All of these deaths were, in one way or another, suspicious, except for Hekmati, a 68-year old Afghan, whose story, instead, hinted at medical neglect, and also revealed, on close examination, the callous cruelty of the regime at Guantánamo. A quiet hero of the anti-Taliban resistance, who had helped free three important anti-Taliban leaders from a Taliban jail, he had discovered at Guantánamo that no one in authority was interested in ascertaining whether or not there was any truth to his story, and he went to his grave without having been able to clear his name.

This ought to be a source of undying shame for those who failed to investigate his story — and who may well have not acted decisively to prevent the spread of his cancer — but, unlike the other five men, his death does not carry with it the suspicion that he was deliberately killed, whereas all the others do. Last week, I recalled the Saudi prisoner Abdul Rahman al-Amri, on the third anniversary of his death, and was unable to come up with an adequate explanation for why he would take his own life.

A devout man, who had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, he was deeply troubled by the kinds of sexual humiliation to which he and other prisoners were subjected, and this could, perhaps, have tipped him over the edge, but he was also a long-term hunger striker, and may, therefore, have been in such a weakened state at the time of his death that a round of particularly aggressive questioning may have been enough to kill him.

In addition, the deaths of the three men on June 9, 2006 — all long-term hunger strikers, like Abdul Rahman al-Amri — have long been contentious, and became more so in January this year when, in a compelling article in Harper’s Magazine, Scott Horton drew on eye-witness accounts by former soldiers, including Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, to paint a vivid and genuinely disturbing picture of how the alleged suicides of the three men in question — Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani — were announced shortly after a vehicle had returned from a secret prison outside the prison’s main perimeter fence, where prisoners were reportedly tortured, and how there was, according to the soldiers, an official cover-up on an alarming scale.

I’ll be returning to Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman’s story in the near future, but in the meantime I want to shift the focus onto Mohammed al-Hanashi, to mark the first anniversary of his death, to ask why questions raised at the time have not been answered, and to bring readers up to date on further questions asked in the last year by the author and journalist Naomi Wolf and the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye.

Shortly after his death, the released British resident Binyam Mohamed, who knew al-Hanashi in Guantánamo, provided an explanation of the circumstances of his death that was deeply shocking. In an article for the Miami Herald, he stated that he and al-Hanashi, who, at the time, weighed just 104 pounds (and at one point had weighed just 86 pounds), had both been on a hunger strike at the start of 2009, which had involved them being force-fed daily, strapped to restraint chairs while tubes were pushed up their noses and into their stomachs.

The man described by Binyam Mohamed was someone who stood up to the unjust regime at Guantánamo and “was always being put into segregation because of his determined insistence in pointing out the realities of what had happened to us all.” Mohamed continued:

The fact is, US authorities didn’t like him talking about words and practices they were only too familiar with: kidnap, rendition, torture, degradation, false imprisonment and injustice. But, while [al-Hanashi] opposed the policies and treatment in Guantánamo, he didn’t have problems with the guards. He was always very sociable and tried to help resolve issues between the guards and prisoners. He was patient and encouraged others to be the same. He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair.

However, as Binyam Mohamed explained, when the officer in charge of Camp 5 (a maximum-security block) sought out a volunteer “to represent the prisoners on camp issues such as hunger strikes and other contentious issues,” al-Hanashi agreed. On January 17, 2009, he was taken to meet with the Joint Task Force commander, Adm. David Thomas, and the Joint Detention Group commander, Col. Bruce Vargo, but he never returned to his cell. “[T]wo weeks later,” Mohamed wrote, “we learned that he was moved to what we called the ‘psych’ unit — the behavioral-health unit (BHU).” He added:

There has yet to be any explanation as to why he was sent there or even what was the cause of death. The BHU was built as a secure unit to prevent, among other things, potential suicide attempts. Everything that someone could use to hurt himself has been removed from the cell, and a guard watches each prisoner 24 hours a day, in person and on videotape. In light of this, I am amazed that the US government has the audacity to describe [al-Hanashi’s] death categorically as an “apparent suicide.”

Instead, Binyam Mohamed explained that he thought al-Hanashi’s death was “a murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it,” and wondered whether “he was killed by US personnel — intentionally or otherwise” or whether his long years of hunger striking “led to some type of organ failure that caused his death.”

Last August, following up on the story, the author and journalist Naomi Wolf, who had been present at Guantánamo on the day al-Hanashi died (as part of a group of journalists covering pre-trial hearings in the trial by military commission of Omar Khadr), revealed that she had been deeply troubled by his death, and the “terse announcement” by the press office of his “apparent suicide.”

