Archive for October, 2010

Last Wednesday, on Day Four of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week — the largest gathering of anti-torture experts and activists since the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” began over nine years ago — one of the obstacles to attracting support for a mass movement against the crimes and human rights abuses of the Bush years (and the continuing crimes and abuses of the Obama administration) was inadvertently revealed during “Defying Torture — The Art of Dissent,” a fascinating event at UC Berkeley Art Museum Theater, featuring the academic and art historian Peter Selz, and artists Clinton Fein and Richard Kamler.

Selz, the 90-year old Professor Emeritus of Art History at UC Berkeley and the founding director of the Art Museum, ran through artists’ scrutiny of torture, from Goya to contemporary artists like Clinton Fein and Fernando Botero, the internationally renowned Columbian artist who responded to the images of torture in Abu Ghraib, first revealed to the world in April 2004, with a powerful series of over 180 paintings and drawings, which were first exhibited in Europe, and were then shown in two powerful exhibitions in New York (in October and November 2006) and at UC Berkeley’s Doe Library from January to March 2007 (organized by the Center for Latin American Studies).

Two small paintings and a small drawing from this series were exhibited by the entrance to the theater for the event on October 13, but although Peter Selz pointed out that Botero donated 26 paintings and 30 drawings from the collection to UC Berkeley’s Art Museum’s permanent collection in September 2009 (and that the museum director who had been opposed to the work had lost his job), the sad truth is that, although the series was displayed at the museum from September 2009 to February this year, it should be on permanent and prominent display, because the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program remain unpunished, and one, John Yoo, who wrote the notorious “torture memos” that purported to redefine torture, creating a climate of impunity that led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, is working as a law professor at Boalt Hall School of Law, just a stone’s throw from the Art Museum.

Fernando Botero explained in 2005 that his Abu Ghraib series was “born from the anger provoked by this horror.” and at the event on October 13, Peter Selz read out the following statement, which Botero had made in support of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week from his studio in Paris (where he works when not in New York):

Torture is often “justified” (“a means to gather information that can be used to save lives or protect society”) and “excused” (“the inevitable excesses that soldiers commit when confronted with the atrocities of war”) by some people. However, both are false. On no grounds can torture be justified or ever excused. Torture represents an insult to the body and soul of the human being, and goes against any definition of civilized conduct. I have denounced torture in my paintings because I believe that art can represent a permanent accusation, the only means we, as artists, have at our disposal to keep alive an idea that should never burn out: that we must never accept the unacceptable, and that any group, people or nation, if it loses its moral compass, can descend into violence and succumb to the horrors of barbarism.

That notion of art’s ability to represent “a permanent accusation” — and questions of censorship, which, to my mind, exist with reference to Botero’s work so long as John Yoo is still employed and Botero’s entire Abu Ghraib series is not on permanent, accusatory display — were also addressed by Clinton Fein and Richard Kamler.

An artist and educator, Kamler’s 35-year career has focused on issues relating to detention, power and responsibility, punishment and blame, through a variety of challenging installations, beginning with “Out of Holocaust” (1976), in which he reconstructed a full-size section of a barrack from a Nazi death camp, using cracked mirrors on the back wall to reflect broken images of the viewers back at themselves, and asking them to consider questions of responsibility. In the 1980s, his work prompted him to become a prison abolitionist, and since then he has sought to challenge the logic of punishment through a number of deeply challenging installations, including “Table of Voices,” described as “An installation on Alcatraz Island for four months that brought together the real voices of parents of murdered children and perpetrators in an effort to create a common ground around The Table.” What was particularly interesting, for those of us concerned with the question of US torture since 9/11, was how, in his work, he consistently works to create opportunities for those on both sides of the issues, as in “Table of Voices,” to engage in dialogue.

The work of Clinton Fein, born in South Africa, directly addressed the Bush administration’s torture program in his series, “Torture,” which was first displayed in San Francisco in January 2007, just before Botero’s exhibition was shown in Berkeley. Also working in response to the Abu Ghraib scandal, Fein created a series of large, high-resolution reenactments of the Abu Ghraib photos. As he told the audience during “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, the genitals of the naked and abused prisoners were pixellated in the original photos, creating the unnerving and deeply deceitful impression that the torture depicted is acceptable, and the only problem is the nudity. 

A rather fuller explanation is available on his website:

Fein’s deliberate rejection of blurring, obscuring or even shading the blatant nudity in his images is a response to the blurring of genitals that characterized the images released to the public, and is consistent with Fein’s history of challenging the notions of decency, which included a Supreme Court victory over United States Attorney General, Janet Reno. “If one was to question which was obscene — the display of someone’s ass cheeks or graphic displays of torture — I don’t think there ought to be any confusion,” said Fein. “Obfuscation is at the heart of what is happening with the torture debate.”

Clinton Fein also showed the Berkeley audience images of two of his works that were never exhibited, because they were destroyed by the printers that he had entrusted to reproduce them — “Who Would Jesus Torture?” (see here) and “Like Apple Fucking Pie” (left, click to enlarge), a recreation of the US flag, with the stars made out of tiny silhouettes of the infamous hooded figure of Abu Ghraib, and the stripes composed of text from the Taguba Report, a military report into the Abu Ghraib scandal, conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who found that, “between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.”

Ironically, even though Taguba was not empowered to look up the chain of command to ascertain who had authorized these abuses, he was ordered to retire in January 2006, and believes that he was forced out by Pentagon officials in retaliation for his report. In June 2008, he responded by accusing the Bush administration of war crimes in the preface to a report on Abu Ghraib by Physicians for Human Rights, stating, “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

From the Art Museum, it was a short hop to the University Lutheran Church on College Avenue for a “Round Table — Writers on Torture,” with myself (as author of The Guantánamo Files), Justine Sharrock, author of Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things (also see here and here), Rita Maran, the indomitable 81-year old UC Berkeley lecturer, human rights activist and author of Torture: The Rise of Ideology in the French Algerian War, and Barry Eisler, the former CIA operative and thriller writer, whose latest novel, Inside Out, breaks new ground in dealing with the Bush administration’s torture program — “extraordinary rendition,” “ghost prisoners” and secret prisons — through the medium of fiction.

I’d been looking forward to meeting Barry for some time, ever since he contacted me out of the blue, and told me he loved my work, had been following it closely, and had used it — and the work of other independent journalists — for Inside Out. As he explains on his website:

Inside Out is dedicated to the bloggers — the independent sleuths who are after the truth, not a pat on the head from the White House; who have a passion for change, not “a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are;” who serve the people, not the powerful.

Barry had sent me an advance copy of Inside Out, which I devoured eagerly, and I was delighted to provide an endorsement, which appears on the dust jacket. This was a pattern that was followed by Justine, who also asked me for an endorsement of her excellent book telling the stories of soldiers who signed up to serve their country, but ended up involved in the torture program — or, in Joe Darby’s case, blowing the whistle on it in Abu Ghraib.

Our discussions in the “Round Table” involved each of us explaining the context of our work, how and why we write about torture, and what we hope to achieve through it, and the session was moderated, in a suitably knowledgeable manner, by Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Short excerpts from the event are available below, via YouTube, and I hope that the full discussion will be available soon, as it was a fascinating fusion of different perspectives on the torture problem that has infected American society like a virus over the last nine years.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week (the largest gathering of anti-torture experts and activists since the Bush administration began its “War on Terror” over nine years ago), I was delighted to join Justine Sharrock, journalist and author of Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things, at Revolution Books on Sunday evening for the opening event. I discussed the event in an article a few days ago, when I wrote:

Justine and I ran through various aspects of the “War on Terror” — in particular, its effects on those subjected to arbitrary detention and torture in the cages of Guantánamo and elsewhere, and, through Justine’s account, its effect on the US soldiers required to implement this torture and cruelty by their political masters, who, as the Abu Ghraib scandal showed, then tried to pretend that it was the work of “a few bad apples.”

It was not, of course. The dehumanization and torture of the men and boys detained in the “War on Terror” — in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantánamo and in secret prisons — was directed from the highest levels of the Bush administration — by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others — and in refusing to thoroughly address and repudiate these actions, and to hold accountable those who authorized America’s slide into barbarity, President Obama continues to send out a message that it is OK for the nation’s most senior officials to break the law so long as they leave the White House after two terms. He has also, sad to say, perpetuated many of the Bush administration’s crimes, and added some of his own, and, as part of the bigger picture, has presided over what appears to be nothing less than a battle for the soul of America, between those who embrace endless war, barbarity and torture, and those who do not.

I’m happy to report that videos of the talks that Justine and I delivered before a lively and extensive Q&A session are now available, and are posted below via YouTube:

Note: See here for a report on Days Two and Three of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This is the seventh part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six.

This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in Pakistan between February and September 2002, which, as I explained in Parts Five and Six (which told the stories of another 27 men seized in Pakistan), was part of a process of capturing prisoners that was, if anything, even more alarmingly random, opportunistic, or reliant on dubious intelligence than the well-chronicled seizure of Arabs in Afghanistan or crossing the border into Pakistan that I chronicled in Parts One to Four of this series.

Of the hundred or so prisoners seized in Pakistan — mostly in house raids, but also in random raids on mosques, on buses and in the street — all but these 40 have been released. The cases of those released reveal, in general, how US intelligence was often horrendously inaccurate, and how opportunism often played a part in the actions of the Pakistani authorities, who were being rewarded financially. As President Musharraf admitted in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Moreover, of the 13 men whose stories are described in this chapter, many appear to be victims of the same failures of intelligence or opportunism as those already released. It is unknown what conclusions President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force reached about these men, but only two were cleared for release under the Bush administration. One of these men subsequently lost his habeas corpus petition, and two others have also lost their habeas petitions, and it is a fair presumption that many of these men were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force.

