In the declaration, Col. Wilkerson, who served in the US military for 31 years and was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from August 2002 until January 2005, stated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all knew — and didn’t care — that “the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent.”

Last March, Col. Wilkerson wrote a guest column for The Washington Note, “Some Truths About Guantánamo Bay,” in which he first laid out some of his major complaints about the failures of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror.” In his column, Col. Wilkerson decried “the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US operations there,” and explained, “Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”

Col. Wilkerson also wrote that:

[S]everal in the US leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released. But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers.

Furthermore, Col. Wilkerson wrote:

[I]t has never come to my attention in any persuasive way — from classified information or otherwise — that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement. This is perhaps the most astounding truth of all, carefully masked by men such as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney in their loud rhetoric — continuing even now in the case of Cheney — about future attacks thwarted, resurgent terrorists, the indisputable need for torture and harsh interrogation and for secret prisons and places such as GITMO.

Col. Wilkerson’s attacks on the Bush administration’s incompetence reflected what I and other researchers had discovered, and as a result, I felt emboldened to approach him, to ask if he would agree to an interview. I was delighted when he accepted, and the resulting two-part interview was published by the Future of Freedom Foundation last August and September.

In it, Col. Wilkerson expanded on the chaotic detention policies following the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and explained how the State Department had been left trying to deal with countries who wanted their citizens back. He conceded that they were largely kept out of the loop by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and added how, in Colin Powell’s opinion, President Bush had “no idea” of the “magnitude” of what Cheney was up to behind the scenes. He also reiterated that there was no reason for the majority of the prisoners to have been held, citing an unnamed colleague, who told him, after 742 prisoners had been transported to Guantánamo, “I’ll tell you right now that 700 of them haven’t done a damn thing except get in the way of somebody capturing them.”

Col. Wilkerson also dropped a bombshell about intelligence gathering, explaining how, “from talking to hundreds of people, literally,” he had recently become convinced that, although he had previously thought that the administration’s fear of another terrorist attack persisted throughout 2002 (in other words, when the entire torture program was being developed), “their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November [2001] as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan.”

Despite these previous attacks on the Bush administration, Col. Wilkerson’s declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad’s claim for compensation is welcome for a number of reasons. The first is because memories are chronically short in this world of endless rolling news, and many people (both journalists and the general public) may have forgotten — if they ever noticed — that Col. Wilkerson has been waging a one-man assault on the Bush administration for the last year.

The second is because he finally implicates George W. Bush in the policies largely implemented by Cheney and Rumsfeld; and the third is because the Obama administration has reached something akin to paralysis in its attempts to close Guantánamo, and the innocent men still detained there — as well as the handful of genuine terrorist suspects — deserve either freedom or a fair trial, so that the abomination that is Guantánamo can finally be closed.

A fourth reason, perhaps most damning of all, concerns the entire basis of the detention policies — to facilitate interrogations — and here Col. Wilkerson expands on his revelation, last summer, that the gathering of intelligence was subverted to justify the invasion of Iraq rather than to protect the American people from another terrorist attack.

The first point is self-evident, as is apparent from mainstream media reporters who appear not to have noticed before that, as Col. Wilkerson explained in his declaration, “many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all,” and that many were “victims of incompetent battlefield vetting.”

Col. Wilkerson also pointed out that “predominantly US forces were not the ones who were taking prisoners in the first place,” explaining that “Instead, we relied on Afghans, such as General Dostum’s forces, and upon Pakistanis, to hand over prisoners whom they had apprehended, or who had been turned over to them for bounties, sometimes as much as $5,000 a head.” As he also explained, “I recall conversations with serving military officers at the time, who told me that many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.”

Col. Wilkerson also explained that, “by late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review.”

Clearly troubled by this, he added that it also became “more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military,” and that, during his morning briefings, Colin Powell “often expressed that he was particularly troubled by the lack of a plan regarding final disposition for the detainees, especially if the idea was to keep them in indefinite detention, without trial, forever.”

Spelling out the Bush administration’s incompetence more clearly than before, Col. Wilkerson added that “At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them,” and that one particular concern was that, through releasing prisoners, “the detention efforts at Guantánamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were.”

As in his previous articles and interviews, he also made it clear that a major stumbling block to the release of prisoners was Donald Rumsfeld, who “just refused to let detainees go,” and that another was Dick Cheney, who “had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office.”

However, whereas, last summer, Col. Wilkerson had indicated to me that President Bush had little idea of the extent to which Cheney was running the government’s post-9/11 policies, in his declaration he fully implicated the President, noting that, although “it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so,” and that he “could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence” by “exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’” Powell also told him that, in his opinion, “it was not just Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

The third point — President Obama’s inability to close Guantánamo — is particularly relevant right now. This was largely outside the scope of Col. Wilkerson’s remit for the declaration, but it was depressing to realize, while reviewing his earlier pronouncements, that a year ago he had pointed out “the now prevalent supposition, recently reinforced by the new team in the White House, that closing down our prison facilities at Guantánamo Bay would take some time and development of a highly complex plan. Because of the unfortunate political realities now involved — Cheney’s recent strident and almost unparalleled remarks about the dangers of pampering terrorists, and the vulnerability of the Democrats in general on any national security issue — this may have some truth to it. But in terms of the physical and safe shutdown of the prison facilities it is nonsense.”

In light of Col. Wilkerson’s explanations about the insignificance of the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners, it is depressing indeed to realize that, one year after he wrote these comments, 183 men are still held at Guantánamo, and the government’s own Task Force has reinforced Col. Wilkerson’s fears regarding the vulnerability of the Democrats on national security issues by recommending that, although 35 men should be tried, 47 others should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Col. Wilkerson has done a great service to those of us (like myself and staff and students at the Seton Hall Law School) who have studied the prisoners’ stories in depth, and have persistently pointed out that there are no valid reasons for holding the majority of the prisoners who are still in Guantánamo. However, the fact that so little progress has been achieved in the last year — and that, in fact, the Obama administration is more clearly wracked by caution, cowardice and inertia than ever before — really should give added weight and urgency to his analysis.

Sadly, the media’s main focus — as part of the relentless spin-cycle of news I mentioned above — has been more on Col. Wilkerson’s revelations about President Bush’s knowledge of the failure of his experiment in detention and interrogation, and rather less on the lack of any rationale for holding the majority of the 183 men who still languish at Guantánamo.

Also overlooked, with implications that are no less grave, are Col. Wilkerson’s ongoing revelations about how the entire process of interrogation, which led to the widespread use of torture, was not to protect America from another terrorist attack, but was, instead, designed to extract information that would justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. This was a bombshell when Col. Wilkerson revealed it to me last summer, and it remains no less shocking now. As he explained in his declaration:

For the Vice President, Secretary Rumsfeld and others, the primary issue was to gain more intelligence as quickly as possible, both on al-Qaeda and its current and future plans but increasingly also, in 2002-2003, on contacts between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s intelligence and secret police in Iraq. Their view was that innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years … was deemed acceptable if led to a more complete and satisfactory intelligence picture with regard to Iraq, thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country.