Her unease heightened when, on her trip back to the States, she “happened to be seated next to a military physician who had been flown in to do the autopsy on al-Hanashi.” “When would there be an investigation of the death?” she asked, receiving the reply, “That was the investigation.” As she described it, “The military had investigated the military.” She added:

This “apparent suicide” seemed immediately suspicious to me. I had just toured those cells: it is literally impossible to kill yourself in them. Their interiors resemble the inside of a smooth plastic jar; there are no hard edges; hooks fold down; there is no bedding that one can use to strangle oneself. Can you bang your head against the wall until you die, theoretically, I asked the doctor? “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he said. You’d have to be fast.

Wolf also noted that the story “smelled even worse after a bit of digging.” After discovering that al-Hanashi had volunteered to represent the prisoners in Camp 5, she noted that this would have meant that he “knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.” She also raised doubts about whether it was possible for a prisoner to kill themselves in the psychiatric ward, asking Cortney Busch of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, who explained, as Binyam Mohamed had, that “there is video running on prisoners in the psychiatric ward at all times, and there is a guard posted there continually, too.”

Shorn of these options, Wolf noted that al-Hanashi could have been killed during the force-feeding process, reflecting on “how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate liquid overfeeding by tube, to which Guantánamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea, and deadly dehydration that can stop one’s heart.”

In an attempt to discover exactly what happened to Mohammed al-Hanashi, Wolf spent several months putting pressure on Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, the head spokesman for the Guantánamo press office, but never received a satisfactory answer, even though she pointed out that “[a]n investigation by the military of the death of its own prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions, which demand that illness, transfer, and death of prisoners be registered independently with a neutral authority (such as the ICRC), and that deaths be investigated independently.” As she explained, “If governments let no outside entity investigate the circumstances of such deaths, what will keep them from ‘disappearing’ whomever they take into custody, for whatever reason?”

In Yemen, where al-Hanashi’s body was repatriated, the government “announced only what the US had — that al-Hanashi had died from ‘asphyxiation.’” Wolf added, “When I noted to DeWalt that self-strangulation was impossible, he said he would get back to me when the inquiry — now including a Naval criminal investigation — was completed.”

Wolf never heard back from DeWalt, but in November Jeff Kaye took up the story. Although he noted that self-strangulation was “rare,” but “possible,” he had other reasons for doubting the official story. The first is that al-Hanashi, who was seized in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, survived a massacre in a fort in Mazar-e-Sharif and subsequent imprisonment in a brutal Northern Alliance jail in Sheberghan, where he would have met survivors of another massacre, involving mass asphyxiation in containers, and may, therefore, have “hear[d] tales of US Special Operations soldiers or officers involved.”

The second, which drew on my work, involves the fact that, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, the Pentagon inadvertently revealed that a false allegation made against him — regarding his presence in Afghanistan before he was even in the country — had been made by Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee,” held in secret CIA prisons for over two years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006. In every other instance, the names of the “high-value detainees” were redacted from the transcripts, but in al-Hanashi’s case, Ghailani’s name slipped through the censor’s net.

Last May, Ghailani was transferred to New York to face a federal court trial for his alleged involvement in the 1998 African embassy bombings, and, as Jeff Kaye pointed out, al-Hanashi’s “possible testimony at a trial in New York City, establishing that Ghailani’s admissions were false, and likely coerced by torture, may have been a hindrance to a government bent on convicting the supposed bomber.”

Whether it was his knowledge of massacres in Afghanistan, his eligibility as a damaging witness in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, or his knowledge of dark secrets in Guantánamo, it seems probable that, one way or another, Mohammed al-Hanashi knew too much, and what makes this suspicion even more alarming is the fact that he died just weeks after he was finally assigned a lawyer.

A review of the cases of all the alleged suicides reveals not only that all the men were long-term hunger strikers, but also that none of them had spoken to attorneys before their deaths, and that therefore any incriminating knowledge they may have had went to their graves with them. This may only be coincidental, but it is worth noting that, after the deaths in June 2006, the Pentagon initially reported that none of the three men had legal representation, but that, within days, officials were obliged to acknowledge that, in fact, two of the men did have legal representation.

In the case of the first man, Salah Ahmed al-Salami (also identified as Ali Abdullah Ahmed) it was also revealed that, at the time of his death, his lawyers had not been cleared to visit him, and in the case of the second man, Mani al-Utaybi, his lawyers had not been able to see him. Speaking at the time, his legal team complained that they had waited over nine months for the Pentagon to grant them clearance to see their client, and that, in the meantime, they had not been allowed to correspond with him at all, because of confusion over the spelling of his name. They also explained that, during a visit to Guantánamo just weeks before his death, they had been told that he wouldn’t see them, and that they had, therefore, been unable to tell him that he had been cleared for release.