ISN 695 Abu Bakr, Omar (Omar Mohammed Khalifh) (Libya)
Khalifh, a Libyan amputee, lost his habeas corpus petition in April this year, despite doubts about where he was captured, and what he had been doing in Afghanistan, as well as disturbing revelations about his treatment in Guantánamo. According to the US authorities, he had worked for a trucking company owned by Osama bin Laden in Sudan, had worked as an explosives trainer at various training camps in Afghanistan from 1996-98, had been “identified” as a trainer and the leader of a Libyan training camp near Kabul, visited by bin Laden, where he was “identified as someone whom others would approach to receive explosives training if they wanted to commit a terrorist attack,” and had also been “identified” as “a military leader in charge of many Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other Gulf States while on the front line” in 2001, who “would meet with other Taliban leaders to plan military operations.” The US authorities also allege that he was seized in the house raids in Karachi on February 7, 2002, which I described in Part Five of this series, but his lawyer, Edmund Burke, explained that he had worked for the Taliban as a mine cleaner until 1998, when his right leg was severely damaged by a land mine, and had then spent years moving from hospital to hospital in Afghanistan to receive treatment for his leg, which was eventually amputated. Burke added that he moved to Pakistan in 2001, and was living in a school for boys when it was raided by Pakistani police. The most disturbing revelations about Khalifh came from former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who told me that that Khalifh’s status had been exaggerated by the authorities in Guantánamo. “They call him ‘The General,’” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’” Despite these contradictory claims, Judge James Robertson denied his habeas petition, finding the government’s version of events generally convincing (although it was not reassuring that, in his unclassified opinion, he muddied the waters still further by incorrectly stating that Khalifh was seized in Jalalabad in March 2002).

ISN 708 Al Bakush, Ismael (Libya)
Apparently a former mujahid in the dying days of Afghanistan’s Communist regime, al-Bakush reportedly stated that he returned to Afghanistan “to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance,” and the US authorities allege that he “and his group would fight sporadically whenever there was a fight between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.” However, al-Bakush also provided a detailed explanation for doing so, stating that “the reason he decided to help fight with the Taliban was because he lived in Afghanistan both prior to Taliban control and after Taliban control. Prior to Taliban control there were robberies, thefts, and fights between groups. After the Taliban took over the area became safe.” Beyond these claims, there was nothing to indicate that he took up arms against the United States, or had any desire to do so. He stated that he “had never met bin Laden,” said that “at no time did he conduct any operations against the American Forces,” and, moreover, “said he had no feelings towards the United States and considered the United States like any other country.” “His main concern,” he explained, “is Libya and the overthrow of [Colonel] Gaddafi.” Much of the evidence against Bakush consisted of allegations about his involvement with Libyan groups opposed to the Gaddafi regime, and the question of Bakush’s continued detention, therefore, seems, as with other Libyans held in Guantánamo, to hinge on whether it is acceptable to hold dissidents opposed to a regime that, until the “War on Terror” began, was regarded as a terrorist dictatorship by the very government that has been holding Bakush for the last eight and a half years.

ISN 713 Al Zahrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
Apparently seized in a house raid in Lahore (around the same time as the house raids in Faisalabad, described in Part Six), al-Zahrani (also identified as Mohammed Muti Zahran) is one of several amputees held at Guantánamo, having apparently lost a leg in Afghanistan. According to the US authorities, he “admitted to being proud that he was a low-level Taliban fighter,” and “stated he was proud that he came to Afghanistan to be a Mujahedin [sic], and stated that if he had not lost his leg, he still would have fought.” These admissions — plus a detailed list of statements, attributed to al-Zahrani, relating to his training at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before the 9/11 attacks) and at an Algerian guest house in Afghanistan — suggest that he was indeed a foot soldier, and that he had undertaken advanced military training, but, as in other cases, they may not be reliable. Noticeably, however, the US authorities have also come up with other allegations indicating that he was a member of al-Qaeda. These include allegations that he was friends with one of the 9/11 hijackers, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, that he “met [Ayman] al-Zawahiri [al-Qaeda’s second-in-command] three or four times and they had a very good relationship,” that he “met with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [the future leader of “al-Qaeda in Iraq”] several times about logistics and personnel issues for the fight against the Northern Alliance,” and that he was involved in planning the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was murdered on September 9, 2001. Again, it is impossible to know how much truth there is to these allegations. They may be as they appear, or they may have been produced through the dubious interrogations of other prisoners connected with al-Qaeda. What is certain is that there are holes in al-Zahrani’s jihadist CV: in another statement attributed to him, for example, he “stated that he doubted the viewpoints of al-Qaeda because some of their operations contradict Islamic principles and go against Islamic laws.”

ISN 717 Bin Hadiddi, Abdulhadi (Hedi Hammamy) (Tunisia)
Like many Tunisians, Hammamy, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in search of a new life. After arriving in 1987, he settled in Bologna where he worked as a hotel porter, and later in a restaurant. In 2000, he moved to Pakistan, where he married the daughter of another Tunisian he met while applying for asylum, and had a daughter, Marwa. He then worked alongside his father-in-law, but one evening, in April 2002, as he went with a Pakistani friend to look at a house to rent, he was seized by the Pakistani police, presumably for the lucrative bounty payments available for vulnerable Arabs in Pakistan. Despite being cleared for release, his habeas corpus petition reached the US District Court in April 2009, when Judge Richard Leon denied his petition, choosing to believe an allegation submitted by the Italian authorities — that he was “a member of an Italy-based terrorist cell that provided support to various Islamic terrorist groups” — as the basis for presuming that he had therefore arrived in Pakistan in connection with terrorism, even though the charges leveled against him in Italy — of “supporting terrorism, in part, by furnishing false documents and currency” — had not been tested in a court of law. Judge Leon was partly persuaded to regard the unsubstantiated Italian allegations as trustworthy, because he concluded that they tied in with another claim put forward by the government, regarding Hammamy’s identity papers, which were apparently “found after the Battle of Tora Bora in the al-Qaeda cave complex.” As with the Italian allegation, which he has persistently refuted, Hammamy has always denied being in Tora Bora, and has claimed that his papers were in fact stolen from him, and that the government has evidence that this is the case. The result of this ruling was that, for the first time, a prisoner cleared under President Bush had his detention justified by a judge, and as one of his lawyers, Cori Crider of Reprieve, explained, “While this doesn’t change the military’s opinion that Hedi Hammamy is transferable, it certainly isn’t going to help him in the political context. Being found subject to military detention is not remotely the same thing as a criminal conviction, but that won’t stop right-wing elements in potential resettlement states from conflating the two issues.”

ISN 722 Diyab, Jihad (Syria)
The story of Jihad Diyab (or Deyab) is spotted with unsubstantiated allegations. A former driver for the Syrian Air Force, he has stated that he left Syria with his family in May 2000 and traveled to Kabul, via Iran and Pakistan, “to start a business selling honey,” and has maintained this story throughout his imprisonment. When he arrived at Bagram in June 2002, the following comments were made by the interrogators who first spoke to him (these were reproduced by Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of one of the interrogators in the US prisons in Afghanistan, in his book The Interrogators, in which he also noted that Diyab and the other prisoners who arrived with him had already been interrogated in Pakistani prisons with the assistance of the CIA): “31 years old; Lebanese; speaks Arabic well, English. Was in the Syrian Air Force. Severe kidney problems. Think he is lying. Says he was a honey trader. Captured in Lahore. Doctor says good to go. Watch him.” With seven and a half years to come up with another story, the US authorities have certainly managed to do that, but it is impossible to know how accurate the allegations are, and very little information has come from Diyab himself, who, as the authorities noted under the sub-heading “Intent,” “would not talk; he spent the entire interrogation looking at the floor.” The allegations accrued from the interrogations of other prisoners include a claim that he was “identified as having fled to Afghanistan where he joined al-Qaeda’s military training camps,” a claim that he “allowed a senior al-Qaeda operative to stay in his house,” and other allegations made by two unidentified “senior al-Qaeda operatives”: one claimed to have met Diyab in the 1990s, when he noted that he was an expert in passport and document forgery, and added that he had met him again in Kabul in 2000 or 2001, and in Lahore in 2002, and another claimed that he had “showed up in Afghanistan in 2000 expecting to be able to attend Khaldan training camp because he had known another individual from their time together in Syria.” This source apparently “disapproved” of him, because he “expected to be accepted into the camps without prior vetting.”

ISN 757 Abdul Aziz, Ahmed Ould (Mauritania)
A Mauritanian seized in a house raid on June 25, 2002, Abdul Aziz is accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, even though the US government has failed to come up with a single piece of evidence to support the claim. Evidently an educated and articulate man (his first lawyers at Guantánamo noted hat he studied literature and philosophy, and speaks French and English, in addition to Arabic), Abdul Aziz, according to the government’s account, traveled to Afghanistan in September 1999 to support the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and undertook training in 2000. At the time of his capture, however, he was working as an Arabic language teacher at an institute in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, and certainly no evidence that he was ever involved in any activities against the United States. Instead, he is quoted in the government’s documents as saying that he “believed his direct supervisor was more affiliated with the Taliban than with al-Qaeda,” that he “visited [the] supervisor’s house but never discussed things such as al-Qaeda,” and that, although “a man he worked for told him that al-Qaeda needed a good administrator and approached him on al-Qaeda’s behalf,” he turned down the offer. Set against this are an array of unsubstantiated al-Qaeda allegations, which are in marked contrast to Abdul Aziz’s own account, in which he admitted that he “spoke with Osama bin Laden about the Institute … for approximately five minutes in October 2000.” The claim that he was a member of al-Qaeda came from an unidentified “source,” who also claimed that he had sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden. It was also claimed that he had been recruited to join al-Qaeda by “a personal adviser of Osama bin Laden, who leads the Mauritanian al-Qaeda cell,” and had attended the wedding of one of bin Laden’s sons in 1999 or 2000.