In his closing comments, Col. Wilkerson noted, “I have made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served in an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred.”

In doing so, I hope that Col. Wilkerson’s statements not only lead to pressure for the release of the majority of the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo, but also contribute to calls for those who authorized the torture and abuse to be held accountable for their actions. These are calls which, in law-abiding circles, have increased since the recent whitewash of a report recommending disciplinary action for John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the authors of the “torture memos,” which purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA — and which then migrated to the military.

For Col. Wilkerson, who remains “extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes,” the need for accountability has a particularly personal meaning, but for the rest of us, it should be no less important that torture was used to justify an illegal war, that it infected the US military, that those who authorized it remain free to continue spreading their poisonous lies (in Dick Cheney’s case, at least), and that men continue to languish in Guantánamo as a result of it — and also as a result of the Obama administration’s unwillingness, or refusal to confront the very facts that Col. Wilkerson has disclosed.

(‘’)

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record and Uruknet.

Adel Hassan Hamad and Salim Muhood Adem, after their release. They are standing in front of posters showing some of the other Sudanese detainees still held in Guantánamo. Photo © Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla, Reuters.

“We have asked for compensation and an apology,” aid worker Adel Hassan Hamad told the conference, adding that his American lawyers would seek compensation in the US courts, and that two other former detainees were also seeking compensation. Released in December, Mr. Hamad, whose story was explained at length here, wore orange overalls to identify his sympathy with those still held in Guantánamo. Unknown to me, until this article was published, was the distressing news that one of his daughters had died during his imprisonment because his wife could not afford medical treatment.

As reported by Reuters, many of those attending the conference “broke down in tears” when addressed by Aygol Ismailova, the Azerbaijani wife of Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, whose story was reported here –- accompanied by his latest letter from Guantánamo. Mr. al-Haj has been on hunger strike for nearly 400 days, and, like all the other hunger strikers in Guantánamo, is force-fed twice a day in a manner that, as described by his lawyer, is “tantamount to torture.”

His wife, as Reuters explained, “wept as she told the gathering how [her husband] has been urinating blood and [is] suffering from other health problems.” She added, “His son Mohamed always asks me, ‘Where is my father? Who took him? What is prison? What do they do there?’ And I don’t know how to answer him. Do people know that I have no way to contact my husband other than letters that reach him late and are censored? For more than six years I’ve not heard his voice, not seen him. This is torture.”

She also said that all the Guantánamo detainees deserved compensation and an apology, and, in the only upbeat moment of the whole speech, noted that Sudanese government officials had told her that they hoped that her husband would be released by the end of March.

Adel Hamad and another former Guantánamo detainee set up mock prison cells in the conference hall to demonstrate the cramped conditions in which they were held. Repeating claims familiar from other released detainees, Mr. Hamad explained, “Often they’d leave prisoners tied up in very, very cold rooms and refuse to allow them to go to the bathroom so they’d wet themselves.” Speaking of his imprisonment in Afghanistan, before he was transferred to Guantánamo, he added, “I was beaten, made to stand for long periods of time, deprived of sleep for three nights.”

13 Sudanese detainees have been held at Guantánamo. Two were released in April 2004, one in July 2005, and another two –- Adel Hamad and Salim Adem, another aid worker –- in December 2007. None of the seven men who remain –- including Sami al-Haj –- has been cleared for release, but it is to be hoped that some, at least, will be released during the course of this year. As Mr. Hamad’s lawyers have explained, both their client and Mr. Adem had been cleared for release in November 2005, but remained at Guantánamo for another two years because of inexplicable stonewalling on the part of the US State Department.

With this obstacle now, hopefully, overcome, it is clearly time for some of the other Sudanese detainees to be repatriated. Only one of the seven –- Ibrahim al-Qosi –- has ever been formally charged. Regarded as a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, al-Qosi was put forward for trial by Military Commission in July 2003. The charges were dropped when the Commissions were judged to be illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, but Congress reestablished the Commissions in the Military Commissions Act in autumn 2006, and it is expected that the charges against al-Qosi will be reinstated.

For more on the Sudanese detainees in Guantánamo, see my book 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.

Adel Hassan Hamad and Salim Muhood Adem, after their release. Photo © Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla, Reuters.

After arriving at Khartoum airport, they were presented with traditional Sudanese clothes by intelligence officers, who took them to a hospital for a short medical examination before returning them to their families and friends. As a noisy celebration got underway, Adel Hamad spoke by phone to his American lawyers, Steve Wax and William Teesdale of the Federal Public Defender’s office in Oregon. “I thank God almighty and express my gratefulness to you,” he said. “I can finally see the light after the darkness.”

If the administration was hoping to lie low for a while, and weather the recent torrent of criticism over its post-9/11 detention policies –- in the Supreme Court, in connection with the destruction of CIA videotapes chronicling the torture of detainees, and through its generally inept attempts to pursue war crimes trials at Guantánamo itself –- the release of these men will provide no comfort whatsoever, as their stories highlight some of the most egregious flaws in the whole of Guantánamo’s sordid history.

Adel Hamad, who is now 49 years old, had been living in Pakistan and working for charity organizations for 17 years. Captured at his home in July 2002, after returning from a holiday in Sudan with his wife and four children, he refuted an allegation that he had any kind of connection to al-Qaeda, telling his tribunal in Guantánamo, “I hate them and I pray to God not to let people among the Muslims carry [out] their ideas.” He also pointed out, “If I was a member in al-Qaeda or if I had an association with them I would’ve not travelled in June 2002 to Sudan with my family on an annual vacation and after the vacation ended I voluntarily returned to Pakistan. If I was a criminal, with association to those criminals, why would I return to Pakistan knowing that Pakistani intelligence was arresting al-Qaeda members?”

His description of his arrest seems particularly shocking, but was actually fairly typical of the dozens of arrests in Pakistan at the time, which were mostly based on dubious or non-existent “intelligence.” “I was arrested in my house at 1.30 at night when I woke up and found myself in front of policemen from the Pakistani Intelligence pointing their weapons in my face like I was in a dream or a disturbing nightmare,” he told his tribunal. “They were screaming at me, ‘don’t move!’ So I told them, ‘what is it, what do you want from me?’ And with them was a tall man who did not look Pakistani, which I think he was American. So they handcuffed me and they told me ‘where are your papers?’ (meaning my passport). So I told them, ‘in my shirt pocket.’ So the tall man checked my passport and he told me that I came back early from my trip. I told him yes. He spoke in poor Arabic. He saw a legal official Pakistani permit by the date that was in my passport, which had a legal official authorization posted for two years. So the guard hesitated at the end and asked the tall man, ‘do we take him?’ And the man said, ‘yes, take him.’ So they took me and detained me in jail in Pakistan for six months and ten days. Later I was moved to Bagram and then to Cuba.”

Over the last year or so, Adel Hamad has become one of Guantánamo’s celebrities, thanks to the efforts of his enterprising lawyers, who traveled to Pakistan to interview his former colleagues and to Sudan to interview his family, producing a film which publicized his plight to a huge audience on YouTube, and which, in turn, led to the establishment of a campaigning website that drew support from thousands of people, including the actor Martin Sheen.