This has always struck me as a particularly bleak commentary on Guantánamo — that no one told Mani al-Uyaybi that he had been cleared for release before his death — but in the bigger picture of the five unexplained deaths the most important thing is for these men not to be forgotten, and for calls to be made — loudly and regularly — for an independent inquiry into how they died.

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 January 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. Cross-posted on Campaign for Liberty, Prison Planet, Zakiraah, Truth is Contagious 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).

Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

Ever since Obama began meeting with his transition team, leaks, gossip and rumors concerning the new administration’s plans to close Guantánamo, and the hurdles they will have to surmount, have been filling the airwaves and the front pages of newspapers. In an attempt to separate fact from fiction and to provide useful information to the President-Elect, I’d like to offer my advice, based on the three years I have spent studying Guantánamo in unprecedented detail, as the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the prisoners, and as a commentator and analyst responsible for numerous articles on Guantánamo in the last 18 months.

As the President-Elect and his transition team are no doubt aware, there are three categories of prisoners at Guantánamo: around 50 prisoners cleared for release or approved for transfer after multiple military reviews; up to 80 prisoners regarded as eligible for trial by Military Commission (the system of “terror trials” conceived in the Office of the Vice President in November 2001); and another 125 prisoners who have long been regarded as “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute.”

However, before looking in detail at what should be done with each of these groups of prisoners, it’s important to understand how the administration came to hold prisoners without charge or trial for nearly seven years, and how it came to put some of them forward for trial in a novel and untested system for “terror suspects,” and to examine the dangerously flawed manner in which the prisoners were seized, held, interrogated and appraised as a threat to the United States.

9/11: an excuse for unfettered executive power

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the nation’s response was mainly driven forward by Vice President Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their close advisors (including, in particular, Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington). According to the “new paradigm” dreamt up by these men, prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” were regarded neither as criminals nor as Enemy Prisoners of War protected by the Geneva Conventions, but as “illegal enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. The primary justification for this was a military order drafted by Cheney and Addington in November 2001, which also created the Military Commissions. Approved with virtually no oversight whatsoever, the military order was followed by a number of secret legal opinions, which attempted to redefine torture, and approved the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the administration’s chosen euphemism for torture) by both the CIA and the military in general.

This was repugnant enough, but what was even more disturbing was the theory that underpinned these innovations. The military order and the secret memos — and the “signing statements” that the President attached to a record number of laws passed by Congress, as recommended by Addington — served as a baleful example of the administration’s quest for unfettered executive power, based on “unitary executive theory.”

Embraced by Cheney and Rumsfeld during their formative years in Richard Nixon’s White House, and also by Addington (left), who teamed up with Cheney to protect Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, the theory contends that, when he wishes, the President is entitled to act unilaterally, without interference from Congress or the judiciary. It is, of course, in direct contravention of the separation of powers on which the United States was founded, and critics have long insisted that it is nothing less than an attempt by the executive to seize the dictatorial powers that the Constitution was designed to prevent.

The “War on Terror” provided the supporters of “unitary executive theory” with an unprecedented opportunity to act without any oversight whatsoever, but what made it even more shocking in its execution was that it effectively allowed no questions to be asked about whether or not the administration’s policies were misguided, overzealous, or just plain wrong.

Buying prisoners for bounties and shredding the Geneva Conventions

Sticking to a mantra that whatever the President chose to do was a justifiable expression of his role as the Commander-in-Chief during wartime, the administration was unconcerned that, when it began collecting prisoners during the invasion of Afghanistan, many of those held as “enemy combatants” were seized not by US forces, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who were encouraged by bounty payments, averaging $5000 a head, that were offered for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.”

In his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, President Musharraf of Pakistan bragged that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (who were mostly transferred to Guantánamo), “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.” When researchers at the Seton Hall Law School analyzed 517 Unclassified Summaries of Evidence for the prisoners (documents laying out the Pentagon’s case for holding them as “enemy combatants”), they discovered (PDF) that 86 percent were seized not by US forces but by their allies, which indicated that the probability of innocent men (or Taliban foot soldiers with no knowledge of al-Qaeda) being passed off as serious “terror suspects” was enormous.

Just as disturbing is the realization that, once they were in US custody in the prisons at Kandahar airport and Bagram airbase, the majority of the prisoners who ended up in Guantánamo were never even screened to determine whether they should have been held in the first place. A senior interrogator at Kandahar and Bagram, who wrote a book about his experiences (The Interrogators) under the pseudonym Chris Mackey, stated explicitly that, under orders handed down from senior figures in the US military and the intelligence agencies, who were sent the prisoner lists from Afghanistan, all “non-Afghan Taliban/foreign fighters” were to be sent to Guantánamo. As Mackey noted, “Strictly speaking, that meant every Arab we encountered was in for a long-term stay and an eventual trip to Cuba.”