ISN 894 Abdul Rahman, Mohammed (Lotfi Bin Ali) (Tunisia)
Abdul Rahman (also identified as Lotfi bin Ali), who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review under the Bush administration, had been living in Italy before traveling to Pakistan, and was essentially an economic migrant. In Guantánamo, he explained that he went to Pakistan for medical treatment and to find a wife. “I have told my story five hundred times,” he said. “I went to Pakistan for drugs. I was sick and I wanted to heal myself, so I went to Pakistan.” He also traveled, he said, “to get married and relax and to get out of what I was in.” Although the US authorities compiled an array of allegations that purported to undermine his story, including claims that he was involved in various North African terrorist groups, and a claim by “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” that he attended the Khaldan training camp in 1998 or 1999, he refuted all the allegations, and insisted that, although he had traveled to Afghanistan from Pakistan, he had only done so because the Pakistani government had started a campaign against Arabs. In his last review before he was cleared for release, he also retracted a confession, “admitted some time ago,” that he associated with “various amounts” of terrorists while in Jalalabad, saying, “I do not pose a threat. I am against terrorism … I am against the killing of innocent people … I live a normal life. I do not like problems. That’s it.” Like the majority of Tunisians in Guantánamo, bin Ali received a prison sentence in Tunisia in absentia (on dubious charges of belonging to a terrorist organization), with the result that, in 2007, when the US authorities were planning to repatriate him against his will, Judge Gladys Kessler of the US District Court in Washington D.C. intervened to prevent his repatriation. Judge Kessler was particularly concerned because two Tunisians repatriated in June 2007 — Abdullah bin Omar and Lotfi Lagha — received prison sentences on their return, after trials denounced by observers as show trials, and in her ruling, in October 2007, Judge Kessler ruled that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.” Since Judge Kessler’s ruling, Lotfi bin Ali has been stuck in Guantánamo, while the State Department has tried to find a third country prepared to accept him.

The following six men were seized in house raids in Karachi on or around September 11, 2002, around the same time that the “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized in a separate house raid. Also seized with bin al-Shibh, who was immediately rendered to the CIA’s network of secret prisons, was Hassan bin Attash, the 17-year old brother of Waleed bin Attash (another “high-value detainee” seized six months later), and the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Bin Attash was held for a week in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul (a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of 24-hour music and noise), and his torture was then outsourced to Jordan, where he was held for 16 months before his return to Afghanistan in January 2004 and his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2004, and KSM’s children were held for a unspecified amount of time, although it is believed that, at the time of writing, they are no longer in US or Pakistani custody (see Part Nine for more on these stories). Although the six men below were not captured with bin al-Shibh, the US authorities have been content to allow observers to infer that they were somehow connected to bin al-Shibh, even though, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, they seem, at most, to have been “nothing more than recent Taliban recruits who ended up in Karachi as part of an extended safe house system that was sheltering all Arabs from arrest, and not just those who were committed to al-Qaeda.”

ISN 836 Saleh, Ayoub Murshid Ali (Yemen)
All six of the men described here were probably rendered, after their capture, to the “Dark Prison,” but only two — Musa’ab al-Madhwani and Hail al-Maythali (see below) — have spoken about their experiences. Saleh, who is accused of traveling to Afghanistan “to join the jihad” in 2000, and of training at al-Farouq, appears, like all the men, to have been an extremely peripheral figure in the Afghan conflict. He has stated that he learned first aid as well as receiving weapons training at al-Farouq, and that his training was cut short because he contracted malaria, and, like Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only seized in Karachi because a plan to return home via Iran was thwarted by the Iranian authorities, obliging him to return to Pakistan.

ISN 837 Al Marwalah, Bashir (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Marwalah, who had studied nursing in Yemen, admitted traveling to Afghanistan in September 2000 and training at al-Farouq and another camp, but he added that he then returned to Yemen to see his family, and especially his father, who was ill. He said that he then returned to Afghanistan in August 2001 and attended al-Farouq for a second time, but refuted an allegation that he had participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and said that he had fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion began. When the tribunal asked him why he had gone to Afghanistan, he said that he wanted to train to fight in Chechnya, and when he was asked, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” he said, “I don’t know. I know I am an Arab fighter” (although he also noted that he had not engaged in any actual combat). In the government’s most recent publicly available allegations, it was noted that, unlike other men who had traveled to Tora Bora, al-Marwalah “and about 400 others” were evacuated to Khost, after “approximately four weeks moving back and forth between two guest houses, one in Kabul, and the other in Bagram,” and that, after traveling through Pakistan, he “stayed in a safe houses” [sic] in Karachi “from July to September 2002.”

ISN 838 Balzuhair, Shawki Awad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Balzuhair was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in April or May 2001, attending al-Farouq, and serving on the Taliban front lines near Bagram. In the most recent publicly available documents, it was noted that he “decided to go to Afghanistan after viewing a video about Chechnya, and became concerned about the Palestinian struggle for independence.” Balzuhair’s route out of Afghanistan apparently involved staying, in a variety of house with “about 20 others” from September to December 2001, and then living “wth a group of about 60 Arabs in the mountains of Afghanistan near Zormat.” From there, he ended up in Karachi, where, after an ill-fated diversion in Iran (as with Ayoub Saleh and Musa’ab al-Madhwani), he was seized after also staying in a house in Quetta for a month and “another house near a rail road track for another month.” As with the other five men, there were no allegations that he had engaged in combat at any point in his travels.

ISN 839 Al Mudwani, Musab (Musa’ab Al Madhwani) (Yemen)
Al-Madhwani is the only one of the six whose habeas corpus petition has been ruled on by a District Court judge, and the outcome was not entirely satisfactory. In December 2009, when Judge Thomas F. Hogan denied his petition, he said that, although the government had “met its burden” in establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that al-Madhwani was connected to al-Qaeda, he “did not think Madhwani was dangerous.” Noting that he had been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, he explained, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.” Moreover, Judge Hogan refused to rely on any statements that al-Madhwani had made to interrogators at Guantánamo, ruling that they were “tainted by abusive interrogation techniques,” to which he was subjected in the weeks after his capture in the “Dark Prison,” although he did accept statements that al-Madhwani made during his Administrative Review Board at Guantánamo in 2005, which, he said, were not tainted because they were made years after the abuse took place. Al-Madhwani’s lawyers had argued that these statements should also have been excluded, because they were “contaminated because he was still worried about upsetting his captors,” but the judge refused to accept this argument, even though one of his attorneys, Darold W. Killmer, explained, “He was threatened that if he changed his story, he would be sent back to a place worse than at the ‘Dark Prison.’” According to al-Madhwani’s own account, he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and trained briefly at al-Farouq, until it closed immediately after the attacks. After spending a few months in guest houses in Afghanistan, he made his way to Pakistan via Khost, traveling with other Arabs, Pakistanis and Afghans, and then, after trying unsuccessfully to return home via Iran, where, he said, he was “beaten and questioned” before being refused entry, spent ten months being moved around various houses in Lahore, Quetta and Karachi, waiting for an opportunity to return home that never came. Moreover, when he explained the situation in Karachi at the time of his arrest, an even less militant picture emerged. “The group I was arrested with were staying in two apartments,” he said. “One person from each apartment refused to surrender and fought the Pakistani forces sent to arrest us. I was in the group that chose to surrender.” He added that the Pakistanis were “thankful for our cooperation and surrendering without fighting.” He then explained that there were seven men in his apartment, including one who was killed, who had only been there for about five days, and that two other men shared the other apartment with a family. In his Review Board, he spoke only briefly about the “Dark Prison,” but it was easy to understand why Judge Hogan, who also spoke to him by video-link from Guantánamo, concluded that his “allegations about abusive interrogations were credible,” and, noticeably, added that they “were not challenged by government lawyers.” In 2005, when a Board Member asked him, “Are you holding anything back from the interrogators?” he replied, “That is impossible, because before I came to the prison in Guantánamo Bay I was in another prison in Afghanistan, under the ground [and] it was very dark, total dark, under torturing and without sleep. It was impossible that I could get out of there alive. I was really beaten and tortured.”

ISN 840 Al Maythali, Hail Aziz Ahmed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Maythali stated that he went to Afghanistan in November 2000 to “fight in the jihad,” and admitted ferrying supplies on the back lines near Kabul, but he added that he was only on the front lines for a week because he had no military experience. He denied allegations that he trained at al-Farouq, and explained that these allegations had only arisen because of his torture in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “there was very bad torture conducted on people,” including himself, which was “so bad that he knew by making up and agreeing to the training it would stop the torture.” He added that “his testicles were disfigured to the point where they cannot be repaired.” Like Ayoub Saleh, Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only captured after returning to Pakistan following an abortive attempt to return home via Iran.

ISN 841 Nashir, Said Salih Said (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Nashir was accused of attending al-Farouq from July to September 2001, when the camp closed. He then apparently served as a guard at Kandahar airport until November 2001, when he traveled to a valley between Zormat and Khost, Afghanistan, where he stayed in caves for approximately ten days, before moving on to Pakistan. In “factors favor[ing] release or transfer,” it was noted that he “stated he would never kill innocent women or children in the United States because it was against his religion.”

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record.

Just keeping up with everything going on in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week is hard enough, and this is in spite of the fact that my patrons at the World Can’t Wait have lined me up for as many of these events as possible on my week-long visit from London. The full schedule is here, which means that this evening (7 pm, Wednesday) I’ll be discussing writing about torture with authors Barry Eisler, Justine Sharrock and Rita Maran at University Lutheran Church, 2425 College Ave., but in the meantime I’d like to recap on the exciting events of the last two days.

On Monday afternoon, Dennis Bernstein interviewed myself and Stephanie Tang of the World Can’t Wait for his “Flashpoints” show on Pacifica Radio’s flagship KPFA radio station, and two particular points arose that I think are worth repeating. While we were chatting beforehand, Dennis quipped that he had extensively covered US torture “before it became legal,” which we used as a springboard for me to point out how apposite it was that this anti-torture week was taking place in Berkeley, where one of the prime architects of that decision to turn torture from something intrinsic to covert operations into something that purported to be legitimate was John Yoo, the former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and now a law professor at UC Berkeley, who, in 2002, wrote the “torture memos” that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used in the CIA’s “high-value detainee” program.

The second discussion point was when Dennis congratulated me for my dedication to the story of Guantánamo and torture, but asked me why I hadn’t given up and moved on. This chimed with much of what I’ve been feeling this week, as all those involved in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week work to draw people in who either do not realize the full, horrific extent of what has been done in their name, or who would prefer not to think about it. Dennis’s question gave me the opportunity to explain that, just because something is wrong, it doesn’t become any less wrong with the passage of time, and that, with Guantánamo, where men have now been held without charge or trial for nearly nine years, never knowing when, if ever, they will be released, it actually becomes more rather than less important to call for its closure as the years go by, and people are encouraged to forget that President Obama missed his self-imposed deadline for the prison’s closure nine months ago, and has not set a new deadline.

The full “Flashpoints” show is available here (and also features an extensive discussion of the new film version of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), and Dennis has also decided to cover “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week every day this week. Tuesday’s show, featuring an interview with Debra Sweet, the World Can’t Wait’s National Director, is here, and please feel free to listen in on Thursday, when I’ll be part of an hour-long discussion with peace activist Ray McGovern and Marjorie Cohn, former President of the National Lawyers Guild.

After the show, the evening’s event was a screening of the documentary film “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and myself) at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Fellowship Hall, where a dedicated and very involved crowd watched former prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, and lawyers Tom Wilner and Clive Stafford Smith, bring the horrors of Guantánamo — and its human cost — to life. The screening was followed by a very lively Q&A session, in which I fielded questions relating to those still held, including the British resident Shaker Aamer, featured in the film, and discussed the many failures on the part of President Obama to close the prison, and to thoroughly repudiate the brutal innovations of the Bush administration in its “War on Terror.”

Yesterday evening, the organizers of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week took the message to the streets of Berkeley — and, in particular, to Boalt Hall, where John Yoo teaches — with a powerful piece of political theater. “The Giant John Yoo Debate” involved a range of passionate and articulate experts, led by Sharon Adams of the National Lawyers Guild (San Francisco), and including peace activist Cindy Sheehan, Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Ann Fagan Ginger of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, and author and activist Larry Everest dissecting and demolishing John Yoo’s arguments for torture and for the President’s supposedly unfettered powers as Commander-in-Chief in wartime, which, in the absence of Yoo himself, were culled from his rare filmed appearances (before Congress, for example) and projected onto the wall of Boalt Hall.

Although I was looking forward to an evening off, a mention of Guantánamo and the supposed viability of the Military Commissions led Debra and Stephanie to shepherd me towards the mike, where I explained how the Commissions were initially established by Dick Cheney to launder torture evidence and facilitate the execution of “enemy combatants” without due process, and how the versions approved by Congress in 2006 and 2009, after the Supreme Court ruled the Commissions illegal, are no improvement, as they are still empowered to accept coerced evidence (at the judge’s discretion), and, in any case, have been established to try non-existent war crimes, and should have been ditched by the Obama administration in favor of federal court trials. I also delivered a denunciation of the administration’s plans to try Canadian citizen Omar Khadr — a former juvenile prisoner — for some of these invented war crimes in a trial that is scheduled to resume at Guantánamo next week.

A particular highlight of the debate, during an evening that was notable for the clear reasoning of Yoo’s many opponents, who yoked their passion to sound arguments in pursuit of his prosecution, was Cindy Sheehan’s description of him as “a baby-faced, twisted piece of human excrement,” but for more understated power, it was hard to beat the law student who, after responding to one of Yoo’s many risible arguments, returned to the mike to make a point of saying how many UC Berkeley students privately think that he should be prosecuted, but are afraid to speak out.

It was a brave move, and one that saw this young man cross over from a safety zone to a seemingly more vulnerable place, where those who speak truth to power are aware that someone might notice, but I hope that he is reassured that speaking out openly about injustice is both empowering and necessary, and I also hope that ripples from the debate cause more students to find that they are thinking twice about John Yoo, and, from those small doubts, find themselves unwilling to accept the presence on their campus and in their university of a man who not only butchered the law to deliver illegal advice to his political masters, but who also disgraces the title of “law professor,” when the sign on his door should read “war criminal.”

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

“Terror ruling threatens civilian prosecutions,” screamed the Los Angeles Times last Thursday. “Ruling in ’98 East Africa embassy bombings is setback for US,” wailed the Washington Post.

The headline writers were referring to the federal court trial, in New York, of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former CIA “ghost prisoner” (for two years and two months), who was then held at Guantánamo for two years and eight months before his transfer to the US mainland in May 2009 to face charges of involvement in the 1998 African embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, in which 224 people were killed, including 12 Americans. Pre-trial hearings had proceeded smoothly, as had jury selection two weeks ago, so what on earth happened last Wednesday that could have prompted such a “threat” and a “setback” to his trial?

The answer, sadly, reveals the depths to which both respect for the law and abhorrence of torture have been sidelined or banished in post-9/11 America. The prompt for those shocking headlines was the refusal of the judge in Ghailani’s case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, to accept information derived through the use of torture, and, specifically, his refusal to allow the government to use its star witness, a man whose identity had only been revealed by Ghailani while he was being tortured in a secret CIA prison.

This is what Judge Kaplan wrote in a three-page order denying the government’s intention to use the testimony of Hussein Abebe, a Tanzanian taxi driver described by prosecutors as a “giant witness,” who, as the Washington Post explained, was “expected to testify that he sold Ghailani the TNT used in the bombing.”

The court has not reached this conclusion lightly. It is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world we live in. But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.

When I read those words, I was delighted that Judge Kaplan had delivered such a ringing endorsement of the US Constitution, and, specifically, of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments.” I had, moreover, taken it for granted that people knew that information derived through the use of torture was prohibited in US courts, which was why much of the mainstream media’s response came as such a shock. Were those responsible for coming up with sensational headlines really trying to argue that information obtained through the use of torture should be allowed in a US court?

As it happened, media outlets like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were not actually making that argument behind their headlines, but by dwelling on the supposed significance of Judge Kaplan’s ruling for future Guantánamo trials, and by failing to openly acknowledge that he had done nothing more than uphold the law, they failed to present the story fairly.

In the Washington Post, for example, the headline was followed up by a claim that Judge Kaplan’s ruling “could complicate any effort by the Obama administration to revive its plans to put major al-Qaeda figures held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on trial in civilian courts in the United States.” It was not until later in the article that this claim was challenged, and was challenged not by a liberal commentator, but by Charles D. “Cully” Stimson, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration and now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who pointed out that the ruling was not necessarily damaging at all. “It would be dangerous to interpret this ruling as forever foreclosing or damaging the possibility of other cases coming to federal court because each case is sui generis,” Stimson explained.

As well as being irresponsible in terms of respecting the US Constitution, another reason this type of reporting was so inadvisable was because it appeared to give weight to other parties who were all too willing to attack Judge Kaplan in order to advance their own agenda. These commentators, who support trials by Military Commission, are desperate for federal court trials to fail, so that they can justify their insistence that all suspected terrorists should be tried by Military Commission at Guantánamo.

This point of view, which is based on ideology rather than common sense, relies on the false assertion — essential to the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — that terrorists are “warriors” rather than criminals, and its supporters maintain their point of view in spite of compelling evidence that the Commissions have been an abject failure, securing only four convictions, and permanently blighted by the fact that they have been established to try non-existent “war crimes,” whereas the federal courts have an established track record of successfully convicting terrorists in hundreds of cases.

Moreover, in dealing with these differing points of view, the Washington Post again muddied the waters. Even though “Cully” Stimson explained that “It’s not clear the outcome would have been any different in a commission,” the Post suggested that the rules of the Military Commission “nonetheless appear to contemplate the admission of evidence derived from statements obtained through torture or cruel treatment if a military judge finds that the evidence ‘would have been obtained even if the statement had not been made’ or the ‘use of such evidence would otherwise be consistent with the interests of justice.’”

The Post may technically be correct, although the possibility of torture evidence being allowed has not yet been thoroughly tested in the Military Commissions. More importantly, however, raising these questions unnecessarily diverts attention from what is happening in New York. As Attorney General Eric Holder explained when Judge Kaplan issued his ruling, “We intend to proceed with this trial,” and on Sunday, in a letter from the office of the United States attorney in Manhattan, the government conceded that it would not challenge Judge Kaplan’s ruling, pointing out that, although it “respectfully disagreed with the court’s decision and believes that, under different circumstances, it would merit review by the Court of Appeals,” an appeal would cause “a delay of uncertain, and perhaps significant, length,” which, as the New York Times explained, “could have greatly inconvenienced many foreign witnesses who had already arrived in New York, based on the original starting date, and others who had made plans based on that date.”

More to the point, and largely overlooked in the often overblown reporting of last week, is the fact that, before his two years in secret CIA prisons when he was subjected to the use of torture, Ghailani had already been indicted (back in 1998) for his involvement in the African embassy bombings, and could — and should — have been tried in federal court after he was first captured in Pakistan in 2004.

This, after all, is what happened with four of his alleged co-conspirators, who were tried in federal court in 2001, after a process of interrogation that did not involve the use of secret prisons and torture. After being convicted in May 2001, they were sentenced to life without parole in October 2001, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

With Judge Kaplan’s necessary intervention last week, the way has been paved for Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani also to be tried without use of the fruits of torture, and if — as seems unlikely — the government does not have untainted evidence with which to convict him, then the only just response is for the government to set him free.

This, of course, is another contentious idea, and one that Judge Kaplan acknowledged when, as the Washington Post described it, he stated that Ghailani “could probably continue to be held as ‘something akin to a prisoner of war’ even if he were found not guilty.” If that were to happen, it would, understandably, open up a new seam of bitter controversy, but we are not there yet, and in the meantime, Judge Kaplan’s decision to uphold the Constitution should be celebrated, and those tempted to turn Ghailani’s trial into some sort of circus should focus instead on the previous convictions for the 1998 bombings, which suggest that enough untainted evidence exists to secure a conviction that will validate the federal court approach and cast further doubt on the purpose and viability of the Military Commissions.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Terror and the Ghailani case.” Cross-posted on Uruknet.

The weather in the Bay Area is radiant — hot, sunny, and astonishing for mid-October — and, although a ten-hour flight from London and my usual paranoia about Homeland Security could hardly be described as constituting the best recipe for a relaxing welcome to the United States, I got off the plane at Los Angeles International Airport at 2.30 pm on Saturday (while my body was telling me it was 10.30 pm) with something of a spring in my step.

I’m here for a week to take part in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, an extraordinary series of events to raise awareness of the United States’ use of torture in the “War on Terror” — and, specifically, to highlight how its use is illegal, morally corrosive, unnecessary and counter-productive. The entire week is taking place in Berkeley not just because of its historical reputation as a place where people understand the difference between right and wrong, but also because one of the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program — the unapologetic John Yoo, who wrote the notorious “torture memos,” which sought to redefine torture and approved its use on prisoners in the “War on Terror” — is a law professor at UC Berkeley.

My presence here is entirely due to the fundraising efforts of the World Can’t Wait, who put together “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week with the National Lawyers Guild (San Francisco), Progressive Democrats of America, Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, National Accountability Action Network, Code Pink, FireJohnYoo.org, Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee and the Rev. Kurt Kuhwald, and I’m delighted that the week was approved by Berkeley City Council on September 21, when a Resolution was adopted to hold a week of public educational events to educate the community about torture.

With the American public divided into those who oppose the use of torture and believe that those who authorized it should be held accountable, those who have bought the lie that it is necessary and makes us safer, and those who prefer not to think about it at all, this is an extremely important week of events, and should have a resonance that reaches far beyond the Bay Area, especially as so many excellent activists, journalists, authors, artists and psychologists are involved, including Adrianne Aron, Shahid Buttar, Marjorie Cohn, Barry Eisler, Larry Everest, Ruth Fallenbaum, Clinton Fein, Jeffrey Kaye, Mimi Kennedy, Jason Leopold, devorah major, Ray McGovern, Rita Maran, Kathy Roberts, Renee Saucedo, Peter Selz, Justine Sharrock, Cindy Sheehan, Abdi Soltani, Debra Sweet, Fr. Louis Vitale and Ann Wright.

Yesterday evening, “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week kicked off at Revolution Books with an author event featuring myself (as the author of The Guantánamo Files) and Justine Sharrock, author of Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things. With a very lively crowd in attendance, Justine and I ran through various aspects of the “War on Terror” — in particular, its effects on those subjected to arbitrary detention and torture in the cages of Guantánamo and elsewhere, and, through Justine’s account, its effect on the US soldiers required to implement this torture and cruelty by their political masters, who, as the Abu Ghraib scandal showed, then tried to pretend that it was the work of “a few bad apples.”

It was not, of course. The dehumanization and torture of the men and boys detained in the “War on Terror” — in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantánamo and in secret prisons — was directed from the highest levels of the Bush administration — by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others — and in refusing to thoroughly address and repudiate these actions, and to hold accountable those who authorized America’s slide into barbarity, President Obama continues to send out a message that it is OK for the nation’s most senior officials to break the law so long as they leave the White House after two terms. He has also, sad to say, perpetuated many of the Bush administration’s crimes, and added some of his own, and, as part of the bigger picture, has presided over what appears to be nothing less than a battle for the soul of America, between those who embrace endless war, barbarity and torture, and those who do not.

The Bush administration talked of the “War on Terror” as a war that might last for generations. Those of us who oppose it must be aware that our struggle may also be generational, but I am pleased to note that this seemed to be appreciated by the audience at Revolution Books yesterday evening, and it was noticeable that the spirit that burns against injustice appeared to be burning more brightly than it was nearly a year ago, when I last visited the US to promote the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash), which, not coincidentally, is showing this evening, at 7 pm, at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Fellowship Hall, at 1924 Cedar Street.

If you’re in the area, come along, and please see here for the full list of events this week.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Last June, in the District Court in Washington D.C., a ruling was delivered on the habeas corpus petition of a Syrian prisoner in Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim al-Janko (also identified as Abdul Rahim al-Ginco), which exemplified all that was wrong with the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror,” and which also dealt a deadly blow to any hopes that the Obama administration would deal robustly and skeptically with the disaster it had inherited.

From the beginning, there had been doubts about President Obama’s commitment to justice for the prisoners at Guantánamo. Instead of respecting the habeas corpus litigation initiated by the Supreme Court in June 2004, and revived, after unconstitutional interference from Congress, in June 2008, the President established an interagency Task Force to review all the Guantánamo cases, which, essentially, was a secretive, executive-led alternative to court review.

Even worse, however, was the hands-off approach that the President, and his Attorney General Eric Holder, brought to the ongoing habeas litigation. When Obama came to power, 23 Guantánamo prisoners had won their habeas corpus petitions, and just three had lost. This should have been a resounding indication that all was not right with the government’s cases, but instead of ordering a shake-up of the department responsible for sending lawyers to the District Court to be humiliated again and again in cases like those of the Uighurs (innocent Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) or Mohammed El-Gharani, a former child prisoner held on the basis of information provided by witnesses that the government itself regarded as unreliable, Obama and Holder did absolutely nothing.

The same people who had worked on the cases for George W. Bush were allowed to keep manufacturing whatever argument they thought might win, leading to further humiliations, as in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, one of 15 men seized in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002. In May, accepting Ali Ahmed’s contention that he was a student, Judge Gladys Kessler, as I explained at the time, “demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a ‘mosaic’ of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.”

However, it was in June, when Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) came to consider the case of Abdul Rahim al-Janko, that new depths were plumbed in the Obama administration’s inability — or unwillingness — to conduct even the vaguest objective analysis of the cases it inherited.

I explained al-Janko’s story in a detailed article at the time, which I recommend for those who want the full sordid tale, but to recap, he had traveled to Afghanistan at the age of 23 after falling out with his father, had stayed in an al-Qaeda-affiliated guest house for five days, and had then (perhaps unwillingly) attended an al-Qaeda-affiliated training camp for 18 days, after which he was tortured as a spy for three months, until he confessed that he had been spying for the US and Israel. He was then held in a Taliban prison in Kandahar for 18 months, which was where he and four other men imprisoned by the Taliban were found in January 2002.

Although all five men — a British citizen, a Tatar and two Saudis, as well as al-Janko — had been imprisoned by the Taliban, they were sent to Guantánamo instead of being freed, and al-Janko was particularly unfortunate, as a search of the house belonging to Mohammed Atef, the military chief of al-Qaeda, who had directed his torture and who was killed in a US bombing raid in November 2001, unearthed a videotape containing his tortured confession, which was wrongly interpreted as a declaration of jihad by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The five men seized in the Taliban prison in Kandahar were eventually released, but al-Janko was the only one freed under President Obama, and the only one whose unjust detention had to be exposed in a US court before his release was secured.

In ruling last June on al-Janko’s habeas petition, Judge Leon was so appalled that the case had come before him at all that he openly mocked the government for “taking a position that defies common sense” by asking the court to address whether a relationship with al-Qaeda or the Taliban “can be sufficiently vitiated by the passage of time, intervening events, or both.” Concluding that “The answer, of course, is yes,” he then dismantled the government’s case point by point, stating, “To say the least, five days at a guest house in Kabul combined with eighteen days at a training camp does not add up to a longstanding bond of brotherhood,” and adding that al-Janko’s torture “evinces a total evisceration of whatever relationship might have existed!”

Judge Leon also stated that his abandonment in the Taliban prison “is even more definitive proof that any preexisting relationship had been utterly destroyed,” and concluded that an analysis of all these factors “overwhelmingly leads this Court to conclude that the relationship that existed in 2000 — such as it was — no longer existed whatsoever in 2002 when al-Janko was taken into custody.”

Last week, al-Janko, who was freed from Guantánamo and given a new home in a third country last October, sued 26 current and former senior US military officials for damages. Alleging violations of his rights under the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, his lawyers stated that he was “the victim of a decade-long Kafkaesque nightmare from which he is just awakening,” adding, “Whether a country provides redress for the people it has wronged in violation of international and US law is a true test of the character of a nation.”

As the Washington Post described it, al-Janko “says that he was urinated on by his American captors, slapped, threatened with loss of fingernails and exposed to sleep deprivation, extreme cold and stress positions.” He also “says that US authorities broke his knee, used police dogs against him and caused kidney damage by failing to treat him for kidney stones.”

Al-Janko undoubtedly has a case, but his chances of securing a meaningful response from the Obama administration — let alone an apology or compensation — must be close to zero, given that the administration’s response to any challenge involving Bush-era crimes, or its own novel developments, such as the proposed extrajudicial executions of US citizens, is to invoke the “state secrets” doctrine, or, in the case of a damning internal report into the “torture memos” of John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, to secure the services of a compliant Justice Department official (David Margolis), who is skilled in the dark arts of an official whitewash. As Glenn Greenwald explained:

[T]he Obama DOJ — which fought unsuccessfully to keep Janko imprisoned at Guantánamo — has been so consistent in its standards that one need not wait to hear from them to know how they will respond. It’s the same way they’ve responded in similar cases: whatever was done to this person is a State Secret that no court can review; those who are responsible for the abuse do and should enjoy full legal immunity; and, besides, we should all be Looking Forward, Not Backward at “unnecessary battles” like this one.

If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. With hindsight, shielding the Bush administration’s torturers from accountability for their crimes has always been an important part of Barack Obama’s supposedly pragmatic Presidency, but in recent months, as Obama’s own crimes have been highlighted in his relentless use of drone assassinations in Pakistan (PDF), and his defense of plans to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, shielding administration officials, past and present, from accountability for wrongdoing has openly become a key policy of the government.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The Public Record, The Smirking Chimp, Uruknet and Common Dreams.

Imagine being strapped into a restraint chair twice a day for nearly 2000 days, with a feeding tube forced up your nose and into your stomach, and liquid nutrient pumped through it. According to an Associated Press report, Abdul Rahman Shalabi, Guantánamo’s longest-term hunger striker, is “occasionally eating solid food,” but he remains seriously underweight, and has medical complications as a result of his extraordinary hunger strike, which has lasted for five years and two months.

Shalabi, a Saudi, weighed 124 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in January 2002, but has rarely weighed more than 110 pounds since he began his hunger strike in August 2005, as part of the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history. At one point, in November 2005, he weighed just 100 pounds (PDF), and when the authorities took harsh steps to bring the strike under control in January 2006, importing a number of restraint chairs to make sure that it “wasn’t convenient” for the strikers to continue (as Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the head of the US Southern Command, explained to the New York Times), Shalabi, Tarek Baada, a Yemeni, and another Saudi, Ahmed Zuhair (who was released last June), refused to give up.

In September 2009, after four years of being force-fed daily, Shalabi weighed just 108 pounds, and wrote a distressing letter to his lawyers, in which he stated, “I am a human who is being treated like an animal.” In November 2009, when his letter was included in a court submission, one of his lawyers, Julia Tarver Mason, stated, “He’s two pounds away from organ failure and death.”

Although it was understandable that the US authorities wished to prevent the PR disaster of having a prisoner die by starving himself to death, medical staff who participated in the force-feeding have run up against trenchant criticism from others in the profession, because medical ethics have long prohibited force-feeding mentally competent hunger strikers, recognizing that it is often the only manner in which they can make protests about the conditions of their confinement.

This is troubling enough, but a far more worrying aspect of the story of Guantánamo’s hunger strikers concerns the three men who died in mysterious circumstances in June 2006, and who may, according to reports by four soldiers who were present at the time, have been killed, either accidentally or deliberately, rather than having committed suicide, as claimed in the authorities’ official narrative. All three were long-term hunger strikers, as were the two other prisoners who allegedly committed suicide — Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi, in May 2007, and Muhammad Salih, a Yemeni, in June 2009 — and the disturbing subtext is that their resistance to injustice, through hunger striking, made them powerful enemies somewhere in the base’s command structure, or in the various shadowy agencies responsible for interrogation.

To the extent that he has survived his long ordeal, Abdul Rahman Shalabi is at least fortunate, although it is clear that five years on a hunger strike has taken a heavy toll on his health. This is in spite of the generally upbeat tone of the authorities’ commentary, which was included in a submission as part of the government’s response to a motion submitted by his lawyers, asking for independent medical experts to be allowed to travel to Guantánamo to examine Shalabi’s physical and mental health, and to treat him if necessary.

According to Navy Capt. Monte Bible, who commands the Joint Medical Group at Guantánamo, Shalabi “has begun to eat such things as pasta, bread, cake, seafood, baklava, cookies, peanut butter, cheese and ice cream,” and medical logs submitted by the government noted that he first ate solid food in February, when a guard “reported seeing him eat a granola bar behind a newspaper, trying to shield himself from view,” and he “received seven Slim Jims — a dried meat snack – and a pack of gum from a visiting attorney.” The next month, according to the log, he “received a sticky bun from night guards at the hospital,” where he is still held, and in July he “ate grapes, spaghetti with meat sauce, two pieces of baklava and a banana.”

Despite this, however, the authorities conceded that Shalabi weighed only 101 pounds — just two-thirds of his “ideal body weight” — in September, and also noted that doctors had diagnosed him with gastroparesis, a condition which slows the digestive system. According to Capt. Bible, it “causes constipation, bloating and abdominal pain,” and “was apparently caused by a weakening of his abdominal muscles as a result of the fast,” although he added that it “may go away as Shalabi begins to eat more solid food.”

His lawyers were less upbeat. Although they noted that he has eaten “high-fat foods, such as peanut butter, ice cream and cheese,” they continued to “express concern about the potentially dangerous long-term effects of his hunger strike,” as the Associated Press described it. One of his attorneys, Jana Ramsey stated, “For months, Mr. Shalabi’s weight has hovered around a dangerous line.”

It is unknown when the court will rule, but it is unlikely that the lawyers’ request will be granted, as judges have a long history of refusing to interfere in the day-to-day running of Guantánamo, or in seeking to allow visits by independent medical experts. In addition, as the Associated Press noted, “Lawyers for the government argued that outside experts are unnecessary in part because the prisoner has cooperated with medical personnel at Guantánamo and is showing signs of improvement.”

For a man who still weighs little more than an anorexic model, it is uncertain to what extent the odd peanut butter snack or ice cream can be regarded as “signs of improvement.” However, the authorities will be hoping that Capt. Bible’s intervention, and the scattered references to food in their logs, will be enough to prevent anyone with an objective point of view from being allowed to meet Shalabi in Guantánamo, where secrecy remains part of the very fabric of the prison, 20 months after President Obama came to power promising to close it, and 19 months after he received a specially commissioned report which concluded that the prison “complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Conventions.”

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Yahya’s Blog and Uruknet.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes and deaths at Guantánamo, see Suicide at Guantánamo: the story of Abdul Rahman al-Amri (May 2007), Suicide at Guantánamo: a response to the US military’s allegations that Abdul Rahman al-Amri was a member of al-Qaeda (May 2007), Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (June 2008), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo (November 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide (May 2009), Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo (June 2009), Death At Guantánamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation (June 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (for ACLU, June 2009), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Lawyers Speak (February 2010), The Third Anniversary of a Death in Guantánamo (May 2010), Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Three): Deaths at the Prison (June 2010), Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo? (1st anniversary of Mohammed al-Hanashi’s death, June 2010), Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues (June 2010), US Court Denies Justice to Dead Men at Guantánamo (October 2010).

Six months after arriving from Guantánamo to a new life in the Swiss canton of Jura, Arkin Mahmut (46) and his younger brother Bahtiyar (34), seen for the first time in the photo here, have spoken publicly about their release, stating that they are “happy” in their new home. However, as the Swiss website swissinfo.ch explained, “communication and getting used to another culture has presented the two brothers with challenges — as has living with the memories of Guantánamo.”

The Uighur brothers, from Xinjiang province in north western China, were among 22 Uighurs held at Guantánamo, who were mostly seized and sold to US forces by opportunistic Pakistani villagers in December 2001. The men had fled from a rundown settlement in the Afghan mountains, where they had ended up after fleeing Chinese persecution, or because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe in search of work. Five were freed in Albania in May 2006, and the other 17 — including the brothers — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008, although the Justice Department, the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. and lawmakers in Congress successfully opposed the judge’s order to bring them to live in the US — and, last May, President Obama also vetoed a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig, which would have involved bringing some of the men to live on the US mainland. Instead, four men were freed in Bermuda last June, six more were freed in Palau last October, and five men remain in Guantánamo, exactly two years after they won their habeas petition, wondering if anyone — Turkey, perhaps, which has strong ties with the Uighur people — will offer them a new home.

Discussing the integration of the Mahmut brothers into Swiss society, and their attempts to overcome the scars of their long detention without charge or trial (in which they spent two years in solitary confinement, and Arkin suffered from mental health problems), swissinfo.ch explained that “Although they want to enjoy their freedom, the road is proving long and stony.” The main road to integration is through learning French (the language spoken in Jura), and Francis Charmillot, the director of the Jura Migrant Welcome Association (AJAM), which is helping the brothers adapt to their new lives, stated, “They are attending a French course four times a week with other students. Furthermore, they have two weekly private lessons.” Their French, according to swissinfo.ch, is “still shaky, so they are not yet able to have conversations,” but “they are able to live independently — shop and take the train — even if it has its price.” As Charmillot explained,
“They had to learn how to go shopping, use our products and manage their budget. Getting around by bicycle was also an achievement as they first had to become familiar with our system of road signs.”

The article also explained how the small Uighur community in Switzerland — numbering just 80 people — is providing support. Endili Memetkerim, the president of the Swiss Association of East Turkestan (the Uighurs’ name for their home country), said, “We meet Arkin and Bahtiyar regularly and we have invited them to eat with us. The younger one, Bahtiyar, took part in the last Uighur community meeting in Bern. They are pleased about being in Switzerland and they know they are among the privileged. The fate of the 20 other Uighur former Guantánamo detainees has not been so kind. The fact that they like it here contributes of course to their integration.” [Note: The four men released in Bermuda might take exception to this analysis, as, by their own account, they have settled in well in their new home].

Initially, the brothers lived together in an apartment, but asked to live separately at the end of April.
“It’s an absolutely legitimate demand for two adults,” Francis Charmillot explained. “Now they live two kilometres away from each other in Delémont and Courroux and meet up regularly.” Charmillot also explained, as the article described it, that Bahtiyar’s integration “seems to be progressing faster than his brother’s,” which is unsurprising, given Arkin’s well-chronicled mental health problems in Guantánamo.

Charmillot added that Bahtiyar had “embarked on a three-month work experience placement at the charity Caritas in Delémont,” which, unfortunately, came to an end because of his difficulties with the language. “The aim,” he explained, “in addition to consolidating their French knowledge, is to find them work so they can become financially independent. But we have to remember that they’ve only been in Switzerland for six months.”

Charmillot also explained that the brothers “do not speak of their Guantánamo past much, except on rare occasions.” He added, “Recently we went out for a pizza and they said that Thursday was pizza day in Guantánamo. Bahtiyar wants to leave this terrible chapter of his life behind. Arkin, however, finds the prison experience much more difficult.”

This is particularly troubling for Arkin, of course, although Francis Charmillot also explained that a legacy of their imprisonment was its effect on the confidence of both men. “They are insecure and are also asking if what they have done or are doing is all right. They are reassured all the time. These are deep wounds which will perhaps heal over time,” he said. Fortunately, unlike some other released prisoners, the brothers are receiving counseling arranged by AJAM, and are also receiving help from representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. ICRC spokesman Christian Cardon said, “It is important for the former detainees that the ICRC ensures a continuity with the work started at Guantánamo. They are happy for our delegate to accompany them in the host country. The ICRC also acts as intermediary between them and their relatives.”

The men have been able to speak to their families by phone, but are, of course, unsure if they will ever see their loved ones again. As swissinfo.ch explained, ”Despite wanting to integrate into Switzerland, the men still cherish the hope of one day seeing their homeland” — and in this they echo the thoughts of Endili Memetkerim, the president of the Swiss Association of East Turkestan, who told swissinfo.ch, “We expect to return and this day will come.”

Note: Click here for a short video news report (in English) about the Uighurs’ attempts to integrate into Swiss society.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 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), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), A Plea To Barack Obama From The Guantánamo Uighurs (August 2009), Court Allows Return Of Guantánamo Prisoners To Torture (September 2009), Finding New Homes For 44 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners (October 2009), Justice At Last? Guantánamo Uighurs Ask Supreme Court For Release Into US (October 2009), Senate Finally Allows Guantánamo Trials In US, But Not Homes For Innocent Men (October 2009), Six Uighurs Go To Palau; Seven Remain In Guantánamo (October 2009), Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau? (November 2009), Guantánamo Uighurs In Palau: First Interview And Photo (November 2009), Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship (December 2009), Swiss Take Two Guantánamo Uighurs, Save Obama from Having to Do the Right Thing (February 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), More Dark Truths from Guantánamo, as Five Innocent Men Released (April 2010), Palau President Asks Australia to Offer Homes to Guantánamo Uighurs (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Thank Bermuda; Supporters Ask UK to Give Them Passports (June 2010), Good News from Bermuda: Ex-Guantánamo Uighurs Settling In Well (September 2010), and the profiles of the remaining five prisoners in Part Three and Part Four of my nine-part series, Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?

This is the sixth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Seven.

This sixth article tells the stories of 14 prisoners seized in two house raids in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, which led to the capture of the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah.

Of the hundred or so prisoners seized in Pakistan — mostly in house raids, but also in random raids on mosques, on buses and in the street — all but these 27 (and 13 more profiled in Part Seven) have been released. The cases of those released reveal, in general, how US intelligence was often horrendously inaccurate, and how opportunism often played a part in the actions of the Pakistani authorities, who were being rewarded financially. As President Musharraf admitted in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Moreover, of the 14 men whose stories are described in this chapter, many appear to be victims of the same failures of intelligence or opportunism as those already released. This is particularly true of nine men seized not with Abu Zubaydah (although there are, of course, serious doubts about his significance, as described below) but in a guest house close to a university, as five others seized in that raid have been released, two of whom won their habeas petitions in rulings that were notable for the level of criticism leveled at the government by the judges in question. In addition, one of the remaining nine also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared for release and, recently, came close to being offered a new home in Germany.

The following five men were seized in the house raid in Faisalabad that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Even so, the five men seized with him have, for the most part, been accused of having connections to al-Qaeda, although one other, an Algerian named Labed Ahmed, was released in November 2008, and all appear to be more fortunate than three others seized in the same raid — two young men named Omar Ghramesh and Noor al-Deen, and an unidentified teenager — who were rendered to Syria as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, and who have never resurfaced in any form.

ISN 682 Al Sharbi, Ghassan (Saudi Arabia)
Al-Sharbi, who speaks fluent English and graduated in electrical engineering from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, is one of very few Guantánamo prisoners to have publicly declared membership of al-Qaeda. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he accepted all the allegations against him, which included claims that he received specialized training in the manufacture and use of remote-controlled explosive devices to detonate bombs against Afghan and US forces, that he “was observed chatting and laughing like pals with Osama bin Laden,” and that he was known in Guantánamo as the “electronic builder” and “Abu Zubaydah’s right-hand man.” Charged in the first incarnation of the Military Commissions, he appeared at a pre-trial hearing on April 27, 2006, and was equally open about his activities, telling the judge, “I came here to tell you I did what I did and I’m willing to pay the price,” “Even if I spend hundreds of years in jail, that would be a matter of honor to me,” and “I fought the United States, I’m going to make it short and easy for you guys: I’m proud of what I did.” Perhaps surprisingly, al-Sharbi, who was a member of the short-lived Prisoners’ Council in the summer of 2005, along with Shaker Aamer (ISN 239) and four others who have been released, was befriended by Guantánamo’s warden, Col. Mike Bumgarner, despite his avowed allegiance to al-Qaeda, and despite the fact that he later became one of Guantánamo’s most persistent hunger strikers. In June 2008, he was again put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Sufyian Barhoumi, Jabran al-Qahtani and Noor Uthman Muhammed (see below), but the charges were dropped by the Pentagon in October 2008, after their prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned, stating that the trial system was designed to prevent the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense. New charges against all four men were filed in January 2009, in the dying days of the Bush administration, but with the exception of Noor Uthman Muhammed, have not been revived under President Obama, perhaps because, as in the majority of cases involving Abu Zubaydah, the government has stepped back from its discredited claims about his significance.

ISN 685 Ali, Abdelrazak (Algeria)
The story of Abdelrazak Ali is so confusing that I have no idea what to believe, and can only hope that the truth will emerge when the supposed evidence is examined by a District Court judge in his habeas corpus petition. In the Summary of Evidence for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he was identified as Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman, a Libyan, but by the time of his second Administrative Review Board in 2006, he was identified as Abdullah Azak, and in the third round of the ARBs, in 2007, he was identified as Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakush, an Algerian. This led to the US authorities accusing him of having “lied for a period of two years eight months prior to revealing his real name and actual place of birth,” and using this as part of the evidence against him, even though, as I have stated, this “may not have been advisable, but was understandable.” According to the US authorities, he was accused, by an unidentified “source,” of staying in various guest houses in Afghanistan from July to October 2001, and of attending the Khaldan training camp “circa 1996/1997,” and by an unidentified “al-Qaeda operative” of being “a member of his Martyrs’ Brigade.’” In response, he has stated that he traveled to Pakistan “to go to school to learn how to read and write,” and has also claimed, like Labed Ahmed (released in November 2008), that he was taken to Abu Zubaydah’s house by other people, and did not know the inhabitants. Given that the allegations against him are such clear examples of unverifiable hearsay, it may well be that this is the case.

ISN 694 Barhoumi, Sufyian (Algeria)
Barhoumi, who lost his habeas corpus petition in September 2009, was accused of being a trainer for the bomb-making group in the house rented by Abu Zubaydah, but has strenuously denied the allegations against him. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted traveling to Afghanistan for military training in 1999, but pointed out that this was long before 9/11, and insisted that, having been shown a video of atrocities in Chechnya at a mosque in the UK, where he lived for two years, his intention was to train to fight in Chechnya. He explained that, after leaving Afghanistan, he traveled “from house to house,” ending up at the safe house in Faisalabad where he was seized with Abu Zubaydah. He added, however, that he was only there for ten days before the raid, and claimed that the allegations were the result of “hearsay” and of “people testifying against me.” He claimed that his interrogators told him, “people are talking about you a lot,” and suggested that, because he was arrested with Abu Zubaydah, “they dumped everything on me and said I was al-Qaeda also.” In 2006, at a pre-trial hearing after he had been put forward for a trial by Military Commission, he, like Ghassan al-Sharbi, refused legal representation, but was primarily concerned with showing the courtroom his hand, which was severely damaged after a land mine accident in Afghanistan, and complaining about the conditions of his imprisonment. Although he was charged for a second time in June 2008, and the charges were dropped in October 2008 and refiled in January 2009, he has not been charged under President Obama, and the fact that his habeas petition proceeded to a ruling may indicate that he is one of the 48 men that the Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial. Noticeably, when his habeas appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year, and the reasons for the denial of his habeas petition were first publicly revealed, it became apparent that, although the judge in his case (Judge Rosemary Collyer) noted that Barhoumi “said that he is not now and has never been a member of al-Qaeda,” and added, “I have no reason not to believe that,” she nevertheless concluded that “he was with an associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners and therefore was properly detained.” That “associated force,” it transpired, was an alleged militia associated with Abu Zubaydah, whose existence was apparently revealed in the diary of another of Zubaydah’s associates, Abu Kamil al-Suri, (someone previously unheard of, and whose current whereabouts are unknown). It also became apparent that, in the absence of any other evidence, the government was using this not only as a new way of justifying Abu Zubaydah’s detention, but also to implicate others like Barhoumi.

ISN 696 Al Qahtani, Jabran (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in June 2008, when al-Qahtani, a graduate in electrical engineering from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, was put forward for a trial by Military Commission with Ghassan al-Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi and Noor Uthman Muhammed, he has had little to say about the allegations against him: that he traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 “with the intent to fight the Northern Alliance and the American forces, whom he expected would soon be fighting in Afghanistan,” and that he was part of a group at Abu Zubaydah’s house who were provided with money to buy the components to make remote-controlled explosive devices. He refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, and spoke very little in April 2006, during the pre-trial hearing for his first, aborted Military Commission, when he was concerned only to refuse the services of his military lawyer. As with the other three men, the charges against him were dropped in October 2008, and new charges were filed in January 2009, although he has not been charged under President Obama.

ISN 707 Muhammed, Noor Uthman (Sudan)
Muhammed was put forward for a trial by Military Commission on May 23, 2008, accused of serving as the deputy emir and a weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed. Noticeably, these charges do not relate to the 9/11 attacks, and in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business. Muhammed’s case ought to raise troubling questions about Khaldan — and, specifically, about how his claims about the camp’s lack of affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban echo the US authorities’ belated conclusions about Abu Zubaydah, and how his alleged role as the camp’s deputy emir ought to raise troubling questions about the camp’s emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in May 2009 after being rendered back to the country, having served his purpose when, in 2002, under torture in Egypt (where he had been flown by the CIA), he falsely confessed to connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. However, despite these problems, Muhammed is one of five prisoners put forward for a trial by Military Commission under the Obama administration, and although there are serious doubts about whether the court is empowered to try him for his alleged involvement with terrorism before the 9/11 attacks, prosecutors made a point, in a pre-trial hearing on September 21 this year, of stating that, “for a number of years,” Muhammed “was the principal trainer and in charge of all training at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan that provided numerous individuals who went on to serve for al-Qaeda.” His trial is scheduled to begin in February 2011.

The following nine men were seized in a separate house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, at the Crescent Mill guest house, also known as the “Issa house,” after its Pakistani owner (who was not seized) or the “Yemeni house,” because most of its inhabitants were Yemenis. Although the house was purported to have a connection to Abu Zubaydah, the majority of the 15 prisoners known to have been seized in the raid have always maintained that they were students at the nearby Salafia University, or that they had traveled to Pakistan for cheap medical treatment, and that the house was a student guest house. One of the prisoners, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, died in mysterious circumstances in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006 (on the night that two other men died in what was described as a triple suicide), and five others have been released. In May 2009, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the five, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who described himself as a student, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.” Ali Ahmed was finally released last September, and in the meantime another student in the house, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi who stated that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive cheap medical treatment for a back problem, was released last June, following the deliberations of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. In addition, two other Yemeni students, Mohammed Tahir and Fayad Yahya Ahmed, were released last December. Since then, one other man has also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared by the Task Force, and is seeking a third country to offer him a new home.

ISN 680 Hassan, Emad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Hassan has repeatedly stated that he never set foot in Afghanistan (until the US took him there after his capture), and that he was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the Koran when he was seized. He has also explained that, while in Pakistani custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.” Nevertheless, he has been subjected to numerous allegations made by unidentified individuals, who have claimed that he trained at al-Farouq, where he was one of 50 men chosen to be Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, and that he was present in Tora Bora, at the showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in December 2001. These dubious sounding allegations have not been tested in court, of course, and it may be that Hassan has simply aroused the wrath of the authorities in Guantánamo because of his refusal to accept the conditions in which he and the other prisoners are held. In 2006, one of his lawyers, Douglas Cox, explained how he was “regarded as a leader by other detainees,” and how he “went on a hunger strike. A few months into it, military doctors started force-feeding him by inserting a tube through his nose. The process was so painful that Hassan felt he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t want to quit, though, because he thought he would be letting down the other detainees.” Weight records released by the Pentagon show that, although Hassan only weighted 113 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped at one point in December 2005 to a skeletal 85 pounds (PDF).

ISN 684 Tahamuttan, Mohammed (Palestine)
Tahamuttan, who was 22 years old when seized, had been a member, since the age of 14, of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organization, with millions of members worldwide, which, in Guantánamo, was routinely described as a front for terrorism (a description that is akin to describing the Catholic Church as a front for the IRA). According to his own account, he had traveled to Pakistan in October 2001, and had been part of two missions from the Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, but in Guantánamo he was subjected to claims that he had traveled to Afghanistan for military training, even though a more plausible explanation of his activities was also provided by the government, in passages in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence in which it was stated that “he met two Afghani men during a lecture at the Jamaat-al-Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, Pakistan, who pressured him into traveling to Afghanistan … even though the Jamaat-al-Tablighi expressly forbade travel to Afghanistan as too dangerous.” However, although “he traveled with the two Afghan men to Quetta, Pakistan, where he was taken to a compound containing Afghan refugees and Arab men who looked like fighters,” he “was advised not to travel to Afghanistan, and his travel was arranged to Lahore, Pakistan.” Cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, he was recently considered for rehousing in Germany, but at the last minute the German government decided to accept only two of the three prisoners offered. However, on September 27, 2010, the Foreign Minister of the Maldives, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, said the government “was going to invite the sole remaining Palestinian detainee in Guantánamo Bay to live a ‘peaceful, free’ life in the Maldives,” and “expressed hope that the parliament would endorse the decision as a gesture of affection to the Palestinian brothers and as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

ISN 686 Hakim, Abdel (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, although Hakim stated in Guantánamo that he had studied the Koran for five months in Lahore, and had then been directed by a religious figure to the guest house near Salafia University, the US authorities alleged that he had trained at al-Farouq. When a tribunal member asked him, “If you were a student studying the Koran, how did you end up here?” he replied, “This is the question I always ask myself … why was I captured there, and why did they bring me here?”

ISN 688 Ahmed, Fahmi (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Fahmi Ahmed (also identified as Fahmi al-Tawlaqi) “said that he went to Pakistan to buy fabrics, taking $3,500 that he had borrowed from his mother, but explained that he actually spent most of his time in Pakistan ‘like a wild man,’ drinking and smoking hashish. After staying for a year and a half, during which time his visa expired, he was eventually advised to go to Faisalabad, where there was a big Arabic community, and where he was told he would be able to locate people who could tell him how to bribe the government to renew his visa. He said he ended up staying for two months with a Pakistani family, but just as he was planning to call his family to arrange to return home, because the house he was staying in was too small, he met Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami [aka Salah Ahmed al-Salami, one of the three prisoners who died in June 2006], who invited him to stay at a larger house, where he was also staying, and where ‘they were all university students.’” In contrast, the US authorities allege that he trained in Afghanistan, fought with the Taliban, and was a member of al-Qaeda, but this seems unlikely, because, as his lawyers explained in 2006, “Although he says he endured his share of abuse at Gitmo –once, soldiers shaved his head in the shape of a cross — he has also made an amazing discovery: rap music. Al-Tawlaqi adopted the rap name King Daniel, which he drew on his prison jumpsuit. He filled two notebooks with rap lyrics, in English, organized by subject. The lawyers can’t say what the songs are about because Justice Department officials wouldn’t declassify the lyrics, though they assured me they are ‘very lewd,’” and he “asked his lawyers if they could persuade Eminem to perform his songs.”

ISN 689 Salam, Mohammed (Yemen)
Salam, who was reportedly seen by “a senior al-Qaeda member” at al-Farouq, has actually presented a far more coherent narrative, which involved traveling to Pakistan to get treatment on his nose, and then meeting up with a missionary under whose guidance he traveled to Faisalabad to study the Koran, where he stayed for eight months until he was seized in the house raid. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, after explaining that a “generous person” paid for his trip, the following exchange took place, which demonstrated how wide the cultural gap was between the Americans and Muslims from the Gulf:

Tribunal Member: I don’t know your culture very well, but … in our culture people just don’t step up and say, “I’ll pay for the trip for you.”
Detainee: In our culture, in Islam, there is such a thing … Indeed, it is an obligation for any Muslim who is rich to pay for someone who is poor.

ISN 690 Qader, Ahmed Abdul (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Qader, who was just 18 years old when he was seized, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan “to help the needy and the poor,” and tried unsuccessfully to establish a charity organization. He admitted that he visited the “back line,” encouraged by friends connected to the Taliban, but insisted that he “never participated in any kind of military activities.” After leaving Afghanistan before the US-led invasion began, he said that he ended up in the house in Faisalabad, where he became friends with Fahmi Ahmed (ISN 688, above). “We shared the same vision and he has the same opinions,” Ahmed said of him, adding, “He used to use hashish with me,” whereas the other students in the house “were trying to inspire me to do the religious things, like look at my religion, because most of the students were studying the Koran and all things related to religious studies.”

ISN 691 Al Zarnuki, Mohammed (Yemen)
Although it was alleged, by unidentified sources, including “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” that al-Zarnuki was seen in various training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2001 (and even that, after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, he attended a meeting in Kandahar with Osama bin Laden to plan further operations), he has stated that he took a break from farming to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and has claimed that he spent four months preaching and then spent a month and a half at the guest house where he was seized, where he became ill.

ISN 702 Mingazov, Ravil (Russia)
A former ballet dancer and Russian army officer, Mingazov, who won his habeas corpus petition in May 2010, has always claimed that he traveled to Afghanistan in search of a new home for himself and his family, after he converted to Islam and faced dangerous discrimination from the Russian military. Following the US-led invasion, he said that he fled with other refugees to a center in Lahore, in Pakistan, run by the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, where he stayed from January to March 2002. Anxious to be reunited with his wife and child, but aware that foreigners in Pakistan were prey for bounty hunters, he then accepted an offer of safe passage to a house in Faisalabad with two other refugees, Labed Ahmed (an Algerian, released in November 2008) and Jamil Nassir (a Yemeni, see below), where, they were told, it would be easier for them to leave the country. After being accidentally delivered to Shabaz Cottage, where Abu Zubaydah was living (and where Ahmed insisted on staying), Mingazov and Nasser were then moved to the Crescent Mill guest house, where they were seized after about ten days. Any doubts about Mingazov’s innocence should have been removed not just by the ruling but also because, during a military review board at Guantánamo, Labed Ahmed had stated that, because he, Mingazov and Nassir “did not have a connection or relationship with Abu Zubaydah,” they “should have been placed in the Yemeni house.” As I have explained previously, “This indicates that, although Abu Zubaydah had some sort of contact with the [Crescent Mill guest] house, it was not a place that had any connection with terrorism, and was, at best, a place where a few foreigners fleeing from Afghanistan could be concealed alongside a group of students.” Despite this, however, the Obama administration recently announced that it would appeal Mingazov’s successful habeas petition.

ISN 728 Nassir, Jamil (Yemen)
The outline of Nassir’s journey to Faisalabad, and the reasons that he should not be regarded as an associate of Abu Zubaydah, can be found in the story of Ravil Mingazov, above. As for what Nassir had been doing prior to his capture, the US authorities initially struggled to find evidence of any anti-US activities. In 2004, at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the only information they had about him, beyond the spurious connection with Zubaydah and the house, was a claim that he had stayed in “the Afghani house” in Kandahar, after traveling from Yemen to Pakistan in late July 2001. By 2007, the US authorities had established a much more exciting narrative, but its reliability is, of course, unknown. According to this version of events, Nassir had traveled to Afghanistan with his wife, had rented a house next door to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and was linked by unknown sources to “the purchase of equipment used to assist al-Qaeda operatives in the production of biological weapons.” According to this allegation, Nassir was working with al-Wafa, a Saudi charity that, for many years, the US authorities believed was working with al-Qaeda on chemical and biological weapons, although these claims appear to have evaporated in every case except Nassir’s, as the director of al-Wafa, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, and two other prisoners once accused of similar crimes — Ayman Batarfi and Jamal Mar’i — have all been released. Nassir has refuted the al-Wafa allegations, and, in light of his own claim that he traveled from Pakistan to Afghanistan to study and teach the Koran, it may be that the most reliable unidentified source is the one who stated that he was “not a guard nor affiliated with al-Qaeda,” but a civilian who had “moved to Afghanistan with his wife and children.”

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Pacific Free Press, The Public Record and Uruknet.