be spreading the word. Fundamentally, the way I see it, the senior Bush administration officials and lawyers who created and endorsed horrific policies enacted in the “War on Terror” need to be held accountable in a court of law. Otherwise, US laws and the UN Convention Against Torture mean nothing.

Celebrity Dialogue: After the Guantánamo issue is settled, do you see yourself continuing your fight against similar injustices or do you have other projects in mind?

Andy Worthington: I’ll get back to you on that when the Guantánamo issue is finally settled!

Celebrity Dialogue: Thank you so much for your time, Andy. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts and hope for your success in life.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I’m cross-posting below an article that was published on NPR’s website yesterday, primarily because the sister of Abdul Salam al-Hila (also identified as Abdulsalam al-Hela), a Yemeni colonel who was kidnapped in Egypt in 2002 and rendered to the CIA’s “Dark Prison” before his transfer to Guantánamo, has perfectly captured the human cost of the hysteria that followed the failed Christmas Day plane bombing by the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, by asking, “So a Nigerian man tries to set off a bomb on an American plane, and they punish my brother for this?”

Prior to this failed bomb attempt, the Obama administration had repatriated six cleared Yemenis from Guantánamo, following up on the release of another court-cleared Yemeni in October. These transfers broke the long-standing deadlock regarding the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo, which had afflicted both the Bush administration and, until that point, the Obama administration too.

The transfers were intended to pave the way for future releases, but in response to claims that Abdulmutallab had been recruited for his failed suicide bombing in Yemen, President Obama capitulated to criticism from Republicans, and from members of his own party, and promised to halt any further Yemeni releases for the foreseeable future.

That was nearly three months ago, and Obama has been true to his word, but as al-Hila’s sister and other commentators point out, refusing to release any cleared Yemenis because of the actions of a single man is akin to collective punishment based on guilt by nationality, and is entirely unacceptable.

In Yemen, Anger Toward US Grows Over Detainees
By Kelly McEvers, NPR, April 1, 2010

Of the nearly 200 inmates still being held at the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, nearly half are from Yemen, on the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

A task force set up by the Obama administration had approved many of these Yemeni detainees for release. But after a Yemen-based branch of al-Qaeda took responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt, those releases were put on hold.

Abdul Salam al-Hila is one of the detainees affected. He was captured in Egypt in 2002. His family says he was working for the Yemeni government to help resettle jihadis who had fought in Afghanistan and ended up in Yemen.

In 2004, the Bush administration claimed that Hila was a member of al-Qaeda, and he was transferred to Guantánamo. Since 2001, the US has used the facility to detain suspected terrorists from other countries.

Hila’s family lives in a tall and narrow house in the Yemeni capital, San’a. They say that since President Obama took office and pledged to close Guantánamo, they had some hope they might at least see Hila again, even if he had to face charges in a Yemeni court.

That hope disappeared when they heard that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to ignite a bomb on a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight late last year, after spending time in Yemen.

“So a Nigerian man tries to set off a bomb on an American plane, and they punish my brother for this?” says Hila’s sister, who did want to be identified. She says the family has endured enough trouble already. Last year, Hila’s two young sons died when a grenade they were playing with exploded.

“His mother died, his father died, his two sons died, and now his uncle has died,” Hila’s sister says. “Do they want us to all be dead before they bring him back home again?”

Exasperation Turning Into Anger

Khaled al-Anisi heads the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, a legal organization in Yemen that is pressing for the Yemeni detainees’ release. He says their families’ exasperation is turning into anger.

“Obama [gave] the people hope. And they [lived] one year with this hope,” Anisi says. “Now, the people start to think this is not [a] Bush problem or [a] Bush administration mistake, it is the mistake [of] all American people,” Anisi says.

As a result, he says, Yemenis have become increasingly angry at all Americans. “They said … all of them [are] the same. Democrat people or Republican people — all of them are [the] enemy,” he says.

Anisi and many others say that the danger with this anti-American sentiment is it makes it easier for al-Qaeda to recruit new members.

US officials say they are keenly aware of the dangers of continuing to hold so many Yemenis at Guantánamo. But they say they’re concerned that if released, these Yemenis will find their way to the local militant group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That’s what happened to two Saudis who were released from Guantánamo in 2007. [Note: McEvers neglects to mention that the Saudis were released by President Bush, and not President Obama, and that they were released as part of a political deal with the Saudi government, undertaken in spite of a recommendation by the intelligence services that the two men in question still posed a threat to the US].