The same was true of the majority of the 220 or so Afghans who were also transferred to Guantánamo. Although Mackey made it clear that only Afghans with “considerable intelligence value” were supposed to be sent to Guantánamo, it was not until June 2002, when around 600 prisoners in total had already been transferred, that those in charge on the ground in Afghanistan came up with a category of temporary prisoner, who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number that entered the system overseen by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. It was, he explained, the only way that they could deal with at least some of the many innocent Afghans who ended up in their custody. Even this, however, failed to stem the flow of wrongly detained Afghans who continued to be sent to Guantánamo until the industrial-scale rendition of prisoners ended in August 2003.

This whole process was in marked contrast to the Article 5 battlefield tribunals, enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, which had taken place in all other US wars since the Second World War. Held close to the time and place of capture, these enabled the military to separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the chaos of war by allowing prisoners to present their case to a military review board, and to call witnesses. During the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and in nearly three-quarters of them the prisoners were found to be innocent and were subsequently released.

Guantánamo’s deliberately flawed tribunals

When tribunals were finally allowed, they occurred up to three years after the prisoners were seized, and took place at Guantánamo, half a world away from the place of capture. They were, moreover, introduced solely as a rebuke to the Supreme Court. In June 2004, alarmed that prisoners seized in wartime were being held without any possibility of review (even if they maintained, as many did, that they were innocent men seized by mistake), the Supreme Court delivered an unprecedented ruling, granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights — the right to challenge the basis of their detention before an impartial judge, based on an 800-year old English law that was one of the foundation stones of US law.

As a mockery of the battlefield tribunals (and of the Supreme Court’s intentions), the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) at Guantánamo prevented the prisoners from having access to lawyers, gave them no opportunity to present evidence in their defense, and prevented them from either seeing or hearing the classified evidence against them.

In addition, although they were empowered to call witnesses from outside Guantánamo, the authorities responded to every single request by claiming that they had been unable to contact them, even when, as Carlotta Gall and I reported for the New York Times in February, the witness requested by one particular prisoner (Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, an Afghan who died in Guantánamo of cancer on December 26, 2007) was Ismail Khan, a minister in Hamid Karzai’s government.

Moreover, doubts about the quality of the information that was presented as evidence by the government were spectacularly confirmed in June 2007, when Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who had worked on the tribunals, denounced them for being nothing more than a front to confirm the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” In detailed analyses of the tribunals’ failings (available here and here), Abraham explained, unambiguously, how the body set up to administer the tribunals, OARDEC (the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants), was staffed for the most part by people with no expertise of analyzing intelligence, was not empowered to seek evidence from the intelligence agencies, and was obliged, for the most part, to rely on information “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and on other information drawn from the interrogations of the prisoners themselves, in which their “confessions” about their own activities and those of other prisoners may have been — and frequently were — obtained through torture, coercion or bribery.

A hallmark of the Bush administration has been its refusal to concede that it has ever made any mistakes in the “War on Terror,” and this was also made clear during the CSRTs. Because of what one tribunal member called the “low evidentiary hurdle” for deciding that prisoners were “enemy combatants,” only 38 of the 558 prisoners held at the time were cleared for release, even though it has subsequently become apparent that many more innocent men were actually held. What makes this situation even more disturbing, however, is the knowledge that the administration insisted on reconvening tribunals on several occasions when it was not satisfied with the initial result.

This happened to Lt. Col. Abraham after he was asked to take part in a tribunal, when he and his fellow officers refused to conclude that Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan shopkeeper with an Afghan wife and a small child, was an “enemy combatant.” Abraham and his colleagues were dismissed, and a second, secret tribunal duly reversed their opinion. It also happened on other occasions, including the cases of two of Guantánamo’s 22 Uighurs (Muslims from the Xinjiang province of China, who had fled to Afghanistan to escape persecution by the Chinese government).

Forever tainted as “enemy combatants”

Moreover, as one of Lt. Col. Abraham’s colleagues noted last summer, the refusal to concede that any of the prisoners were innocent meant that, “after several detainees were found to be ‘not an enemy combatant,’ DoD took away that option and we had to start using the term ‘no longer an enemy combatant’ for those held for no apparent reason.”

By the time of the CSRT’s successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), whose stated aim was to determine whether the prisoners still constituted a threat to the United States, the authorities rapidly dispensed with the claim that prisoners were “no longer enemy combatants.” Of the 207 prisoners approved to leave Guantánamo after the first three rounds of the ARBs, only 14 were regarded as “no longer enemy combatants,” and the rest were still explicitly regarded as “enemy combatants,” who were only approved for transfer from Guantánamo — to the custody of their home country, or to a third country.