What makes Hamad’s story particularly striking, however, beyond his unquestioned innocence, is what happened after his tribunal in Guantánamo three years ago. The tribunals, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), were established in the wake of a momentous Supreme Court decision in June 2004 that, contrary to the administration’s assertions to that date, the detainees had habeas corpus rights; in other words, that they had the right to challenge the basis of their detention in a court of law. Rather than delivering them to the US courts, however, the administration established the CSRTs to review the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants” without rights, who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. Emphasizing its disdain for the rule of law, the government prevented the detainees from having legal representation, and, moreover, relied on secret evidence that was withheld from them.

The tribunals, which duly found that all but 38 of the 558 detainees at the time had indeed been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” came under fire this June from Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of military intelligence who had taken part in compiling the “evidence” for the tribunals, and who condemned them as a sham, reliant upon vague, unsubstantiated and generic evidence, and designed merely to approve the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

While Lt. Col. Abraham’s comments are credited with prompting the Supreme Court to review the detainees’ rights once more (in a hearing that took place last week, as reported here and here), Adel Hamad’s tribunal had already provided the first vivid demonstration of the injustice of the whole process back in August 2006, when Farah Stockman of the Boston Globe reported that, in his CSRT, Hamad had been judged to be an “enemy combatant” because of exactly the kind of generic allegations that were later condemned by Lt. Col. Abraham.

Hamad maintained that the Saudi charity he worked for, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), was “a charity organization that works to help the Afghan refugees providing them with food, medicine, clothes and education, building charter schools which is made of an orphanage, educational training, and also works in the health department by establishing hospitals, small clinics, and also digging water wells, [and] building water wells.” The US authorities, however, described it as an organization that “supports terrorist ideals and causes,” even though it has never appeared on a terrorism watchlist (despite being investigated by the US Senate), and was one of the favored projects of the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz.

Another organization that Hamad had worked for previously, the Kuwait-based Lajanat Dawa Islamiya (LDI), which also does not feature on any US terrorism watchlist, was described as “one of the most active” Islamic NGOs “providing logistical and financial support” to mujahideen operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which “may be” associated with Osama bin Laden.

In his tribunal, a clearly exasperated Hamad refuted all the allegations, at one point exclaiming, “arresting employees like myself [who] is not capable of supporting terrorists financially, is this justice? I am an employee who works for a living and I have no connection to the [organization’s] political views or its financial resources, so why do you punish me for a crime I did not commit. Why don’t you arrest the charities’ presidents or the people who support [them] financially instead of arresting a simple employee with no informational value?”

Adel Hamad with two of his four children in Pakistan, before his capture.

Predictably, his tribunal judged that he had been correctly designated an “enemy combatant,” but although his pleas appeared to have been ignored, Stockman, who was allowed to examine the CSRT documentation, noted that one of the tribunal members –- an unidentified army major –- had issued a dissenting opinion. Taking into account the fact that neither WAMY nor LDI appears on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, the major argued that, “even assuming all the allegations … are accurate, the detainee does not meet the definition of enemy combatant.” He added, “These NGOs presumably have numerous employees and volunteer workers who have been working in legitimate humanitarian roles. The mere fact that some elements of these NGOs provide support to ‘terrorist ideals and causes’ is insufficient to declare one of the employees an enemy combatant.”

Stockman noted, however, that the major was overruled by his colleagues, one of whom –- in a single line that discredits the whole tribunal process as effectively as Lt. Col. Abraham’s later declaration –- wrote that the case “passed the ‘low evidentiary hurdle’ set up by the rules of the hearings.”

Two months ago, the major, who took part in 49 of the 558 CSRT hearings, publicly added his complaints to those recorded by Lt. Col. Abraham, telling William Teesdale, “Much of the material presented was supplied by intelligence agencies and were summaries that were not necessarily justified by the underlying evidence.” The major specifically mentioned his dissent in Adel Hamad’s CSRT, and also spoke about the deliberate exclusion of exculpatory evidence, the reconvening of CSRTs when an unfavorable result was produced, and the pressure exerted on the tribunals from higher up the command structure.

The case of Salim Muhood Adem, who is also 49 years sold, is, in its own way, just as damning as that of Adel Hamad. A Pakistani resident, who had first traveled to Pakistan in 1991 when he “performed official lawful work for schools,” he told his tribunal that he had been employed by the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwaiti NGO, since 1994, and pointed out that he had mentioned to the interrogators what type of work he did –- traveling from one school to another to check on education before being transferred to “the Orphanage Office of Administration” –- and that it “wasn’t a crime.”

Responding to an allegation that the organization was “suspected of supporting extremist activity, and some employees are suspected of supporting terrorism,” he said, “I have only known the Islamic organization to be associated with humanitarian efforts, never terrorism.” He acknowledged traveling to Afghanistan in 1998, explaining that he went “to supervise the administration of Orphanage Schools” in Kunar province and Jalalabad, and was perplexed by an allegation that his residence was “identified as a suspected al-Qaeda residence and raided.” He said that he rented the house from a Pakistani woman, and added, “everything I did regarding the house was legal.” Crucially, he explained that when he was arrested “the officer that arrested us said he was giving us to the American forces to avoid problems and keep our country safe.”

When asked if there were other people with him when he was arrested, Adem replied that it was only himself, his wife and their two small children, and when asked, “Were your children arrested also?” he said, “I don’t know … They knocked on the door and I went downstairs to open it. I was then arrested … Some of them entered my house by jumping off the roofs of neighbouring houses and some came through the front door. When they came in I asked them to please not scare my family. I opened the doors in the house one by one to show them what was inside each room. They handcuffed and blindfolded me and then took me away.”

Unlike WAMY and LDI, the RIHS was actually blacklisted by the US Treasury in January 2002, apparently because some of its personnel, including the director of its Pakistani office, Abdul Muhsin al-Libi, “defrauded well-meaning contributors by diverting money donated for widows and orphans to al-Qaeda terrorists,” and “padded the number of orphans it claimed to care for by providing names of orphans that did not exist or who had died. Funds then sent for the purpose of caring for the non-existent or dead orphans were instead diverted to al-Qaeda terrorists.”

However, neither al-Libi nor another named suspect, Abu Bakr al-Jaziri, both of whom also apparently held senior positions in the Afghan Support Committee, which was identified as having been established by Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, were captured by the Americans. Instead, Adem and four of the charity’s other workers were seized, even though there was no evidence that any of the men knew anything about the terrorist funding. What’s particularly shocking about Adem’s situation is that, although the other four men –- one Jordanian and another three Sudanese, including the charity’s accountant in 2001 –- were released between November 2003 and July 2005, Adem had to wait another 29 months to be granted his freedom.

Explaining the delay in the release of both men, Adel Hamad’s lawyers recently filed a declaration in the DC Circuit Court, outlining the progress –- or lack of progress –- in negotiations between the Sudanese and American governments, which revealed the extent to which political maneuvering, rather than issues of justice, has driven much of the US administration’s policy towards the detainees. This is clear in general from the cases of the Saudis and Yemenis at Guantánamo. In the last twelve months, following fruitful negotiations between the Saudi and US governments, 69 Saudis have been repatriated from Guantánamo, even though none had been cleared for release, whereas the Yemen, whose 95 detainees now constitute the largest group of detainees by nationality, is still awaiting the return of just six detainees, some of whom, like Adel Hamad and Salim Adem, have been cleared for release for over two years.