Of the two dozen Yemenis who have been released so far, most lead normal lives. Two or three are missing. Another one was killed in a US-assisted airstrike against alleged al-Qaeda hideouts in December.

Lack Of Will To Pursue Solution

Letta Tayler, who researches Yemen for New York-based Human Rights Watch, says the US and the Yemeni governments should work together to find a solution for the remaining detainees.

“And that solution should be either Yemen repatriating the detainees to Yemen or finding a third country that can host them, and if necessary, either solution would involve placing restrictions on detainees’ movements to protect national security,” she says.

Tayler says the problem is that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh lacks the will to pursue such a solution.

“If President Saleh sees the repatriation of Yemenis as a political asset at any given moment, he will advocate for that. If he does not see it as politically expedient at any given moment, he won’t. And a lot of the time, he does not see it as politically expedient, he sees it as a headache,” Tayler says.

Life Hard For Released Detainees

Last year, Yemen asked the US for tens of millions of dollars to fund a rehabilitation program for Yemenis returning from Guantánamo. That plan never materialized.

But the US has increased military aid to Yemen to help fight al-Qaeda. US military and intelligence agencies already provide equipment and information for Yemeni airstrikes against alleged al-Qaeda targets.

Saleh al-Zuba spent six years at Guantánamo and was released back to Yemen in late 2006. He spent a few more months in Yemeni custody, then was freed when a relative vouched for him.

Now, Zuba spends most days at home, watching TV. He says he tried to open a honey store, but the owner wouldn’t rent to him because he heard Zuba had been in Guantánamo. Once a month, Zuba has to check in with local security officers.

“I don’t need a rehabilitation program,” Zuba says. “Right now, I just need a job.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The following article, circulated as an email by Guantánamo lawyer David Remes this morning, apparently caught a number of people off-guard, and David has subsequently found himself taken to task for circulating it. In contrast, I thought it was a perfect April Fools’ Day joke, and neatly encapsulated, as satire should, every failure of the Obama administration to repudiate the crimes committed by the Bush administration in the “War on Terror,” and to hold accountable those who authorized and implemented the use of torture. As a result, I’m happy to reproduce it below.

Victory at last!
A satirical article by David Remes

President Obama announced early this morning that the United States has entered into a series of bilateral accords that will permit the repatriation or resettlement of almost all remaining Guantánamo detainees within the next 60 days. Only detainees slated for prosecution in federal civilian court will continue to be held.

The accords will also cover detainees held by the United States, or by other countries by agreement with the United States. “We will no longer countenance proxy detentions,” a senior Administration official said in an interview.

Mr. Obama stated: “Detention without trial cannot be squared with the core principles of justice on which this nation was founded. It’s time to end this shameful policy once and for all.” The president stated that he would work with Congress to repeal the Military Commissions Act of 2009, passed last year by Congress, and close what he called “loopholes” in anti-torture laws.

In a related development, Attorney General Eric H. Holder also announced early this morning that he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the roles senior Bush Administration officials may have played in authorizing or approving interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment under international law.

Mr. Holder stated: “We will not rest until every Bush Administration official implicated in such crimes is held fully accountable for their crimes. If the special prosecutor determines that any Bush Administration official played any role in these crimes, that official will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and we will seek the maximum penalty allowed by law.”

Human rights groups hailed the announcements. In a joint statement, they said: “We supported President Obama because he pledged to end the horrific policies of his predecessor. He has now made good on his promises.”

Former senior Bush Administration officials declined to comment, but Elizabeth Cheney, whose father is Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, stated, “President Obama should go back to Kenya, and the rest should go straight to hell.”

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

After eight years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, five former Guantanamo prisoners are beginning new lives this week — two in Switzerland and three in Georgia. Their stories reveal, yet again, how Republican lawmakers and media pundits in the US, who have, in recent months, renewed their fear-filled attacks on those still held, are guilty of hyperbolic and unprincipled outbursts, and, in addition, how these critics’ attacks are damaging to the prospects of cleared men, seized by mistake, finding new homes in countries that, unlike the US, are prepared to offer them a chance to rebuild their shattered lives on a humanitarian basis.

All five men were cleared for release from Guantánamo on two or three separate occasions — through Bush-era military review boards, through the deliberations of an interagency Task Force established by President Obama, and, in some cases, through successfully having their habeas corpus petitions granted by a US court. However, difficulties arose when it came to freeing them because they feared torture or other ill-treatment if returned to their home countries, and the US government (first under George W. Bush, and now under Barack Obama) recognized its obligations, under international treaties, not to repatriate them, but to find other countries prepared to take them instead.