In a second article, I demonstrate the effects of this cynical semantic maneuvering on the 50 prisoners still held at Guantánamo who have been cleared for release or “approved for transfer,” but cannot be repatriated because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture. I will suggest how Barack Obama can break this deadlock, and will also examine the gulf between rhetoric and reality concerning the Military Commissions, proposals to transfer prisoners to the US mainland, and what the new President should do with the prisoners considered “too dangerous to be released, but not guilty enough to prosecute.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, ZNet and AlterNet.

In the wake of various right-wing claims that the journalistic integrity of the article was in doubt, following an “Editor’s Note” issued by the Times, pointing out that I have described Guantánamo as part of “a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration to the Sept. 11 attacks,” and that I have an “outspoken position on Guantánamo” and “a point of view,” I thought it might be prudent to relate a little of the background to the story, explaining its genesis, and directing readers to other sources to help verify the story reported by Carlotta and myself.

The story of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati had intrigued me while I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, primarily because he had called Ismail Khan — who was exceedingly well known as the governor of the western Afghan province of Herat — as a witness in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo. These tribunals were established to review the detainees’ status as “enemy combatants,” and were apparently empowered to call outside witnesses requested by the detainees, although as Carlotta and I reported, based on my research, on statements made last year by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who had served on the tribunals, and on a report compiled by the Seton Hall Law School (PDF), no outside witnesses had ever been called to appear at a tribunal.

Ismail Khan in 2004.

In Chapter 18 of The Guantánamo Files, I looked specifically at the US authorities’ stated inability to locate witnesses requested by the detainees to appear at their tribunals to clear their names. Because Ismail Khan was so famous, I mentioned the request made by a truck driver named Abdul Razzak, who claimed that he had freed Khan from a Taliban jail in 1999, but had no time to research his story further.

Instead, after also mentioning a few more of the many Afghan detainees who beseeched the authorities to establish contact with officials in Afghanistan who could apparently vouch for them, I focused on the case of Abdullah Mujahid. He had been cleared for release at the time I was writing the book, and was finally released from Guantánamo — only to end up being held without charge or trial in a US-run wing of Kabul’s Pol-i-Charki prison — in December 2007.

In Guantánamo, Mujahid persistently maintained that he had been working for the government of Hamid Karzai, and the authorities’ alleged inability to find witnesses requested by him was demonstrated as a sham in June 2006, when, in the space of 72 hours, the journalist Declan Walsh located three witnesses whom the authorities claimed to have been unable to contact: one was working in Washington DC, another was working for the Karzai government in Kabul, and the third was working for the provincial government in Gardez. All three were able to verify his story.

When I read that Abdul Razzak had died of colorectal cancer in Guantánamo on December 30, I was determined to see if I could find out anything more about his story, and Googled various variations of his name, and the events he had referred to, until finally, “ismail khan taliban jailbreak 1999” led me to Dissension Within Taliban Made Daring Escape From Prison Possible, a New York Times article by Carlotta Gall, from January 2002, which matched the account of the jailbreak described by Abdul Razzak in many ways.

Carlotta Gall interviewed the engineer of the prison escape, 21-year old Hekmatullah Hekmati, who, as she described him, “was only a teenage Taliban intelligence officer, barely old enough to grow a beard, when he decided to help Ismail Khan.” According to Hekmati’s account, he had become “disillusioned by the Taliban, whom he saw as power hungry opportunists presenting themselves as religious students, and bad leaders, who were waging a brutal, ethnically motivated war against their countrymen.” He decided that Khan, imprisoned, with 14 others, in the Kandahar prison that held the Taliban’s most senior political and military prisoners, might provide a good alternative, having established himself as a “decent administrator” during his tenure as Herat’s pre-Taliban governor. “I thought he would work more for his country, if he were freed,” he told Carlotta Gall.

Having secured a job as an intelligence officer at the prison, through a relative, Hekmati said that he then set about persuading Khan that he was trustworthy. Speaking to Carlotta Gall, Ismail Khan said, ”We spoke to Hekmatullah for about a year about the escape. Since he was such a powerful Talib he could easily come to my cell and speak to me. I could not believe he could do it and that I could trust him.” To prove that his intentions were sincere, Khan added that he told Hekmati that, “if he wanted to go ahead with the plan he should move his mother and brothers and sisters to Iran for safety,” and that when he did so he knew that the plan was real.

While Ismail Khan’s son, Mirwais, and several of his cousins organized the escape, Hekmati acted as a go-between, delivering a letter to Khan outlining the plans. In response, Khan said, he “pledged to provide the young man with a lifetime sinecure and arranged for a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser to be sent to Kandahar for the escape.” After discussing plans to free all 15 prisoners, the escape team settled on just three men — Khan, Haji Abdul Zahir, a commander from a famous Afghan family, and his cellmate from Jalalabad, General Qassim — and on the night of March 2, 1999, while the other guards slept, Hekmatullah Hekmati opened their cells and led them to a Land Cruiser parked outside, which had been adorned with the white flag of the Taliban.

After changing into the “black turbans and flowing robes that were the signature dress of the Taliban,” the escape party drove off, passing through checkpoints with ease. They later got lost in the desert, and hit an anti-tank mine, which destroyed the vehicle and left both Ismail Khan and Hekmatullah Hekmati with “broken legs and open wounds,” but Hekmati’s father, who had been driving the Land Cruiser, then “set off for help and after a four-hour walk north reached the front lines of Ismail Khan’s own troops, who arranged a rescue.”

Although Carlotta Gall did not mention Abdul Razzak by name, it seemed probable to me that he was actually Hekmati’s father, named as Abdul Raza Hekmati, who drove the escape vehicle and arranged for the rescue of Ismail Khan and his own son after the Land Cruiser hit the anti-tank mine. The elder Hekmati evidently shared his son’s disgust with the direction the Taliban was taking. As Hekmatullah came up with his plans, Carlotta Gall noted, “The only other person he told was his father, who did not try to stop him but advised him to take it very slowly and carefully.”

In the various accounts that he gave in Guantánamo, Abdul Razzak credited himself with the motivation to free Ismail Khan, which his son claimed was his own idea, but in other crucial respects the story of the escape, as described by Hekmatullah Hekmati, matched Abdul Razzak’s account exactly, not only in his various descriptions of himself as the driver of the escape vehicle, but also in his description of the incident with the anti-tank mine. Explaining his role in the escape, Abdul Razzak said, “It was at night time. I brought [the] Land Cruiser … and I was waiting in a dark place. My son did it, because he was in the intelligence and he was entrusted by the Taliban. He took all three of them out and put them in the car… and then we escaped.” The following exchange from one of his military review boards is his take on the incident with the anti-tank mine:

Board Member: What happened to the Land Cruiser he purchased?
Detainee (through translator): Hit a mine and my son’s foot was amputated and my hand was broken. It was destroyed.

After discovering this story, I contacted Carlotta Gall, who remembered that a friend of Hekmatullah’s had told her that his father had been arrested and sent to Guantánamo, and that she had spoken about it to Haji Zahir, who was outraged and said that he would talk to the Americans about it. With the truth established that Abdul Razzak was indeed Hekmatullah Hekmati’s father, the story then took shape.

I provided Carlotta with information from his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) and his Administrative Review Boards (ARB) at Guantánamo, from the statements of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, and from the report by the Seton Hall Law School, and Carlotta tied the whole thing together, talking to key figures and securing poignant quotes from representatives of the US and Afghan governments, and from those who knew Mr. Hekmati.

I was particularly impressed with the comments made by Haji Zahir, who explained, “What he did was very important for all Afghan people who were against the Taliban,” adding, “He was not a man to take to Guantánamo. He was a man to give a house to and support.” Haji Zahir was even more significant than the final version of the article indicated. His father, Haji Abdul Qadir, not only served as vice-president for six months in Hamid Karzai’s first government, but was assassinated in July 2002, and his uncle was Abdul Haq, a celebrated anti-Taliban commander who was killed by the Taliban in October 2001. Ironically, the void left by the death of Abdul Haq, who was described in an obituary in the Guardian as “one of the few homegrown political figures who could have restored unity to his benighted and wartorn country” raised the profile of another anti-Taliban Pashtun who had, until that point, struggled to establish himself in the south of the country. That man was none other than Hamid Karzai.

Haji Zahir (center) gives instructions to his frontline soldiers during the Tora Bora campaign in November 2001. Photo by Majeed Babar.

This was not Haji Zahir’s only claim to fame. During the largely disastrous Tora Bora campaign in late November and early December 2001, when Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and many other senior figures in al-Qaeda and the Taliban escaped unscathed into Pakistan’s largely autonomous border provinces — leaving numerous foot soldiers and fleeing civilians to be captured and sent to Guantánamo — Zahir was widely regarded as the only trustworthy commander out of the three Afghan commanders chosen to lead the US Special Forces’ proxy Afghan armies in the battle against bin Laden’s men.

The other two commanders — the thuggish Hazrat Ali and the urbane smuggler Haji Zaman Ghamsharik — are discussed in Chapter 4 of my book. Haji Zahir never made the final cut, but I noted in my first draft that he, and the 600 men he brought with him, were to prove themselves able fighters in the battle for Tora Bora, and I also quoted some perceptive comments that he made after the operation, when he explained to John F. Burns of the New York Times that he had pleaded with the Americans to block the trails to Pakistan. “The Americans would not listen,” he said, “even when I told them that one word with me was worth more than $1 million of their high technology. Their attitude was, ‘We must kill the enemy, but we must remain absolutely safe.’ This is crazy.”

I think Haji Zahir’s significance — added to that of Ismail Khan — reinforces the importance of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati’s role in striking a major blow against the Taliban, and I believe that it should make his lonely death, after being falsely imprisoned for five years by an administration that was blithely and cruelly unconcerned with establishing whether or not he had been captured by mistake, count for something more productive than a belated and much-needed epitaph. This epitaph is clearly important for an innocent man who, even in death, had his name blackened by the people who had wrongly imprisoned him in the first place, and who let him die without having had an opportunity to clear his name, but what his story reveals about the many failures of Guantánamo should also resonate in the halls of power in Washington.

To this end I was pleased to note that, in an article in the Washington Independent on February 10, Aziz Huq of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law cited Mr. Hekmati’s case as part of an argument aimed at the Supreme Court, which is currently deciding whether or not the Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. In the article, Aziz Huq asked the highest court in the land “to decide whether the role of the courts is to bless the errors and abuses of the executive — or whether it is the role of the courts, as a co-equal branch, to check error and reject lies.”

Discussing the failures of the current limited review of cases allowed by 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act, Aziz Huq wrote, “There are many reasons why the government might be resisting fuller review. It could be that the government, as a matter of principle, believes it should have the power to lock-up indefinitely anyone it deems is a terrorist-combatant. It could be that it has tortured the detainees to get information. It could be that it would rather let a man die of cancer in Guantánamo than follow its own leads to prove his actual innocence — that he had, in fact, fought against the Taliban.”

For further information on Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, I recommend the transcripts of his CSRT (PDF, pp. 55-9), his first round ARB (PDF, pp. 272-85) and his second round ARB (PDF, pp. 37-51), which reveal even more of his story, to counter the administration’s claims, after his death, that he was “assessed to be an experienced jihadist with command responsibilities,” and that he was also “assessed to have had multiple links to anti-coalition forces.”

Additional claims, not mentioned in the article, which were introduced in his ARBs — and which almost certainly came from dubious “confessions” made by other detainees — were that he was paid to smuggle 50 Arab family members out of Afghanistan and into Iran, that he was “knowledgeable of an assassination plot against President Karzai the day before it occurred,” and, most bizarrely of all, that he told another detainee that “there were still suicide pilots in the United States who could carry out their missions.” A final allegation referred to his conduct in Guantánamo, where, it was claimed, he was “currently instructing others on how to resist interrogation tactics.”

As mentioned in the Times article, he refuted all the allegations against him, but his reason for denying the claim about his behavior in Guantánamo revealed explicitly how allegations in the prison have often arisen through conflict between the detainees. He explained that this particular false allegation arose because a Tajik detainee, who had lived in an adjacent cell for a month, had “started fighting” with him and had falsely accused him.

Also not mentioned in the article was a specific and rather telling comment about the Taliban’s connections with Pakistan. After explaining that he was driven to take part in the jailbreak because of his opposition to the Taliban’s “ruthlessness and injustice,” he stated his belief that, when Ismail Khan was governor, “the whole area was peaceful and all the money coming through the province was safe,” whereas the Taliban “were disbursing money to Pakistan and just wasting money.”

He also included additional information about the time that he spent in exile in Iran after the jailbreak (before returning to Afghanistan to be handed over to unquestioning US forces by a personal enemy), when the Taliban offered a substantial reward for his capture. He explained that, because he was protected by Burhanuddin Rabbani’s governing council (the official anti-Taliban government-in-exile in northern Afghanistan, which was recognized as legitimate by most of the western world, including the United States), he fled to Iran with his family, where he was provided with a house and financial support, and where, in addition, his neighbor was Ismail Khan. “They gave me the house he (Khan) used to live in, and Khan took another house,” he explained. “We had a family relationship. They invited us to their house and we invited them to our home. We would eat food and then they would go back home.”

The final word on this shameful story — for now, at least — must go to the Guantánamo spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, who admitted that he “did not know” if Mr. Hekmati “was allowed any final contact” with his family before he died. This seems extremely unlikely, as Mr. Hekmati himself explained, in the last of his fruitless military reviews in 2006, that after nearly four years in US custody he had not received a single letter from his family, and did not even know where they were.

So much for justice.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch and Antiwar.com.

A double standard on reporters who express opinions?
Letter to NY Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt

2/12/08

On February 12, FAIR sent a letter to the New York Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt regarding a recent editors’ note that suggested that the newspaper has double standards for reporters who publicly express opinions. The letter is below. We encourage others who have concerns to also contact Hoyt, at: public@nytimes.com.

***
Dear Clark Hoyt,

The New York Times recently published an unusual editor’s note about the February 4 front-page article, “Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S.”

The note concerned Andy Worthington, one of the two journalists identified in the article’s byline:

Mr. Worthington has written a book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, in which he takes the position that Guantánamo is part of what he describes as a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration to the September 11 attacks. He has also expressed strong criticism of Guantánamo in articles published elsewhere.

The editors were not aware of Mr. Worthington’s outspoken position on Guantánamo. They should have described his contribution to the reporting instead of listing him as co-author, and noted that he had a point of view.

There is no indication that Worthington’s reporting was flawed in any way. What the paper is saying is that Worthington’s critical view of Guantánamo disqualifies him from having a byline on a Times article on the subject, and must be noted whenever he contributes to such a story.

Is this rule applied to all Times reporters covering any subject? It would seem not. The Times’ response to its chief military correspondent Michael Gordon expressing a point of view on national TV on the very topic he covers as a reporter provides an instructive comparison.

On the Charlie Rose show (1/8/07), the host asked Gordon if he believed “victory is within our grasp.” Gordon responded by endorsing the White House’s call for a “troop surge”:

“So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it’s worth it [sic] one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we’ve never really tried to win. We’ve simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it’s done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.”

The Times’ public editor at the time, Byron Calame, wrote (1/28/07) that he “raised reader concerns about Mr. Gordon’s voicing of personal opinions with top editors.” The Washington bureau chief assured Calame that Gordon’s remarks were merely “a poorly worded shorthand for some analytical points about the military and political situation in Baghdad that Michael has made in the newspaper in a more nuanced and un-opinionated way.” Gordon continued to write about the “surge” for the Times, with no mention made of the fact that he had publicly voiced support for the military strategy.

Of course, Gordon is a Times staffer, while Worthington is a freelancer. But it’s unclear why you would want more stringent rules for opinions expressed by occasional freelancers as opposed to staffers who write regularly for your publication.

Another perhaps more relevant difference between the two cases is that Gordon’s opinion was strongly supportive of the White House, while Worthington had been critical. Was this a factor in the Times decision-making? Was the editor’s note prompted by Bush administration complaints?

The Times’ response regarding the Guantánamo article stands in sharp contrast to its inaction regarding a complaint brought by FAIR about another recent Times article, a front-page piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg (1/28/08) that claimed that George W. Bush “has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents.” This assertion has no basis in fact (see FAIR’s Action Alert, 1/28/08), yet the Times had no response to FAIR’s request for a correction. When the paper moves swiftly to distance itself from an article with no apparent factual problems, one can’t help but wonder about the paper’s journalistic priorities.

We look forward to your response.

Isabel Macdonald
Communications Director
FAIR

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

I shall only reproduce one paragraph of the article here, which I believe defends my right to adopt an “outspoken position on Guantánamo.” Scott describes as “preposterous … the suggestion that there is something ‘outspoken’ in calling to close Guantánamo and labeling the facility what it is. The posture adopted in Worthington’s book is indeed very radical. Among the radicals who have embraced it are the American Bar Association, Pope Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama, Chancellor Angela Merkel, the English Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, and hundreds of other political and spiritual leaders around the world.”

You’ll have to visit Harper’s to discover the rest.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

“A front-page article on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008 described the problems of the tribunals at the American military base in Guantánamo, as seen through the failure to resolve the case of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, an Afghan war hero who died there Dec. 30 after a five-year-long detention. The article quoted several Afghan officials who said they were prepared to offer evidence that he was falsely accused, but were never given a chance to do so.

”Andy Worthington, a freelance journalist who worked on the article under contract with The New York Times and was listed as its co-author, did some of the initial reporting but was not involved in all of it, and The Times verified the information he provided. That included the fact of Mr. Hekmati’s death, and the content of transcripts released by the Pentagon showing that the accusations against Mr. Hekmati had been made by unidentified sources and that the tribunal at Guantánamo had never called outside witnesses requested by detainees.

”Mr. Worthington has written a book, “The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison,” in which he takes the position that Guantánamo is part of what he describes as a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration to the Sept. 11 attacks. He has also expressed strong criticism of Guantánamo in articles published elsewhere.

”The editors were not aware of Mr. Worthington’s outspoken position on Guantánamo. They should have described his contribution to the reporting instead of listing him as co-author, and noted that he had a point of view.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Described on his death as “an experienced jihadist with command responsibilities,” who “was assessed to have had multiple links to anti-coalition forces,” Mr. Hekmati had persistently presented a different story in his military tribunals and review boards at Guantánamo.

I had come across Mr. Hekmati’s story during my research for The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, and was delighted to work with Carlotta on this significant story. Please visit the New York Times website for the article.

Note: For commentary on the Hekmati story, please see the following articles by Scott Horton at Harper’s, Daniel Politi at Slate, and Chris Floyd at Atlantic Free Press and CounterPunch.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.