In the declaration, William Teesdale explained that the Sudanese government had been notified that Hamad and Adem had been “approved for transfer” on November 14, 2005, and that the State Department had sought assurances that they would be investigated on their return to Sudan, and that their human rights would be respected. The Department also sought permission to have “access to the detainees if needed,” and assurances that the Sudanese government would “take responsibility for the detainees and prevent them from being a further threat to the United States.”

The Sudanese Deputy Ambassador, a Mr. Elguneid, explained to Teesdale that the Sudanese Embassy gave an “official reply” to these demands in June 2006, agreeing to all of them and even pointing out that US officials had “met with some of the [previously] released detainees in Sudan since their release.” The State Department then indicated that it would be good “to try to resolve the issue of all the Sudanese Guantánamo detainees” (another six, including al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, are still being held) and that the way forward would be to “draw up a memorandum of understanding between the two countries.”

Deputy Ambassador Elguneid noted, however, that Samuel Whitton, the US Ambassador who had been proceeding with these negotiations, then left his job, and that “negotiations with the new Ambassador At Large for War Crimes, Clint Williamson, were more difficult.” This was something of an understatement. Elguneid admitted that, despite filing ten requests for a meeting to discuss the release of Hamad and Adem, he had been unable to secure an appointment with Williamson, and had not met any State Department officials since that last meeting in June 2006.

With the release of Adel Hamad and Salim Adem, the deadlock has obviously been broken, but the clear politicization of the detainee release process casts further shadows on the legitimacy of Guantánamo, and the stonewalling on the part of State Department officials serves only to undermine Condoleezza Rice’s claims that the Department is committed to defense secretary Robert Gates’ stated aim of finding ways to close the prison sooner rather than later.

This article draws on passages from my newly published book 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.

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

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers (and variations on the spelling of their names) are as follows:

ISN 940: Adel Hassan Hamad
ISN 710: Salim Muhood Adem (Salim Amir or Salim bin Amir)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

The media –- both mainstream outlets and the blogosphere –- have spent the last week consumed by the story of a leaked operating manual from Guantánamo. This is understandable in some ways. The prison’s Standard Operating Procedures have never been revealed to the public before, and, while it takes some dedication to stay awake through the numbing and pedantic attention to detail that drags on through 238 pages, there is something genuinely shocking about the stark admission that all incoming detainees are to be held in isolation for the first 30 days “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process,” which “concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on the interrogator.” At least as worrying is the additional directive that, during this period, the detainees are to be prevented from having contact with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). What makes these admissions particularly disturbing, of course, is that they were brazenly committed to paper in an official document, even though the conduct that they endorse –- the establishment of an offshore interrogation camp, and denying access to ICRC representatives –- is illegal.

In this photo from December 2006, a detainee, clutching the “Summary of Evidence” against him, is escorted from his Administrative Review Board hearing (the annual successors to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals). Photo © Paul J. Richards/AFP-Getty Images.

These are not, however, facts that were previously unknown. A copious amount of evidence –- discussed in the majority of the books published about Guantánamo, including my own, The Guantánamo Files –- attests to the fact that the prison’s major focus was the illegal interrogation of detainees, and the denial of access to ICRC representatives has also been reported in detail, particularly in the cases of Abdallah Tabarak, a supposed bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who was mysteriously released in 2004, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian accused of aiding the 9/11 hijackers in Germany, who is still held in Guantánamo.

More noticeably, the manual, published in March 2003, is nearly five years old, and, although there are good reasons to be wary of the administration’s claims that it is completely out of date, it is, to a large degree, ancient news, whose domination of the media has overshadowed other, more contemporary issues of considerable importance.

A case in point is a new statement by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an Army reservist who worked at Guantánamo in 2004-05, which was submitted to the Washington DC Circuit Court as part of a brief in the continuing, and long-running struggle to secure justice for Sudanese detainee Adel Hamad. A hospital administrator for a large Saudi charity, Hamad had lived in Pakistan for 17 years, working on various humanitarian aid projects, when he was captured by Pakistani and American intelligence operatives in July 2002, based on spurious or non-existent “intelligence,” and sent to Guantánamo.

Lt. Col. Abraham, an Army reservist with 20 years experience in military intelligence, first came to prominence in June this year, when his criticisms of the tribunal process at Guantánamo –- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), convened to assess whether, on capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” –- were widely credited with persuading the justices of the Supreme Court to reverse themselves for the first time in 60 years, agreeing to review the detainees’ right to challenge the basis of their detention in a case that is scheduled to start on December 5.

In an affidavit filed in the case of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti detainee, Lt. Col. Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the tribunal process, which he described as severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature –- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.” In addition, he insisted that the process was designed to rubber-stamp the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

His latest statement is no less explosive. After giving a little more of his background, pointing out that his last assignment before Guantánamo, from November 2001 to November 2002, was as “the Lead Counterterrorism Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Command,” for which he received the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Abraham explains that he has been asked by Adel Hamad’s lawyer, the Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon, to provide “additional information about the manner in which OARDEC [the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants] operated during my assignment there, from September 11, 2004 until March 9, 2005,” and also “to comment upon certain declarations provided by the directors of the national intelligence organizations,” which were filed in an attempt to prevent the courts –- and, in some cases, the detainees’ lawyers –- from having access to supposedly sensitive government information about the detainees.

After revisiting previously aired complaints about OARDEC –- specifically that most of the staff “were volunteer reserves forces with little or no experience with intelligence or legal matters,” who were ill-equipped to deal with OARDEC’s “extraordinary and historic mission” –- Lt. Col. Abraham launches a blistering attack on the woeful, and deliberately narrow parameters of OARDEC’s capabilities, which, by extension, refutes the national intelligence directors’ claims that there was any information worth concealing.

Noting that the mission, as established in the Combatant Status Review Tribunal Procedures, in July 2004, mandated OARDEC to request “reasonably available information in the possession of the US government bearing on the issue of whether the detainee meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant,” he points out that, in reality, “the facilities and systems utilized by OARDEC precluded access to or use of information that OARDEC needed in order to perform its primary mission effectively,” and that the mission was additionally hampered because there was “no systematic method for requesting the government information relating to specific detainees,” and because the largely unskilled staff “rarely selected the most promising sources of information and failed effectively to identify and pursue leads if any developed.”

The specific problems relating to the collection of evidence centered on the fact that OARDEC was only permitted access to material that was “classified SECRET and below” –- in other words, that access to “TOP SECRET information,” which might have been particularly useful, was denied across the board. This lack of access was compounded by the administration’s insistence that all 558 CSRTs were completed within 120 days, and, even more critically, by the fact that OARDEC was “entirely dependent on indulgences from external organizations,” having “no organic intelligence assets, no collection capabilities, no dissemination authority, and no direct tasking authority” of its own.

“As a result,” he adds, requests for information were “very rarely” sent to the CIA, were never sent to the NSA (National Security Agency) or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and were only sent to the US Army Intelligence and Security Command when Abraham himself “mentioned this fairly obvious and fertile source of information.” Compounding these failures, OARDEC’s lack of any “tasking authority” meant that any responses to the limited number of requests that were actually made were “largely dependant on whether anyone at the agency was inclined to do so.” In most instances, he concludes, “OARDEC received either a negative response (no information available) or no response at all.”

Abraham also notes that, even on the databases available to OARDEC, “access to much information was confined to particular individuals or groups, called communities of interest (COIs),” and adds that, “In order to access COI-restricted information, individuals either had to be members of the COI or obtain special access.” However, “Even if an OARDEC member had the appropriate clearance and access to the overall system, without a password and authorization, he or she would be denied access to COI information.” As a result, he explains that most of the OARDEC staff lacked access to COI-restricted information to such an extent that, “If there were information about a detainee in those other systems, the OARDEC researchers could not find it.” His conclusion is bleak. Given these obstacles, and the fact that most of the staff “had little if any understanding of the nature of, or even the existence of the myriad of intelligence components … They literally did not know what they were missing.”

Shorn of almost all genuine sources of intelligence, Abraham writes that OARDEC “relied primarily upon information provided by Joint Task Force Guantánamo” –- the organization running the prison itself –- “which consisted primarily of post-detention custodial and interrogation reports”; or, in rather clearer language, “Most of the information OARDEC collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees.”

Describing a typical scenario, he notes that the compilation of material for the tribunals effectively began and ended with the file received from Guantánamo, which contained little more than post-detention summaries of interrogations, and incident reports relating to the detainee’s behavior. On some occasions, documentation relating to the detainee’s initial detention, “including notes on the contents of items in the detainee’s possession” might also be in the file, “but this was not so in every case.” He then explains that, even with this evidence, the researchers failed to investigate it rigorously, preferring, instead, to search their “limited databases” and “cast broad nets for any information, no matter how marginal, no matter how tenuous, no matter how dated, no matter how generic, no matter how dubious the source, so long as it could be connected to the detainee.”

In this photo from December 2006, a detainee sits alone during his recreation period. Photo © Brennan Linsley/AP.

The result of this slap-dash approach was obvious, and, looked at in conjunction with the lack of access to genuine classified information (if, indeed, any existed) explains some of the more egregious and well-documented failures of the tribunal process. “Where no information was obtained about an individual,” Abraham explains –- adding, crucially, that this “was the case for nearly all detainees except individuals of prominence” –- the search “would shift to more broadly based themes, such as the region from where the individual came, his ethnic group or nation of origin, or any organization denominated as being associated with terrorist activities, with which the individual was alleged to have been associated.” For the last of these allegations, Abraham notes, pointedly, that OARDEC personnel “presumed that having an alleged association with an organization was a sufficient basis for attributing all research relating to that organization to the individual.” As Mark and Josh Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School realized through their analysis of the CSRT documents –- and as I write about in depth in The Guantánamo Files –- what this meant in practice was not only that a significant number of detainees were tarred as terrorists through the most tangential associations with organizations proscribed by the US government, but also that organizations that were not included on the government’s blacklists –- like the World Association of Muslim Youth, for which Adel Hamad worked as a hospital administrator –- were labeled as entities associated with terrorism.

Furthermore, Abraham notes that “information relating to the credibility of a source was omitted, making sources appear authoritative even when they were suspect,” and he uses, as an example, an allegation against a particular group that “would be repeated without disclosing that it originated with one of the groups’ political opponents or some government overtly hostile to it” (as happened, in particular, with detainees from China, Libya and Tunisia). He also points out that, using the time restraints as a deliberate cover, “independent evidence from the detainee’s life before his arrest” was never investigated, even though the detainees’ “claims of innocence often could have been corroborated or disproved by a few simple inquiries,” and in this instance he uses, as an example, that, “if a detainee told interrogators that he had worked at a hospital in Afghanistan, OARDEC could have requested that an agency with regional or functional purview locate and obtain records from the hospital and interview personnel there.” In addition, he notes that “Beyond impractical discussions about bringing villagers to the nearest video conference facility,” he was “not aware of any realistic attempts” to “identify or even attempt to bring before the Tribunal [outside] witnesses [requested by the detainee] or their statements,” and concludes that OARDEC “was designed to conduct Tribunals without witnesses other than the accused detainee.” This, too, is a topic that I discuss at length in The Guantánamo Files, particularly in relation to many of the Afghan detainees, who begged their tribunals to make a few phone calls to confirm their innocence. In June 2006, the journalist Declan Walsh proved how easy it was to contact witnesses that the US government claimed to be unable to find, locating, in just 72 hours, three witnesses, in Washington, Kabul and Gardez, who were able to verify the story told by a wrongly imprisoned pro-US Afghan commander, Abdullah Mujahid (who is still in Guantánamo, even though he has now been cleared for release).

After this comprehensive demolition of the tribunals’ claims to competency, Abraham turns his attention to the claims made by the directors of the national intelligence organizations that granting the courts access to government information about the detainees “might risk disclosure of highly sensitive national intelligence information, such as source or method information.” He notes in the first instance that OARDEC’s systems were so primitive that the staff were unable to communicate electronically with major organizations including the CIA and the NSA, and also had no way of retaining or utilizing highly classified information. “This limitation,” he writes, “precluded any possibly that such sensitive information could be incorporated into materials presented to the Tribunals.”

Moreover, Abraham points out that “the kinds of sensitive national intelligence information discussed by the intelligence directors is not normally shared between intelligence agencies except in the rarest of circumstances,” and specifically rebuts a statement made by General Michael Hayden, the current director of the CIA, and the director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 –- that disclosure of government information would reveal details of “clandestine intelligence operations, including counterterrorism operations, foreign intelligence information and assistance, information provided by sensitive sources, and technical collection activities” –- by insisting that this kind of information would not have been disclosed to OARDEC, or to the tribunal members, “under any circumstances.” He adds that, “in the few cases where the concerns might apply, there are adequate mechanisms in place to provide for in camera review of any critical information, the nature of which precludes disclosure beyond the court.”

In a damning aside –- which he cannot prove, though I too infer that it is correct, based on my extensive research into the detainees’ stories –- Abraham explains that, even assuming OARDEC had been able to conduct an exhaustive search for information, “what it would have likely discerned from the exercise is that there is little information to be obtained on people that have never before been considered let alone determined to be persons of interest.” As long ago as February 2002, this was effectively admitted by Brigadier General Mike Lehnert of the Marines, who was in charge of Guantánamo in the early days, when he stated, “A large number [of the detainees] claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

The administration’s response to this failure to extract information from the detainees –- who, in 86 percent of cases, were not actually captured by the Americans themselves, but were handed over or sold by their Afghan or Pakistani allies –- was to instigate the grotesque system of punishments and rewards, partly chronicled in the leaked manual from March 2003, whereby, to put it bluntly, torture became a substitute for the skilled gathering of intelligence. A later component of the regime, as Lt. Col. Abraham has described in such shocking detail, was to rig the tribunals to make it appear that the “rather large number in the middle” –- many of whom were completely innocent, or had nothing useful to offer –- were a grave and continuing threat to US security. As many of the 310 detainees still in Guantánamo were effectively condemned by this corrupt process, I contend that Lt. Col. Abraham’s latest statement –- which was only previously reported on the Supreme Court’s SCOTUSblog –- is actually far more important than a leaked operating manual.

Note: Despite my reservations about the media frenzy surrounding the leaked manual, it is worth looking at, and Stephen Soldz, psychologist and anti-torture activist, wrote the most perceptive article about it here.

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.

As published on CounterPunch. An edited version appeared on the Huffington Post.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part One) (December 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part Two) (December 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

In his affidavit, the Major, a Judge Advocate’s General (JAG) officer who served as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Reserves, and has worked as a Deputy District Attorney, explained that the training he received, both in Washington and Guantánamo, was “minimal,” that the CSRT process was “not well defined,” and that, “although the CSRT rules required having a JAG on each CSRT panel,” they were “silent as to the role.” He and other JAG lawyers concluded that they were there as “informal legal advisors to the other board members,” whose legal knowledge was often poor. He described, for example, “a sentiment among the JAG officers that many of the CSRT officers did not understand the distinction between conclusory statements and evidence,” and noted that some tribunal members “did not understand that the presumption was to be given to the evidence.” In part, however, this was by design on the government’s part, as he also noted, “The CSRT rules afforded the government evidence a presumption of correctness. For me as a tribunal member this meant that when I had a piece of evidence with some small corroboration, then I had to view that with great significance and it would also have made it difficult for any detainee to rebut.”

One of the trailers at Guantánamo, in which the CSRTs were held.

Describing the 49 tribunals on which he sat as a member, he wrote that he and his colleagues typically worked 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, and explained that the tribunals’ recorders, whose general role was “to generate the evidence“ to present to the panels, “did not have much control over the content of the information to be presented to the CSRT hearings,” adding that “Much of the material presented was supplied by intelligence agencies and were summaries that were not necessarily justified by the underlying evidence.”

He also explained that the role of the Personal Representatives, who liaised with the detainees and sometimes helped them put their case to the tribunals, was “unclear,” noting that “some PRs did little,” but that one Air Force Major “strongly advocated for the detainees he was assigned to assist.” In a further demonstration that some of those involved in the process were more concerned with results than with justice, he added, “I heard some CSRT members say that they did not appreciate the zeal with which he tried to assist the detainees.”

In a particularly telling passage, in which he discussed the CSRT of Adel Hamad, he explained that “the tribunal members had very little discussion of the evidence in his case,” and that his “primary concern” was that there was “insufficient evidence to describe him as an enemy combatant.” After drafting a dissenting opinion, he discussed it with a Navy Commander, who was also on the panel, and was surprised that his colleague “questioned the meaning of some of the definitions used in my dissenting report,” concluding that it “came from a lack of legal training.” In one of the most damning passages, he also noted that, although exculpatory evidence, which might have exonerated the detainees, was supposed to be presented separately, “as required in the CSRT rules,” none was presented in any of his 49 tribunals, and the only time he ever encountered exculpatory evidence was “by accident,” when “some of the evidence presented by the recorder would contradict the allegations made against the detainee.”

The Major also wrote about taking part in six CSRT hearings, “where there was a unanimous decision that the detainee was a Non Enemy Combatant (‘NEC’).” He explained that in each case “the Command directed that a new CSRT be held or the original CSRT was ordered reopened,” but pointed out that “the ‘new evidence’ that was presented was in fact a different conclusory intelligence finding,” which, significantly, “was not justified by the underlying evidence.” In addition, he and other dissenting tribunal members were “briefed by CID (intelligence) agents who were brought in by Command to explain why the NEC results were wrong,” and he described discussions that followed these meetings, when he and other tribunal members concluded, with some justification, “that this was an attempt to influence the results of the CSRT hearings.”

In other passages, he described acrimonious meetings and a “heated conference” that followed “inconsistent decisions” in the cases of 18 Uyghur detainees (Chinese Muslims, oppressed by their government, who had fled to Pakistan from Afghanistan after a ruined village they were living in was bombed by US forces), and explained how his suggestion, based on his experience of the criminal justice system, that “inconsistent results were good for the system,” and would show that it was “working correctly,” were ignored.

In a final point, which also indicates how loaded the process was in favor of the government’s allegations, the Major noted that he spent a month and a half working as a legal advisor to the CSRTs, but “was never told that I could review the sufficiency of the evidence and write or discuss that issue with a CSRT.”

While it remains to be seen whether the Major’s statement will add significantly to the growing clamor to return habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo detainees, it has certainly revived a vitally important story, which looked, until now, as if it had been allowed to fall off the radar.

The first Guantánamo whistleblower to speak out publicly was Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an Army reservist with 26 years’ experience in military intelligence. In an affidavit filed in the case of the Kuwaiti detainee Fawzi al-Odah, Lt. Col. Abraham, who had been part of the team responsible for compiling the “evidence” used in the tribunals, delivered a blistering condemnation of the entire process, stating that the CSRTs were severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature –- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and that, moreover, the process was designed to rubber-stamp the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” Like the Army Major, Lt. Col. Abraham also experienced bullying when he and the other members of his tribunal decided, in the case of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan shopkeeper who was married to an Afghan woman, that the detainee was not an “enemy combatant.”

Despite the uproar that Lt. Col. Abraham’s affidavit caused for a few weeks in June and July this year, the press soon moved on. A few ripples of interest still lingered when he visited Capitol Hill in early August to reiterate his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, but there the trail ended. A week later, after liaising with him, I reported exclusively that another officer who had taken part in the CSRT process had written to wish him luck, and to declare, “my recollections of the process are similar to yours. The finding of enemy combatant was expected, the finding of not an enemy combatant was looked upon as a failure of the process.” Another officer also “expressed support for his efforts,” but by that time everyone was on holiday, and the plight of the “enemy combatants” was forgotten.

The affidavit filed by the army major in Adel Hamad’s case not only revives the important story that Lt. Col. Abraham bravely divulged in June; it also raises the number of former insiders criticizing the process to four, and neatly returns to the first reports of dissent within the ranks of those involved in the CSRTs, which first surfaced in August 2006. In an article for the Boston Globe, Farah Stockman reported on Adel Hamad’s case, noting that an Army Major –- clearly the same man who has now filed an affidavit publicly, even though no one involved in the case is providing any further information –- had issued a dissenting opinion. Taking into account the fact that neither of the charity organizations for which Hamad had worked in Pakistan –- the Saudi-based World Association of Muslim Youth, and the Kuwait-based Lajanat Dawa Islamiya –- appeared on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, he argued that, “even assuming all the allegations … are accurate, the detainee does not meet the definition of enemy combatant.” He added, “These NGOs presumably have numerous employees and volunteer workers who have been working in legitimate humanitarian roles. The mere fact that some elements of these NGOs provide support to ‘terrorist ideals and causes’ is insufficient to declare one of the employees an enemy combatant.”

After Lt. Col. Abraham first spoke out in June, I wrote an article that drew on Farah Stockman’s original story, in which I also noted her shocked conclusion –- that the Major was overruled by his colleagues, one of whom, in a single line that discredits the whole tribunal process as effectively as the recent affidavits, wrote that the case “passed the ‘low evidentiary hurdle’ set up by the rules of the hearings” –- and I’m pleased to note that, with the Army Major now stepping forward to join the ranks of the Guantánamo whistleblowers, the mystery of Adel Hamad’s dissenting tribunal member has now been solved. After the abuse that Lt. Col. Abraham received after going public in June, when the Department of Justice attempted to belittle him, and smeared his account as “innuendo,” I also understand why he has refrained from revealing his identity.

All that remains now is for more former CSRT personnel to follow his lead, and also, if he’s watching and waiting to do the right thing, for a dissenting officer who served as the Personal Representative in Guantánamo to two detainees to come forward too. First reported by Corine Hegland in the National Journal in February 2006, the story of this particular Personal Representative showed a principled man speaking truth to power on a heroic scale. Alarmed that those he was representing had been accused of crimes that they couldn’t possibly have committed, this man –- perhaps the Air Force Major referred to by the Army Major in his affidavit –- checked the file of the detainee who had made the allegations, saw that he had accused 60 men of attending a particular training when none of them had even been in Afghanistan at the time, and took the unprecedented step of submitting a written protest to the authorities after the CSRT of Farouq Saif, a teacher of the Koran who was allegedly seen at Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar. In his letter, he stated that the government’s sole evidence that Saif had been at the airport was the statement of another prisoner, who, according to an FBI memo, which he presented to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According to the FBI, he “had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could not have been.” The Personal Representative added, “I do feel with some certainty that [the accuser] has lied about other detainees to receive preferable treatment and to cause them problems while in custody.”

We know the identity of one of the other 59 men accused by the “notorious liar” –- Mohammed al-Tumani, a young Syrian who had gone to Afghanistan with his whole family, to be reunited with his father, who was working as a cook in Kabul –- but, although some of the other falsely accused detainees are almost certainly covered in my book The Guantánamo Files, in which I look in depth at false allegations and false confessions, the knockout blow to the credibility of the corrupt tribunals might be delivered if this man, with his insight into lies that were treated as “evidence” on a colossal scale, could be persuaded to join the ranks of Guantánamo’s principled whistleblowers.

As published on CounterPunch (as “Fourth Whistleblower Rocks Guantánamo”). An edited version appeared on the Huffington Post.

Note: After this article was published, Steve Wax, one of Adel’s lawyers, wrote to me to point out, “The document filed with the court was a declaration by William Teesdale, an investigator and attorney in my office. It says that the major read and approved the contents. It was not an affidavit from the major himself”.

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.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part One) (December 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part Two) (December 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

Currently an army reservist and an attorney in California, Abraham worked at Guantánamo, from 11 September 2004 to 9 March 2005, in the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) as “an agency liaison, responsible for coordinating with government agencies, including certain Department of Defense (DoD) and non-DoD organizations, to gather or validate information relating to detainees for use in CSRTs.” He also served as a member of a CSRT, and, as he described it, “had the opportunity to observe and participate in the operation of the CSRT process,” and he concluded from his experience that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Specifically, Abraham complained that the OARDEC personnel –- mostly from the military reserves –- who were responsible for compiling the information used in the “Unclassified Summary of Evidence” against each detainee were woefully inexperienced, and that few of whom “had any experience or training in the legal or intelligence fields.” He also complained that the tribunals’ Recorders were similarly inexperienced, and were “typically relatively junior officers with little training or experience in matters relating to the collection, processing, analyzing, and/or dissemination of intelligence material,” and that those who actually aggregated the information –- the case writers –- “in most instances” had “the same limited degree of knowledge and experience relating to the intelligence community and intelligence products.” Given the shortcomings of the majority of the personnel involved, Abraham also noted that, although “large amounts of information” were received, the workers “often had no context for determining whether the information was relevant,” and frequently discarded information because it was “considered to be ambiguous, confusing or poorly written,” as well as “reject[ing] some information arbitrarily while accepting other information without any articulable rationale.”

Abraham expressed a similar disdain for the quality of the information produced by the various government agencies, which the largely unqualified workers were required to collate and aggregate. This information, he wrote, frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature –- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and additional information, contained within the Detainee Information Management System and other databases, was equally “deficient,” typically “excluding information that was characterized as highly sensitive law enforcement information, highly classified information, or information not voluntarily released by the originating agency.” Neither the case writers nor the Recorders, Abraham asserted, had “access to numerous information sources generally available within the intelligence community.”

Further proof that the gathering of information for the tribunals was not geared towards justice and transparency came when, as “one of only a few intelligence-trained and suitably cleared officers,” Abraham was tasked with investigating aspects of the “evidence,” to confirm “in a statement to be relied upon by the CSRT board members that the organizations did not possess ‘exculpatory information’ relating to the subject of the CSRT.” When he approached the various agencies involved, however, he discovered that he was only allowed “limited access to information, typically prescreened and filtered,” was not permitted to request additional searches for information, and was rebuffed when he asked for written statements confirming that there was no exculpatory information. His experience confirmed that the agencies were largely providing or withholding information at their own discretion, without any process of outside scrutiny being available.

His bitterest experience, however, occurred when he was chosen –- along with an Air Force colonel and an Air Force major –- to take part in a CSRT. After reviewing the evidence, all three men “found the information presented to lack substance,” noting that supposedly specific factual statements “lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” that statements made by alleged witnesses “lacked detail,” and that generalized statements were presented “in indirect and passive forms without stating the source of the information or providing a basis for establishing the reliability or the credibility of the source.” In addition, Abraham wrote that statements by the interrogators, which were presented to the panel, “offered inferences” from which they were “expected to draw conclusions” that the detainee was an “enemy combatant,” but that when they subjected these statements to even the most cursory of questions, the Recorder’s only response was, “We’ll have to get back to you.”

Based on the “paucity and weakness of the information provided both during and after the CSRT hearing,” Abraham and his colleagues duly determined that there was “no factual basis” for concluding that the detainee was an “enemy combatant,” but that was not the end of the story. The director and deputy director of OARDEC “immediately questioned the validity” of the decision, ordering the tribunal members to prepare statements containing the specific questions they had raised to enable the Recorder to provide “further responses,” and reopening the hearing to allow the Recorder to “present further argument.” Refusing to bow to the pressure, Abraham and his colleagues failed to change their determination, and as a result, as he declared in a pithy conclusion to the affidavit, “I was not assigned to another CSRT panel.” He pointed out, however, that OARDEC’s response to the decision was “consistent with the few other instances” when the rigged system had been bucked. In meetings attended by Abraham that followed the sporadic decisions that detainees were not “enemy combatants” –- there were only 38 in total, out of 558 CSRTs –- he wrote that the focus of inquiry was always “what went wrong.”

Speaking after the affidavit was first publicized, Abraham said that he had first raised his concerns about the tribunals during his time at Guantánamo, but had decided to submit the affidavit because “the issues were not adequately addressed.” He told the Associated Press, “I pointed out nothing less than facts, facts that can and should be fixed,” adding that he had a responsibility to point out that officers “did not have the proper tools” to determine whether a detainee was in fact an “enemy combatant,” and explaining, “I take very seriously my responsibility, my duties as a citizen.”

David Cynamon, one of al-Odah’s lawyers –- who was put in contact with Abraham by his sister, after she attended a public lecture on Guantánamo given by Cynamon and his colleagues –- described Abraham’s affidavit as “prov[ing] what we all suspected, which is that the CSRTs were a complete sham,” while adding that he feared that his courage was “probably an assurance of career suicide.” Cynamon’s colleague, Matthew J. MacLean, who pointed out that Abraham was the first CSRT member who has been identified, let alone been willing to criticize the tribunals in the public record, declared, “It wouldn’t be quite right to say this is the most important piece of evidence that has come out of the CSRT process, because this is the only piece of evidence ever to come out of the CSRT process. It’s our only view into the CSRT.”

In fact, MacLean’s comments were not entirely accurate. Whilst it’s certainly true that Abraham was the first ex-tribunal member to criticize the CSRT process in public, his is not the first reported example of dissent amongst tribunal members. In September 2006, in a Boston Globe article, Detentions over charity ties questioned, Farah Stockman reported on the case of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator, who was captured in May 2002 in Pakistan –- where he had been working for 17 years –- and sold to the American forces. In his CSRT, Hamad was judged to be an “enemy combatant” because of exactly the kind of “generic” allegations described by Lt. Col. Abraham. The Saudi charity he worked for, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, was described as an organization that “supports terrorist ideals and causes,” even though it has never appeared on a terrorism watchlist (despite being investigated by the US Senate), and was one of the favored projects of the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, and another organization that he had worked for previously, the Kuwait-based Lajanat Dawa Islamiya (which also does not feature on any US terrorism watchlist), was described as “one of the most active” Islamic NGOs “providing logistical and financial support” to mujahideen operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which “may be” associated with Osama bin Laden.

An exasperated Hamad refuted all the allegations, at one point telling his tribunal, “arresting employees like myself [who] is not capable of supporting terrorists financially, is this justice? I am an employee who works for a living and I have no connection to the [organization’s] political views or its financial resources, so why do you punish me for a crime I did not commit. Why don’t you arrest the charities’ presidents or the people who support [them] financially instead of arresting a simple employee with no informational value?” Predictably, his tribunal judged that he had been correctly designated an “enemy combatant,” but although his pleas appeared to have been ignored, Stockman, who was allowed to examine the CSRT documentation, noted that one of the tribunal members –- an unidentified army major, whose name was redacted –- had issued a dissenting opinion.

Taking into account the fact that neither WAMY nor LDI appears on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, he argued that, “even assuming all the allegations … are accurate, the detainee does not meet the definition of enemy combatant.” He added, “These NGOs presumably have numerous employees and volunteer workers who have been working in legitimate humanitarian roles. The mere fact that some elements of these NGOs provide support to “terrorist ideals and causes” is insufficient to declare one of the employees an enemy combatant.” Stockman noted, however, that the major was overruled by his colleagues, one of whom –- in a single line that discredits the whole tribunal process as effectively as Lt. Col. Abraham’s affidavit –- wrote that the case “passed the ‘low evidentiary hurdle’ set up by the rules of the hearings.”

In two other cases, the dissenting officer was not a tribunal member, but the detainees’ Personal Representative. In a majority of the CSRTs, the Personal Representative fulfilled his intended function as a pale shadow of a legitimate defense counsel, failing to “participate in any meaningful way,” as Lt. Col. Abraham noted of the Personal Representative in his tribunal. In February 2006, however, in two articles for the National Journal, Guantánamo’s Grip and Empty Evidence, Corine Hegland reported the story of an unidentified lieutenant colonel in the army (whose name was also redacted), who fought a brave, if unsuccessful battle for two of his detainees. Along the way, however, he demolished the tribunals’ legitimacy even more comprehensively than either Lt. Col. Abraham or Adel Hamad’s dissenting major.

The first case –- that of Farouq Saif, a young Yemeni who went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran –- is particularly noteworthy because Saif was judged as an “enemy combatant” because of two false allegations. The first –- that he was a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden –- was directed at 30 detainees in total, and was made under duress, and later retracted, by Mohammed al-Qahtani. One of several purported “20th hijackers” for the 9/11 attacks, al-Qahtani made the allegations during a seven-week period, from November 2002 to January 2003, when he was subjected to Pentagon-approved “extreme interrogation techniques” (otherwise known as torture).

The second allegation –- that Saif had been seen at Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar, where he was “wearing camouflage and carrying an AK-47” –- proved so intolerable to his Personal Representative that he submitted a written protest, in which he stated that the government’s sole evidence that Saif had been at bin Laden’s airport was the statement of another prisoner, who, according to an FBI memo that he presented to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According to the FBI, he “had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could not have been.” The Personal Representative wrote, “I do feel with some certainty that [the accuser] has lied about other detainees to receive preferable treatment and to cause them problems while in custody. Had the tribunal taken this evidence out as unreliable, then the position we have taken is that a teacher of the Koran (to the Taliban’s children) is an enemy combatant (partially because he slept under a Taliban roof).”

The “notorious liar” actually made false allegations against 60 prisoners in total, as was revealed after the tribunal of Mohammed al-Tumani. A young Syrian economic migrant, who had traveled to Afghanistan with other family members to join his father in Kabul, where he was working as a cook, al-Tumani and his father were captured in Pakistan after fleeing the chaos of post-invasion Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq training camp with such vigor that his Personal Representative decided to investigate the matter further. When he looked at the classified evidence, however, he found that only one man –- the same detainee mentioned above –- claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and had identified him as being there three months before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine Hegland described it, “The curious US officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.”

The identity of the other 58 detainees falsely accused by the “notorious liar” are unknown, as the dissenting officer involved in unveiling this monstrous injustice –- perhaps unwilling to risk “career suicide” –- has not come forward to elaborate, but in my book, The Guantánamo Files, I report on numerous other examples of patently false allegations masquerading as “evidence,” which were ignored by compliant tribunal members accepting the “low evidentiary hurdle” of the process. While I wait to see if Lt. Col. Abraham’s principled stand will encourage other insiders to speak out, it’s worth pointing out that Adel Hamad, Farouq Saif and Mohammed al-Tumani remain in Guantánamo. Hamad has finally been judged to be “No Longer an Enemy Combatant” and is awaiting release, but Saif and al-Tumani are still damned by the false confessions of a “notorious liar.”

Note: The Pentagon refers to Farouq Saif as Farouq Ali Ahmed, and to Mohammed al-Tumani as Muhammad Khantumani. For the campaign to free Adel Hamad, visit the Project Hamad website, which is the source for the image below.

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.

As published on CounterPunch.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part One) (December 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part Two) (December 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

For an article on the release of Adel Hamad, see The Shocking Stories of the Sudanese Humanitarian Aid Workers Just Released From Guantánamo.