The fact that Georgia — the former Soviet satellite in the Caucasus — is the new home of three of these men, and not the US state, demonstrates another obstacle to the men’s release. Had President Obama acted decisively last April, two Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake in December 2001) would have been freed in the US, and others would undoubtedly have followed. However, when the President bowed to pressure from Republican critics, and turned down a plan, put forward by White House Counsel Greg Craig, and backed by defense secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which involved bringing the two men to live in the US, the job of Obama’s Special Envoy, Daniel Fried, who was charged with finding new homes for dozens of cleared prisoners from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, was made considerably more difficult.

America’s allies had to overcome their obvious impulse — refusing to help unless the US also acknowledged its own mistakes by giving new homes to cleared prisoners — and it is a tribute to the governments of Switzerland and Georgia that they felt able to place humanitarian concerns above political pragmatism by accepting the men. Switzerland had already accepted an Uzbek ex-prisoner in January this year, and Georgia now joins Switzerland in a distinguished club that also includes Albania, Belgium, Bermuda, France, Hungary, Ireland, Palau, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain. These countries have all shown up the US (and other European countries, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark), who have turned their backs on the dozens of cleared prisoners who will languish in Guantánamo until new homes can be found for them.

The Uighur brothers released in Switzerland

The two men given new homes in the Swiss canton of Jura are brothers, Arkin Mahmud, 45, and Bahtiyar Mahnut, 34, Two of the 22 Uighurs originally held at Guantánamo (five of whom were released by George W. Bush in Albania in 2006), the men had been living in a small, rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or because they nurtured futile hopes of finding some way to rise up against the Chinese government. They were sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers when their temporary home was destroyed in a US bombing raid and they had crossed the border into Pakistan.

The US government understood almost immediately that they had been seized by mistake, but that did not prevent senior officials from allowing Chinese interrogators to visit them at Guantánamo, and, it seems, securing a guarantee in UN negotiations that China would not oppose the invasion of Iraq by designating a Uighur separatist group as a global terrorist organization.

Attempts to conveniently tie the Guantanamo Uighurs to this group came unstuck in June 2008, when a US court derided the government’s supposed evidence as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it was not until October 2008 that the government finally abandoned all claims that the men were “enemy combatants.” That month, their habeas corpus petition finally reached Judge Ricardo Urbina, in the District Court in Washington D.C., who ordered their release into the United States, pointing out that holding innocent men was unconstitutional.

The Bush administration appealed, and the appeal was approved in February 2009 by the notoriously right-wing Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who ruled (with the blessing, sadly, of President Obama’s Justice Department), that matters of immigration were to be decided by the Executive and not the courts, thereby gutting the men’s habeas victory of any practical meaning.

After Greg Craig’s honorable plan to rehouse two of the men in the US was scrapped, Daniel Fried was obliged to undertake numerous missions to persuade other countries to offer them new homes. Fried eventually persuaded Bermuda and the Pacific island of Palau to take ten of the men, but Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut in particular remained a problem. Palau had refused to offer a new home to Mahmud, who had developed mental health problems in Guantanamo, and, in solidarity, his brother, who had been offered a new home, turned down the offer, preferring to stay with his brother in Guantánamo instead.

An appeal to the government by the Washington Post, asking that the men be allowed into the US, was subsequently ignored, but it seemed that Obama was on a collision course with the Supreme Court, which accepted the men’s case last October, until Switzerland obligingly offered the men a new home in January this year.

As Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut begin their new lives in Switzerland, five Uighurs remain in Guantánamo, but their fate is unknown. The Supreme Court refused to proceed with their case at the start of this month (although they did vacate the terrible Court of Appeals ruling), essentially because the five remaining men had also been offered new homes in Palau, but had turned them down, and it remains to be seen if Palau will renew its offer, if another country will rescue them from their seemingly endless ordeal, or if the lower courts will, once more, attempt to order their release into the United States.

A Libyan refugee released in Georgia

Announcing the release of the other three men from Guantánamo, the Justice Department refused to reveal their identities, but Candace Gorman, the indefatigable attorney representing Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan, revealed that one of the three is her client, and it appears that the second man is also Libyan, and that the third is from an unidentified country in the Middle East (perhaps Libya, again, or Syria or Tunisia).

The release of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi brings to an end another of Guantánamo’s many particularly bleak stories. A refugee from Libya, al-Ghizzawi had settled in Afghanistan in the 1990s, where he married an Afghan woman and had a child. Together, he and his wife ran a small bakery in Jalalabad, but after the US-led invasion, hearing that Arabs were being targeted, he decided to seek refuge with his in-laws in his wife’s home village. There, however, he was seized by bounty hunters and sold to US forces.

In Guantánamo, al-Ghizzawi suffered horribly. Afflicted with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he nevertheless received little or no treatment, in common with the majority of those with medical problems, whose treatment was dependent on cooperation with their interrogators. In practical terms, what this meant for innocent men like al-Ghizzawi was that they would not be treated unless they provided false confessions to their interrogators, which could be used to justify their own detention, or the detention of others identified in these false confessions.

Al-Ghizzawi’s case is also notorious in terms of the warped review processes masquerading as justice at Guantánamo, as was revealed in 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who had been involved in compiling the information used as evidence in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo in 2004-05. In an affidavit filed in a case submitted to the Supreme Court, Lt. Col. Abraham explained how the tribunal system, designed to review the prisoners’ cases to ascertain whether they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely, was a sham, and that the information used consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.”

Lt. Col. Abraham also explained how he had taken part in one of the tribunals, and, with his fellow officers, had concluded that the government had failed to establish that the prisoner before them had any connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda or the Taliban for the very reasons described above. That prisoner was Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, and, as Lt. Col. Abraham added, the authorities refused to accept the tribunal’s decision, dismissing all three officers, and conducting a second tribunal that reached the conclusion the government wanted; namely, that al-Ghizzawi was an “enemy combatant,” and that he could continue to be held indefinitely. This was not the only “do-over” tribunal, but the fact that it happened at all is a disgrace, and the fact that al-Ghizzawi continued to be held for another six years after Lt. Col. Abraham exposed the shortcomings in the government’s so-called evidence is a disturbingly clear example of the complete disregard for any notions of justice or decency in the running of Guantánamo.

It was not until June last year that al-Ghizzawi was finally cleared for release by the interagency Task Force established by President Obama to review all the Guantánamo cases, and even then the Justice Department behaved appallingly, neglecting to inform Candace Gorman of the decision and then gagging her when she tried to inform al-Ghizzawi’s family, and his wife, who, in despair after years of waiting, had decided to seek a divorce.

Unprincipled obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo

I have no idea if the identities of the other two men released in Georgia will be made available, but it is clear that they too have been deprived of their freedom for up to eight years not as a result of any coherent policy, but as a direct result of the Bush administration’s arrogance and incompetence in establishing Guantánamo as a prison outside the law filled largely with men who were seized and sold to US forces by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and who had no connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other group involved in international terrorism.

With 183 prisoners still at Guantánamo, and 101 of these cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, in some cases, by the US courts, the shrill rhetoric of those who still insist that the prison is full of terrorists should have been silenced, but as the cynical fearmongering of recent months has shown all too clearly, when it comes to Guantánamo, Republican lawmakers are more than happy to stir up unsubstantiated hysteria about the prison, playing the fear card as the mid-term elections approach, and encouraging Democrats to do the same.

I have my doubts that the other 82 men qualify as terrorists, but presume that the 35 proposed for trials (either in federal courts or in Military Commissions) will one day have their cases considered by a judge and jury, and that the other 47 men, who the Task Force recommended be held indefinitely without charge or trial, will be able to challenge this deeply distressing advice in a US court, before judges reviewing their habeas corpus petitions. As with 34 of the 46 cases so far decided, the judges will, no doubt, conclude that, in many of these cases, the government’s assertions that they are too dangerous to release, despite a lack of usable evidence, will be revealed as distortions based on the kind of false confessions that Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi resisted making in exchange for medical treatment.

For now, however, while readers should bear in mind that only between 5 and 10 percent of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo will, in the end, be judged to have had any connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the release of these five prisoners to Switzerland and Georgia continues to demonstrate that innocent men are still held at Guantánamo, and that the fearmongering in the US is both unjustifiable and potentially damaging to these men’s prospects of being rehoused elsewhere.

Given these obstacles — and lawmakers’ refusal to accept any cleared prisoners into the US — Daniel Fried is to be congratulated for successfully concluding the complex negotiations leading to the release of these men, and, sometimes single-handedly, it seems, working towards the closure of Guantánamo, which remains a stain on America’s reputation, and a dark symbol of the Bush administration policies that Obama has found himself unwilling, or unable to thoroughly repudiate.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout. Digg the original here.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 52 prisoners released from February 2009 to February 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain.