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Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of which was already covered in Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files and in the archive of articles on his website, the project will be completed in spring 2012.

This is Part 32 of the 70-part series. 399 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, the next ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantanamo Prisoners Released in 2006,” covered the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006), almost all of whom were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice, as is the case with this latest ten-part series, dealing with the 124 prisoners released in 2007, including two more who died without ever having been charged or tried.

I also hope that readers will reflect on the problems of over-classification that have been thoroughly chronicled in the preceding series analyzing the Detainee Assessment Briefs. My analysis to date has established repeatedly that even patently innocent prisoners seized by mistake were regarded as a “low risk,” rather than as no risk at all, and it is important for readers to bear in mind that the entire process of detaining and processing prisoners and exploiting them for their supposed intelligence was shot through with a drive to conclude that they were all a threat, and to overlook the distressing fact that most of them were seized in a largely random manner, mostly by America’s Afghan and Pakistan allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were widespread, and were never subjected to anything that resembled an adequate screening process.

And then, of course, as I have outlined above, and as is revealed extensively in the files, they were trapped in a prison where officials, in their ill-conceived desire for “actionable intelligence,” ended up attempting to justifying their detention either by coercing or bribing the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, to come up with allegations that could be passed off as plausible, whether or not there was any substance to them at all.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2007 (Part Two of Ten)

Yahya Al Sulami (ISN 66, Saudi Arabia) Released July 2007

As I explained in Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, Yahya al-Sulami (also identified as al-Silami), who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he had been teaching the Koran in Afghanistan. I also explained that he was one of many prisoners who came under particular suspicion because he did not have a passport at the time, as the US authorities had realized that those who attended training camps did not have passports because they were required to hand them in at guest houses before training. However, this inevitably meant that those who did not have passports for other reasons — either because they were lost, stolen or abandoned in the rush to leave a hostile environment, or because they were entrusted to others in an attempt to find a legitimate way to leave Afghanistan — were automatically regarded as liars, whether or not this was the case. As I also explained, al-Sulami said that he was given a contact in a village near Khost by a friend in Mecca, where he taught the Koran for four months, but was clearly regarded as lying when he said that he lost his passport in a river while following a group of Afghan refugees to the Pakistani border.

As I also explained at the time of his release, he was one of 30 prisoners accused of being bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, as one of a group of prisoners who became known as “the Dirty Thirty,” although the origin of the allegations was not made clear. In Guantánamo, al-Sulami denied a claim by the US authorities that all 30 were bodyguards, and “were told the best thing they could tell US forces when interrogated was they were in Afghanistan to teach the Koran,” and also refuted another allegation, which he said was made by a Yemeni prisoner whom he described as “mentally unstable and on medication” (presumably Yasim Basardah, known as the most notoriously unreliable informant in Guantánamo), in which he was “identified as the Emir of a group of 10-15 fighters guarding a river crossing leading to the Tora Bora camp.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Sulami was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated August 11, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in February 1979, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that, after graduating from high school in 1999, he “attended the Religious Institute in Mecca,” and, after graduating from there, “decided to teach Islam to non-Arabs in accordance with various religious decrees that had been issued by religious scholars.” In “approximately August 2001,” he flew to Karachi, with the assistance of a man named Khalid al-Muslih, who, he said, he “had met while studying at the Holy Mosque in Mecca” (although an analyst described him as “possibly an al-Qaida facilitator”).

On arrival in Karachi, he said, he contacted the Dar al-Ifta (the House of Religious Affairs),” and “informed them of his plan to teach the Koran in Afghanistan.” He then “crossed into Afghanistan via the Miram Shah border crossing and proceeded to Khost,” where a man named Muhammad al-Afghani (also described by an analyst as “a possible al-Qaida facilitator”) took him to a mosque, where, he said, he stayed for four and a half months, teaching the Koran to children.

He “denie[d] receiving any type of military training” during this period, and said that, once the war in Afghanistan started, he “contacted al-Afghani and requested that he arrange for [his] return to Saudi Arabia.” Al-Afghani then “introduced [him] to two Afghan guides who led [him] and 30 other Arabs from Khost back [sic] to Pakistan.” He “stated that the group he was with traveled for six days in the mountains before they arrived in Pakistan,” and, after crossing the border near Parachinar, were seized by Pakistani border guards.

After being held in a Pakistani jail in Peshawar, he was transferred to US custody at  the Kandahar Detention Facility on December 27, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, allegedly for the following reasons: “To provide background information on members of the group with whom detainee was captured, To provide information on the tactics and logistics of the Al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan from 2000 until the fall of Tora Bora [and] The effect of the civil war on the Afghanistan educational infrastructure.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

[T]he “Reasons for Transfer” included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners’ files after their arrival at Guantánamo. This is because, contrary to the impression given in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer. As Chris Mackey, a senior interrogator who worked in Afghanistan, explained in a book that he wrote about his experiences (The Interrogators), every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by US forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “Al-Qaida and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

In assessing his story, the Task Force described his “claim of traveling to Afghanistan to teach the Koran” as “highly suspect,” although their rationale for doubting him was questionable. Firstly, it was noted that “[t]he only language [he] speaks is Arabic; however, he claims that without a translator, he taught to children who only spoke Pashtu.” This analysis rather shamefully ignores the fact that the Koran, regarded as the literal word of God, is taught and learned in Arabic regardless of whether those learning it are actually Arabic speakers.

Another reason for disputing al-Sulami’s story was that one of the men seized with him apparently “stated that a prison warden instructed the members of [his] group, when they were captured, to claim they were in Afghanistan to teach the Koran,” although this, to be honest, was the kind of reasoning used in the 17th century witch hunts, and it made it impossible for a genuine teacher of the Koran to establish that he was not a liar.

Most alarmingly, however, the main allegations against al-Sulami came, as I suspected, from Yasim Basardah, the most notoriously unreliable witness in Guantánamo — and also from another unreliable witness, a well-known victim of torture. Basardah “reported numerous times that detainee was the commander of approximately 15 fighters responsible for guarding a river crossing leading to a Tora Bora camp,” although no one else said he was, and he “also stated that detainee had become one of [Osama bin Laden]‘s bodyguards while [he] was at Tora Bora.”

This was a typical allegation, as the group of men of which al-Sulami was a part were described as the “Dirty Thirty,” and were all regarded initially as bin Laden bodyguards, although, on close inspection, these claims all seem to have been made either by Basardah or by other prisoners who were tortured, and whose statements are therefore unreliable. Alarmingly, in al-Sulami’s case, an analyst noted that Basardah had “stated that detainee was a bodyguard on only one occasion,” and added, crucially, “In every interview where [Basardah] was questioned on detainee, [he] has changed his story. Detainee’s identity as a bodyguard has not been substantiated through other known sources.”

Basardah also “speculated that detainee probably received special mission training,” and “stated that there was a special group at Al-Farouq that trained and then disappeared,” with “[a]dditional special training for the group” being “conducted at the Kandahar Airport.” He also “stated that detainee once possessed a computer disc showing this training,” and that he “knows important people in Yemen and Afghanistan,” but as the analyst’s comments reveal (above and beyond what is known of Basardah’s general unreliability), all of the above is worthless because he couldn’t even maintain a coherent story when it came to conjuring up information about al-Sulami.

The torture victim who also apparently identified al-Sulami was Abdu Ali al-Haji Sharqawi (ISN 1457, still held, and also identified as Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj), who was tortured in Jordan and in CIA facilities in Afghanistan. His worthless claim was that he “believed detainee went to Afghanistan after 11 September 2001″ (he didn’t), and he also said that he “believed detainee was part of Hamzah al-Qaiti’s  group in Kabul,” because he “saw him at al-Qaiti’s guesthouse.” Al-Sulami said that he hadn’t been in Kabul, but, instead of believing him, the authorities persuaded an Egyptian, Fadel Roda al-Waleeli (ISN 663, released in July 2003, and also identified as Reda Fadel El-Weleli), “met detainee once in Bagram,” prompting an analyst to claim, “This corroborates [Sharqawi]‘s placement of detainee in the Kabul area, which is located near Bagram.”

In conclusion, the Task Force claimed that al-Sulami “continue[d] to hide his true activities while in Afghanistan, such as in which cities and guesthouses he stayed,” adding, “Further exploitation is necessary to assess [his] true threat and intelligence potential.” As the Task Force explained, “Due to the lack of available information about detainee,” JTF-GTMO determined that he was “at least medium intelligence value,” and that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and sometimes hostile to the guard force and staff.”

As a result, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updating a recommendation for his continued detention at Guantánamo (dated September 19, 2005), repeated that recommendation, although it was also noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Sulami] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” This was particularly significant because, in a key passage in his file, it was stated, “After the 2002 Saudi delegation visit, [he] was identified by the Saudi Mabahith as one of the seventy-seven Saudi nationals of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US Government, but whom the Saudi Government would attempt to prosecute if transferred to their custody from JTF-GTMO.” Even so, it took another 11 months for an agreement to be reached that led to his repatriation, when he was put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Abd Al Razaq Al Sharikh (ISN 67, Saudi Arabia) Released September 2007

As I explained in Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, Abd al-Razaq al-Sharikh (also identified as Abdulrazzaq al-Sharikh, and Abd al-Razaq al-Sharekh), who was only 16 years old when he arrived in Afghanistan in late 2000, was the younger brother of another juvenile prisoner, Abdulhadi al-Sharikh (ISN 231, released in September 2007), who was only 17 at the time of his capture. In Guantánamo, al-Sharikh said that he wanted to fight in Chechnya, where another brother had been killed, but explained that, although he wanted to “go over there so I can die and meet up with him,” a friend advised him that he “wouldn’t last one day” in Chechnya, and suggested that he went to Afghanistan instead.

Al-Sharikh also admitted training at Al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11), and serving on the Taliban front lines with Pakistani members of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, but insisted that he never fired a weapon at anyone, and that there was little activity until after 9/11, when the Northern Alliance attacked them so hard that they retreated. In his tribunal, he was not questioned about whether he was at Tora Bora, which was taken to be a significant sign of militancy, and said that, instead, he went to Khost via Kandahar, and then crossed into Pakistan, where he was arrested with two Pakistani guides.

As I also explained, in my articles, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” despite being a juvenile at the time of his capture, al-Sharikh was not treated differently from the adult population at Guantánamo, according to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which stipulates that juvenile prisoners — those under 18 at the time their alleged crime takes place — “require special protection,” and obliges its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

At the time of his release, I told more of his story, explaining how he said that, in Saudi Arabia, “The Muslim scientists, or clergymen, were telling me to fight in Afghanistan. They convinced me to fight there, and told me how to get there, so I went.” Turning to the circumstances of his capture, he denied an allegation that he was “captured by Pakistan police while traveling with a group of Arabs and Afghanis, some of whom were security guards for Osama bin Laden,” saying, “This is not true. When I went to Pakistan, I only had two people with me. When I was turned over, they captured the Arab and Pakistani people. When they sent me to prison, I was taken along with the other group.” He added that he had traveled with two Pakistani guides, and that, after surrendering, he was met by a representative of the Saudi government, who knew of him because “I am from a very well known family.” Despite assurances from the representative that he would help him return to Saudi Arabia, however, he was then handed over to US forces.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Sharikh was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated August 6, 2007, in which he was identified as Abd al-Razzaq al-Sharikh, and it was noted that he was born in January 1984, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he “completed one year of high school and then sold honey outside various mosques near his parents’ home” in Riyadh, but, in early 2000 (when he was mistakenly identified as being 18 years old, even though he was only 16), his brother, identified as Abd Abdallah Ibrahim Latif al-Sharakh (aka Abbad), “was killed while participating in jihad in Chechnya.” It was noted that he “looked up to Abbad and when he heard that Abbad was killed, he became zealous to join the jihad and martyr himself.”

Al-Sharikh stated that he “was not recruited by any organization and did not become a member of Al-Qaida,” and, instead, “decided to travel to Afghanistan (AF) on his own initiative and at the suggestion of his brother’s friends,” who “approached [him] at his brother’s funeral and encouraged him to travel to Afghanistan because the living conditions and training opportunities were better there than in Chechnya.” His brother’s friends arranged for him to travel with another individual (perhaps because of his age), and in early December 2000, the two flew to Karachi, and then on, via the Taliban’s office in Quetta, to Kandahar, and a compound near Kandahar airport, where al-Sharikh spent a week before training at Al-Farouq.

He said that he spent a few months training, and then traveled to “a location a short distance behind the front line at Bagram,” where he “rotated between the front and secondary battle lines for approximately eight or nine months until the Bagram line fell to the Northern Alliance and the order came to retreat.” He and four other individuals then “started back to Kandahar, but because of Coalition bombing, they diverted to Khost,” where he stayed “for approximately ten days before he heard that all Arabs needed to make their way to Pakistan.” He then set off for Pakistan on foot with two Afghans, presumably as guides, and said that, after eight days, he “joined a group of 20 to 30 other Arabs who hiked to Pakistan through the Tora Bora Mountains.”

It was also noted that, on December 15, 2001, the day after this group arrived in Parachinar, they were seized by the Pakistani authorities. The Task Force claimed that he was apprehended “with a group of 31 other Arabs, which consisted mostly of [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards, but this was not necessarily a reliable assessment, as will be noted below. The group was then transferred to a prison in Peshawar, where al-Sharikh was held until he was transferred to Kandahar on December 26, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information about the following: Terrorist recruitment of Muslim foreign nationals attending the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force was dubious about his claim that he was not a member of Al-Qaida, claiming that, as well as traveling to Afghanistan and taking part in training and combat, as he acknowledged, he had also been “selected by senior Al-Qaida leaders” for a terrorist attack on the Prince Sultan Air base (PSAB) in Saudi Arabia, and had “also acknowledged having been present at Tora Bora during meetings of senior Al-Qaida commanders during the battle.”

It was also noted that he had “reported about his brother,” and had “provided much of what [was] known about [his] timeline,” but “continue[d] to omit specific details regarding [his brother]‘s activities and his associates at Tora Bora.” Moreover, the Task Force claimed that he had “not acknowledged being a UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguard or a member of UBL’s security detail,” and noted that he had “provided very little information of value about UBL, Sayf al-Adl, or other senior Al-Qaida figures to whom he had access, and it is not clear whether he has no valuable information about them or if he is deliberately withholding important information.”

In seeking to justify its claims, the Task Force drew on some distinctly dubious witnesses. One was Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016, still held), the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the US torture program was specifically developed, who said that he recalled al-Sharikh and his brother paying for specialized training, and another was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (ISN 212, but never held at Guantánamo), a particularly important “high-value detainee,” who was the emir of the Khaldan training camp until it was closed by the Taliban in 2000, after he refused to allow it to be taken over by Osama bin Laden. Al-Libi’s torture in Egypt in 2002 led to a false confession that Al-Qaida operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, which was then used to justify the invasion of Iraq, even though al-Libi retracted it. Sent back to Libya after several years in secret CIA prisons, al-Libi died in Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison in May 2009, reportedly by committing suicide, although observers believed that he had been killed.

Despite his conflict with bin Laden, al-Libi was described as “a trusted Al-Qaida senior trainer and commander,” and it was claimed that, “while providing explosives training at Al-Farouq in April 2001, he was directed by senior Al-Qaida operative Abu Hafs al-Masri to provide specialized training to two Saudi nationals named Akrima and Hammam” — identified as the aliases of al-Sharikh and his brother — and that he “provided the training at a special site for three days,” after which they were “to conduct attacks against a US military base in Saudi Arabia.”

Another dubious witness, and well known as an unreliable witness in Guantánamo, was Abd al-Hakim Bukhari (ISN 493, released in September 2007), who, ludicrously, was described as an “[a]ssessed Al-Qaida operative,” even though he had been imprisoned and tortured by Al-Qaida as an alleged spy. Bukhari apparently identified al-Sharikh and his brother “as having connections to terrorist cells in the US and the United Kingdom.”

Another even more unreliable witness was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), a Yemeni known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who claimed that al-Sharikh was “a jihadist from Saudi Arabia who belonged to the Mehjin Center (camp of fighters) in Tora Bora,” and “further stated” that Yahya al-Salmi (ISN 66, also identified as al-Sulami, see above) “became the leader of the Mehjin Center after Mehjin died, and that [al-Sharikh] was [his] deputy. He also claimed that al-Sharikh, along with al-Sulami, “commanded approximately 15 fighters responsible for guarding a river crossing leading to a Tora Bora camp.”

The claim that al-Sharikh “stated he witnessed a meeting held in Tora Bora,” which included various Al-Qaida leaders, prompted an analyst to note that it was “unlikely [he] would be allowed to witness a high-level meeting if he did not hold a position of authority or trust among the senior Al-Qaida commanders at Tora Bora.”

Some of the allegations above may well have been true, but it was disturbing how many were produced by notoriously unreliable witnesses, and how few came from al-Sharikh himself. Nevertheless, it was clear that there were reasons to regard him as suspicious, because, as the Task Force also noted, “Prior to the visit of a Saudi government delegation to JTF-GTMO in 2002, the Saudi government provided information about 37 detainees whom they designated as high priority. Detainee was number one on that list.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed to be a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been mostly compliant and rarely hostile to the guard force and staff,” and, as a result, Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updating a recommendation for his continued detention at Guantánamo (dated August 3, 2006), repeated that recommendation, and it is unclear why he was released the next month.

After his release, and after he had been put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, the Pentagon claimed that al-Sharikh became involved in providing support to terrorists. In May 2009, the Pentagon produced a fact sheet, “Former Guantánamo Detainee Terrorism Trends” (PDF), in which it was claimed that he had been “arrested in September 2008 for supporting terrorism,” although this was not listed as “confirmed” but only as “suspected.” No further information has been provided to justify this claim, and it may be that he was included because, in February 2009, one of his brothers, Abdulmohsin al-Sharikh, was listed as one of Saudi Arabia’s 85 most wanted terror suspects.

Khalid Al Bawardi (ISN 68, Saudi Arabia) Released November 2007

As I explained in Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, Khalid al-Bawardi, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, told his tribunal at Guantánamo the most complete tale of being a missionary, which he related with a superior moral tone that was both pompous and convincing. He explained that he took a vacation from his job with the Chamber of Commerce, and went to Pakistan to find people who were receptive to the idea of dawa, which he described as correcting the mistakes of Muslims who have “strayed from the path of righteousness.”

He then gave his tribunal a lecture on Jamaat al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organization, saying that, although he met Tablighi representatives in Pakistan, “They have certain procedures that they are tied down by and the procedures they follow are wrong in our religion. Their work is good and it’s correct but they make some mistakes,” adding, “You are not able to understand this or get a whole clear picture because you don’t have a complete picture of Jamaat-al-Tablighi. Besides that, you have to know Islam to know what is right and what is wrong.”

Having decided to work on his own, he said he traveled around Pakistani villages with a guide, correcting people’s mistakes (particularly to do with raised graves and good luck charms), and then went to Kabul, where the people were more in need of his help. When the war started, he was advised to leave the country, and, after explaining that he suspected that his landlord stole his bag, which contained his passport, he described a difficult journey to the border, in which a man who gave him a lift in a car “forcefully told me to get out” in the desert, and a young Afghan who took him into his house also asked him to leave “I told him I wanted this and that and he said he was poor and that he couldn’t help me,” he said. After finding a guide, he was arrested crossing the border.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Bawardi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated October 6, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in November 1972, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that, after quitting school, he “became a telephone operator and receptionist in the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce,” and then, after about a year, “quit work and sold vegetables for a few months.” On an unknown date, he traveled to Dubai, “to conduct missionary work and teach the Koran,” and at some point “read an old fatwa” issued by a sheikh, which “directed all pious men to travel abroad and perform missionary work in underdeveloped Islamic countries,” which he took to mean places such as Afghanistan or Pakistan. Pointing out that “there was no mention of jihad in the fatwa,” he said he chose to travel to Pakistan, and flew to Karachi in approximately May 2001.

On arrival, he said that he met an Afghan named Muhammad, who offered to be his guide. He said he “spent approximately one month in the Karachi area teaching the Koran in small unnamed villages,” while Muhammad translated for him. In approximately June or July 2001, Muhammad told him “they could do great work in Afghanistan and suggested they go there,” and he and Muhammad then traveled to Kabul, where he “facilitated discussion groups on Islam for four months,” but, in October 2001, “after the air war started,” he “decided go back to Saudi Arabia and left Kabul without Muhammad.”

Essentially telling the same story he later told his tribunal at Guantánamo, he said that, after “seeking out someone to help him leave Afghanistan, [he] returned to his apartment in Kabul to find all of his possessions, including his passport, stolen in his absence.” He then set off for Pakistan “by car, but his Afghani driver left him somewhere on the road between Kabul and the Pakistan border in fear of being seen with an Arab.” He then “walked for some time before reaching a small village where he stayed for three or four weeks.” Sometime in November 2001, with an Afghan guide, he “left on foot for the border,” but, on the way, “ran into and joined a larger group of 10 to 23 male refugees heading toward Pakistan.” He said that he traveled with this group for about a week until they were seized by Pakistani border officials, and added that he “was held for a few days in a Pakistani jail and questioned by Saudi officials,” and then, on December 27, 2001, was transferred to US custody.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, and the Task Force provided the following explanation, which, unusually, added analysis from Guantánamo to the spurious information compiled in Afghanistan: “Detainee’s transfer was likely due to the perceived association between him and the 30 UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards, Al-Qaida members, and Taliban fighters with whom he was arrested. However, initial reports suggested he was able to provide information on the following: Effect of the civil war on religion and ethnicity as they affect regional security issues.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “utilizing a cover story passed to him while in a Pakistani prison,” noting that a fellow prisoner had “stated that a prison warden instructed members of [his] captured group to claim they were in Afghanistan to teach the Koran,” and adding that it was assessed that he “continue[d] to hide his true activities.” To reach these conclusions, however, the Task Force relied on a number of dubious witnesses.

One was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), well known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who “stated detainee trained at Al-Qaida’s Al-Farouq Camp for three weeks, two months before the US bombing campaign started in October 2001,” and “also identified detainee as fighting in the Quodous area” (noted by an analyst as “a likely reference to the center in Tora Bora commanded by Al-Qaida member Abdul Qadoos”) “and as being in charge of determining where to dig caves and bunkers.”

Another unreliable witness was Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held, and also identified as Maad al-Qahtani), who said he “met detainee in Tora Bora.” An analyst described al-Qahtani as “a confirmed Al-Qaida operative with direct ties to senior Al-Qaida leadership, including UBL [Osama bin Laden] and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad,” but he is more generally known as the most notorious victim of torture in Guantánamo.

It was also claimed that variations on his name had been found on various documents seized in raids on houses connected with Al-Qaida, and this led to a far-fetched claim that he “may have been an Al-Qaida facilitator,” because a “variation of [his] alias, Abu Khalid al-Tamimi, [was] the same as that used by a facilitator of a 1998 suicide plot against a US tanker ship in the Straits of Gibraltar.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been semi-compliant but mostly hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a previous recommendation for his continued detention at Guantánamo (dated October 15, 2005), repeated that recommendation, although, crucially, he added, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Bawardi] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO),” although it took another 13 months for that agreement to be reached, and for him to be repatriated, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

In an interview in January 2010, al-Bawardi spoke to the Daily Telegraph, and claimed that he had, in fact, traveled to Afghanistan for jihad. As the article noted, “Bored, depressed and stuck in a dead-end job, Khaled al-Bawardi spent just a few hours watching jihadi videos to convince himself that he wanted to fight for militant Islam. It took another six years in Guantánamo Bay, plus a year in religious rehab in Saudi Arabia, to realize there might be better career options.”

Al-Bawardi said, “When I was young, I thought these people were angels and we had to follow them. Now, though, I can see between right and wrong.” The article also stated, “Quietly-spoken, and dressed in a traditional Arab robe and keffiya, Mr. Bawardi is an alumnus of the Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Counselling and Care outside Riyadh, where for the last two years, batches of former Guantánamo inmates have undergone religious ‘deprogramming’ in exchange for their liberty.” The article also noted differing points of view about the program, stating that, “although there is widespread agreement that the battleground lies as much in the mind as in the streets, mountains or deserts, debate remains as to whether Saudi-style rehab programmes are the right answer. Critics contend that the Prince Mohammed project’s softly-softly approach is simply a way for Saudi’s rulers to sweep dissent under the carpet, and that it is far too easy for inmates to simply pretend they have reformed. Its backers, though, say there is little alternative — punishment, after all, is a limited sanction against a movement that thrives on martyrdom.” In contrast, “Saudi officials maintain that only a tiny minority of the programme’s 120 former Guantanamo inmates are known to have reoffended — while the rest are, they claim, helping to combat the spread of Al-Qaida’s ideology. Defeating that, they point out, is the only sure route to vanquishing Al-Qaida permanently.”

Sadeq Mohammed Said Ismail (ISN 69, Yemen) Released June 2007

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One)” and in an article at the time of his release, I explained how, according to his account at Guantánamo, Ismail (also identified as Sadeq Mohammed Said), who was born in 1982, and was therefore 19 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in May 2001 and serving as a courier for the Taliban. Although he had been injured in an aerial bombing attack near Khost, and was captured after crossing the border into Pakistan, the US authorities managed to claim, based on an unsubstantiated allegation, presumably from another prisoner, that he was captured in Tora Bora, during the showdown in November and December 2001 between Al-Qaida and Taliban forces, and the US military and their Afghan proxies, when Osama bin Laden and the senior leadership of Al-Qaida slipped away across the unguarded border to Pakistan.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Ismail was a brief “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated November 12, 2004, in which Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended to his military review board that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD).”

Little information was provided in this document, although it was noted that, according to the Task Force’s assessment, he “traveled to Afghanistan for the purpose of receiving military training; however, he claims to have received no training.” The allegation that he was a courier was also mentioned, as it was claimed that, “While in Afghanistan, [he] participated in escort or courier operations between Kandahar and Kabul for the Taliban for several months until the US bombing campaign began in the area.”

The Tora Bora allegation was not mentioned, but it was noted that the Task Force assessed him “as being very deceptive, as he ha[d] not been forthcoming during debriefings,” was “very uncooperative,” and gave “conflicting information.”

It was also noted that, in his “Most Recent JTF GTMO Assessment, signed on 6 September 2003,” which also recommended his transfer to the control of another country for continued detention, he was assessed as being of low intelligence value and a medium threat. Despite the recommendation for his transfer, however, he was not released for another two years and seven months, and three years and nine months after he was first recommended for transfer.

After his return from Guantánamo, in an interview with Gulf News following his release from four months in Yemeni detention on October 12, 2007, he told reporter Nasser Arrabyee that “he did not know why he was arrested in the first place, and why he was released.” Identified as Sadeq Mohammad Saeed, he told a different story abut his capture, claiming that he “was arrested along with his compatriots in Afghanistan from a hospital where he was undergoing treatment for injuries he suffered in a battle more than six years ago.”

Arrabyee explained that, just hours after arriving at his home in Ibb city, “he was receiving visitors who came for a welcome ceremony,” and was dressed “in smart traditional Yemeni clothes and sporting a long beard.” His brothers “were introducing him to those who came to the house, many of whom were strangers.” Some were relatives of other Guantánamo prisoners. She noted that, although he “was initially reluctant to speak to the journalists,” he “gave in after some persuasion by his brothers and spoke to Gulf News,” focusing on what he called a “letter to the Americans and the world,” in which, with some defiance, he “said he and his companions were engaged in ‘jihad’ since they left [their] homes and families and would continue doing so as long as they live.” That may have been bravado, to be honest, although it may also have got him labeled as a suspected recidivist by the US authorities.

Explaining more, he said, “I traveled to Pakistan and from there to Afghanistan and then I joined one of the Taliban battlelines.” As Arrabyee described it, he “refused to delve into the bodily abuses he suffered while in Guantánamo, but spoke about abuses against religion inflicted on all detainees,” and said, “The abuses targeted religion, reviling God, and Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and his companions and the believers. Some brothers were subjected to psychological and physical torture because they were Muslims. There were a lot of abuses, and it is enough to say they were directed at Allah, his prophet and the believers.”

He added that “he was not sure of his future plans,” and explained, “I cannot say anything right now. I’m still a stranger on this land, I’m a new-born, I cannot say I can do this and that.” Arrabyee noted that he “traveled to Afghanistan before completing his secondary school.”

In a final rhetorical flourish that can only have alarmed the US authorities, fearful of retribution and unable to understand the desire of some Muslims to fight in other Muslim countries, one of his brothers, Rashad Mohammad Saeed, who had traveled to Afghanistan for jihad, said, “Let the Americans know that jihadists are respected in their nations and they are not killers or criminals.” As Gulf News put it, “he exhorted Muslims to rise in revolt against the Bush administration which spends billions of dollars to destroy Taliban and Al-Qaida,” saying, “These attempts are only making the Taliban and Al-Qaida stronger and stronger.”

Mishal Saad Al Rashid (ISN 74, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2007

As I explained in Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, and in an article at the time of his release, Mishal Saad al-Rashid (misidentified by his captors as Mesh Arsad al-Rashid), who was 21 years old at the time of his capture, was typical of numerous men captured and sent to Guantánamo, in his insistence that he went to Afghanistan, over a year “before any problem happened in America,” to help the Taliban fight General Dostum and Ahmed Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance.

He was confused that the Northern Alliance had formed a coalition with the United States, as the only coalition that he knew of was between the Northern Alliance and Russia. Although this misconception, repeated by several other prisoners, was partly due to the propaganda issued by pro-Taliban sheikhs in Saudi Arabia, it also had some basis in fact, at least in the case of Dostum, who had fought with the Russians during the Soviet invasion, before switching sides in the early 1990s.

In his tribunal at Guantánamo, al-Rashid accepted an allegation that he was a member of the Taliban (but not Al-Qaida), and also acknowledged that he had received military training in Afghanistan. He was one of several hundred Taliban fighters who surrendered after the fall of Kunduz, believing that they would be freed after handing over their weapons, but who discovered, instead, that they were to be imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, a fortress run by General Dostum. After the prisoners were tied up and taken for questioning, some of them, fearing that they were about to be killed, staged an uprising, which was put down by the Northern Alliance, backed up by US and British Special Forces, and supported by American bombing raids, in which the majority of the prisoners were killed. In the end, a week after the uprising began, 86 survivors emerged from the basement, who had survived being bombed and flooded.

At Guantánamo, when asked about the “uprising,” al-Rashid, who was injured in his thigh and shoulder, said, “What uprising? We didn’t do any uprising. We had given up our weapons, so how could we be part of an uprising? They [Dostum's troops] were the ones that had the weapons. We tried to defend ourselves but we couldn’t, because they had all the weapons.” He added that accusing men who were tied up of using weapons was a sure sign of the “betrayal” that had taken place in the fort.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Rashid was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated April 28, 2007, in which it was noted that he was born in 1980, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he attended elementary school but “acquired no further formal education,” and, from 1995 to 2000, worked as a guard at a palace. Around March 2000, he responded to a fatwa “telling Muslims to support the Taliban in Afghanistan against the NA [Northern Alliance],” and also “heard about religious persecution of Muslims in Afghanistan,” and, as a result, he quit his job and traveled to Qatar, intending to take a flight to Pakistan. For reasons that were not explained, he and a new friend he met en route were unable to fly to Pakistan, and so they returned to Saudi Arabia, where they succeeded in taking a flight to Islamabad instead. They then made their way to Peshawar, where “they spoke with a Pakistani about their desire to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban,” and he “helped them cross the border into Afghanistan and escorted them to a Taliban house in Kandahar.”

He attended training at Al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11), and was then “assigned to the reserve lines (secondary line) for several months.” He then traveled to the front lines in the Khawaja Ghar region, where, with other Arabs, he fought alongside the Taliban. After the Taliban withdrew (as the Northern Alliance advanced), he and others retreated to a Taliban house in Kunduz, where his commander, Mullah Thaker, told the them to surrender and said that “they would be allowed to return to their country.” It is not known whether Thaker knew this to be untrue, but after surrendering, they were taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where he “was shot in the left leg and under his right arm.”

After he and the other survivors were moved to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, he was transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport on December 29, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif [and] Taliban membership.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he had “denied having knowledge of any of the detainees that ha[d] identified him,” had “failed to provide any detailed information concerning his activities and associates while in Afghanistan,” and had “provided inconsistent information about his personal history.” Nevertheless, there was nothing about his story to demonstrate that he was anything more than a simple foot soldier, but the Task Force managed to come up with an alternative account from Ali al-Tayeea (ISN 111, released in January 2009), a talkative Iraqi known as one of the most unreliable witnesses in Guantánamo.

Al-Tayeea claimed that al-Rashid “worked with wireless communication systems,” and “reported that detainee was responsible for transporting trainees between Kabul and Al-Farouq, and served as Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi’s liaison when he came to the camp (al-Iraqi, ISN 10026, who was moved to Guantánamo in 2007, and is still held, was described as “one of [Osama bin Laden]‘s closest commanders and the person in charge of non-Afghan Taliban troops and Al-Qaida fighters that made up the 55th Arab Brigade on the Afghanistan northern front”). Al-Tayeea also stated that al-Rashid “reportedly collected intelligence on trainees and soldiers for al-Iraqi and that the two men had frequent contact.”

To be fair, although an analyst noted that “[t]his reporting indicate[d] detainee had direct access to al-Iraqi and served in a significant role in UBL’s 55th Arab Brigade, possibly as a counterintelligence officer,” the analyst also noted that al-Rashid’s “close association to al-Iraqi” was “uncorroborated by other sources and require[d] further exploitation,” although anyone reading just the start of the 10-page file would not have known this, as, in an “executive summary,” it was stated simply that he “may have served as a counterintelligence or intelligence officer,” and “may have served as a liaison for senior Al-Qaida leader Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi at the Al-Farouq Training Camp.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although one reason for regarding him as a risk was because he had cursed an interrogator during a session in 2003. While this was not actually indicative of anything but frustration, an analyst claimed that, “While this can be construed as only rhetoric, it also denotes the detainee’s inclination to continue to wage or support jihad in the future.” Al-Rashid was also “assessed to be a medium threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been semi-compliant and rarely hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a previous recommendation for his continued detention at Guantánamo (dated April 14, 2006), repeated that recommendation, although he was released just eight months later, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Rukniddin Sharopov (ISN 76, Tajikistan) Released February 2007

As I explained in an article after his release, Rukniddin Sharopov, who was born in 1981 (although the US authorities initially stated that he was born in 1973), claimed in Guantánamo that, because he wanted to earn some money, he agreed to “serve for the army of Tajikistan’s government.” He said that he believed that he would be serving in Lajerg in Tajikistan, but was “tricked” into fighting with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a close ally of the Taliban in the fight against the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan, and serving in Afghanistan instead. He explained that, in Lajerg, he found himself in a camp run by the IMU, where his passport was taken away from him, and one of the organization’s leaders, a man called Rostum, “told him it was better if he went into the military.” As a result, he said, he was sent to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against General Dostum’s Uzbek faction of the Northern Alliance.

He then explained that he was a passenger on a truck containing Uzbek soldiers — not Taliban, as alleged by the US authorities — who surrendered to Dostum’s forces in a compound in Khawaja Ghar, near the border with Tajikistan, and added that, although he had no criminal record in Tajikistan, he believed that this might cause a problem for him in his home country. “This is one thing the interrogators told me,” he said. “The interrogator told me it would be a problem for me if I went back to Tajikistan because I was with the Uzbek community.” He denied receiving training at Lajerg, as, he said, he had received some mandatory training in Tajikistan, and he added that he didn’t like to shoot guns and that at the camp he collected wood for the fire. “I never fought before and I am not going to fight after this. I have never fought in my life,” he stated.

After his capture, he was taken to Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, and was one of only 86 men — out of a total of around 450 foreign fighters — who survived a notorious massacre in the fort. This followed an uprising by a number of the prisoners, who feared that they were about to be shot. He said that he did not take part in the uprising, but was in the basement when it was flooded by the Northern Alliance and the US Special Forces, and that some soldiers untied his hands and “put something around my injury.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Sharopov was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated August 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Rukniddin Sharipov, and was noted that he was born in September 1981, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he “complained of chest pain a few times,” although there had “not been findings on chest X-rays,” and that he “was on a hunger strike in Oct 02.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account and mostly corresponding with what he told his tribunal at Guantánamo, the Joint Task Force noted that he was sent to school in Pakistan “when he was five and remained there until age 15,” and then “attended Government Degree College, where he studied Civics, Pashtu, and History.” He apparently “stated he returned to Isfara when he and a friend, Tsabit Vakhidov” (ISN 90, see below, also identified as Muqit Vohidov and Wahldof Abdul Mokit) and another friend, identified only as Farad, “were recruited for service with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),” described by the US authorities as “a Tier 1 counterterrorism target, defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

He apparently said that the three of them “left Isfara by train destined for Russia to find work,” but “[w]hile they were at the train station in Dushanbe,” they “met a man by the name of Rostam who recruited them to join what they believed to be the Tajikistan military,” and “told them that they would be paid USD $300 a month in wages if they joined.” After they agreed, they went to Tavildara, also in Tajikistan, where they “arrived at an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) training camp.”

There, he said, there were about 200 soldiers, and, after he received a few days’ military training, “he stood guard at the main gate of the camp.” He and the others were then flown to Kunduz “in helicopters provided by the Tajikistan government,” although he “did not know where he was flying,” and was only told that “he was going to a warmer place.” He added that he believed he arrived in Afghanistan sometime after Ramadan in 2000.

When it came to the circumstances of his capture, it was stated that he traveled with other IMU fighters from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif,” but were told to surrender to Dostum’s forces just before arriving. The Task Force noted that he “was present at the Mazar-e-Sharif prison uprising,” and also noted that he stated that he “had his hands tied behind his back and was on his knees when fighting started in the prison.” He added that he “began to run and was wounded,” and “received three shrapnel wounds on his right foot.” It was also noted, “During the fighting, he went back to the house and went into the basement where there were many other Pakistani and Arabic-speaking prisoners. Only one of the prisoners in the basement had a Kalashnikov. [He] heard that Dostum’s forces threw a grenade into the house, [which] killed some of the prisoners in the basement and injured others. [He] spent about 5-6 days in the basement.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Detainee may be able to provide general to specific information on the training and relocation of Tajik youth into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban [and] Detainee may be able to provide general to specific information on the unit that formed the Uzbek movement in Mazar-e-Sharif.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he had “admitted being an IMU member,” and assessed that he and Vakhidov “were both recruited to join the IMU prior to leaving their homes,” because, although both men “stated that they were headed for ‘Russia’ to seek jobs,” neither “had a specific destination in Russia.” It was also claimed that Sharopov “did not explain where they got finances to take the train,” and It was “much more likely that someone in their village recruited them and that ‘Rostam’ was scheduled to meet with them on the train and escort them to the Tajikistan training camp.”

This may have been so, but it still didn’t demonstrate that Sharopov was anything more than a simple foot soldier. The Task Force concluded that he was only “of low intelligence value,” and only posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although officials also claimed that he had been “indoctrinated into the Islamic extremist ideology and knowingly joined the IMU for jihadist purposes,” which I do not believe had been established. It was also noted that his “overall behavior pattern ha[d] been compliant with spikes in aggression, with the most reports coming from harassment of the guard force.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to continued detention in Tajkistan, even though it was also noted that he was “a fugitive from Tajikistan and [was] wanted for violating Tajikistan’s laws and international orders,” which indicated that he would be treated very poorly if repatriated.

Sure enough, after his release, Sharopov and Muqit Vohidov (aka Tsabit Vakhidov) were tried and sentenced to 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labor camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan” and aiding the Taliban by fighting for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and for taking part in “illegal border crossing.” After passing sentence, the Supreme Court judge, Musammir Uroqov, said that both men had maintained their innocence, and added, “In their last words, they said they didn’t expect such consequences for acts they committed.” However, according to RFE/RL, the judge was satisfied that “investigations carried out in Vohidov and Sharopov’s native Isfara region proved that both men [had] been involved with the banned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.”

In June 2010, as I explained here, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting revisited the story, explaining how the men’s families had been campaigning for a review of the verdict, and how prosecutors were possibly prepared to review the case. Although arguments were made that the sentence was justified because the men “committed acts that violate national law,” it was also noted that the time they served in Guantánamo was not taken into account during the sentencing.

Moreover, as I explained, other observers remained deeply critical, and their insights reflected badly not only on the Tajik authorities but also on the US government. As the IWPR article explained, Payam Foroughi, until recently a human rights officer with the OSCE in Tajikistan, “believes due process was not followed,” pointing out that the men “had not enough, or any, time to sufficiently and seriously discuss and properly prepare their case with a lawyer — and one of their choice — prior to their court hearing.” He also believed that the court “should have probed further into the allegation that Vohidov and Sharopov willingly became members of the IMU,” adding, “If anything, the evidence points to them having been victims of human trafficking.”

Criticism of the US came, inadvertently, from the judge in the men’s trial in 2007, who told IWPR, “We could not determine, even from the defendants, on what legal basis they were detained at and released from Guantánamo. We could not get hold of any documents. So we reached a verdict based on the documents that we had.” Highlighting this problem more explicitly, a local lawyer told IWPR that “the lack of documentation from Guantánamo was a recurring problem in countries to which detainees are repatriated.” He might have added that in most countries the authorities’ response was to let the men go.

In August 2011, RFE/RL reported that, for the 20th anniversary of Tajikistan’s independence, on September 9, 2011, human rights activists and lawyers were calling on the Tajik president to consider releasing the two former Guantánamo prisoners as part of an amnesty, noting, “Some 8,000 prisoners are expected to be set free to mark the occasion. Unofficial estimates suggest there are currently 13,000 people imprisoned in Tajikistan. There have been 11 amnesties in Tajikistan over the past 20 years. In the most recent, in November 2009, some 10,000 prisoners were released.”

The article stated, “Human Rights Watch, two prominent American lawyers, and a legal expert from Columbia University in New York have sent letters to Tajik President Emomali Rahmon making the case for Rukniddin Sharopov’s and Abdumuqit Vohidov’s release.” Chicago-based attorney Matthew J. O’Hara wrote, “It is my expert opinion that a great injustice has been done on the two.” He explained that it was probable that the two men “did not traverse the international border by will,” and, as RFE/RL added, “Sharopov and Vohidov maintain that they have never killed anyone, or been involved in terrorist activities or acts of violence.”

In their letter, Human Rights Watch stated, “Neither US, nor Tajik authorities provided any sound evidences of Sharopov’s and Vokhidov’s belonging to terrorist activity and crimes. We hope that the forthcoming amnesty law will also cover ex-prisoners of the Guantanamo Bay, who were accused of murder, and hope that Vokhidov’s and Sharopov’s appeals for amnesty will be carefully examined.” However, there has been no further news since August 2011.

Mehrabanb Fazrollah (ISN 77, Tajikistan) Released February 2007

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I explained how Mehrabanb Fazrollah, who was 39 years old at the time of his capture, was subjected to a particularly thin set of allegations in Guantánamo: that he traveled to Afghanistan in April 2001, that he “admitted to fighting with the Taliban,” and that he was captured with a Kalashnikov and ammunition.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Fazrollah  was an “Update Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated August 28, 2005, in which he was also identified as Mehrabon Faizulloh Odinaev, and it was noted that he was born in October 1962, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, it was noted that he served in the Russian Army from 1981 to 1983 (but did not serve in Afghanistan), and then “received training as a bus driver and an auto mechanic,” but “also worked at an oil refinery, on a collective farm producing cotton, and in a fruit delivery business.” From 1992 to 1994, during the Tajik civil war, he lived in Afghanistan for three months, and then “became a refugee and moved to a refugee camp near the Kunduz airport.” After the civil war he returned to Dushanbe, and, in 2000, “sent his ten-year old son with a group of Tajik youths” to study at a madrassa in Karachi.

In March or April 2001, he said, he decided to visit his son. Traveling to Pakistan via Afghanistan, he spent a week with old friends, and “continued his travels with stops in Kunduz and Kabul.” After locating his son in May, he spent a month with him and then set off back for Tajikistan. However, he said that he was unable to find anyone to help him cross the river to get back to Tajikistan (which was a dangerous and illegal crossing), so he remained in an Afghan village until early November 2001, when he “decided to depart for Kunduz because the Northern Alliance arrived and were arresting people who did not have identification.” There, he said, he stayed in a refugee camp for ten days, but was then picked up by Northern Alliance troops.

They told him that “they would bring him and several others to a safe place,” but, instead, took them to Qala-i-Janghi, an ancient fort in the possession of the warlord General Rashid Dostum, where he survived the massacre that resulted after some of the hundreds of prisoners started an uprising, fearing that they were about to be shot. He was one of 86 survivors, who hid in a basement where they were bombed and flooded, but no mention was made of it in his file. He was then moved to Dostum’s prison at Sherberghan, before being transferred to US custody at the Kandahar detention facility. He was sent to Guantánamo on May 10, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif, Tajiki refugees residing in Afghanistan [and] A madrassa in Karachi, PK.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force provided a conflicting account to his own, noting that he was “assessed as a low-level member of the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan (IMT), which is allied with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),” and also noting that he “admitted he fought alongside the Taliban against Northern Alliance forces and fled after the collapse of the Taliban.” The IMU was described by the US authorities as “a Tier 1 counterterrorism target, defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests,” but even so, he was regarded as not being of major significance.

The Task Force also claimed that he had “not been forthright during debriefings,” and regarded his story of visiting his son as “a cover story,” but in conclusion he was only assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his ”overall behavior ha[d] been non-hostile and compliant,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation for his “Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention” (dated May 5, 2004), recommended him for transfer with conditions, although he was not released for another year and a half.

Fahed Al Harazi (ISN 79, Saudi Arabia) Released September 2007

In Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Fahed al-Harazi, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of travelling to Afghanistan in March 2001 and — with remarkable speed — becoming a trainer at Al-Farouq, the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11.

in an article at the time of his release, I expanded on his story, noting that, although he had secured legal representation by the time he was released, he had refused to meet his lawyers, and had also refused to take part in either his tribunal or his review boards, so that the allegations against him went unanswered. While the first set of allegations — that he traveled to Afghanistan in March 2001 “to fight the jihad,” attended “an Al-Qaida affiliated camp,” fought on the front lines against the Northern Alliance, and was wounded in Qala-i-Janghi — seem plausible, the additional claims — that he was actually a trainer at Al-Farouq, and that his name was found on a document at the “Military Committee al-Mujahideen Affairs Office,” which contained “nominees for the Al-Qaida Trainers Preparation Center” — appeared more dubious.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Harazi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated June 19, 2007, in which he was also identified as Fahd al-Harazi, and it was noted that he was born in November 1978, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he “completed at least 15 years of school,” although he “held no job after graduation, but spent his time with ‘non-religious’ friends.” However, he regularly “attended a masque next door to his residence in Mecca,” and there “met a Pakistani named Abdul Jalil who told [him] he needed to go and fight in jihad.” Another individual, named Majid, then “told [him] that they both could go to Afghanistan and then return to Saudi Arabia after only a short time,” and he “managed their travel, obtained Pakistani visas, and paid for all travel expenses.” In March 2001, they flew to Karachi, and then on to Quetta, Kandahar and Kabul.

In Kabul, he said, he and Majid “attended two weeks of military training, which consisted of instruction on small arms and grenades,” and were then sent to Kunduz. They “arrived at a Taliban guesthouse in Kunduz the first week in May 2001,” and al-Harazi said that “[b]etween five and 20 Taliban soldiers were resting at this guesthouse at various times.” After a week, he “and his two associates traveled to the second line, about three miles to the rear of the Taliban front lines.” He ”claimed he went to the front lines on five or six occasions with his AK-47 but never fired his weapon nor did he see any fighting,” and remained on the lines until he was instructed to retreat to Kunduz (he said this was late August 2001, but it was almost certainly November).

Two weeks later, the Taliban surrendered to the Northern Alliance, and he “was told they could surrender and were guaranteed safe travel through Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, to Herat, AF,” but Northern Alliance forces under the warlord General Rashid Dostum apparently captured him and others on November 24, 2001, and took them to Qala-i-Janghi, where a massacre of prisoners took place, after some of them staged an uprising, fearing that they were about to be shot.

As the Task Force described it in al-Harazi’s file, “After one night in captivity, the prisoners revolted leading to the deaths of members of the Northern Alliance forces and CIA officer Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann.” Al-Harazi “was shot in the arm during the uprising,” and he and 86 others that “survived the assaults hid in the basement until they were re-captured about a week later,” after the basement had been bombed and flooded. He was taken to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, and was turned over to US control on approximately December 28, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban training capabilities, Training Course for Trainers at Al-Farouq Training Camp [and] Routes of ingress and egress from Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force decided that he was lying, although their reasons for doing so were questionable. One unreliable witness, Abdu Ali al-Haji Sharqawi (ISN 1457, still held, and also identified as Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj), is a victim of torture in Jordan and in secret CIA custody in Afghanistan, and there might therefore be doubts abut the truth of his statement that, after being shown a photo of al-Harazi, he “identified [him] as Hassan al-Makki, who attended the class at Al-Farouq Training Camp to become an instructor.” To back this up, it was noted that the same name, Hassan al-Makki, “was found on a list of participants for a course entitled “Training Course for Trainers,” held at Al-Farouq from September to December 2000,” in which it was stated that al-Makki “traveled to Afghanistan in 1999, attended the trainer’s course, and worked as a trainer at Al-Farouq.” It was also “indicated” that al-Makki “was residing in the airport complex for the duration of training,” which an analyst took to mean “the Al-Qaida guesthouse located at Kandahar airport.”

The problem with these claims, of course, is that it is by no means clear that the man from Mecca who adopted the alias Hassan was actually al-Harazi, even if that was an alias he used, as others from Mecca might also have chosen that name, and it is no more reassuring that David Hicks (ISN 2, released May 2007), “stated detainee went by the name Khalid and was a trainer of the basic training course at Al-Farouq,” because it is well-known that Hicks lied under pressure, and, in any case, although he allegedly identified al-Harazi as a trainer at Al-Farouq, presumably under prompting, he gave him the wrong name.

Also of significance is al-Harazi’s claim that he did not attend Al-Farouq and, instead, attended a camp outside Kabul, which he described as “not a typical training camp where many people attended, but rather a small residence utilizing very old, primitive weapons.” In an attempt to tie him to a loftier role than being a mere foot soldier, it was then stated that he was perhaps the Hassan identified by Ibrahim Bin Shakaran (ISN 587, a Moroccan released in July 2004 and also identified as Brahim Benchekroun), who “stated that an individual named Hassan was in charge of physical training at a privately-owned Libyan paramilitary camp located in Kabul.”

Obviously under pressure, another prisoner, Fahd al-Sharif (ISN 215, released in November 2007), described al-Harazi as his cousin, “as they are both named al- Sharif and both come from Mecca.” This was ridiculous, as al-Harazi was not called al-Sharif, but there was more. He also “reported that other JTF-GTMO detainees refer[red] to detainee as Abu Barak,” and “separately mentioned the name Abu Barak as a trainer in the poisons training course that [he] attended.” According to Fahd al-Sharif, “Abu Barak taught at the Derunta Camp, Khaldan Camp, and Abu Musab al-Suri’s Camp.” An analyst noted that Fahd al-Sharif was “the only source who ha[d] associated the names al-Sharif and Abu Barak to [sic] detainee,” and also noted that he “identified Abu Barak as an Egyptian, not a Saudi,” but went on to claim that, since al-Sharif “identified detainee and a poisons trainer with the same alias from approximately the same time period (1999 – 2000), it is possible detainee is the poisons trainer. However, no other information is available to corroborate this assessment.”

If this was not enough shallow innuendo, it was also noted that Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), a Yemeni well known as the most prolific and unreliable witness at Guantánamo, “stated detainee was a member of an Arab group fighting the Northern Alliance in Taloqan,” which no one else claimed, and John Walker Lindh (ISN 1, but never held at Guantánamo, because he is an American citizen) apparently “photo-identified detainee as Hassan,” under unknown circumstances, although, as the “American Taliban,” he was subjected to torture by his own countrymen before his trial in 2002, which makes his testimony worthless. Lindh apparently said he “first saw him during the retreat from the front lines,” and ”believed [he] was an administrator because he carried a walkie-talkie during the retreat and was responsible for keeping people in the rear motivated.” Despite there being no reason for believing this statement, an analyst noted that “possession of a walkie-talkie and role as a motivator indicate a leadership position among the fighters.”

In other dubious statements, Said al-Zahrani (ISN 204, released in July 2007) “stated detainee was known as Abu Hassan,” and said he “saw [him] at the front lines and in the ‘big kitchen,’ which another detainee described as a large dining area.” Al-Zahrani also apparently “indicated that detainee spent 10 days in a large house in Kunduz with 90 others during the retreat.” In another account, Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, “detainee [was] a mujahid from Jeddah” (he was actually from Mecca, as has been made clear) “who was involved with an unspecified Kandahar mujahideen group.”

In other dubious statements, Humud al-Jadani (ISN 230, released in July 2007), who is emerging in these files as another unreliable witness, “reported detainee was present at the Al-Farouq Training Camp, the frontlines, a Kandahar guesthouse, and the Hamza al-Ghamdi Guesthouse in Kabul in 2000.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force also noted that, “Prior to a 2002 visit to JTF-GTMO, Mabahith [the Saudi intelligence service] designated detainee as a high priority detainee,” stating that he “left Saudi Arabia on 29 October 1999, with Turkey listed as his final destination.” Mabahith also “indicated they had information indicating detainee received training at Al-Farouq,” and noted that he “was on the Saudi government’s “watch and arrest list” for his trip to Afghanistan.” An analyst also noted that Mabahith had “no record of detainee returning after his 1999 travel to Turkey.”

This may indicate that some of the information gathered by the US authorities was true, although much of it was emblematic of the desperation, which runs through the files, and which fuels attempts to prove, time and again, and often in conditions of abuse or torture, that prisoners were more significant than they appeared to be. In conclusion, the Task Force assessed al-Harazi as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been semi-compliant and sometimes hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the commander of Guantánamo, updating a recommendation for his “Continued Detention with Transfer Language” (dated May 26, 2006), recommended him for continued detention without any discussion of transfer. Nevertheless, he was released just three months later, to be to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Muqit Vohidov (ISN 90, Tajikistan) Released February 2007

As I explained in an article after his release, Muqit Vohidov (also identified as Wahldof Abdul Mokit), who was born in 1981 (although the US authorities initially stated that he was born in 1969), said in Guantánamo that he had been tricked into joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a close ally of the Taliban in the fight against the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he explained that he was unaware that he was being recruited to join the IMU, and thought that he was going to be joining the Tajik army instead. He added that the man who lied to him about it –- and to three others in his group –- was a man called Rostum, presumably the same man identified by his friend Rukniddin Sharopov (ISN 76, see above) as a regional leader of the IMU. He also said that he was not previously aware that there were any Uzbeks in Tajikistan, and added that his passport was taken away by a man called Zakir, who was surrounded by armed men who made it clear that they would shoot him if he asked too many questions, and was then flown by helicopter to Afghanistan in January 2001.

He said that he then spent time at three IMU offices in Afghanistan — including offices in Kunduz and Kabul — and wanted to escape but couldn’t, and added that he eventually found a teacher at a madrassa who told him that he would be able to escape from Mazar-e-Sharif, so he went there, spent three months trying to escape, and was then captured by General Dostum’s forces in November 2001. He admitted carrying a Kalashnikov when he was a guard at the madrassa, but denied an allegation that he fought against US forces. When asked how he was arrested, he said that he was in a room with three other people — two he did not know and one doctor — when “Somebody knocked on the door, I opened it and this person came and said, ‘Who are you?’ I told him I was a Tajik, and then he arrested me.”

He also called Sharopov as a witness, who confirmed his story about their recruitment, but was unable to verify what had happened to him after he had left the IMU. Sharopov added that he and Vohidov had survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, where hundreds of prisoners, held in a Northern Alliance fort run by General Rashid Dostum after surrendering, were killed after some of them staged an uprising, fearing that they were about to be shot. Sharopov also explained that both he and Vohidov were then held in a prison in Sheberghan that was also run by General Dostum, until they were transferred to US custody.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Sharopov was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated August 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Sobit Abdumukit Vitalikonovich Vakidov, Sabit Farad Tsabit Vokidov and Abdul Mochid Sobid Wahedof, and it was noted that he was born in September 1981, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account and mostly corresponding with what he told his tribunal at Guantánamo, the Joint Task Force noted that, “Prior to his recruitment into theIMU, [he] ran a distribution business.” Describing the events that led to his capture, it was noted that he and Rukniddin Sharopov (identified as Sharipov), described as “one of his best friends,” left Tajikistan and “were on a train to Russia to find better jobs when they met a man named Rustam, who offered them a military job in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.” He said that they “both accepted this offer,” although he added that he “believe[d] Rustam ‘tricked’ [them] because they thought they would be working with the government of Tajikistan’s Army and not the IMU.” An analyst described Rustam as “probably an IMU recruiter,” and it was noted that the IMU was described by the US authorities as “a Tier 1 counterterrorism target, defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

Vohidov proceeded to explain that, in January 2001, he attended an IMU camp located in Tavildara, although he claimed he “did not receive any training at this facility,” and said that after ten days “helicopters ferried approximately two hundred IMU fighters to Afghanistan,” including he and Sharopov “who flew on separate helicopters.” They were taken to Kunduz, but Vohidov said he then “attended a Madrassa in Kabul for approximately five to six months,” where he met a man named Sharifullah “who offered to get [him] back to Tajikistan if [he] accompanied him to the IMU office at Mazar-e-Sharif,” where he “worked as a supply clerk in the office and was responsible for the food.” He was seized in Mazar-e-Sharif in November 2001 and taken to Qala-i-Janghi, described as the “site of the uprising in which CIA Agent Michael Spahn [sic] was killed,” even though he claimed he “was not at the prison during the uprising.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Practice of bringing youths into Afghanistan from Tajikistan, Madrassa detainee attended [and] Non-governmental organization (NGO) DOSF.”

In assessing his story, the Task Fprce identified the “madraassa” that Vohidov said he attended in Kabul as being an IMU facility, and also claimed that in Mazar-e-Sharif he worked at the “intelligence office for Sharafuddin Sharafat, former Taliban Intelligence chief at Mazar-e-Sharif and the current ACM [anti-coalition militia] leader.” It was also claimed that Vohidov “met Sharafat during his five to six-month stay in Kabul.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his behavior was “assessed as somewhat compliant.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to continued detention in Tajkistan, even though it was also noted that he was “a fugitive from Tajikistan and [was] wanted for violating Tajikistan’s laws and international orders,” which indicated that he would be treated very poorly if repatriated.

After his release, Vohidov — and Rukniddin Sharopov — were sentenced to 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labor camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan” — where they were accused of aiding the Taliban by fighting for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) — and for taking part in “illegal border crossing.” After passing sentence, the Supreme Court judge, Musammir Uroqov, said that both men had maintained their innocence, and added, “In their last words, they said they didn’t expect such consequences for acts they committed.” However, according to RFE/RL, the judge was satisfied that “investigations carried out in Vohidov and Sharopov’s native Isfara region proved that both men [had] been involved with the banned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.”

In June 2010, as I explained here, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting revisited the story, explaining how the men’s families had been campaigning for a review of the verdict, and how prosecutors were possibly prepared to review the case. Although arguments were made that the sentence was justified because the men “committed acts that violate national law,” it was also noted that the time they served in Guantánamo was not taken into account during the sentencing.

Moreover, as I explained, other observers remained deeply critical, and their insights reflected badly not only on the Tajik authorities but also on the US government. As the IWPR article explained, Payam Foroughi, until recently a human rights officer with the OSCE in Tajikistan, “believes due process was not followed,” pointing out that the men “had not enough, or any, time to sufficiently and seriously discuss and properly prepare their case with a lawyer — and one of their choice — prior to their court hearing.” He also believed that the court “should have probed further into the allegation that Vohidov and Sharopov willingly became members of the IMU,” adding, “If anything, the evidence points to them having been victims of human trafficking.”

Criticism of the US came, inadvertently, from the judge in the men’s trial in 2007, who told IWPR, “We could not determine, even from the defendants, on what legal basis they were detained at and released from Guantánamo. We could not get hold of any documents. So we reached a verdict based on the documents that we had.” Highlighting this problem more explicitly, a local lawyer told IWPR that “the lack of documentation from Guantánamo was a recurring problem in countries to which detainees are repatriated.” He might have added that in most countries the authorities’ response was to let the men go.

In August 2011, RFE/RL reported that, for the 20th anniversary of Tajikistan’s independence, on September 9, 2011, human rights activists and lawyers were calling on the Tajik president to consider releasing the two former Guantánamo prisoners as part of an amnesty, noting, “Some 8,000 prisoners are expected to be set free to mark the occasion. Unofficial estimates suggest there are currently 13,000 people imprisoned in Tajikistan. There have been 11 amnesties in Tajikistan over the past 20 years. In the most recent, in November 2009, some 10,000 prisoners were released.”

The article stated, “Human Rights Watch, two prominent American lawyers, and a legal expert from Columbia University in New York have sent letters to Tajik President Emomali Rahmon making the case for Rukniddin Sharopov’s and Abdumuqit Vohidov’s release.” Chicago-based attorney Matthew J. O’Hara wrote, “It is my expert opinion that a great injustice has been done on the two.” He explained that it was probable that the two men “did not traverse the international border by will,” and, as RFE/RL added, “Sharopov and Vohidov maintain that they have never killed anyone, or been involved in terrorist activities or acts of violence.”

In their letter, Human Rights Watch stated, “Neither US, nor Tajik authorities provided any sound evidences of Sharopov’s and Vokhidov’s belonging to terrorist activity and crimes. We hope that the forthcoming amnesty law will also cover ex-prisoners of the Guantanamo Bay, who were accused of murder, and hope that Vokhidov’s and Sharopov’s appeals for amnesty will be carefully examined.” However, there has been no further news since August 2011.

Abdul Rauf Aliza (ISN 108, Afghanistan) Released December 2007

In Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, and in an article at the time of his release, I explained how Abdul Rauf Aliza was seized in November 2001 during the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, and was held, with thousands of other men, in a filthy, overcrowded prison in Sheberghan run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. He was then transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airbase with nine other Afghan prisoners.

One of the nine, Jan Mohammed (ISN 17), a baker from Helmand province who had been forcibly conscripted by the Taliban, was one of the first prisoners to be released from Guantánamo in October 2002. After his release, he explained that the decision to transfer him to Kandahar came about because some of Dostum’s men “told US soldiers that he and nine others were senior Taliban officials.” “They came and took ten strong-looking people,” he told the journalist David Rohde. “Only one of those ten was a Talib.”

It’s probable that the solitary Taliban member transferred to Kandahar with Jan Mohammed was Abdul Rauf Aliza, who was, at some point, more accurately identified by the US authorities as Mullah Abdul Rauf, a Taliban troop commander. Although Aliza claimed that he was conscripted by the Taliban, who said they would take his land if he refused, and insisted that he only worked for them as a cook, several released Afghans explained to the journalist Ashwin Raman that Mullah Abdul Rauf was one of three Taliban commanders in northern Afghanistan held in Guantánamo. They told Raman that he had not been so cautious with his identity while detained in Camp X-Ray, when he “repeatedly pleaded with the Americans to let many of the detainees free,” saying, “These are no Talibs, I am the real Talib.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Rauf Aliza was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated October 26, 2004, in which Brig. Gen. Hood recommended to his military review board that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD).”

In this document, it was noted that, according to the Task Force’s assessment, he was “associated with several Taliban commanders and leaders in Afghanistan (AF) including Mullah Agha Jon Akhund, Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund, and Muhammed A. Fazl” (ISN 7, also identified as Mullah Fazil, and described by an analyst as “the Chief of Staff for the Taliban, as well as military commander for 2500 to 3000 Taliban soldiers”). It was also noted that he “accurately identified Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund as the Taliban Defense Minister and logistics supervisor,” that he ”personally knew and accurately identified Taliban Commander Mullah Agha Jon Akhund,” and that, “[d]espite his claims of being a low-level Taliban foot soldier and food supplier, [he] managed to become closely associated with several senior level Taliban commanders and leaders.”

It was also noted that Shardar Khan (ISN 914, released in October 2006) “identified detainee” and former Taliban governor Khairullah Khairkhwa (ISN 579, still held) as “two cell block leaders attempting to instigate and influence the rest of the cell blocks to disregard orders, make noise, refuse food, and commit suicide,” to which an analyst again raised doubts, noting, “For a simple Taliban foot soldier and bread deliverer, detainee manage[d] to exhibit leadership qualities by conducting speeches and instilling fear into those who cooperate with JTF GTMO personnel.” The analyst also noted that Khairkhwa “identified the detainee as a possible military leader, military commander, or possibly even as a mayor of Khost.”

In other passages, it was stated that he had “admitted involvement in the production and sales of opium, as well as association with criminal elements within the Taliban and the Northern Alliance,” and it was noted that, although he had been “cooperative with his debriefers,” his accounts “remain[ed] vague and inconsistent when questioned on high-level Taliban leadership or topics of a sensitive nature,” to which an analyst added that, although he was “substantially exploited,” there were “several intelligence gaps that remain[ed] in his story, such as his involvement and knowledge concerning Taliban communications operations, associations with other JTF GTMO detainees, and his opium business.” It was also noted, “After serving three tours with Taliban, it does not seem plausible that the detainee was not promoted and given a more important duty than a mere bread deliverer.”

The last of these many major hints that Abdul Rauf Aliza was more than he appeared to be was a note that “[t]he name Mullah Abdul Rauf, detainee’s reference name, was located on a list of factions and leaders within the Taliban as a corps commander in Herat,” to which an analyst noted, “Several high level Taliban JTF GTMO detainees also identified detainee as a Taliban troop commander,” but added, “However, detainee does have similar physical characteristics to [Mullah Fazil], which may cause his misidentification.”

In conclusion, despite all the doubts highlighted above, it was also noted that, in his “Most Recent JTF GTMO Assessment, signed on 29 March 2004,” which also recommended his transfer to the control of another country for continued detention, he was assessed as being of low intelligence value and a medium threat,” even though it was also noted that, although he “ha[d] been generally cooperative, he ha[d] evaded answering questions regarding his role and leadership within the Taliban,” and even though, “due to recent findings that [he] may have had a more important role within the Taliban than previously thought, [his] intelligence value ha[d] been updated from low to medium.” Despite the recommendation for his transfer, however, he was not released for another three years and two months, and three years and nine months after he was first recommended for transfer.

In August 2010, Newsweek reported that Abdul Rauf Aliza had escaped from prison on his return, had rejoined the Taliban, and was threatening collaborators with the US and the Afghan authorities in Kabul. As the article described it, “One short handwritten note, shown to Newsweek, said: ‘We have made a decision for your death. You have five days to leave Afghan soil. If you don’t, you don’t have the right to complain.’ The screed, written on the letterhead of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s defunct Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, bore the signature of Abdul Rauf Khadim, a senior Taliban official and former inmate at the American lockup in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who had been released into — and subsequently escaped from — Kabul’s custody last year.”

In April 2011, Newsweek reported that Khadim (described as Maulvi Abdul Rauf Khadim) “commanded Mullah Omar’s elite mobile reserve force,” until his initial capture, “fighting regime opponents all over Afghanistan.” After he “convinced his jailers that he wanted only to go home and tend his farm,” and was repatriated, he {e]scap[ed] from house arrest in Kabul, [and] fled to Pakistan.” The article continued, “Today he’s the shadow governor of southern Uruzgan province and a potential rival to [Abdul Qayyum] Zakir ([ISN 8] who was freed from Gitmo at the same time) for the insurgency’s top slot, with a loyal following of fighters at the heart of the US military surge in neighboring Kandahar and Helmand provinces.”

Abdul Aziz Al Oshan (ISN 112, Saudi Arabia) Released September 2007

In Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Aziz al-Oshan (also identified as Abdul Aziz al-Khaldi), who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he was a student who went to Afghanistan to rescue his brother, but was seized by the Northern Alliance, and was one of hundreds of prisoners sent to Qala-i-Janghi, a fort near Mazar-e-Sharif, where he survived a massacre that took place after some of the prisoners staged an uprising, fearing that they were about to be shot. When asked in his tribunal about the “uprising,” he said, “You are talking about the uprising. They called it an uprising and it’s not; it’s some kind of massacre. I was even wounded while I was there.”

in an article at the time of his release, I explained how he had recently come to prominence when a poem he had written was included in Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, an anthology of Guantánamo prisoners’ poetry compiled by law professor Marc Falkoff, who was the attorney for a number of Yemeni prisoners, and he had also written a perceptive and critical analysis of the library facilities at Guantánamo, which revealed how he was gentle, softly-spoken, literate and with a wry sense of humor that five and a half years in Guantánamo could not extinguish. I also told more of his story, based on his account — which began with an explanation of how, after taking his final exam at university, he went to Afghanistan to find his brother Saleh (who was also captured, but released in July 2005), in order to persuade him to return to Saudi Arabia.

Caught up, in late November 2001, in the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban bastion in the north of Afghanistan, he was “tied down and taken with other detainees” to Qala-i-Janghi. In Guantánamo, he explained to his tribunal that, although he had not been involved in any kind of military training and had not raised arms against either the Northern Alliance or the US-led coalition, he was afraid of being tortured, because he had previously been tortured in Afghanistan.

“When I was first captured,” he said, “it was the Afghani police there. They were threatening me and torturing me. If I didn’t say that I was from Al-Qaida or Taliban I was tortured. I went to Kandahar and I was tortured there. The guy was speaking English saying ‘Al-Qaida? Taliban? Al-Qaida? Taliban?’ Evidence of the torture is that they broke my tooth which was fixed here.” He added, “Once I arrived here, things were a little better. There was no torture or things like that but, because of what happened in the past I was dwelling on the fact that, are these people treating me good and they are going to come back and torture me again?”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Oshan was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated June 19, 2007, in which he was identified as Abd al-Aziz Sad Muhammad Awshan al-Khalidi, Abdul Aziz Bin Saad, and Abdul A. Mohammed, and it was noted that he was born in September 1979, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he was “one exam away from finishing his four-year college degree” in Islamic studies at the Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in his hometown of Riyadh, when he decided to travel to Afghanistan. The Task Force also noted that he “was not married and lived with his parents through college,” and that he “received a stipend of 800 Saudi riyals (SAR) per month from the Saudi government for attending the university,” and also that, because he “was the only student with a car, he charged people money to take them places,” and “also received money from his parents.”

The Task Force further explained that he “was still in Saudi Arabia when the 11 September 2001 attacks occurred,” and that he “believed the attacks violated Islamic ethics because the Koran states it is wrong to kill innocent people.” This seemed to be particularly important, as did a statement that he “was not personally recruited, but heard from friends about fatwa (religious decrees) urging young men to fight abroad,” and also “overheard other Saudis talking about the conflicts in Chechnya and Afghanistan, and read newspaper articles detailing the suffering of Muslims in those countries.” It was also noted that he read a well-known fatwa “calling on people to ‘defend the Muslims and Islamic nations’ against the Northern Alliance (NA) troops of Massoud and Dostum.”

In spite of noting that he “was not personally recruited,” the Task Force claimed that, in November 2001, he “decided to travel to Afghanistan,” not only “to find his brother,” but also “to fight the jihad.” Al-Oshan apparently “financed his own trip,” which was unusual, as most jihadists traveled with the assistance of facilitators, who made their arrangements for them, and traveled via Syria and Iran (rather than flying to Karachi and then traveling via Quetta, as was typical for jihadi recruits).

When they reached the border, the border guards “instructed a taxi driver to take them to a guesthouse in Herat,” and gave them contact details. After one night in Herat, they apparently traveled to Kabul, where, it was claimed, they “stayed at an unidentified guesthouse for about a week because ‘the front lines were full,’” even though it was not even remotely likely that new arrivals would have been allowed to travel immediately to the front lines on arrival.

He then reportedly traveled to Kunduz with two other men, staying at an unidentified guesthouse, where, it was claimed, he was shown how to use an AK-47, and then traveled to the front line, where he stayed for six days “without seeing any combat action since the mountains acted as a buffer between them and the NA [Northern Alliance].” He and the others then retreated, and walked back to the guest-house in Kunduz. He then apparently “left during the night with a group of others going to Mazar-e-Sharif,” presumably to surrender, but “Dostum’s troops apprehended them and took them to the Qala-i-Janghi Prison.”

Based on his account, the Task Force described the uprising as follows: “On 25 November 2001, shooting erupted within the walls of the prison, and detainee was shot in his thigh and back. Other prisoners dragged him into the basement of the prison. Dostum’s forces pumped gasoline into the basement and ignited it; they later flooded the basement with water. After about one week, the Red Cross arrived and transported all the surviving prisoners to Sheberghan Prison.”

From Sheberghan, US forces took him to their prison at Kandahar, and he was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Training and tactics of front line Taliban fighters.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force focused primarily on his family ties, rather than on any information corroborating the claims that he had been on the front lines in Afghanistan, which, as I noted above, drew only on his own statements, possibly extracted under duress. One of his brothers, Isa (aka Eissa al-Aushan), was described as “the deceased leader of a Riyadh Al-Qaida cell responsible for the.kidnapping and murder of a US contractor, Paul Johnson, Jr.,” and “was killed in a July 2004 gunfight with Saudi security forces.”

It was also noted that he was “assessed to have an uncle named Saud Muhammad Abd al-Aziz al-Awshan,” described as “a Saudi-based terrorist financier associated with the Philippines-base Moro Islamic Liberation Front,” although whether either of these connections actually impacted on him was not provable, and was certainly not sufficient to justify an analyst’s claim that, because “Al-Qaida recruitments often occur within family groups,” his “close relationships with several Al-Qaida members likely exposed him to Al-Qaida propaganda, and possibly to direct recruitment.” The analyst also claimed that “[t]hese relationships likely also indicate a high level of loyalty toward Al-Qaida.”

When it came to the most relevant relationship, with Salman Mohammed (ISN 121, released in December 2006, and also identified as Sulaiman al-Oshan), who was the brother he traveled to rescue, the Task Force described Mohammed as “a mujahid with the 55th Arab Brigade,” and noted that he “was on a list of thirty-seven detainees whom the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Directorate of Investigations (Mabahith) designated as high priority before a Saudi delegation visit to JTF-GTMO in 2002.”

This, again, was nothing more than guilt by association, and despite their best efforts, interrogators could also not get Mohammed to incriminate his brother. What was reported instead was that, although Mohammed “corroborated detainee’s approximate date of arrival at the front lines,” he “provided conflicting accounts as to why detainee traveled to Afghanistan, first claiming that he did not know, and later stating that detainee came to retrieve [him].”

The most relevant passage in the file did not involve how his brothers were perceived by the Saudi authorities, but how he was regarded, and it was noted, “In July 2002, a delegation from Saudi Arabia visited JTF-GTMO and interviewed detainee. Detainee was identified as of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US, and unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests. Furthermore,the Saudi delegation indicated that the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to take custody of detainee for possible prosecution as soon as the US determined it no longer wanted to hold him.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” which seemed like an exaggerated assessment, especially as he was also “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harry H. Harris Jr., the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updating a recommendation for continued detention with transfer language (dated March 31, 2006), recommended him for continued detention without transfer language, although no reason was given. Even so, he was released three months later, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Yousef Al Shehri (ISN 114, Saudi Arabia) Released November 2007

In a footnote to Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Yousef al-Shehri, who was just 16 years old at the time of his capture, was seized between Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz with 120 other suspected fighters. I also explained how his cousin, Abdul Salam al-Shehri (ISN 132, released in June 2006), who was just 17 years old at the time of his capture, and who had hidden in the basement during the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, thought he was dead. He was then transported to a prison in Sheberghan run by the Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum, where he spent six weeks in horribly overcrowded conditions, surrounded by the dead and dying, before being transferred to US custody.

Although al-Shehri — like the other juveniles at Guantánamo (at least 22 in total) — should have been rehabilitated rather than punished, according to America’s obligations under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified on December 23, 2002, only three juveniles were ever treated differently from the adult prisoners (as described in “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)”).

As I explained in an article at the time of his release, al-Shehri’s suffering at Guantánamo became particularly pronounced when he took part in a prison-wide hunger strike, involving as many as 200 prisoners, in the summer of 2005. In July 2005, and again in January 2006, his weight, which had been 141 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in February 2002, dropped to just 97 pounds, and his lawyers, who visited him in October 2005, said that he was “emaciated and had lost a disturbing amount of weight,” adding that he was “visibly weak and frail” and “had difficulty speaking because of lesions in his throat that were a result of the involuntary force-feeding” to which he had been subjected.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Shehri was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated July 21, 2006, in which he was identified as Yusif Muhammad Mubarak al-Shihri, and it was noted that he was born in September 1985 (and was therefore just 16 at the time of his capture), and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he left school sometime in 2000, and then “sold fruit, vegetables and honey from a cart on the side of the road for approximately two months in Riyadh, Jeddah and Mecca” until a man named Muhammad al-Qosi convinced him to go to Pakistan. There he met another Saudi, Abdul Aziz, and reportedly spent two and a half months in Karachi with him, at a mosque, until Abdul Aziz told him that “it was their duty to participate in jihad with the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

In April 2001, they “traveled to Kabul, where they spoke with the Taliban and stated they wanted to fight,” and “were given directions to a Taliban guesthouse,” where they were separated. Al-Shehri then traveled with three Arabs and approximately 30 Afghans to a compound in Kunduz, commanded by Mullah Thacker, and then, with seven Afghans, he was sent to an Arab unit on the front lines at Khawaja Ghar, where he “spent approximately four or five months at a support center close to the front.” Although his commander, Abu Muath, gave him “one day of training on grenades and the Kalashnikov,” he reportedly “transported food and bullets to the front line and helped bury the dead.”

After the US-led invasion, when “the fighting on the front lines became intense” (in November 2001), al-Shehri and his group were instructed to withdraw from the front lines to Kunduz. After two weeks, his commander informed him that “Mullah Thaker had ordered a withdrawal to Kandahar,” and he and others “traveled in cars and trucks to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, where Northern Alliance commander Dostum’s men stopped the trucks and ordered the fighters to surrender their weapons.” They were then taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where he survived the massacre, and he was then taken to Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, where he was held for a month and a half. He was then taken to Kandahar by US forces, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Personalities and replacement operations of the Arab element that supported the Northern Taliban forces (assessed to be referring to UBL’s [Osama bin Laden's] 55th Arab Brigade).”

In assessing his story, the Task Force stated that he was “historically uncooperative during debriefings, and his truthfulness [was] often in doubt.” It was also claimed that there were unexplained holes in his timeline, which “afforded him the opportunity to attend training at Al-Farouq [the main training camp for Arabs], which he probably completed prior to supporting the Taliban and al-Qaida on the front lines.”

Whether or not he was anything more than a basic foot soldier was actually open to question, as the Task Force was preoccupied by his “familial ties to a significant Al-Qaida member”; namely, “his older brother Saad Muhammad Mubarak al-Shihri aka Abdul Rahman al-Najdi aka Abu Uthman al-Shahri” who was apparently “an official spokesman for Al-Qaida and on Saudi Arabia’s most wanted list in November 2005.”

The Task Force also noted that he had “shown his willingness to martyr himself while at JTF-GTMO,” adding, “Should he be released, he would probably seek the opportunity to do so,” and explaining that he had “sent a letter to his family telling them of his wish to be a martyr.” It was also noted that, on May 18, 2006, he had tried to commit suicide — or, as the Task Force put it, had “committed self-harm by attempting to overdose on prescribed medication.” The fact that suicide was not even remotely regarded as a form of martyrdom by jihadists appeared to have eluded the Task Force.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US. its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed as a moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and sometimes hostile with the guard force and staff.” Providing specific details, the Task Force noted that, on December 10, 2004, “he became violent during an interview session,” when he “threw books at his interviewer, flipped a table, and attempted to head butt a guard,” and that, on August 18, 2005, “while assigned to the detainee hospital, [he] was denied a request to be unrestrained during prayer call,” and “[h]e and the other detainees became upset and began pulling out their IV’s and brandishing them as weapons, throwing thermometers, and grabbing med packs containing syringes and anything else that could be used as a weapon.”

As a result of the above, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation that he retained in DoD control (dated June 10, 2005), recommended him for continued detention, although, crucially, it was also noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Shehri] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” It took another 16 months for that agreement to be reached, when he was released.

After his release, al-Shehri was processed through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, but in February 2009 he was included as one of eleven former Guantánamo prisoners in a list of the Saudi government’s 85 most wanted militants, all of whom had allegedly left Saudi Arabia and in October 2009 it was reported that he and another man, Raed al-Harbi, had been killed in a shootout with Saudi authorities after they entered the country from Yemen, disguised as women, and “planning to carry out attacks.”

Bijad Al Atabi (ISN 122, Saudi Arabia) Released July 2007

In Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Bijad al-Atabi (also identified as al-Otaibi), who was 30 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of being an assistant commander in Al-Qaida’s Arab Brigade, and I added more information in an article at the time of his release, in which I explained that, in Guantánamo, he was accused of stating that he traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, that he was trained at a camp near Kabul, and that he fought on the front lines until ordered to surrender to Northern Alliance commander General Dostum at Mazar-e-Sharif.

He was then imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, a fort where hundreds of men were killed in a massacre, after some of them started an uprising against their captors, fearing that they were about to be killed. He was one of 86 men who survived in the basement of the fort for a week, despite being bombed and flooded.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Atabi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated January 22, 2007, in which he was identified as Bijad D. al-Atavi and Bajad Dhayfallah Hawaymal al-Ruqi al-Utaybi, and it was noted that he was born in August 1971, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based largely on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that at the age of eight, his father died and he began working on the family farm while also attending school. From 1988 to 1997, he “worked as a guard with the Saudi National Security Force, where [his] duties included guarding movement sponsored television, telecommunication, electric, and food processing facilities.” He said that he “did not receive and firearms training, but was armed with a Belgian rifle.” From 1997 to 1999, he “returned home to work on the family farm.”

He was, he said, “inspired to fight jihad” after listening to a fatwa issued by a well-known sheikh, but spoke to another sheikh who told him that Osama bin Laden “was not a good Muslim and to avoid Al-Qaida.” Nevertheless, he then spoke to an Afghan who gave him information about how to get to Afghanistan and where to stay,” and, on May 25, 2000, “traveled alone to Jalalabad,” via Dubai and Peshawar. There, he said, he was taken to the university, where he stayed with the brother of an individual he had met while traveling from Peshawar to Jalalabad. After a few days, he went to Kabul, where he “stayed in the Wazir Akbar Khan area at a Taliban guesthouse” for a week, and was then taken to the front lines outside Kabul, where he “received training on the AK-47 rifle and hand grenades for approximately two to three weeks at a small unknown Taliban training camp.” He said that he “never fought during his time on the frontlines,” and also said that “Al-Qaida attempted to recruit [him], but [he] refused.”

Al-Atabi further stated that he was on the frontlines until late July or early August 2000, but added that, during one of his regular trips from the frontlines to the Taliban guesthouse (“for rest”), he “was injured in an automobile accident and taken to a hospital in Kabul,” where he remained for up to six weeks. In October 2000, approximately, he was transferred to a hospital in Lahore, Pakistan, where he “received additional surgery and physical therapy on his hand.” He also explained that the Taliban “paid for some of [his] medical bills, and [he] paid the balance.” He then “remained in Lahore at a Taliban guesthouse until approximately  February 2001, when he returned to Kabul and stayed in a guesthouse for about a month, and then traveled to Qarabagh, where he stayed at another guesthouse until approximately mid-April 2001.

He then “traveled to and fought in the Khawaja Ghar region of Afghanistan” until he “was told the Taliban reached an agreement with General Dostum” of the Northern Alliance. This was described as being “approximately mid-October 2001,” although it was actually in November. He then “traveled to Mazar-e-Sharif in a convoy where he was detained on approximately 23 November 2001 by Northern Alliance (NA) forces and taken to the Qala-i-Janghi prison.” Al-Atabi’s comments about the massacre were not noted, but an analyst stated, “Over 70 JTF-GTMO detainees surrendered to General Dostum’s troops in late November 2001. Dostum’s forces took the prisoners to the Qala-i-Janghi prison located outside Mazar-e-Sharif, on 24 November 2001. After one night in captivity, the prisoners revolted leading to the deaths of NA forces and CIA operative Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann. Detainee and other JTF-GTMO detainees, who survived the revolt, withdrew to a basement in the compound until they were recaptured , approximately one week later.”

On December 29, 2001, after being held in Sheberghan prison, also run by Dostum, for four weeks, al-Atabi was transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban organization, leadership, equipment and procedures [and] Taliban training camp in the vicinity of Taloqan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force described him as “a member of Al-Qaida and a sub-commander in [Osama bin Laden]‘s 55th Arab Brigade,” and while the former was the normal exaggerated description of any Arab fighting the Northern Alliance, the latter claim came only from one witness, Ali al-Tayeea (ISN 111, released in January 2009), who was well-known within Guantánamo circles as an unreliable witness. Al-Tayeea apparently identified al-Atabi as Abjad Dhaif Allah (aka Abu Umar), and also “photo-identified [him] as Abu Omar al-Nejdi, but stated [his] real name [was] Bujaad Daif Allah,” which an analyst regarded as “a variant of [his] name.” He claimed that al-Atabi “was an al-Qaida explosives and weapons expert who received extensive training,” and “was a mid-level commander, well known to Al-Qaida fighters,” who “fought on the Kabul and Khawaja Ghar fronts,” and also claimed he “was on the North Line for a long time and was Abu Tarub’s sub-commander in the Bilal Group of the Arab Brigade.”

Furthermore, with reference to Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, (described as having “primary operational command of the former 55th Arab Brigade, [and] serving as [Osama bin Laden]‘s military commander in the field”), al-Tayeea claimed that al-Atabi “knew Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi very well because [he] always went to al-Iraqi’s office.” He added that he “saw [al-Atabi] twice with al-Iraqi and also saw [him] with information needed on the North Line,” and “believe[d] detainee was a very important person.”

Even if al-Tayeea was correct to identify al-Atabi as a sub-commander, it did not follow that he was “a very important person,” but what made al-Tayeea’s statement dubious was not only his track record, but also the fact that there was no other reliable verification for his story. Muhammad al-Adahi (ISN 33, still held), apparently “also photo-identified detainee as Abu Omar al-Najdi, a sub-commander to Abu Turab,” but this smacks of a coerced statement, or one produced simply to make life easier, as al-Adahi, a Yemeni who accompanied his sister to Afghanistan for her marriage, never went anywhere near the front lines where al-Atabi was reportedly a sub-commander.

Others recognized al-Atabi, but none of them claimed that he had a command position. Abd al-Rahman al-Umari (ISN 199, a Saudi who died in Guantánamo in May 2007, and was also identified as Abdul Rahman al-Amri) “identified detainee as Abu Omar who was at the Rabei position in Kabul,” Said al-Zahrani (ISN 204, released in July 2007) “identified detainee as Abu Omar who fought on the frontlines”) and correctly “believed [he] was wounded in a castle near Mazar-e-Sharif”), and John Walker Lindh (ISN 1, although he was never held at Guantánamo, because he was a US citizen), “thought the detainee depicted in a photograph shown to him was Abu Umar, a Saudi from Najd, SA.” Lindh apparently also “said Abu Umar had been in Afghanistan for a long time, ‘maybe even in the 80s, fighting against the USSR,’” and “recalled seeing detainee on the backlines near Takhar, AF, and Kunduz, AF, after the retreat.” He added that he “thought detainee had been killed.” An analyst noted, “If detainee is the individual identified by Lindh, [he] has withheld details of his background story,” but it seems more likely that it was Lindh, presumably under duress, who was making things up.

The Task Force also noted that “[v]ariations of detainee’s name and aliases ha[d] been recovered in Al-Qaida associated documents,” recovered during house raids, but this kind of claim is particularly dubious. More significant was a note stating that, “Prior to the Saudi delegation visit in 2002, the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Directorate of Investigations (Mabahith) provided information on 37 detainees whom they designated as being high priority. Detainee was eighteenth on the list.”

Mabahith also “noted detainee was on the Saudi movement’s ‘watch and arrest’ list due to information they received reporting detainee’s death in Mazar-e- Sharif and the possibility of someone else using detainee’s passport,” which, of course, was nothing to do with him, but what was most significant was that, “After the Saudi delegation visit, detainee was assessed by Mabahith” not as being “high priority,” but “as one of the 77 Saudi nationals of low intelligence or law enforcement value to the US Government, but of whom [sic] the Saudi Government would attempt to prosecute if transferred to their custody from JTF-GTMO.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed to be a medium threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile toward the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation for his continued detention (dated October 24, 2005), repeated that recommendation, without any acknowledgement of the Saudis’ description of al-Atabi as being “of low intelligence or law enforcement value to the US Government.” However, six months later, he was released, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Also see Part One of this series.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

In June 2004, for a brief moment, George W. Bush’s excesses were checked by the Supreme Court, which, in Rasul v. Bush, took the unprecedented move of granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners seized in wartime, after recognizing that the Bush administration had shunted aside the Geneva Conventions in favor of a unprecedented system of arbitrary detention.

In this system, the US government decided that all its actions relating to terrorism and the perceived threat from al-Qaeda and the Taliban (essentially regarded as interchangeable with al-Qaeda because they had “hosted” Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan) constituted part of a “war on terror,” and decided that everyone seized could be held, without anyone bothering to ascertain whether they had been seized by mistake, as “illegal enemy combatants,” who literally had no rights whatsoever, either as human beings or as prisoners.

For the Bush administration and for Congress, however, although the Supreme Court’s ruling was inconvenient, as it allowed lawyers to take on prisoners as clients, and to meet with them, it was not the end of their adherence to arbitrary detention, and they largely fought back against it. The President introduced a hastily invented review process for the prisoners (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals), which was heavily weighted in favor of the presumption that they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” on capture, and Congress went further, passing laws in 2005 and 2006 — the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act — that purported to strip the prisoners of their habeas corpus rights.

It was not until June 2008 that the Supreme Court once more took the opportunity to reassert its authority (in Boumediene v. Bush), arguing that the habeas-stripping provisions of the DTA and MCA were unconstitutional, and reiterating that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights, and that, this time around, they were constitutionally guaranteed.

For opponents of Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” what followed was a golden period for accountability, as, between October 2008 to July 2010, 38 out of 52 prisoners won their habeas corpus petitions, as judge after judge in the District Court in Washington D.C. concluded that the government had failed to meet its spectacularly low burden of establishing, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that the prisoners were involved with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

In the majority of cases, the government accepted defeat, releasing — or not opposing the release — of 31 of these men, and 26 were subsequently released. The other five are Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who are at risk of torture if repatriated, and who are still seeking a new home.

Beginning in January 2010, however, judges in the D.C. Circuit Court started pushing back against the lower court’s rulings, at first by advocating for unfettered executive power in wartime (which the Obama administration had not even asked for), and then by whittling away at the requirements for ongoing detention decided by the District Court judges (who largely agreed that prisoners had to be demonstrably part of a chain of command).

The Circuit Court judges, led by Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who was notorious, under George W. Bush, for supporting every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, also pushed to reduce, if not to eliminate entirely, the burden on the government to establish that its evidence was trustworthy, and the result, from July 2010 onwards, has been that five successful habeas petitions have either been reversed (three cases) or vacated, and sent back to the lower court to reconsider (two cases). In addition, the District Court judges, who were, essentially, ordered to lower the burden of proof and regard the government’s alleged evidence as reliable, have, since July 2010, turned down the last eleven habeas petitions submitted by the prisoners. Details and links are in my article, Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List.

Fadel Hentif, a Yemeni, loses his habeas petition for having a watch and staying in a guesthouse

I have, previously, written about eight of these rulings, but have not provided any updates since summer, when I wrote about how Khairullah Khairkhwa, a former Taliban minister, lost his habeas petition in June. The next prisoner to lose was Fadel Hentif (also identified as Fadil Hintif), a Yemeni whose habeas petition was refused by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. on August 1, 2011, although a heavily redacted version of the opinion was not made available until mid-September (PDF).

Hentif claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan to perform humanitarian aid work, which he said, “would be a chance to do something good in memory of his deceased father.” After staying briefly in a guesthouse in Kandahar, he said that he was directed by the owner of the guesthouse to stay with a Yemeni in Kabul, who provided medical supplies to Afghans in need. Hentif said that he worked with this man for a while, and then traveled to Logar province and the city of Jalalabad before leaving for Pakistan, where he was seized and transferred to US custody.

In challenging his story, the US government claimed, primarily, that the guesthouse was affiliated with al-Qaeda, that Hentif had attended a training camp, that two men he met in Kabul were also affiliated with al-Qaeda, and that he had been present at the battle of Tora Bora at the end of 2001, which was a showdown between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, on the one hand, and US forces and their Afghan proxies on the other.

However, while Judge Kennedy found no evidence that Hentif had attended a training camp or had been at Tora Bora, and also found no evidence confirming his connection with suspicious individuals in Kabul, he was required, by a Circuit Court precedent, to conclude that “staying at an al-Qaeda guesthouse is ‘overwhelming’ evidence of an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”

Shockingly, in reaching his conclusion that the respondents (the government) had “carried their burden by a preponderance of the evidence,” he was also convinced by a piece of alleged evidence that, throughout Guantánamo’s history, has been mocked by commentators; namely, his possession of a model of Casio watch allegedly linked to the detonation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Influenced, again, by the Circuit Court, which declared that “evidence that a detainee had a Casio watch on his person at the time of his capture was a ‘telling fact,’” Judge Kennedy noted, “Although Casio watches of this model are not unique, the fact that Hentif possessed one is further support for respondents’ contention that Hentif was part of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.”

What made the ruling particularly depressing was that, in January 2007, as was revealed in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in April this year, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended Hentif’s release, based on assessments made by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo. Nevertheless, he was not released by President Bush, was not released by President Obama, and, moreover, appeared to be a victim of the Justice Department’s general indifference to the fate of the prisoners, as government lawyers could easily have been instructed not to challenge the habeas corpus petitions of any of the prisoners cleared for release by President Bush, or by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Abdul Qader Ahmed Hussein, a Yemeni, loses his habeas corpus petition for handling a gun in Afghanistan

On October 12, Judge Reggie B. Walton denied the habeas corpus petition of Abdul Qader Ahmed Hussein (also identified as Ahmed Abdul Qader), another Yemeni (PDF). Just 18 years old at the time of his capture, he was one of 15 prisoners seized in a guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on the same night — March 28, 2002 — that a supposed “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah (actually the mentally damaged gatekeeper of a training camp that was not associated with al-Qaeda), and a handful of other allegedly significant prisoners were also seized from another completely different location.

Hussein was one of the few prisoners in the guesthouse to explain that he had spent time in Afghanistan, as most of the others said that they had traveled to Pakistan to study, or, in a few cases, to receive medical treatment. Whether under Bush or Obama, the administration has never been happy to accept this argument, claiming that everyone in the house had been in Afghanistan in some sort of military capacity, but officials do not have a good track record when it comes to establishing their story.

Of the 15, for example, although one died in Guantánamo in June 2006, in a disputed triple suicide, five of the remaining 14 have been released. Two of these men — Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed and Mohammed Hassan Odaini — were freed after convincingly winning their habeas corpus petitions, and the others were freed after administrative reviews. In addition, a sixth man, a Russian named Ravil Mingazov, won his habeas corpus petition in May 2010, only to have the ruling challenged by the government. See here for a report by his attorney on his 18-month wait for what will almost certainly be a successful appeal on the part of the government, because of the Circuit Court’s bias.

In Hussein’s case, he said that he went to Afghanistan “to help the needy and the poor,” and tried unsuccessfully to establish a charity organization. He admitted that he visited the “back line,” encouraged by friends connected to the Taliban, but insisted that he “never participated in any kind of military activities.” After leaving Afghanistan before the US-led invasion began, he said that he ended up in the house in Faisalabad, where he became friends with Fahmi Ahmed, another Yemeni, who is still held. “We shared the same vision and he has the same opinions,” Ahmed said of him, adding, “He used to use hashish with me,” whereas the other students in the house “were trying to inspire me to do the religious things, like look at my religion, because most of the students were studying the Koran and all things related to religious studies.”

Reviewing his case, in light of the Circuit Court’s rulings, Judge Walton denied Hussein’s habeas petition for a variety of reasons that do not exactly encourage overwhelming support for the direction the habeas hearings have taken. Following a previous Circuit Court ruling (in the case of a Yemeni called Hussein Almerfedi), it was considered significant that Abdul Qader Ahmed Hussein had stayed at two mosques in Pakistan run by the vast and apolitical missionary organization Jamaat al-Tablighi, which is regarded, by Justice Department lawyers and the Circuit Court, as a front for terrorism, even though it has millions of non-terrorist members worldwide, and using it to justify detention is akin to imprisoning Catholics for the actions of the IRA.

It was also considered significant that, while in Afghanistan, he was handed a Kalashnikov rifle “from three Taliban guards in an area near the lines of battle between the Taliban and Northern Alliance,” and was shown how to use the gun by one of the Taliban guards. Judge Walton was also not impressed that it took him so long to leave Afghanistan, despite professing a desire to return home, and that he failed to enrol in university while staying in Faisalabad, despite claiming that he intended to do so.

Judge Walton concluded, “These facts, when viewed together, are more than sufficient to constitute the level of ‘damning’ circumstantial evidence that is needed to satisfy the government’s burden of proof in this case,” which, to my mind, only demonstrates that the Circuit Court’s tampering with the burden of proof has had disastrous results, as Hussein now finds himself consigned to permanent imprisonment at Guantánamo, possibly for the rest of his life, based on little more than innuendo.

Karim Bostan, an Afghan, loses his habeas petition for alleged insurgent activities in summer 2002

On the same day as he delivered his ruling in Hussein’s case, Judge Walton also denied the habeas petition of Karim Bostan (also identified as Bostan Karim), an Afghan whose case demonstrates another peculiarity of Guantánamo — the desire, on the part of successive US administrations, to hold, in a prison supposedly associated with terrorism, Afghans allegedly involved in minor acts of insurgency against the US occupation of their country (PDF).

In Bostan’s case, the evidence has always been thin, to put it charitably. A preacher and a shopkeeper, he was seized on a bus that traveled regularly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was reportedly “apprehended because he matched the description of an al-Qaeda bomb cell leader and had a [satellite] phone,” which he had apparently been asked to hold by a fellow passenger, Abdullah Wazir (who was released from Guantánamo in December 2007). Other allegations were made by another Afghan, a young man named Obaidullah, who said in Guantánamo that he had made false allegations (and had also falsely incriminated Bostan), while he was being abused by US soldiers in Khost and Bagram. As he explained:

The first time when they [US soldiers] captured me and brought me to Khost they put a knife to my throat and said if you don’t tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you … They tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport … In Bagram they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say.

Despite this, Obaidullah lost his habeas corpus petition in October 2010, and is also a candidate for a trial by military commission, for which both the Bush and Obama administrations have decided that it is somehow appropriate to stretch the meaning of “war crimes” to include a young Afghan who allegedly stored and concealed explosives that could have been used to attack US forces, but never were.

In Bostan’s case, Judge Walton’s ruling revealed, shockingly, that his ongoing detention, possibly forever, was justified because he “was a member of the Jamaat al-Tablighi,” and “met Obaidullah and Wazir through the Jamaat al-Tablighi,” and because he took Abdullah Wazir’s phone on the bus and apparently attempted to hide it and the “most likely explanation” for doing so “was his knowledge that the telephone could be used to detonate explosive devices.”

Judge Walton decided that “these facts, when viewed collectively, demonstrate that the petitioner was more likely than not a ‘part of’ al-Qaeda,” and just to reiterate how far the Circuit Court has drifted from any notions of fairness and proportion, it is worth noting that he specifically stated, “As the Circuit found in Almerfedi, a detainee’s membership in Jamaat al-Tablighi, together with other ‘damning’ circumstantial evidence, is sufficient as a matter of law to justify the detainee’s detention.”

The Circuit Court’s overreach, in reversing the successful habeas petition of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif

If these rulings should have reduced anyone who believed in US justice to some sort of state of despair, worse was to come on October 14, when the D.C. Circuit Court delivered its ruling in the government’s appeal against the successful habeas corpus petition of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni who won his petition in July 2010, reversing his successful petition in a shocking ruling that has finally seen the Circuit Court’s scandalous destruction of habeas corpus picked up on by the mainstream media (PDF).

As the New York Times noted in an editorial last Sunday, the Supreme Court’s 2008 habeas ruling in Boumediene v. Bush “has been eviscerated by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,” whose “wrongheaded rulings and analyses, which have been followed by federal district judges, have reduced to zero the number of habeas petitions granted in the past year and a half.”

The Times followed up by urging the Supreme Court, which has refused to consider any significant Guantánamo appeals filed since Boumediene, to “reject this willful disregard of its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which, the editors added, “it can do so by reviewing” Latif’s case.

In analyzing that ruling, the Times lamented that the Circuit Court had shamefully dismissed the considered opinion of the District Court judge in Latif’s case, who, ironically, was Judge Kennedy. As the Times explained, it is “undisputed” that Latif “was in a car accident in Yemen in 1994 and sustained head injuries,” and, in 2001, “went to Pakistan to seek free medical treatment, and eventually traveled to Kabul to find a Yemeni man who had promised to help him.” Moreover, although the government contended that he “was recruited by an al-Qaeda operative and fought with the Taliban,” Judge Kennedy “found that the government’s evidence did not sufficiently support its contention, that incriminating evidence was not corroborated and that Mr. Latif had a plausible alternative explanation for his travels.”

Crucially, however, in reversing Judge Kennedy’s decision, the majority judges in the Circuit Court ruling, Judge Janice Rogers Brown and Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson (who have a history of extreme decisions in Guantánamo cases), “improperly replaced the trial court’s factual findings with its own factual judgments,” as the Times explained, noting also that the court “unfairly placed the burden on Mr. Latif to rebut the presumption that the government’s main evidence was accurate,” because “the government should bear the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that his detention is warranted.”

What this means, in practical terms, is not only that the Circuit Court has stepped way beyond its mandate, but, specifically, that the majority judges argued that “the government’s intelligence report on the Latif case should have been given ‘a presumption of regularity’ and that unless there is ‘clear evidence to the contrary,’ trial judges must presume that this kind of report is accurate.”

By this rationale, of course, the already severely lowered bar for detention would disappear completely, effectively making it impossible for the prisoners to argue against anything the government alleged against them. The irony, of course, is that the court had already gutted habeas of all meaning, but with this particular overreach may finally provoke a much needed and long overdue backlash. As Judge David Tatel, the third judge in the panel, noted in a strongly worded dissent, there was no reason whatsoever for his colleagues to make such an assumption about the intelligence report, which was “produced in the fog of war, by a clandestine method that we know almost nothing about.”

In addition, Judge Tatel noted that it was “hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court’s command” that the habeas review process be “meaningful,” and the Times concluded by stating that “the appeals court has gone off on the wrong track,” and reiterating that the justices of the Supreme Court “need to reaffirm the right of prisoners in Guantánamo to seek justice in federal court and to explain firmly and clearly what that entails.”

It is to be hoped that the Circuit Court’s shameful overreach will finally prompt the justices to act, and to restore the meaningful remedy that habeas was for the Guantánamo prisoners until 16 months ago.

In addition, there should be justice for Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif in particular, in part because he has well-documented mental health issues, as I explained when he won his petition, but also because he, like Fadel Hentif, was also cleared for release under George W. Bush, in December 2006, in a recommendation that was cited in an updated recommendation in January 2008 released by WikiLeaks, and issued by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who was the commander of Guantánamo at the time.

As with Hentif, the Bush administration’s failure to release him has been compounded under President Obama, who has failed to instruct the Justice Department to stop challenging the petitions of prisoners cleared for release, and, it seems clear, has been content to use the Yemeni prisoners as part of his political maneuvering.

With Yemen off-limits since January 2010, when Obama issued a moratorium on any further prisoner releases to Yemen following a hysterical response to the news that the failed Christmas plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been trained there, it has suited the administration — with one notable exception — to prevent any political difficulties by appealing every successful habeas petition won by a Yemeni, regardless of whether there was any genuine reason for doing so, or whether, as in the cases of Fadel Hentif, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif and the other 17 Yemenis cleared for release between 2004 and 2007 but still held, they are nothing but pawns in a political game.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of which was already covered in Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files and in the archive of articles on his website, the project will be completed in spring 2012.

This is Part 31 of the 70-part series. 386 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, the next ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantanamo Prisoners Released in 2006,” covered the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006), almost all of whom were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice, as is the case with this latest ten-part series, dealing with the 124 prisoners released in 2007, including two more who died without ever having been charged or tried.

I also hope that readers will reflect on the problems of over-classification that have been thoroughly chronicled in the preceding series analyzing the Detainee Assessment Briefs. My analysis to date has established repeatedly that even patently innocent prisoners seized by mistake were regarded as a “low risk,” rather than as no risk at all, and it is important for readers to bear in mind that the entire process of detaining and processing prisoners and exploiting them for their supposed intelligence was shot through with a drive to conclude that they were all a threat, and to overlook the distressing fact that most of them were seized in a largely random manner, mostly by America’s Afghan and Pakistan allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were widespread, and were never subjected to anything that resembled an adequate screening process.

And then, of course, as I have outlined above, and as is revealed extensively in the files, they were trapped in a prison where officials, in their ill-conceived desire for “actionable intelligence,” ended up attempting to justifying their detention either by coercing or bribing the prisoners themselves or coercing or bribing their fellow prisoners, while showing them the photo albums of prisoners known as the “family albums,” to come up with allegations that could be passed off as plausible, whether or not there was any substance to them at all.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2007 (Part One of Ten)

David Hicks (ISN 2, Australia) Released May 2007

As I explained in Chapter 9 of my book The Guantánamo Files, David Hicks, one of the most well-known prisoners at Guantánamo, who was 26 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, was a former horse trainer from Adelaide, who converted to Islam after traveling to Europe and training with the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999, and then traveled to Pakistan to study in a madrassa, subsequently crossing into Afghanistan to continue his studies — at what he described as a “center for Islamic revolution” — and to fight with the Taliban, as was reported in an article in the Australian in December 2006.

On November 10, 2001, he rang his father on a satellite phone from a ditch outside Kandahar, telling him he was going to help the Taliban defend Kabul from the Northern Alliance. He then made his way to Kunduz, and on November 24, as the last bastion of Taliban power in northern Afghanistan fell to the Northern Alliance, he decided to make his escape. Climbing on board a taxi-van with dozens of Afghans, he tried to hide his blond hair and blue eyes, but was unsuccessful. As the van made its way through the streets of Pul-i-Khumri, south of Kunduz, the driver noticed his pale skin and called the local Northern Alliance commanders. Heavily armed soldiers stopped the van at a checkpoint, seized Hicks and took him to a cell in the local garrison, where, he said, he was sold for $15,000 to the Americans, who took him to the Northern Alliance prison at Sheberghan, under the control of the warlord General Rashid Dostum.

Because of his color and his nationality, Hicks, like John Walker Lindh, was singled out for particular attention by the US military. According to Shah Mohammed (ISN 19, released in May 2003), who was held with him in Guantánamo, he was treated differently from the majority of the prisoners from the moment he arrived in Sheberghan. “He was asked a lot of questions [by the Americans], more than us,” he said. Hicks himself said, in court documents discussed in the New York Times, that US soldiers “tied his hands and feet and beat him with bare fists during two-hour sessions,” and forced him to sit on a window ledge, while six soldiers pointed their weapons at him. He also explained that one interrogator, “obviously agitated, took out his pistol and aimed it at me, with his hand shaking violently with rage,” adding, “I realized that if I did not cooperate with US interrogators, I might be shot.”

His treatment at Sheberghan was, however, just the start of his misery. While the majority of those around him were transferred to Kandahar or released through deals made by General Dostum, Hicks was one of a handful of prisoners (including Lindh) who were flown to the USS Peleliu for interrogation, where his American interrogators were joined by unsympathetic representatives of his home country, and where he heard other prisoners “screaming in pain” while being interrogated. He was then moved to the USS Bataan, where conditions became “drastically” worse, and it was while he was on this second ship that he and other prisoners were taken by helicopter to some vast, barn-like buildings in an undisclosed location, where they were forced to kneel for ten hours, and where, Hicks said, “I was hit in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle several times (hard enough to knock me over), slapped in the back of the head, kicked, stepped on, and spat on.” It was only after these avenues of abuse had been exhausted that he was finally transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport.

There, he said, he and other prisoners “were forced to lie face down in the mud while solders walked across our backs,” and he “was stripped, his body hair shaved,” and, he said, a piece of “white plastic was forcibly inserted in my rectum for no apparent purpose,” about which soldiers “made crude comments.”

In Guantánamo, Hicks said, he was repeatedly beaten, once for eight hours, and frequently while he was restrained and blindfolded. “I have been beaten before, after and during investigations,” he said, adding that he had also been “menaced and threatened, directly and indirectly, with firearms and other weapons before and during investigations.” He also said that he was subjected to sleep deprivation “as a matter of policy,” and according to Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal (the “Tipton Three”), he was one of numerous prisoners refused medical treatment — in his case, treatment for a hernia at a time when they recalled that he had “gone downhill” and appeared willing to make any number of false confessions to alleviate his plight. Revealing he extent to which very little information regarding the prisoners’ ill-treatment is available in their publicly available files, the Pentagon’s own brief allegations against Hicks contain no reference whatsoever to any of the above.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Hicks was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated September 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in August 1975, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after being introduced to Islam by members of Jamaat al-Tablighi (the worldwide missionary organization that was nevertheless regarded by US authorities as “a Tier 2 NGO target”; in other words, an organization that had “demonstrated the intent and willingness to support terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests”), he ”became aware of the situation and struggles occurring in Kosovo, as well as the role of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), while working as a horse trainer in Japan in 1998 and 1999.

He “claimed it was the plight of the people in Kosovo that urged him to seek the KLA,” and then traveled to Kosovo, where he trained for three months, but never saw combat, as the conflict ended. After a thwarted attempt to fight in East Timor, he flew to Pakistan in the fall of 1999, where, in December 1999, “while performing missionary work for the JT [he] met with representatives of the Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT),” described as “a Tier 1 target”; in other words, one of a number of terrorist groups, “especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests,” even though LeT’s main preoccupation was the India-Pakistan conflict regarding Kashmir, and even though Hicks’ sole preoccupation was with Kashmir, and did not involve US interests at all.

After traveling to Lahore and Quetta for discussions, and to join LeT, Hicks traveled to Muzzafarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, for training, although again he never saw combat, as Pakistan’s largest and most influential intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, was “controlling the number of troops in Kashmir,” and did not let hi in, even though he apparently “stated he would have waited several months or longer for an attempted insertion into Kashmir.” Thwarted again, he managed to enter Afghanistan instead, and traveled to Kandahar “in search of military training, based on information from a contact with the Taliban in Pakistan.’ He then returned to Pakistan, and studied the Koran at a madrassa in Karachi for four months.

In December 2000, he returned to Kandahar, and, on this occasion, was apparently “introduced to the Al-Qaida organisation,” and reportedly undertook military training at the Al-Farouq training camp, described as “Al-Qaida’s Al-Farouq terrorist camp,” even though its main purpose was basic military training. It was stated that he “trained with Al-Qaida at multiple locations in Afghanistan, including the Abu Obeida terrorist camp for urban warfare training,” and met with Mohammed Atef and Abu Hafs, two senior figures in Al-Qaida. He also visited the front lines, but again missed out on combat.

In describing his capture, it was noted that, “[a]s the Taliban lines fell, and just prior to the capture of Mazar-e-Sharif by the Northern Alliance, [he] fled the area to Kunduz, AF, by riding in a truck,” and “then traveled to Bagram, AF, where Northern Alliance national soldiers arrested him,” and “was turned over to US Forces and incarcerated on the USS Pettiloo (actually, as noted above, the USS Peleliu). He was sent to Guantánamo on the day the prison opened, January 11, 2002, allegedly because it was assessed that he “may provide knowledge of Al-Qaida Training Camps in Afghanistan.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

[T]he “Reasons for Transfer” included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners’ files after their arrival at Guantánamo. This is because, contrary to the impression given in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer. As Chris Mackey, a senior interrogator who worked in Afghanistan, explained in a book that he wrote about his experiences (The Interrogators), every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by US forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “Al-Qaida and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

In assessing Hicks’ story, the Task Force described him as having had “direct involvement with senior Al-Qaida leadership, including Osama Bin Laden,” even though there was no indication that he had met bin Laden. It was also claimed that he “actively sought out extremist organisations throughout the world in order to train, operate, and fight with them” (even though he always missed out on combat), and that his “involvement and extensive training with the KLA, LeT, Al-Qaida, Taliban, and Jamaat al-Tablighi [made] him a highly skilled and advanced combatant, as well as a valuable asset and possible leader for extremist organisations” (which, again, was a huge exaggeration considering that Hicks had never fought anyone).

It was also claimed that he was “an admitted/sworn fighter for Al-Qaida and [had] written a statement affirming such,” even though this statement obviously contained what the US authorities wanted to hear, and not what actually happened. It was also stated that he had been assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and that he still possesse[d] intelligence value,” although “due to his current trial by Military Commission,” for which he had been “formally charged with conspiracy, attempted murder by an unpriviledged [sic] belligerent, and aiding the enemy,” JTF GTMO stated that it would “not continue exploitation efforts.”

The Task Force also noted that Hicks’ “overall behavior” in Guantánamo had been  “compliant,” although he was assessed as being “deceptive.” It was also assessed that he posed “a high risk, and pose[d] a significant threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.”

As the Task Force noted, however, its appraisal was not especially relevant, because, in July 2003, Hicks was one of the first six prisoners to be put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Salim Hamdan, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, Ibrahim al-Qosi, and, initially, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi (although they were subsequently released). The Commissions were declared illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, but were then revived by Congress, and the first trial of the revived system was Hicks’, in March 2007.

As I explained in Chapter 20 of The Guantánamo Files, on March 26, 2007, a weary David Hicks accepted a plea bargain and declared that he was guilty of the only charge that was eventually raised against him: providing “material support for terrorism.” For his cooperation, he was sentenced on March 30 to nine months’ imprisonment, rather than the seven years that the prosecution had been seeking, and was told that he would be returning home in May 2007 to serve his sentence in Australia.

This was some comfort for Hicks, but observers noted that the process was still fundamentally flawed. Australian lawyer Lex Lasry told the Sydney Morning Herald that the court looked “pretty dysfunctional.” He was not impressed when the judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, eliminated two of Hicks’ three lawyers, excluding one, Joshua Dratel, after he refused to agree in advance to court procedures that had not been drawn up, and he complained that when Hicks’ remaining lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori, objected that Kohlmann was not sufficiently impartial, he “sat in judgment of himself” and “solemnly found that there were no grounds to find he was not impartial.”

For further information about how Hicks’ release came about as part of a deal arranged between Vice President Dick Cheney and Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, see “The politics of David Hicks’ release from Guantánamo confirmed: plea bargain arranged between Cheney and Howard,” and for further information about the corrupt political maneuvering in the Military Commissions, see, ““The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials.”

After his release, Hicks told his story in depth in his book, Guantánamo: My Journey, published in October 2010. For an excerpt, see “Former Guantánamo Prisoner David Hicks Describes His First Two Weeks at Camp X-Ray,: and also see “Empathy and Self-Reflection: An Extraordinary Article by Jason Leopold About His Friendship with Former Guantánamo Prisoner David Hicks,” and “Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner David Hicks Gives His First Interview — To Jason Leopold of Truthout.”

Gholam Ruhani (ISN 3, Afghanistan) Released December 2007

Gholam Ruhani, who was 26 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in December 2001 with Abdul-Haq Wasiq (ISN 4, still held), the Taliban’s deputy minister of intelligence, and one of the few senior Taliban figures captured by the Americans, in a potentially perilous Special Forces operation in Ghazni, south of Kabul, as I explained at the time of his release, also drawing on an account I gave in Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files. At the time, Ghazni was a Taliban stronghold, but when the Special Forces received a tip-off that a local warlord had arranged a meeting with Qari Amadullah, the Taliban’s minister of intelligence, in which, it was suggested, Amadullah might provide information that would lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden, their commander, Gary Berntsen approved the mission.

In the end, Amadullah did not turn up, and clearly had no intention of doing so. Safely ensconced in Pakistan, after escaping from Afghanistan, he spoke to a journalist in late December, interrupting the interview to take a phone call, and then declaring, “I am personally requested by Mullah Omar and Sheikh Osama to go to Uruzgan and take the command of new guerrilla war preparations, which will start as soon as possible, and you will hear the news in papers and on BBC.”

Unsurprisingly, having effectively given US forces his itinerary as a result of this loose talk, he was killed in a US air strike a few days later. In the same interview, however, he also spoke about Abdul-Haq Wasiq. He said that Mullah Omar, who, he claimed, was living in a safe place in the mountains north of Kandahar, had asked him to visit, but he had been unable to do so, “because a lot of people know me, and I am frightened they will capture me somewhere on the road. So I sent my assistant Mullah Abdul-Haq Wasiq to Kandahar. Unfortunately he was captured by American agents in Ghazni.”

This suggests that Wasiq either made his own negotiations with the Americans in Ghazni, or was invited and then betrayed by the local warlord, because after the meeting he was duly arrested, along with Gholam Ruhani, by the Special Forces operatives, who duly declared that they were “the number two and three in Taliban intel.”

In Guantánamo, Wasiq has been coy about his role, claiming that he was forced to join the Taliban, and that he sometimes acted as the deputy minister of intelligence, but only to combat “thieves and bribes.” This did not convince his tribunal, who greeted him with the words, “Good afternoon, Mr. Minister. Seldom before have we had someone of such prestige and responsibility.” Ruhani, however, was adamant that he was not the “number three in Taliban intel.” He said that he was a Taliban conscript, who fulfilled his duties in a clerical capacity to avoid being sent to the front lines, and explained that he was asked to attend the meeting between the Taliban and the Americans because he had learned a little English while studying electronics manuals in a store run by his elderly father. “I turned over my pistol and ammunition to the American, as an act of faith, because it was a friendly meeting,” he said. “I expected to leave the meeting and return to my life, my shop and my family. Instead, I was arrested.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Ruhani was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated January 14, 2007, in which it was noted that he was born in 1975 and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that, according to his own account, his family owned an electrical store in Ghazni, where he attended school until, fearing that he would be drafted by the Communist government, his parents sent him, via a family friend, to Iran, where he worked in a textile factory for two and a half years, and only returned to Afghanistan “sometime after 1992, while President Burhanuddin Rabbani was in office.” He then “worked in his father’s store stocking shelves and cleaning” until 1996, when the Taliban “gained control of Kabul” and “began conscripting people.”

He then “took a job with the Ministry of Intelligence because he did not want to go to war,” and “spent approximately two years working with a thirteen or fourteen-man security detail in Kabul,” and also “served as a driver for the group leader, Muhammad Nabi Majrooh,” described as “the Director of the Operations Department who helped [him] get the job.” Majrooh later sacked him (for unspecified reasons), and was then dismissed himself, “because the Taliban suspected he was collaborating.with the Northern Alliance,” but Ruhani “maintained employment at the security office,” when a man named Asim took over. Throughout this period, he added, “he did not receive any formal weapons training, but did carry a pistol for work.”

In describing the circumstances of his capture, it was noted that, the day before the Northern Alliance captured Kabul in November 2001, he “left Kabul for Ghazni, where he continued working at his father’s store.” It was then, he said, that an acquaintance named Nanwai “contacted [him] stating he needed an English translator for a meeting.” Ruhani “agreed to accompany Nanwai to the meeting, which occurred at Haji Ghulan Muhammad Hotak’s house in Ghazni.” In a footnote, the Task Force explained that Hotak was “assessed to be a high-level Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander in the Wardak province, and a major narcotics trafficker and weapons facilitator,” who was seized and held in Bagram, where he was designated ISN 1674, and was released on October 14, 2006.

At the meeting, Hotak made a phone call and told Ruhani to ask the unidentified person who answered when he was coming to Ghazni. He was told that it would be in two or three days, and so, three days later, on December 10, 2001, “Nanwai and Hotak requested [Ruhani] attend another meeting at a school,” at which Abdul-Haq Wasiq was present, and Hotak “requested [Ruhani] to act as an interpreter between [Wasiq], Hotak, and the ‘Americans.’” They then drove from the school “to where the ‘Americans’ were waiting,” but Ruhani “claimed he could not understand them because they spoke ‘British English,’” and another translator took over. “The purpose of this meeting,” Ruhani stated, “was to identify the location of Mullah Muhammad Omar,” the leader of the Taliban.

Despite this, at some point during the meeting, “one of the ‘Americans’ exited the house, reentered with American soldiers,and arrested all of the Afghans,” who were then taken to the US prison at Bagram airbase. Ruhani was on the first flight into Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (the day the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Four members of a thirteen or fourteen-man Taliban unit who were his superiors in Kabul [and] Weapons security and duties of the Taliban team in Kabul.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he “downplay[ed] his position and authority in the Taliban Intelligence organisation,” alleging that Qari Ahmadullah, the Taliban Chief of Intelligence, was his brother-in-law, and that Muhammad Nabi Majrooh was Qari Ahmadullah’s brother.” Even if true, this would not preclude the possibility that he played only a minor role in the Taliban’s intelligence operations in Kabul, and although an unidentified “sensitive contact” identified him “as Majrooh’s deputy in 2001,” there is no way of knowing if there was any truth to this allegation.

Primarily, the Task Force seemed to regard him with some wariness because of his alleged family associations, claiming that Qari Ahmadullah did not die in December 2001, and, on June 7, 2003, “led a group of 36 extremists in a fatal bomb attack against a bus carrying German Intemational Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in Kabul,” and that, in September 2006, Muhammad Nabi Majrooh, “along with two Taliban military commanders, planned to conduct suicide attacks throughout Afghanistan.” Again, although there were footnotes referring to specific reports that dealt with these claims, they have not been independently verified, and, in any case, they serve only to suggest that Ruhani was suspicious because his sister married Qari Ahmadullah.

In assessing him, the Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because he “ha[d] familial ties to active Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) entities, and would probably join ACM groups dedicated to attacking US and coalition forces in Afghanistan if released.” He was also “assessed as a medium threat from a detention perspective,” whose “overall behaviour ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile toward the guard force and staff,” although, on September 1, 2005, he “damaged government property by stuffing pieces of his flip flops into his sink.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, updating a previous recommendation for his continued detention (dated January 21, 2006), recommended him for transfer to ongoing custody in Afghanistan, in a wing of the main prison in Kabul, Pol-i-Charki, that was refurbished by the Americans, and was used to hold prisoners returned from Guantánamo from April 2007 onwards.

Abdallah Al Matrafi (ISN 5, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2007

A father of three, Abdallah al-Matrafi (also identified as Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi), who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, had directed a fund-raising committee in Bosnia, and had worked as an imam in Mecca before establishing the charity Al-Wafa, as I explained at the time of his release, also drawing on an account in Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files. At the time of his release, he was presumably aware that most of the dozens of other prisoners who had worked for Al-Wafa had been freed, as their claims that they were involved in genuine humanitarian aid work were accepted one by one. He, however, was regarded as a more significant prisoner, against whom was stacked an array of allegations of his involvement with both the Taliban and Al-Qaida.

After the invasion of Afghanistan began, al-Matrafi sent his family to safety in Pakistan, but stayed on in Kabul, even though the organization’s stores were the targets of bombing raids, in which seven aid workers were killed. He finally left the capital when he was seriously injured in a bombing raid, and his family last heard from him on December 10, 2001, as he was about to board an Emirates flight from Lahore to Dubai. He never made it onto the plane. Abducted at the airport by US agents, he was transferred back to Afghanistan and put on the first flight to Guantánamo.

Little was heard about him in Guantánamo, although it was clear that the authorities regarded him as a major supporter of terrorism, alleging in his tribunal that he knew Osama bin Laden, that his plan to provide funds to bin Laden for training caused disagreement within Al-Wafa, that he admitted that Al-Wafa purchased weapons and vehicles for the Taliban, and that he “negotiated a deal that allowed the Taliban to direct Al-Wafa’s activities.”

In his review boards, further allegations were added, including claims that he “admitted he took orders from Osama bin Laden,” that he “provided financial support to Al-Qaida after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and that he purchased medical laboratory equipment for a microbiologist who was “developing anthrax for Al-Qaida.”

Set against these allegations, however, were a number of counter-claims, which, typically, were ignored when the authorities declared him an “enemy combatant.” On several occasions, al-Matrafi stated that there was no relationship between Al-Wafa and Al-Qaida, “explaining that Al-Qaida disliked Al-Wafa, and both organizations were in disagreement.” It was also noted in the Summary of Evidence for his second review board that, two months before 9/11, he met with bin Laden at his house in Kandahar, and stated that the purpose of the meeting was “to discuss unresolved issues” from a previous meeting, “concerning disagreements between Al-Wafa and Al-Qaida.”

A brief survey of al-Matrafi’s statements before his capture is sufficient to explain his refusal to accept that he was affiliated with terrorists. In October 2001, after Al-Wafa was blacklisted, he appeared on the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera, protesting his innocence and offering to open up the organization’s accounts to public scrutiny.

In addition, two prisoners in Guantánamo who had worked for Al-Wafa backed up his statements. Ayman Batarfi (ISN 627, released December 2009), a Yemeni doctor who tended wounded soldiers during the battle of Tora Bora, pointed out that, although Al-Wafa had a good working relationship with the Taliban, this was required to pursue its humanitarian work, and both Batarfi and another man, Mustafa Hamlili, an Algerian-born Pakistani resident (ISN 705, released in July 2008), reinforced al-Matrafi’s claim that the organization was regarded with suspicion by Al-Qaida because of its Saudi links.

Batarfi may, in fact, be the alleged “Al-Qaida facilitator” mentioned in the Summary of Evidence from al-Matrafi’s first review board, who identified him as “having problems with Osama bin Laden because [he] had come to do charity work in Afghanistan and was funded by the Saudi royal family, who Osama bin Laden rejected and denounced.” This source added, moreover, that al-Matrafi “would take Saudis from Al-Farouq [the main training camp for Arabs in Afghanistan] and try to send them back to Saudi Arabia.”

None of this helped him, however, and what probably counted against him more than anything else was the apparent discovery, in August 2002, of a store of chemicals in offices used by Al-Wafa in Kabul, which included “36 types of chemical, explosives, fuses and terrorist guide books.” Whether this had anything to do with him is unknown. His brother, Mohammed, reiterated that the organization had no links to Al-Qaida. “My brother and I have repeatedly said we have no terrorist links, and that any organization, official or non-governmental, is free to come and investigate our headquarters,” he told the press, adding, “We are only helping the Muslim people of Afghanistan.”

Nothing more has been heard of al-Matrafi since his release, but as I explained when he was repatriated, “Time alone will tell what the Saudi government makes of [Abdul Aziz] al-Matrafi on his return, but, like the allegations against his workers that disappeared under scrutiny like a malevolent mirage, it may well be that those who vouched for him were correct in their appraisal that he was the head of a charity that was required to work with the Taliban, but that was otherwise committed to bringing humanitarian aid to some of the most deprived people on earth.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Matrafi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated October 25, 2007, in which it was noted that he was born in July 1964, and was “in overall good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, between 1982 and 1984, “he served as a tank mechanic in the Saudi Arabian Army, achieving the rank of sergeant,” and then traveled to Afghanistan to participate in the resistance to the Soviet occupation, described as “the Soviet Jihad.” He was apparently there for 18 months,  and met Osama bin Laden and other mujahideen who were later involved in Al-Qaida.

From 1993 until 1997, he served as “the local director in Mecca for the High Commission for Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” identified as “probably” referring to the Saudi High Commission for Relief, and further identified as “an NIPF Priority 2B TSE,” defined as “having available resources and being in a position to provide financial support to terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests, or provide witting operational support to Priority 2B terrorist groups.”

It was also noted that he “returned to Afghanistan sometime between April 2000 and March 2001,” after meeting with “the founder of Al-Wafa, Shaykh Abdallah al-Rayis,” who asked him to “set up offices and religious institutes in Afghanistan.” Al-Matrafi subsequently “met with the Afghan Minister of Education, Emir Khan Motaqi, who advised [him] on appropriate locations for the religious institutes,” and “then returned to Saudi Arabia to discuss his findings with Shaykh al-Rayis.” On returning to Afghanistan, he established Al-Wafa offices in Kandahar, Kabul, Herat, and Karachi.

So far, there were no claims that Al-Wafa had any connection with Al-Qaida, although the Task Force also alleged that, during Ramadan in 2000, he met with Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a religious scholar (who, later, was ferociously opposed to the 9/11 attacks), who apparently took him to meet Osama bin Laden “to discuss the Al-Wafa offices in Afghanistan, and the differences between the ideologies of Al-Qaida and Al-Wafa.” According to the Task Force, at the end of the meeting, bin Laden gave him a letter authorizing Abu Hafs to assist him in establishing additional al-Wafa offices in Afghanistan. As a result, it was claimed, he “submitted the appropriate papers through the office of the Taliban Supreme Commander, Mullah Omar,” and, “[i]n the spring of 2001, an Al-Wafa office opened in Kabul,” although, in the account above, it seemed that al-Matrafi managed to open offices without any assistance whatsoever from bin Laden.

A this point, the allegations take a darker turn. After claiming that, in “late spring of 2001,” al-Matrafi was approached “regarding providing funding for Taliban Ministry of Communication and Electricity projects in Afghanistan” by the Pakistani nuclear scientist and Islamic scholar Dr. Bashir Ud-Din Mahmud (aka Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood), a co-founder of the Pakistani charity Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (“Reconstruction for the Islamic Community”), and Shaykh al-Farouq (aka Suheil al-Farouq), the head of the UTN office in Kabul, it was claimed that, in approximately July 2001, he “again met with UBL to discuss Al-Qaida and Al-Wafa issues, and, just before September 11, 2001, “met with Al-Qaida biological and chemical expert Yazid Sufaat and directed him to the Al-Wafa office in Pakistan.”

These are severe allegations, but it has never been established that there was actually any truth to them, given the doubts expressed in the accounts related before the WikiLeaks files were released, and nor has it been established that there is any truth to an additional claim that, after 9/11, he “facilitated the movement of Al-Qaida operatives into Afghanistan.” What is clear is that, in early December 2001, he “crossed from Afghanistan into Pakistan with the help of his translator Muhammad Ajmal,” who “convinced Pakistani customs officials that [he] was ill and needed immediate medical attention,” and who then took him to a Lashkar-e-Tayyiba office in Lahore. There, he “provided [him] with an escort in order to obtain a visa and the necessary exit paperwork before taking [him] to the airport.”

However, Pakistani police arrested al-Matrafi at Lahore airport on December 11, 2001, and he was transferred to US custody on December 29, 2001. He apparently reported that, when he was seized, he had various items in his possession, including $1,000, although the Task Force noted that none of the items were held by JTF-GTMO. He was sent to Guantánamo on February 13, 2002 to “provide information on the following: The financing of Al-Qaida operations in Bosnia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan using Al-Wafa as a front operation [and] Key Al-Qaida and Taliban leaders.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he had been “truthful about many of his activities as a director of Al-Wafa,” but claimed that “he omit[ted] other details and attempt[ed] to downplay his associations with and support to Al-Qaida by stating that all of his support went to the Taliban or for the betterment of the Afghan people.” It was also noted, as he said repeatedly and was noted elsewhere, that he “claimed that he did not agree with [Osama bin Laden] and Al-Qaida’s goals and that Al-Qaida did not trust Al-Wafa.”

In a detailed analysis, it was claimed, with reference to the chemical weapons claims mentioned above, that “he attempted to procure chemical warfare weapons for use against US and Coalition forces and was involved in Al-Qaida’s attempts to develop or procure Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and that he “authorized Al-Wafa to spend $5000 US to assist Al-Qaida anthrax researcher, Yazid Sufaat, purchase laboratory equipment.” It is not certain where these claims came from, but it is alarming to realize that one source, mentioned here, may have been Jamal Mar’i (ISN 577, released December 2009), a Yemeni who worked for Al-Wafa in Karachi, who was kidnapped from his home on September 23, 2001 and rendered to a secret prison in Jordan before ending up in Guantánamo, or, even more worryingly, Jamil Qasim, who was never even sent to Guantánamo.

Ayman Batarfi (ISN 627, also released in December 2009) was a Yemeni doctor,  identified by Mar’i as “Sufaat’s associate,” although that may not have been a reliable claim, given the circumstances of Mari’s detention. Mar’i also said that Batarfi “gave Sufaat the telephone number for Jamil Qasim who Sufaat was to contact for funding assistance,” and who “was a micro-biology student and served as a junior medical advisor for Al-Wafa in the Karachi office along with [Mar'i] and Abu Ahmad (aka Imran Uways).” Qasim, also identified as Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, was reportedly flown to Amman, to the same secret prison that Jamal Mar’i was sent to, but he never resurfaced. In 2007, Amnesty International told the Washington Post it had “asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but ha[d] not received an answer.”

Other unsubstantiated claims about al-Matrafi were that he “attempted to purchase a computerized laser-guided missile system costing $500,000 US,” in which the missiles “would contain a chemical substance, have a range of 1,500 kilometers, and have a destruction radius of 1,500 square meters” (which sounds like a paranoid fantasy, rather than anything real), and there were also suspicions that, because he “admitted he met with Dr. Bashir Ud-Din Mahmud,” it was possible he “was involved in attempting to procure a nuclear weapon for Al-Qaida.”

This was in spite of the fact that, although he was “assessed to be a supporter” of the Al-Qaida network, he was “not assessed to be a member of Al-Qaida,” and, more importantly, it contradicted a statement by the “high-value detainee” Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014, still held), who “commented that the Al-Wafa NGO disagreed with Al-Qaida’s opposition to the Saudi government and actively attempted to undermine Al-Qaida’s recruiting and training programs in Afghanistan prior to 11 September 2001,” and another statement by Humud al-Jadani (ISN 230, released July 2007), who “reported that [al-Matrafi] disagreed with the message [Osama bin Laden] was preaching to the mujahideen concerning martyrdom.” Al-Jadani said that al-Matrafi “felt that martyrdom was attained by fighting to the last breath, whereas [bin Laden] was preaching suicide missions.” He added that bin Laden “became upset and threatened [al-Matrafi]’s life, ordering [him] never to go near any of the Al-Qaida guesthouses again and never talk again to the mujahideen about martyrdom.”

Whle the US allegations against al-Matrafi were, then, largely full of holes, it was of interest that the Mabahith (the Saudi intelligence service) “provided information on 37 detainees, in order of precedence, whom they designated as being of high priority interest,” and that al-Matrafi “was the 13th name on that list,” because the Mabahith had previously had him “under surveillance for recruiting activities.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies,” and it was also claimed that he was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” even though his “overall behavior ha[d] been mostly compliant and rarely hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended his continued detention, updating a similar recommendation on September 9, 2006. Nevertheless, he was released just two months after this updated recommendation, for reasons that have never been explained, and, on his return, was presumably put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul (ISN 8, Afghanistan) Released December 2007

As I explained in a footnote to Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, Rasoul, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in a car with two Taliban commanders, Mullah Norullah Noori (ISN 6, still held) and Mullah Mohammed Fazil (ISN 7, still held) after the fall of the city of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, in November 2001. In Guantánamo, he claimed that he was a Taliban recruit, who was seriously wounded in 1997, and added that he rejoined the Taliban in 1999 “to gain better medical attention,” and went to Kunduz to fight the Northern Alliance in September 2001.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Rasoul was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 25, 2006, in which he was identified as Abdullah Gulam Rasoul, and it was noted that he was born in 1973, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, based on his own account, the Joint Task Force noted that he was from a village in Helmand province, that he claimed “he only attended two years of school during his adolescence,” and that he also claimed “he never received any formal military training.” He also claimed, as he later did in his tribunal at Guantánamo, that he “answered the call to jihad twice, once in 1997 and the second time in 1999.”

He further explained that, on the first occasion, he “decided to travel to Kabul, AF, to join the Taliban,” when he “was issued an AK-47 while staying at a compound that housed 15 to 20 people,” but, after just a month, “was seriously wounded after a bombing raid by Massoud” (Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated two days before the 9/11 attacks), and was then held in hospital “for approximately seven or eight months.”

In 1999, when he rejoined the Taliban in Kandahar, he claimed “he reacquired an AK-47 for his personal use,” and said he stayed in a compound known as Kuli Urdo, which “housed military personnel and several tanks,” although he added that he “would spend a few days at the compound and a few days at home.” He also said that, while there, he “recalled seeing” Mullah Norullah Noori (identified as Sham Ul-Haq Noorullah), and another unidentified man named Allah Uddin.

After traveling to Kunduz in September 2001 “to join Taliban soldiers in the fight against the NA” (although he claimed “he never saw combat”), he said he “recalled seeing his friends from Kuli Urdo, Mullah Mohammed Fazil (identified as Mohammed Fazl), and two other men, Dadi Allah, and Mullah Beradar.” He also pointed out that, of the 5,000 Taliban in Kunduz, all “were under the command of [Fazil], Allah, and Beradar.”

Describing the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force claimed that, on November 28, 2001, he and Noori and Fazil (both described as “Taliban leaders”) and two other unidentified men “turned themselves over to General Dostum,” although it seems more likely that, as he explained on other occasions, they were all seized while traveling together in a car. Dostum then “moved the group to Mazar-e-Sharif,” and, in early December 2001, took Rasoul, Noori and Fazil to his prison at Sheberghan. After being transferred to US custody, they were held on two US ships — the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan — and were then taken to Bagram. Rasoul was on the first flight into Guantánamo, when the prison opened on January 11, 2002, and the spurious reason given for his transfer was to “provide information on the following: Extensive information on Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Fazl.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that his “true position and standing within the Taliban ranks ha[d] not been clearly determined,” because he “continue[d] to identify himself as being a mere foot soldier,” even though he “identified [Fazil, Noori], Mullah Beradar, Mullah Dadullah-Lang, and Mullah Quyem (NFI) as friends and associates.” Providing a variation on his capture story, the Task Force noted that it was “highly doubtful that the detainee, who was allegedly standing with other Taliban soldiers along a roadside, would be singularly selected by General Dostum’s soldiers to join [Noori] and [Fazil] in the vehicle they were secured in, unless [he] was as significant as his fellow captives.”

The Task Force also picked up on the fact that Fazil was the “Taliban Army Chief of Staff,” and that Noori was the “Governor of Balkh Province,” and noted that Rasoul “was placed in a house with the high-ranking government officials, while the other two foot soldiers were sent to Qala-i-Janghi prison,” where hundreds of Taliban soldiers were sent after surrendering, and where a notorious massacre took place. An analyst noted that, although Rasoul claimed it was “normal that low ranking people ride in cars with high-ranking commanders,” he “stayed with the high-ranking officials at a separate facility” while “about 500 of [Fazil's] troops went to the Qala-i-Janghi prison.”

There were other, idiotic claims — that Rasoul “carried three Casio watches on his person at the time of capture,” and that two were the model F-91W, which was “a type of watch used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs)” — but when it came to understanding Rasoul’s significance, the fact that he “admitted being a bodyguard to [Fazil],” and that Fazil said that he “performed duties as a bodyguard, driver, and administrative assistant” (even though he also described his duties as being “more like a foot soldier”) ought to have made it clear that he was of some significance, although instead the decision was made to release him.

The Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed to be a low threat from a detention perspective,” whose “overall behaviour ha[d] been compliant and rarely hostile to the guard force and staff,” and, as a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation for “Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD) with Transfer Language” (dated December 24, 2005), recommended him for transfer out of DoD control, although he was not released for another year.

After his release, as I explained in an article for the Guardian, “Who are ‘the worst of the worst’?,” he apparently resurfaced as Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a Taliban leader responsible for roadside bomb attacks against British forces, and, by March 2010, had apparently risen through the ranks to become Mullah Omar’s top deputy, after the capture of Mullah Berader (aka Barader). Also known as Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a detailed profile of him was published in the Christian Science Monitor in April 2010. He was also profiled in Newsweek in May 2011.

Fahed Mohamed Al Qahtani (ISN 13, Saudi Arabia) Released July 2007

Fahed al-Qahtani, who was just 19 at the time of his capture, had been recruited for jihad in his home country, as I explained in an article at the time of his release, drawing on an account in a footnote to Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files. In Guantánamo, he explained that he had also been aided in his travel by a facilitator, but also said, “I went for jihad to Afghanistan, but when I got there I changed my mind. I saw some things there that were against my religion … Things like worshipping a cemetery where people have died. That has nothing to do with our religion, worshipping graves.” Refuting allegations that he attended Al-Farouq, the main camp for Arab recruits, and that Osama bin Laden visited while he was there, he insisted that he spent most of his time in a house in Kabul that was “a cooking facility for the [Taliban] front line,” and then fled with others to Kunduz, the last Taliban bastion in the north, “until we were surrounded and there was an agreement to have all the Arabs delivered to Mazar-e-Sharif.”

Delivered, with several hundred others, to Qala-i-Janghi, a nearby fort, he survived a US-led massacre, which took place after some of the prisoners started an uprising, by somehow escaping from the fort without being killed. “I was present but did not participate in the fighting,” he explained. “I escaped during the fighting and turned myself in one day after. I went to the market to turn myself in. I met people in the market who were in the army of [General] Dostum [one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance]. That is where I was when I was recaptured … Dostum sold me to the Americans … They put me in jail and I was tortured by Afghans and made to say things. I was moved to Kandahar. When I got to Cuba I told the interrogators the real story.” Despite apparently telling the truth, the most extraordinary piece of “evidence” against al-Qahtani emerged in Guantánamo, when it was shamelessly alleged that he “admitted under duress that he was an Al-Qaida [sic] and had met Osama bin Laden.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Qahtani was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated May 26, 2006, in which he was identified as Fahd Nasir Muhammad al-Oahtani, and it was noted that he was born in January 1982, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he dropped out of high school, and, on a trip to Mecca, “met a Yemeni named Abu al-Maali (variant: Ma’ali) who discussed with him the uprising in Palestine,” and told him “he should travel to Afghanistan (AF) for training and then return to Saudi Arabia for subsequent missions in Palestine.” Al-Maali told al-Qahtani “he would arrange for passports, visas and travel arrangements,” and promised he would meet him in Afghanistan “at a later date.” Al-Qahtani then asked three friends to accompany him, and, although they were reportedly unwilling, al-Maali persuaded them as well.

Traveling to Kandahar via Karachi and Quetta, al-Qahtani and his friends “were taken to the Arab guesthouse near the Hajji Habash Mosque.” He said he “spent approximately one week in the guesthouse and was told to hand over his documents for safekeeping while he was training,” although he “fell ill just prior to departing for the Al-Farouq training camp,” and “spent three months in a clinic recovering from malaria.”

When he recovered, he was sent to Al-Farouq, and “after he completed basic training, he returned to the guesthouse in Kandahar and was told he could return to Saudi Arabia or stay at the house.” He “opted to stay at the house, wait for Abu [al-]Maali to arrive, and obtain money for his return trip,” but al-Maali obviously didn’t arrive, because, in approximately April 2001, al-Qahtani left the Kandahar guesthouse and traveled to Kabul, and then Kunduz, staying in Taliban guesthouses, and in Kunduz, where the house was a staging area for Taliban fighters traveling to the front lines and for weaponry,” he apparently “made several trips to Takhar province,” and “continued to travel between the two locations until approximately mid-November 2001, when fighters on the front lines, led by [a man named] Gharib, retreated to the Kunduz guesthouse.”

When General Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces surrounded Kunduz, a deal was arranged whereby fighters were told that, if they surrendered, they would be transported to Kandahar. Al-Qahtani and others and were loaded onto trucks, but, instead of being disarmed, taken to Kandahar and freed, as they expected, they were taken to Mazar-e-Sharif, and imprisoned in the Qala-i-Janghi fort. There, his  group “was put in the fortress basement,” and the next day he “was taken out, beaten, and robbed.” Then, when he “was being moved to the courtyard, he heard an explosion and fighting broke out.” This, as noted above, was an uprising by some of the prisoners, who feared they were about to be shot, but it was savagely put down in what has become known as the Qala-i-Janghi massacre.

Al-Qahtani, however, was fortunate not be killed, as he later explained in his tribunal at Guantánamo. As he said, he “took cover behind some trees and remained there until nightfall when he escaped the fortress with fifteen other fighters.” They then split up and he traveled with two of the men to a market near Mazar-e-Sharif, where he “was shot and captured by Northern Alliance forces,” and claimed “to have been taken to a house and tortured for two days before being taken to another house where he was tortured into admitting he was Al-Qaida,” and then “taken to a third house for one day” until he was “transferred to a hospital where he was briefly treated.”

After being treated, he “was taken to a fourth house where he was detained with the others he had escaped Qala-i-Janghi with and held until the end of Ramadan,” and was then turned over to US forces. He recalled “being one of the first to arrive at the Kandahar Detention Facility,” which opened on December 28, 2001, and he was also on the first flight into Guantánamo on January 11 2002, when the spurious reason given for his transfer was to “provide information on the following: Al-Farouq training camp.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that, although he “initially admitted attending Al-Farouq,” he had “since retracted this claim stating he received training while in a guesthouse on the front lines.” Nevertheless, the Task Force insisted on assessing him as “a probable member of Al-Qaida who traveled to Afghanistan to receive basic, and possibly advanced, militant training,” who “resided in numerous Al-Qaida and Taliban guesthouses and attended at least one Al-Qaida training camp.”

This was a reference to Al-Farouq, but it was noticeable that, beyond his own single confession, later retracted, the only witness who placed him at Al-Farouq was Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, whose testimony is therefore extremely unreliable. Al-Qahtani, identified as “Al-Qaida member Maad al-Qahtani,” apparently “stated that he attended basic training at Al-Farouq with detainee and graduated in mid-February 2001,” and added that “[t]hey also attended advanced training together at Tarnak Farms, from March to mid-April 2001.”

It was also noted that Mohammed al-Qahtani “later stated he had not attended advanced training with detainee and only went to basic training with [him],” but although an analyst noted that, “[s]tarting in winter 2002/2003, [he] began retracting statements,” it was also noted that, “based on corroborating information it is believed that [his] initial admissions were the truth,” and that, as a result, it was “assessed that his identification of detainee as an advanced training classmate is factual, not the mistake [he] would like us to believe.”

Another unreliable claim made by Mohammed al-Qahtani, mentioned in Fahed al-Qahtani’s file, was that, “when questioned whether any of his training camp classmates volunteered for or were asked about their willingness to participate in martyrdom missions,” he stated,”they all were; otherwise they would not have traveled to Afghanistan for jihad,” even though there is no indication that there is any truth to this claim, as many of those who traveled for jihad — the majority, I believe — traveled to take part in the military conflict with the Northern Alliance, and not to take part in martyrdom missions.

In conclusion, the Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated June 11, 2004), recommended him for continued detention, but added, crucially, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Qahtani] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO),” although it took another 14 months for that agreement to be negotiated, and he was then put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Majid Al Joudi (ISN 25, Saudi Arabia) Released February 2007

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” in which I drew partly on a brief account in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Majid al-Joudi, who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, was a long-term hunger striker. In my book, I explained that the lawyer Julia Tarver Mason, who represented ten Saudi prisoners, visited Guantánamo in October 2005 and noted that three of her clients — Majid al-Joudi, as well as Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Yousef al-Shehri — reported to her the brutal manner in which they were being force-fed, because they were taking part in the prison-wide hunger strike that began that summer.

They said that the feeding tubes, which were “the thickness of a finger,” were regarded as objects of torture. She reported that they were forcibly shoved up the prisoners’ noses without anaesthetic or sedatives being provided, and that this resulted in prisoners “vomiting up substantial amounts of blood,” but added that when they did so, “the soldiers mocked and cursed at them, and taunted them with statements like ‘look what your religion has brought you.’” She also noted the prisoners’ claims that they “were verbally abused and insulted and were restrained from head to toe” while the feeding took place, with “shackles or other restraints on their arms, legs, waist, chest, knees, and head,” that attempts to give them intravenous medication were “often quite painful … as inexperienced medical professionals seemed incapable of locating appropriate veins,” and, most shockingly, that, while doctors, including the head of the hospital, were watching, “the guards took tubes from one detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee. When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes.”

However, at the time I wrote The Guantánamo Files, I knew nothing else about al-Joudi’s story, as the documents relating to his case were not released by the Pentagon until September 2007. In his one and only appearance at any of the hearings, in November 2006, al-Joudi said that, in October 2001, he was invited to join the humanitarian aid effort in Afghanistan that followed the US-led invasion of October 2001, and that he subsequently took a break from his work — in two family-run fabric stores — and traveled to Afghanistan in mid-November to work for a month for the charity Al-Wafa. He added that, over a two-week period, he distributed food and clothing to villages near Kandahar until he was wounded in the leg. According to the allegation in his last Unclassified Summary of Evidence, he “stated he was hit by a car and taken to a hospital that was taken over by Al-Qaida,” and that he told the men, who “initially thought he was mujahideen and was in Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban,” that “he was volunteering with Al-Wafa.”

As I explained in relation to Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi (ISN 5, above), working for Al-Wafa was enough to be regarded as a terrorist in Guantánamo, where its legitimate humanitarian aid work was ignored. In al-Joudi’s case, the US authorities insisted, despite his protests to the contrary, that documents in his possession when he was captured suggested “he was closely involved with Al-Qaida and that he was either a trainer or a trainee on an anti-surveillance course” — even though this was highly improbable, if not impossible, if he had arrived in Afghanistan just a month before he was seized.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Joudi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated September 28, 2006, in which he was identified as Majid Abdallah al-Judi and Majeed Abdallah, and it was noted that he was born in 1967, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account (largely mirroring what I wrote in my online chapter), he was “a distant cousin of King Abdullah Hussein, the current ruler of Jordan,” although in Mecca, where his family lived, he began working in the family’s clothing store, run by his brother, after leaving school, until, one day in approximately October 2001, “the director of the Al-Wafa branch office in Mecca, Muhammad Abdallah Hasan, visited [his] store on several occasions to discuss volunteering in Afghanistan.”

On November 2, 2001, al-Joudi said, he “went to the Al-Wafa office in Mecca and entered into an agreement to volunteer to work for Al-Wafa in Afghanistan (AF) only during Ramadan 2001.” He was provided with “an airline ticket and $2,000 USD,” and left Saudi Arabia soon afterwards, traveling to Kandahar, where the local office manager met him, and he was provided with a room in a house. Two days after his arrival, he said, he and two other Saudi nationals “started delivering food to surrounding villages,” but, around December 1, 2001, when he was returning to the office, after calling his family from a phone booth, “a car struck him as he was crossing a street,” and he “was rendered unconscious and taken to a nearby hospital,” the Mirwais Hospital (aka the Chinese Hospital), where he was taken in “with a broken leg and facial injuries.”

He stated that, “when he awoke, he learned that the hospital had been taken over by members of Al-Qaida,” and that there were “eight armed individuals, using the hospital as a safe haven and barricading themselves on the second floor.” He added that some of them “strapped explosives to their bodies, threatening to blow themselves up if attacked,” although they were killed after a siege, and it was noted that al-Joudi’s file listed his date of capture as December 15, 2001, “when coalition forces removed [him] from the hospital.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 21, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The Al-Wafa office in Kandahar.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force stated bluntly that his account was “assessed to be false,” because he had “provided fictitious names for Al-Wafa employees, and detained Al-Wafa employees [did] not recognize [him],” and also because his “claimed arrival date at the Kandahar Al- Wafa office [was] at least a month later than the period Al-Wafa reportedly closed the office.” It was therefore claimed that his “associations with Al-Wafa [were] assessed to be a cover story to mask his true activities and associations including his membership in Al-Qaida.”

It was claimed that, due to his “evasiveness, non-cooperation, false cover story … pocket litter, and circumstances of capture,” he was “assessed to be a member of Al-Qaida defending Kandahar who was injured during coalition attacks and hospitalized where he was subsequently captured.” His pocket litter, which he denied belonged to him, apparently included “a handwritten page on which he vowed to remain a jihadist as long as he was alive,” and “two after-action reports detailing the results of surveillance exercises,” which were assessed as having been conducted at the Kandahar Airport Training Camp, and there were also claims that his name was found on incriminating documents recovered from computers seized in house raids involving Al-Qaida members, although there was no direct testimony from any other prisoner to incriminate him.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed to be a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and often hostile to the guard force and staff,” although there was no mention whatsoever of him being a long-term hunger striker. As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a previous recommendation for his continued detention (dated November 1, 2005), repeated that recommendation, but added, crucially, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Joudi] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).”

After his release, and after he had been put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, the Pentagon claimed that al-Joudi became involved in unspecified terrorist activities. In May 2009, the Pentagon produced a fact sheet, “Former Guantánamo Detainee Terrorism Trends” (PDF), in which it was claimed that he had been involved in “Terrorist facilitation,” and, moreover, that his involvement was “confirmed” rather than “suspected.” However, no further information has been provided to justify this claim.

Zayd Al Husayn Al Ghamdi (ISN 50, Saudi Arabia) Released November 2007

Zayd al-Husayn al-Ghamdi, as I explained at the time of his release (and also in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One)“), who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in Afghanistan in December 2001, although his family did not even know he was in Guantánamo until 2006, because the US authorities had described him as a Jordanian. In Guantánamo, it was noted that he traveled to Afghanistan in July 2001, and he was declared an “enemy combatant” after his tribunal in October 2004 on the basis of three particularly thin allegations: that he was a member of the Saudi charity Al-Wafa, that he “carried a weapon in Afghanistan,” and that he was “present and wounded during military operations at Khost” in December 2001.

These allegations were augmented in the years that followed, but nothing about these additional claims suggests that they were reliable. The authorities alleged that he “was identified” as the “occasional leader” of a group of fighters in the northern city of Taloqan, but ignored another narrative that could be pieced together from other statements: that al-Ghamdi reported that he left home “to provide help for the refugees in Afghanistan,” that he worked for Al-Wafa as a laborer in Kabul, and that he traveled to Taloqan because, after approaching Taliban representatives in Kabul to find out “places needing assistance with orphans,” he had been told that Taloqan was a suitable area.

The additional information compiled by the authorities also provided an explanation of the circumstances of his capture, which contradicted the claim that he was “wounded during military operations.” After fleeing to Khost, al-Ghamdi said that he “stopped in the first Taliban center he came to,” which was subsequently bombed. Injured and “rendered unconscious,” he awoke in a hospital in Miram Shah, in Pakistan, where he was arrested and transferred to US custody.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Ghamdi was a “Recommendation for Transfer Out of DoD Control (TRO),” dated December 5, 2005, in which he was also identified as Zayed M. al-Hussain, Zaid Muhammad Sa’ad al-Husayn, Zayed Mohammed Saad al-Hussain, and Zayid al-Ghamzi, and it was noted that he was born in 1974, and was “in good health,” although he had “a history of right tibia fracture with surgical intervention prior to detention.” It was also noted that he “went on hunger strike in August 2005,” and had been “evaluated by behavioral health for cluster personality traits.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force failed to resolve the confusion about his nationality, noting that, although he “stated he was born in Amman, JO, because his Saudi parents were visiting Jordan at the time his mother went into labor,” and that the family “returned to Saudi Arabia within a month of [his] birth,” an analyst noted that a “visiting Saudi delegation did not identify him as a citizen during a July 2002 visit” (although the Jordanian authorities, who met with him, “did not identify him as a citizen” either).

According to al-Ghamdi’s account, he left university in Jeddah after one semester in order to work as an auto mechanic, and “was inspired to go to Afghanistan (AF) to help destitute immigrants” after reading a flyer issued by the Al-Haramain Intemational Foundation.” After obtaining a visa for Pakistan, he flew to Karachi, and then traveled to Kabul via Quetta, where, he said, “he spent three weeks at a religious institution, the Center for the Preservation of Islamic Virtue in Kabul.” There, Taliban representatives told him “where in Afghanistan he could assist orphans.”

He then “traveled to the first of these places,” the Bamiyan region, “where he remained for three months at Taliban centers,” and “reportedly spent two to three months teaching Shia orphans the Koran and attempting to convert them to Sunni Islam.” In addition, “he claimed to have bought the children food and clothing and helped the community at large by digging wells and helping to repair walls.” From Bamiyan, he said, he traveled to the Pul-e-Khumri region in northern Afghanistan, around the capital of Baghlan province, “where he reportedly spent one month. ”

He also said that he was then “escorted by the Taliban to Kunduz and then traveled by taxi to Taloqan, where he “reportedly spent two months teaching the Koran to children and distributing bread and rice to the poor.” He “claimed he resisted Taliban pressure to fight against the Northern Alliance, as he felt it was contrary to his missionary work to pick sides and fight fellow Muslims.” He also “admitted carrying a sidearm for protection while in Afghanistan, but denie[d] firing it or ever receiving military training.”

Describing the circumstances of his capture, he said that, after the US-led invasion began, “he decided to return to Saudi Arabia,” and “first went to Kabul before proceeding to Khost.” However, on or about December 5, 2001, while leaving Khost, he “was reportedly wounded during an air raid, rendered unconscious, and placed in a taxi,” and, when “he regained consciousness, he was in Miram Shah.” After explaining that “he did not know when or how he crossed the Afghanistan/Pakistan border,” he said that he was then transferred to US custody and held in the US prison at Kandahar airport. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The Wafa Humanitarian Organization [and] Taliban student centers in Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was “assessed to be deceptive,” and had given “very generic and innocuous descriptions of his activities while in Afghanistan, consistent with a cover story to hide possible participation in Al-Qaida terrorist training and combat against coalition forces,” and had “provided conflicting accounts of several details of his background.” It was noted, for example, that only on one occasion, during an interview in February 2002, had he “claimed to have worked as a laborer for the Al-Wafa organization, but ha[d] not mentioned his personal involvement in the organization during further questioning.” It was also claimed that his “frequently observed physical and martial arts training [was] inconsistent with his purported story as a simple missionary,” although it is difficult to see how that conclusion could be defended.

However, although it was assessed that al-Ghamdi was “a possible Al-Qaida member who fought alongside Al-Qaida and Taliban mujahideen against US/Coalition forces under the auspices of [Osama bin Laden]‘s former 55th Arab Brigade,” there was no actual evidence. The only witness was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), widely known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who lied about dozens of his fellow prisoners.

Basardah — and Basardah alone — “reported that detainee was a fighter and occasional leader of approximately 30 men in the Taloqan region,” and also “claimed he saw detainee at Taloqan with a Libyan named Omar, a military leader at Taloqan and at Tora Bora,” who “had been in Taloqan for approximately five years fighting against the Northern Alliance.” Basardah also “reported” that al-Ghamdi was “a fellow Yemeni” (even though he was not), who “fought with him in the Taloqan region of northern Afghanistan prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks,” and who, following the attacks, “went to Kabul and stayed in the same guesthouse” as him, and then “reportedly traveled to Kandahar, the last time [Basardah] saw [him] until they were reunited at JTF-GTMO.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed al-Ghamdi as being “of low intelligence value,” and, despite only having Basardah’s unreliable testimony to go on, as posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updated a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in another country (dated April 22, 2005), and recommended him for transfer out of DoD control” instead, although he was not released for almost two years, and was then put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Majid Al Barayan (ISN 51, Saudi Arabia) Released September 2007

Majid al-Barayan, who was 29 years old at the time of his capture, was captured on the Pakistani border, as I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards.’” In Guantánamo, he was subjected to a number of dubious allegations produced by his fellow prisoners — or even by “high-value” detainees, held in secret prisons run by the CIA, where the use of torture was widespread. For example, he was apparently identified, by unnamed sources and “an al-Qaeda member,” as “being on the front lines near Taloqan,” in northern Afghanistan, in April 2001, when he apparently “was assigned to an anti-aircraft artillery weapon,” and he was also accused of attending Al-Farouq, of being in Tora Bora, and, most bluntly, of being “a member of Al-Qaida.” Another prisoner — who I thought may have been Yasim Basardah, the most notorious liar in Guantánamo — said that he “saw the detainee at Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan in early 2001,” which also appeared to be an unreliable claim.

For his part, al-Barayan had attempted to portray himself as a missionary, although his interrogators were unconvinced, noting that, although he claimed that he taught children in an orphanage, he did not know the name of the orphanage or any of the children’s names, and could not remember how many children were at the establishment. In addition, a hint that he may indeed have been at Tora Bora came in the following passage: “When the detainee was asked if things were confusing during the fighting, with people running up the hills and back down again, and many people dying, he replied, yes. When the detainee was asked if he fired at the Americans, he replied, no, not at the Americans. We could not see them.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Barayan was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated September 28, 2006, in which he was also identified as Majid Abdallah Said Barayan, and it was noted that he was born in September 1972, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that al-Barayan’s family was originally from the Hadramout region of Yemen, but evidently moved to Saudi Arabia (although this was not mentioned). According to his own account, it was noted that, between 1992 and 1994, he “worked as an accountant for the al-Aziziya Water Company in Saudi Arabia,” and, in 1995, traveled to the UK to attend a college in Salisbury, when he also visited the Finsbury Park Mosque in London. Four months later, he returned to Saudi Arabia, and, in 1998, he traveled to Seattle for 30 days, and “enrolled in an English language course.” On his return to Saudi Arabia, he “enrolled in Career Craft, a three-month employment placement program,” and then “found a job as an accounting clerk and was later promoted to warehouse supervisor.”

It was also noted that, in January 2001, he took a vacation in Malaysia, and also stopped in Pakistan, where he visited Karachi and Lahore, and, after returning home, during July 2001, “began contemplating dawa,” and “decided to travel to Afghanistan because he had heard it was in dire need of assistance.” In Quetta, he said, he went to a guesthouse, where he “told the guesthouse operator that he wanted to go to Afghanistan,” and “left the following morning for Kandahar, AF in a taxi,” adding that, “[s]ince he did not have to pay for the ride, he assumed that it had been paid for by the guesthouse operator.”

In Kandahar, he said, he was taken to a Taliban guesthouse, where he “was asked why he was in Afghanistan, and he replied that he was there for dawa.” He stated that “the guesthouse operator asked [him] if he would train to be a fighter, but [he] declined.” Approximately seven to ten days later, he said, “he was driven to a guesthouse in Kabul, where he was encouraged to join the struggle against the Northern Alliance, but again he declined,” and he was “then transported to a small town between Kabul and Ghazni, AF where he spent approximately six weeks teaching children at an orphanage how to properly clean themselves before prayer.”

He also stated that, approximately two to three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he “fled the Kabul area to seek refuge in Khost,” where he “was provided refuge by an Afghan named Noor Muhammad,” who, approximately one month later, told him that “there was a group of Arabs getting ready to flee to Pakistan.” Muhammad “subsequently drove [him] to a safehouse where he joined approximately 30-40 Arab males who were traveling to the Pakistani border.” There they were seized by border guards, and “transported to Peshawar, PK where they were held for approximately two weeks.” He was transferred to the Kandahar Detention Facility on December 27, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Finsbury Park Mosque in London.”

In assessing his story, his brief stay in the UK six years before his capture was certainly regarded as significant by the Task Force. The Finsbury Park Mosque, for example, with input from British intelligence, was described, rather hysterically, as “a key transit facility in London for the movement of North African and other extremists to and from Al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan,” and it was also noted that al-Ghamdi attended the mosque with Muhammad al-Shabibi, a friend from Saudi Arabia, and another man named Sadeh, one of al-Shabibi’s friends, who he stayed with while on London, and who, without evidence, was described as “possibly” being Mossem Sadeh, allegedly “an Armenian facilitator connected to [Osama bin Laden] and associated with such poisons as Anthrax and Botulinum Toxin,” even though there was nothing to suggest that this was the case.

The Task Force also stated that he had “not been forthright about the time he spent in the United States and other countries,” which I regard as a hugely predictable analysis, with no evidential basis, and also noted that he was “assessed as acquiring fake Malaysian passport stamps to cover his true activity, which was to receive militant training at Al-Farouq Training Camp,” even though he “continue[d] to adhere to his cover story of teaching the Koran at an orphanage in Afghanistan.”

In attempting to justify its claim that he was “assessed to have participated in armed hostilities against US and coalition forces in Taloqan, Tora Bora and near Kabul under [Osama bin Laden]‘s former 55th Arab Brigade,” the Task Force drew on a handful of witnesses, although none of them were necessarily reliable. One, Hamud Dakhil Hamud (ISN 230, released in July 2007, and also identified as Humud al-Jadani), stated that al-Ghamdi “lived in Saudi Arabia, went to Afghanistan and fought in Tora Bora with Al-Qaida.” He also “claimed that he first saw [him] in Tora Bora and then later at a guesthouse in Kandahar in 2001,” and that al-Ghamdi “told him that his participation in hostilities at Tora Bora was his first jihad and that he had studied in America and Europe.”

I have no idea if these statements were accurate, but four other witnesses were certainly unreliable. One was Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held, and identified as Maad al-Qahtani), who was the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, making all his claims unreliable. He apparently “photo identified detainee as a mujahid from Saudi Arabia who was at Tora Bora.”

The second notoriously unreliable witness, as I guessed, was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), who, just to reiterate, is known as the most prolific and unreliable witness at Guantánamo. Basardah identified al-Ghamdi as “an Al-Qaida trained Arab fighter who holds both Saudi and Yemeni citizenship, but is a native Yemeni,” and said that he saw him in Tora Bora. He also “claimed that he knew [him] quite well, having lived with him for over a month in Taloqan and having fought together against the Northern Alliance at the front,” and “added that detainee was in charge of an anti-aircraft missile launcher on top of a Toyota truck.” He also said that he “saw detainee at a safehouse in Kabul,” and “remarked that [he] received training at al-Farouq.”

The last two unreliable witnesses, also well known in Guantánamo as liars, were: Abdul [Hakim] Bukhary (ISN 493, released September 2007), a Saudi who “identified detainee as an individual who was very close to [Osama bin Laden], visited the US, and issued fatwas at JTF-GTMO,” and Ali A. Motaieb (ISN 111, released in January 2009, and also identified as Ali al-Tayeea), an Iraqi who “remarked that the detainee had tried to organize a fatwa in JTF-GTMO.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been compliant but sometimes hostile to the guard force and staff,” and, as a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation for his continued detention (dated September 19, 2005) repeated that recommendation. Given this, it is not known why, 13 months later, he was released, although on his release, he was, of course, put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Isa Al Murbati (ISN 52, Bahrain) Released August 2007

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Isa al-Murbati, who was 36 years old at the time of his capture, was a grocer, married with five children, who had previously served in the army. Accused of traveling to Afghanistan in November 2001 with the intention of fighting, and of training to use an AK-47 in Kabul, he said in Guantánamo that he had never been in Afghanistan and had traveled to Pakistan for medical treatment. He pointed out that he was issued with a medical visa — dated 28 October 2001 and valid for one month, it was included in his passport, which was held by the US authorities — and was arrested by the police on arrival in Pakistan.

In Chapter 8, drawing on “Guantánamo Bay Detainee Statements,” compiled in May 2005 by his attorneys Mark Sullivan and Joshua Colangelo-Bryan of Dorsey & Whitney (PDF), I explained how al-Murbati said that, in the US prison at Kandahar, where he was transferred after his capture, he was “shackled to a pole outside in very cold weather,” and, “every hour, US military personnel threw cold water on [him] while he was shackled to the pole.” He said that this took place every night for a week, and added that on one occasion he was taken to an area away from the other prisoners, because Red Cross representatives were visiting the camp, and the authorities did not want them to see him.

Speaking of the abusive conditions at Guantánamo, particularly under Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Isa al-Murbati said that, on one occasion, after an interrogation, the guards dragged him back to his cell by his shackles, causing his ankles to bleed, and then forced his head into the toilet and flushed it, and described another occasion when the lights in his block were suddenly turned off at night, and a group of guards, accompanied by a dog, entered his cell and sprayed mace in his eyes.

When al-Murbati’s lawyers first met him in October 2004, he was wearing a cast on his arm as the result of a series of incidents of escalating brutality that had been provoked when he asked one of his guards — a young, white sergeant with “a reputation for being difficult” — for a spoon. A few days later, when he was returned to his cell after an interrogation session and, as usual, put his shackled hands through the slot in the door so that the shackles could be removed, the sergeant grabbed the belt attached to the shackles and “pulled it violently, even putting his foot against the cell door to create greater leverage,” which caused him “significant injury.”

Al-Murbati also said that he was subjected to a package of abusive measures that was implemented in a widespread manner, and that involved, in his case, the air conditioning being turned off so that his cell became almost unbearably hot,  In addition, on several occasions, according to his account, the floor was “treated with a mixture of water and a powerful cleaning agent,” which was then thrown on his face and body, “causing great irritation’ and making it difficult to breathe.” He was also subjected to loud music and noise, and explained that he was played songs “that had Arabic language lyrics praising Jesus Christ,” and on other occasions “very loud music and white noise was played through six speakers arranged close to [his] head” for twelve hours, and “multiple flashing strobe lights were used as well,” which were so strong that he “had to keep his eyes closed.” He also reported that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, as part of the program known euphemistically as the “frequent flier program,” whereby he was “moved from cell to cell in the Tango and Oscar [isolation] blocks, typically on an hourly basis,” and, as a result, was “never able to sleep for more than short periods.” He did not specify how long he had been subjected to this, but it is known from other accounts that prisoners were moved in this manner — every few hours — for day, weeks and even months, and that this is clearly torture.

Just before his release, he told Joshua Colangelo-Bryan that he was “held in almost total isolation,” and was “regularly prevented from sleeping and from communicating with his fellow detainees,” as I explained in an article based on a report by Geoffrey Bew in Gulf Daily News. Al-Murbati had been held for over six months in Camp 6, the newest of the prison blocks at Guantánamo, where prisoners, including dozens cleared for release, were kept in isolation for at least 22 hours a day. Colangelo-Bryan reported that the guards in Camp 6 “run large fans,” which “sound like jet engines and prevent captives from communicating and deprive them of sleep,” and explained, “In his cell, Isa cannot see other detainees and he can barely communicate with them. He told me that it is possible to speak with his brothers through an air conditioning vent in his cell. However, to reach the vent, Isa has to stand on his cement bunk. Most often if he tries to talk to others this way, guards tell him to get off his bunk. They also threaten to take away the few items that Isa has in his cell if he does not follow their directions,” which, as Bew described it, “forces him to crouch to talk under the door, for which he is also berated if caught.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Murbati was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated July 15, 2006, in which he was identified as Issa Ali Abdullah al-Murbati, and it was noted that he was born in 1965, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, from 1984 to 1998, he “was a member of the Bahraini Air Force (BAF) as an F-5 mechanic,” and, in approximately 1993, “traveled to Lowery AFB in Denver, Colorado and attended electronics training.” It was also noted that, while he was a member of the BAF, he “attempted to open a bar in a hotel” with a friend, but the business failed and “resulted in [his] release from the Air Force for unspecified reasons.” He was apparently reinstated in 1997 but “released permanently in 1998 after being deemed unproductive.”

He then “opened a vegetable stand with his brother,” but, in approximately 2000, he quit “because of the long hours and obtained a job as a plumber,” which he stayed in for approximately eight months before injuring himself. At this point, as “a result of his failed business ventures, [he] had accrued a debt of 15,000 Bahraini Dinars (approximately $39,855 USD) for which he had been jailed five times for non-payment.”

At this obvious low point in his fortunes, Shaykh Mustafa, a missionary with the vast missionary organization Jamaat al-Tablighi, who was speaking at a mosque in Manama, told him “Allah would take care of his debts if he traveled to Afghanistan (AF) to fight jihad.” Mustafa asked him “if he would hand-carry an envelope of donations to Shaykh Mansur at the al-Makki Mosque in Karachi, Pakistan (PK),” and showed him an envelope “which contained $3000 USD in $100 USD denominations, and sealed it in front of him.” Al-Murbati then “obtained a one month visa for Pakistan,” and, on approximately November 2, 2001, flew to Karachi.

In Karachi, he delivered the envelope to Shaykh Mansur, spent twelve days at the mosque and then traveled to Afghanistan, where, with the assistance a man from the Karachi mosque, he and three others were taken to Kandahar. There, four unidentified Arabs apparently informed them that “there was not training available at that location.” The group then traveled to Kabul, and “resided in an unidentified house with twenty other individuals for four days,” until al-Murbati “heard that the Taliban was pulling out of the north, and decided to return to Kandahar,” where he apparently checked into the Chinese Hospital (aka the Mirwais Hospital), despite having no injuries.

There he apparently decided to return to Pakistan, and “departed the hospital with an unidentified group of individuals and headed towards Khost,” but after pulling over to the side of the road, with others, in order to break the Ramadan fast, he “was washing his hands after eating, [when] one of the jihadists from the group of fasters accidentally discharged a hand grenade,” and he “was injured by shrapnel in his neck, left wrist and portions of his right back,” and “was taken to a nearby clinic where the metal was removed.” Afterwards, “he was given an injection of painkiller, and placed on a bus headed towards Pakistan.” This bus “stopped at another clinic in the tribal lands to have the wounded passengers’ bandages removed,” and, the next morning, set off for Peshawar.

However, “approximately a half-hour from Peshawar, the bus was stopped at a Pakistani checkpoint, all occupants (except a single Pakistani) were arrested and detainee’s money (approximately $1000 USD) was taken.” He added that the Pakistani authorities “placed him in a hospital for two weeks and then transferred him to a Pakistani prison for two or three additional weeks.” The Task Force added that “Pakistani reporting” identified his date of capture as December 12, 2001, and he was transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001. The Task Force also noted that it was “probable, based on similarities in their accounts,” that al-Murbati, Asim al-Aasmi (ISN 49, released in February 2010), and Zayed al-Hussain (ISN 50, see above), who were all traveling from Khost, and were all injured, were captured together outside Peshawar.

Al-Murbati was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Possible Al-Qaida or Taliban recruiter, travel facilitator, and JT member, Shaykh Mustafa, Safehouse on Ansari Street in Kabul [and] Upper level Al-Qaida and Taliban personnel.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that his brother, Abd al-Rahim al-Murbati, was “a known financier who helped move funds for an Al-Qaida financial facilitator,” and was imprisoned by the Saudi authorities in June 2003. This led to Isa al-Murbati being “assessed to be a probable courier for the Al-Qaida network, using the JT as a cover,” although there was an absence of evidence. The Task Force suspected that his visit to Afghanistan in 2001 was not his first visit, but was unable to prove its suspicions, and, instead, relied on its innuendo regarding his brother, and claims from two dubious witnesses.

The first was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), a Yemeni known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who “photo-identified detainee stating he recognized [him] from the US prison in Afghanistan” — which, of course, has no significance as identification. Basardah “said he had very little information on detainee, other than the fact that he was a merchant working in the milk trade,” and “stated detainee would ship milk from Afghanistan to Bahrain.” Instead of recognizing that Basardah knew nothing about al-Murbati, an analyst noted that he had “never mentioned being involved in the milk trade,” and it was “interesting” that Basarfdah “would identify him as such.” Ridiculously, the analyst added, “The word ‘milk’ is often used by extremists as a cover word for the PK machine gun. It is possible that  detainee was couriering money under the guise of dawa (charitable) donations to acquire weaponry.” It is not known if this is the same analyst who, noting that, in a September 2003 letter to his niece, al-Murbati “cryptically, and out of context, inquire[d], “What is the news surrounding ‘Oranges’?” stated that the word “oranges” was “used by extremists as a cover word for hand grenades.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” Elsewhere, it was noted that he was “considered a high risk as he will probably engage in nefarious activity if released.” He was also “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated May 6, 2005), recommended him for continued dentition. It is not known what changed in the next 13 months to lead to his release.

As I explained in an article after his release, drawing on a report in Gulf Daily News, Geoffrey Bew explained that, on arrival, al-Murbati “was whisked straight to the Public Prosecution in Manama for a roughly three-hour debriefing, where he was greeted by family members, including his eldest and youngest sons, MPs, supporters and friends.” His youngest son, seven-year old Ebrahim, who was just a baby when he last saw his father, held a bouquet of flowers for him, and said, “It is the first time I will to speak to my father. I am very happy.” Al-Murbati’s eldest son, 17-year old Ali, was “trembling with emotion as he declared the family’s delight,” and said, “I am so happy. I feel so good. I cannot believe it. We heard he was coming home, but could not believe it.” After the debriefing, al-Murbati returned to his home, where he was reunited with his wife and his two daughters.

Bew also reported that MP Mohammed Khalid, who helped campaign for the release of all the Bahraini prisoners, said that it was “a great day,” but added that “the next push would be for compensation.” “I am very happy with today’s event,” he said. “This is the last page in the Guantánamo Bay chapter. Now we want compensation for all the Bahrainis who have come home.”

Saud Dakhil Al Mahayawi (ISN 53, Saudi Arabia) Released July 2007

The story of Saud al-Mahayawi, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, was completely unknown until two months after his release, when the allegations against him were released as part of a package of documents made publicly available by the Pentagon. As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,’” according to the US authorities, he had not even traveled to Afghanistan until “the latter part of 2001,” when his “religious pilgrimage” began, following a meeting at a prayer session with an Afghan, who “explained that the people of his country needed to be instructed concerning the Koran.”

Revealing their cultural ignorance, those who compiled the Summary of Evidence against al-Mahayawi noted that he “later contacted the Afghan and expressed interest in going to Afghanistan to teach the Koran, despite [his] inability to speak the language,” an observation which indicates that the authors had clearly failed to comprehend that, as the literal word of God transmitted to the Prophet Mohammed in Arabic, the Koran is always learned and recited in Arabic, even if those learning it speak other languages.

Al-Mahayawi said that he sold his business and his car to raise the money to travel to Peshawar in Pakistan, where he was met by the Afghan, who took him to Khost to teach the Koran. He explained that he believed that, after about a month, his Afghan friend stole about 5,000 Saudi Riyals from him (about $1,300), which made him “very depressed and angry,” so that he “thought about going home.” When the US-led invasion began, he stated that he “feared for his life,” and asked the owner of the house he was staying in to arrange for a guide to take him to the Pakistani border, where, he said, he “surrendered himself to the Pakistani border patrol,” who “subsequently turned [him] over to the American authorities.”

In contrast to al-Mahayawi’s story, the US authorities alleged that he “was captured with an individual who stated he first met the detainee in Tora Bora,” and that he “was identified as an Al-Qaida fighter at a guard post in the valley” between Jalalabad and Tora Bora, where he “was armed with a Kalashnikov (AK-47) and fired his weapon after coming under fire from Afghans in the valley.” Another mysterious individual “stated that although the detainee claimed affiliation with Jamaat al-Tablighi [a vast apolitical proselytizing organization, with millions of members worldwide], he was actually a fighter at Tora Bora.”

In addition, it was claimed that “[s]everal of the individuals in the group with whom the detainee was captured are believed to have been bodyguards of Osama bin Laden,” indicating that he was part of a group identified as “the Dirty Thirty,” who were mostly accused of being bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, even though there has been no way of verifying if those claims are reliable, as they may have been produced by Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), who was the most notorious torture victim in Guantánamo, and whose statements are therefore unreliable, or by others seized at the time whose statements were produced in unknown circumstances that may have involved torture or other forms of coercion. There was also one more unspecified, and very vague allegation attributed to a “senior Al-Qaida operative,” who apparently “identified the detainee and believed he saw him in Afghanistan.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Mahayawi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated April 15, 2007, in which he was also identified as Saud Dakhilallah al-Jihni and Saud Dakheel al-Hareth, and it was noted that he was born in August 1976, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, which largely corresponded with the one he later told his tribunal, he “dropped out of high school in 1998 after one year and began selling dates at a local market in Jeddah until 2001,” and, while visiting Mecca in 2000, “met a Pakistani named Abdul Rahman,” who told him “about the incorrect method many Afghans were using to practice Islam and suggested [he] travel to Afghanistan to help teach them correctly.”

In early September 2001, he said, he flew to Karachi, where he contacted Abdul Rahman. He then traveled to Peshawar, where Abdul Rahman met him and took him to a village outside Khost (mistakenly identified, I believe, as Torkham, which is a border town some distance from Khost). He added that he “was carrying 8,000 to 10,000 Saudi riyals (SAR) at the time,” and said that, in Afghanistan, while staying with Abdul Rahman in a house owned by a man named Abdullah, he “would teach poor and disadvantaged Muslims to read the Koran in Arabic and how to properly perform Islamic rituals.” After approximately one month, he said, Abdul Rahman “stole approximately 5,000 SAR from [him] and disappeared.”

Al-Mahayawi said he “used his remaining money to purchase cold weather clothes for himself and the children,” but after three months, “the violence in Afghanistan increased and [he] decided to leave Afghanistan to avoid death or injury.” He said that he “traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistani border with 30 other Arabs and surrendered to the Pakistani border patrol on 15 December 2001.” Taken to a prison in Peshawar, he was transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Recruitment of clergy from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he “was captured with the ‘Dirty 30,’” and explained that they had been “identified as being a mix of [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards, Al-Qaida members, and Taliban fighters who attempted to flee Afghanistan during the Al-Qaida withdrawal from Tora Bora.” It was also noted that al-Dahayawi “had no identification, documents, weapons, or equipment in his possession at the time of his capture.”

The Task Force also claimed that he was “a member of Al-Qaida who was active in Kandahar and engaged US and Coalition forces in combat action at Tora Bora,” although the two sources for this claim were both notoriously unreliable. One was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), well known as the most prolific and unreliable witness at Guantánamo, who identified al-Mahayawi as Saud al-Juhuni, or Shakir, and said he was “an Al-Qaida trained fighter at a guard post in the valley between Tora Bora and Jalalabad, AF during the Al-Qaida defense of Tora Bora against US and Coalition forces in early to mid-December 2001.” He also said that he “was armed with an AK-47 and fired his weapon when [he] came under fire from Afghans in the valley.” In another interrogation, Basardah said that he “claimed an affiliation with Jamaat al-Tablighi (JT), was a fighter at Tora Bora, and had unidentified problems with the Saudi authorities.”

The other unreliable witness was Mohammed al-Qahtani, who said he “met detainee in Kandahar and Tora Bora,” and “knew him as Shakir, a mujahid from Jeddah.” The references to the name Shakir look convincing, but they may have been prompted, and, in addition, an analyst noted that al-Mahayawi denied staying in Kandahar.

In further attempts to justify regarding al-Mahayawi as a threat, the Task Force referred to his “name and aliases” being found on a list in the pocket litter of an alleged Saudi fighter, which indicated to an analyst that he “probably stayed at an Al-Qaida-affiliated guesthouse and possibly attended an Al-Qaida training camp,” and “variations of [his] name and aliases” being “found on numerous associated Al-Qaida documents and computer files that were discovered during raids of safehouses in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2001 and 2003,” although these references are not necessarily reliable as there are significant doubts about the names and especially the alleged aliases involved.

As if to confirm this, the Task Force also claimed that al-Mahayawi “possibly arranged travel for mujahideen seeking personal visits to [Osama bin Laden],” which is, of course, in a different league from claims that he was a foot soldier who pretended to be a teacher. This convoluted claim came about because Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program in secret CIA prisons was specifically invented, “stated that he saw detainee in Afghanistan.” This means that Zubaydah was the “senior Al-Qaida operative,” mentioned above, who apparently “identified the detainee and believed he saw him in Afghanistan,” and what was also noteworthy was the fact that the US authorities had picked up on another claim made by Zubaydah in unknown circumstances — that “an individual by the name of Abu al-Hareth” was “the facilitator for mujahideen traveling to visit [Osama bin Laden],” and decided that this was “a variant” of al-Mahayawi’s alias.

Despite the raft of dubious allegations above, it was clear that none of the witnesses had identified him as a bodyguard for bin Laden, as it was noted only that he “was captured as part of a group of 30 Al-Qaida fighters, including 18 who have been identified as UBL [bin Laden] bodyguards.” As was specifically noted, ”Contrary to a previous assessment, JTF-GTMO assesses that detainee was almost certainly not a UBL bodyguard. Despite detainee’s presence among a group of confirmed UBL bodyguards during the retreat from Tora Bora, statements by multiple Al-Qaida members, including senior Al-Qaida leaders and UBL bodyguards currently in custody at JTF-GTMO, indicate that detainee was not part of UBL’s security detail, but only joined the group of bodyguards during the withdrawal.”

Elsewhere, however, there were allegations from the Saudi authorities that also troubled the Task Force. It was noted that, “Prior to the Saudi delegation visit in 2002, Mabahith [Saudi intelligence] provided information on 37 detainees whom they designated as high priority targets,” and it was stated that he “was number 21 on that list, having been watchlisted by the Saudi government for his travels to Chechnya and jihadist activities in Ethiopia.” By way of further explanation, it was noted that, according to Mabahith, he “was listed on two Saudi government watch lists. The first was a list of individuals forbidden to travel for five years, per decree dated 23 February 1998. The second was a Watch and Arrest listing for detainee’s trip to Chechnya (NFI), per ministerial decree dated 21 February 2002.” It was also noted, “Mabahith arrested detainee in Mecca for attempting to create a new jihad organization (NFI) in A’Wkadin, Ethiopia.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed to be a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour has been semi-compliant and occasionally hostile toward the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation for “Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD) with Transfer Language,” dated February 27, 2006, recommended him for continued detention, although he was released just three months later, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Sultan Al Uwaydha (ISN 59, Saudi Arabia) Released November 2007

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sultan al-Uwaydha, who was 26 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of having been in Tora Bora, of visiting one of bin Laden’s houses, and of having experience of assembling and sighting anti-aircraft weapons. I then looked at his story in more detail at the time of his release (and also in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – “Osama’s Bodyguards‘”), when, as I noted, his explanation for being in Afghanistan — that he traveled to “teach the Koran to poor and disadvantaged Muslims,” and that he duly taught the Koran to children in various locations, before hooking up with his uncle in Khost and escaping to Pakistan, where he was arrested — was severely at odds with the authorities’ version.

The authorities claimed that he was “arrested after crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan with 30 other persons suspected of being Osama bin Laden bodyguards,” and was, therefore, suspected of being one of the so-called “Dirty Thirty.” Other allegations, from an unidentified “source,” from “an Al-Qaida operative,” and from “a senior Al-Qaida operative,” purported to reinforce this notion that he was one of 30 bodyguards for bin Laden. One of these “sources,” for example, stated that “he knew the detainee and that he was probably an Osama bin Laden bodyguard because the detainee was always with Osama bin Laden,” although this sounded distinctly dubious, even before the release of the military files by WikiLeaks promised to shed light on the identities of those making the allegations.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Uwaydha was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated August 1, 2007, in which he was also identified as Sultan Ahmad al-Dardir Musa Uwaydha and Sultan Asman al-Uwaydah, and it was noted that he was born in 1974, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted, based on his own account, that, after graduating from high school, he “lived at home and worked for his older brother as a carpenter,” and also “participated in religious studies” at a mosque in Medina. He also said that, in 2000, after Muhammad Ghulam, a Pakistani visitor to his mosque, invited him to visit Pakistan, he “accepted the invitation and flew to Karachi, PK, where he stayed in a hotel for about a week before heading to Afghanistan (AF) to teach the Koran,” traveling with Ghulam via Quetta to Kandahar, where they stayed “as tourists before going to Ghazni.”

Al-Uwaydha said that he “taught the Koran to children at a mosque in Ghazni,” and, in approximately August 2001, left for Kabul, but, because he did not know any Arabs in Kabul, then “traveled to Khost to find his uncle, who was assessed to be Abd al-Rahman Shalabi Isa Uwaydha (ISN 42, still held, and also identified as Abdul Rahman Shalabi), but ended up traveling “to a nearby village where he taught at the local mosque for two to three months.” At the end of this period, when “the Northern Alliance had advanced south and entered Kabul,” he “returned to Khost, found his uncle, and they then decided to go to Pakistan.”

He added that he and his uncle “traveled to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with 30 other Arabs and surrendered to the Pakistani border patrol on 15 December 2001,” after an eight-day journey. The Task Force claimed that he “was captured with a group known as the ‘Dirty 30,’ which reportedly “consisted of a mix of [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards, Al-Qaida members, and Taliban fighters who attempted to flee Afghanistan during the Al-Qaida withdrawal from Tora Bora.” It was also noted that al-Uwaydha “claimed he lost his passport, money, and other important documents during his travel from Afghanistan,” and that, after his capture, the Pakistani authorities held him in a prison in Peshawar, and transferred him to US custody on December 27, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Hideouts of UBL [Osama bin Laden] in Afghanistan, Travel history of UBL [and] Recruitment of clergy from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he “fail[ed] to provide an accurate account of his reasons for traveling to, and activities while in Afghanistan,” and noted, as they did with all the prisoners captured at this time, that another prisoner had told them that “a Pakistani prison warden advised detainee’s group to say they were in Afghanistan to teach the Koran or for religious studies.” He was, instead, “assessed to be a member of al-Qaida” and a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, although the witnesses who purportedly confirmed this — and who were referred to anonymously above — were not necessarily reliable.

Two were “high-value detainees” held and tortured in secret CIA prisons. The first, Walid bin Attash,(ISN 10014, still held), described as a “[s]enior Al-Qaida operative,” apparently “photo-identified detainee as Hamza Sharif, one of UBL’s bodyguards, who arrived in Afghanistan at the end of 2000, trained at al-Farouq and then joined the security detail,” and the second, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (ISN 10012, convicted in federal court in New York in January 2011), also described as a “[s]enior Al-Qaida operative,” even though he was no more than a minor player, reportedly “photo-identified detainee as Hamza al-Sharif, who served as one of UBL’s bodyguards in late 2000 and early 2001.” Ghailani also “stated detainee was with UBL in Kandahar and Kabul and heard that detainee later fled with UBL to Tora Bora.”

Two other witnesses were also the victims of torture in the CIA’s network of secret prisons. The first, Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457, still held), described as a “[s]enior Al-Qaida facilitator,” said he “recognized detainee as a Saudi from Medina who traveled to Afghanistan in 1998 and was a UBL bodyguard from that time forward” (even though al-Uwaydha reportedly arrived in Afghanistan in 2000), and also “stated detainee’s alias was Hamza al-Sharif and that detainee was close to UBL,” and the second, Sanad Ali Yislam al-Kazmi (ISN 1453, still held), described as an “admitted Al-Qaida member,” reportedly “identified detainee as Hamza Sharif, a bodyguard from Saudi Arabia.”

In addition, Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), the most notorious victim of torture at Guantánamo, identified detainee as a probable UBL bodyguard because detainee was always with UBL,” and Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), well known as the most prolific and unreliable witness at Guantánamo, apparently “photo-identified detainee as a UBL bodyguard.” Basardah also said he “saw detainee four times in Afghanistan with UBL,” and “stated detainee traveled to Tora Bora to prepare the location three weeks before UBL’s arrival.” He also “emphasized detainee had close ties to al-Qaida.” In further interrogations, Basardah led the authorities to believe that al-Uwaydha “reportedly directed fire against US forces, was known for his skills with weaponry, and attended al-Farouq Training Camp.” Basardah told his interrogators that “he personally observed detainee arrange anti-aircraft fire against US forces in Tora Bora and that detainee was good at driving tanks,” and also claimed that he “was able to repair many different types of weapons.”

A further allegation from a torture victim came from Abu Faraj al-Libi (ISN 10017, still held), another “high-value detainee” held and tortured in secret CIA prisons, and described as a “[s]enior al-Qaida operative,” who said he “recognised detainee as Hamza, a driver for a guesthouse in Kandahar whom he had seen in 2000.”

It may be, of course, that all of the allegations above were true, but if that is the case then it is difficult to see why al-Uwaydha was released. He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although he was only “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour” had only been sometimes “hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Buzby updated a previous recommendation for his continued detention (dated August 3, 2006) with a similar recommendation, although he was released just three months later, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

Muhammad Al Jihani (ISN 62, Saudi Arabia) Released July 2007

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – “Osama’s Bodyguards,’” Muhammad al-Jihani, who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, was a former taxi driver, who was so unforthcoming in his tribunal at Guantánamo that it was impossible to ascertain anything other than the fact that he claimed that he had been teaching the Koran in Afghanistan. When asked, “Did you have a place to do that? Did you already contact the mosque or something where you were going to teach?” he responded by saying, grumpily, “All these questions are in my files. Go back to the file and read the file.” The Summary of Evidence against him, released after he was freed, adds a little to the picture, but not very much.

Al-Jihani said that he had traveled to Afghanistan in June 2000, using his own money to pay for his travel, in order “to perform Islamic missionary work after hearing several fatwas issued by Imams in Jeddah,” and clearly refuted all claims that he had traveled for other reasons, including those made by an unidentified “source” who identified him “as one of 30 men who were Osama bin Laden bodyguards and drivers,” and another unidentified source who identified him as “one who visited Kabul, Afghanistan for approximately two weeks between fighting on the front lines.” In addition, a “senior al-Qaeda operative” allegedly claimed that al-Jihani “might have stayed at the Hamza al-Ghamdi guest house in Kabul,” and an “admitted jihadist” described him as a mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan, who “taught the Koran, fought at Tora Bora, Afghanistan and was one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards.” As with other prisoners, it was to be hoped that the military files released by WikiLeaks would shed light on the identities of those making these allegations.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Jihani was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated July 13, 2006, in which he was identified as Mohammed N. al-Juhani and Muhammad Naji Subhi al-Mahayawi al-Juhani, and it was noted that he was born in October 1967, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force, drawing on his own account, noted that he “worked as a self-employed taxi driver for approximately 15 years,” and that, as was discussed in the information presented to his tribunal, he said that he “traveled to Afghanistan (AF) to perform missionary work after hearing several fatwas (religious edicts) issued by imams (prayer leaders) in Jeddah.” He added that he left Saudi Arabia in June 2000 “without speaking to anyone about his trip,” and “did not receive any assistance from outside parties regarding his travel plans,” and explained that he traveled to Kabul via Karachi and Quetta, using “money that he had saved, between 7,000 and 10,000 Saudi Riyals (approximately $1,866 and $2,666USD), to fund his travel and personal expenses.”

Al-Jihani said that, in Kabul, he stayed with a man named Abdul Hadi, the imam of a mosque, and “turned over his passport and half of his money” to him. Then, for the next year and half, “he taught the Koran to young men between the ages of seven and seventeen,” and stated that he “never participated in any type of military training or combat.” At the end of November 2001, he said that “he left Kabul as it was no longer safe and traveled to Khost,” where he met up with with “a group of 30 men traveling to Pakistan.” On arrival in Pakistan, however, they were seized by Pakistani border guards, who, as the Task Force described it, “arrested detainee with a group of confirmed [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards, al-Qaida members and Taliban fighters,” otherwise known as the “Dirty 30.” He was then held in a prison in Peshawar, and transferred to US custody on December 27. 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, although the Task Force conceded that his file “does not indicate why he was sent to JTF-GTMO; however, his transfer was likely due to his perceived associations with the 30 UBL bodyguards, Al-Qaida members, and Taliban fighters with whom he was arrested.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that al-Jihani “was unable to provide any details of his associate[s] or locations” for the 17 months that he said he was teaching in Afghanistan,” and noted that “reporting from other sources possibly identified [him] as a UBL bodyguard and a fighter in Kabul since 1999, as well as in Tora Bora.” These sources, however, were not necessarily reliable.

Two were “high-value detainees” held and tortured in secret CIA prisons. The first, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (ISN 10012, convicted in federal court in New York in January 2011), described as an “Al-Qaida operative,” said that al-Jihani “fought on the front lines under Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi” (ISN 10026, still held), who was described as “one of UBL’s most senior commanders and the person in charge of non-Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters (Al-Qaida’s 55th Arab Brigade) in the Afghanistan northern front,” and added that he “visited Kabul for two weeks prior to returning to the fight.” The second, Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the Bush administration’s torture program was specifically invented, reportedly “believed detainee to be a Yemeni national who possibly stayed at the Al-Qaida affiliated Hamza al-Ghamdi guesthouse in Kabul and was seen on the front line in Kabul.” This was particularly worthless testimony, of course, as al-Jihani was not a Yemeni, and the allegations regarding Kabul mean nothing, and what it summons up, therefore, is a desperate Abu Zubaydah being shown photos while held in some torture dungeon, and trying to come up with something that would please his captors.

Another witness was also a victim of torture in the CIA’s network of secret prisons. Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457, still held), described as an “Al-Qaida member and facilitator,” apparently “reported that detainee fought on the front lines north of Kabul in a place called Suraca El San’ani (NFI),” which was also a rather empty claim.

In addition, Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), the most notorious victim of torture at Guantánamo, apparently “stated detainee was a mujahid at Tora Bora,” and “added he and the detainee were on a ‘Jihad mission’ there.” In another interrogation, al-Qahtani “identified detainee as an associate in Kandahar.” Another witness was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252, released), well known as the most prolific and unreliable witness at Guantánamo, who “claimed detainee fought in the Ktal region of the Tora Bora Mountains.”

Furthermore, when it came to the claim that al-Jihani was a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, it was revealed, crucially, that Basardah was “the only one to specifically name [him] as a bodyguard.” In a fascinating section, in which it was claimed that it was “possible the bodyguards may have information on [bin Laden]‘s intended movements which can provide clues to his current whereabouts” (and which is now no longer necessary, of course), the Task Force explained that “[s]ome of the significant reports which identify the bodyguards, but do not include detainee, are from debriefings of [Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj]; senior Al-Qaida facilitator Abu Zubayduh; senior Al-Qaida operational planner and former UBL bodyguard Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash (aka Khallad); and UBL’s driver [Salim Hamdan, ISN 149, released in December 2008]” — in other words, not Mohammed al-Qahtani, as was widely thought before the files were released (although al-Qahtani certainly was also responsible for “identifying” bodyguards).

In another significant passage, there was a reference to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (ISN 212, but never held at Guantánamo), a particularly important “high-value detainee,” whose torture in Egypt in 2002 led to a false confession that Al-Qaida operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, which was then used to justify the invasion of Iraq, even though al-Libi retracted it. Sent back to Libya after several years in secret CIA prisons, al-Libi died in Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison in May 2009, reportedly by committing suicide, although observers believed that he had been killed. In al-Jihani’s case, it was noted that “Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s inability to identify detainee from al-Libi’s time at the Yaqub Mosque and the detainee’s inability to provide information about personalities and descriptive features of the Yaqub Mosque casts additional doubt on his cover story.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed al-Jihani as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because his “placement within Al-Qaida and his lack of cooperation indicate continued support to Islamic extremism and increases the potential of him rejoining these elements if released.” It was also noted that he was “a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been mostly compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harris, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated June 3, 2005), recommended him for continued detention, although it was noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to [al-Jihani] and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO),” although that agreement was evidently not reached for another year, when he was finally released, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of which was already covered in Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files and in the archive of articles on his website, the project will be completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening on January 11, 2012.

This is Part 30 of the 70-part series. 374 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, this latest ten-part series covers the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006) and readers will, I hope, realize that almost all of these prisoners were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice. The largest groups released by nationality in 2006 were Saudis (45 in total — 15 in May 2006, 14 in June and 16 in December) and Afghans (35 in total — 7 in February, 5 in August, 16 in October and 7 in December).

I also hope that readers will reflect on the problems of over-classification that have been thoroughly chronicled in the preceding series analyzing the Detainee Assessment Briefs. My analysis to date has established repeatedly that even patently innocent prisoners seized by mistake were regarded as a “low risk,” rather than as no risk at all, and it is important for readers to bear in mind that the entire process of detaining and processing prisoners and exploiting them for their supposed intelligence was shot through with a drive to conclude that they were all a threat, and to overlook the distressing fact that most of them were seized in a largely random manner, mostly by America’s Afghan and Pakistan allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were widespread, and were never subjected to anything that resembled an adequate screening process.

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America.

Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo. Part Seven featured more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006, and Part Eight featured more mental health issues, another juvenile, three men sent to live in Albania because it was not safe for them to be returned to their home countries, and the last of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. Part Nine featured the stories of eleven more Afghans, and this final part telling the stories of the prisoners released in 2006 tells the stories of another 14 Afghans (and one Pakistani) and includes some genuinely shocking examples of pro-US Afghans rounded up because of false information told to US forces by their rivals, and which, sadly, the US authorities were too arrogant or indifferent to investigate.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2006 (Part Ten of Ten)

Abdul Bagi (ISN 963, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Bagi, who was 30 years old at the time of capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

Bagi said in Guantánamo that he and his 39-year old uncle, Kushky Yar (ISN 971, see below), were captured in the street near their homes while heading to the bazaar to buy parts for a tractor. Bagi denied that he was involved with the Taliban, saying, “My father and mother are dead and they left me small children. I am serving them. I have not served the Taliban or anybody else … I have been home every night taking care of my brother and sister.” He was remarkably restrained when it came to the allegation that he was “apprehended wearing an olive drab green jacket consistent with the eyewitness accounts of the individual attacks,” saying, “The green jackets are in the shops, hundreds of them, everybody can buy them and wear them.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Bagi was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 13, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1972 and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force conceded upfront that, after two years and three months in detention, there was no indication that he had been involved in anti-US activities, explaining that, “Initially it was believed [he] was one of several individuals involved in ACM [anti-coalition militia] operations directed to deter US/Coalition Special Forces (USSF) conducting an operation called “Combined Special Operations Forces (CSOF) Eagle” during February 2003 in Helmand Province,” one of whose primary objectives was to apprehend Abdul Wahid, “who was believed [to be] located at his compound.” As the Task Force explained, however, “It cannot be confirmed that detainee was actually part of this operation.”

After noting that Abdul Bagi was a farmer, who “farmed his portion of the family land,” the Task Force noted that he “cannot read,” and “only knows how to write his own name,” and also noted, “He has not been on hajj. He does not know how to drive. Neither he nor anyone in his family has ever traveled outside of Afghanistan. He has heard of jihad, but does not know what it means. He believes soldiers and the government conduct jihad.”

Turning to the day of his capture, the Task Force noted that, by his own account, on the day of his capture “he was awakened by US vehicle noise near his village, as well as sporadic gunfire in the mountains nearby his village.” Later that morning, he and his uncle “were walking to the bazaar to obtain oil and a filter for a tractor, when five US forces vehicles approached them,” and they “stepped off the road and into a shallow depression,” because, “[d]uring previous encounters with US Forces, a translator had told them to stay clear when US vehicles came by,” so they stepped off the road “to let the vehicles pass.” However, when US forces noticed that they “were wearing green jackets similar to those worn by the men who had attackedUS Forces and appeared to be hiding in a shallow ditch,” the vehicles “pulled up to where they were sitting and US Forces captured them,” and took them to the US prison at Bagram airbase.

Abdul Bagi was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Specific Taliban personnel, Possible resistance to Coalition Forces [and] Anti-US sentiment in the Bahgran [Baghran] District of Afghanistan.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

[T]he “Reasons for Transfer” included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners’ files after their arrival at Guantánamo. This is because, contrary to the impression given in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer. As Chris Mackey, a senior interrogator who worked in Afghanistan, explained in a book that he wrote about his experiences (The Interrogators), every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by US forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “Al-Qaida and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

In assessing his story, the Task Force reiterated that it “cannot be confirmed detainee was involved in insurgent operations against Coalition Forces.” It was noted that his uncle “claimed unknown personnel approached him, and gave him an RPG and told him he was to take part in an ambush against the Americans.” However, “When he learned the Americans were on the way, he threw the RPG in a well and hid in the hole.” An analyst noted, correctly,  that it was “unlikely” that Kushky Yar “would not know the people who provided the RPG to him” and Abdul Bagi, but the bigger question was whether this had actually happened, and, although Abdul Bagi and Kushky Yar were both wearing olive drab green jackets, Bagi’s “denial of being part of an ambush against US Forces or ever having an RPG seem[ed] to be plausible.”

In notes indicating that false confessions were obtained from both men on capture, it was noted that Abdul Bagi “denied the report that he admitted to US Forces upon capture that he was involved in the attacks,” and also “denied the report that claimed he hid a weapon at the well.” It was also noted that “[n]o one searched the well where the RPG had allegedly been thrown; therefore, no RPG was recovered.”

In conclusion, Abdul Bagi was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” What this actually means, of course, is that he was not regarded as a risk at all, but over-classification was evidently built into the system at Guantánamo, and this can also be seen from the manner in which, despite conceding that there was no evidence whatsoever to indicate that he was anything other than a farmer seized by mistake, he was still “assessed as a supporter of the Taliban,” and was “suspected to be a probable low-level member of an Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) group headed by former Taliban Commander, Abdul Rais Wahid.” In addition, in an analysis of his behavior at Guantánamo, it was noted that he had “a past history of passive behaviour,” and had “only three acts recorded in his discipline history.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updated a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated March 29, 2004), recommended the transfer of Abdul Bagi to continued detention in Afghanistan “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” even though this information was not spelled out explicitly, and even though, of course, there was actually no justification for demanding his ongoing detention. He was released nine months later.

Rahmatullah (ISN 964, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Rahmatullah, who was 20 years old at the time of capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

Rahmatullah was one of four men — the others being 34-year old Abdul Wahab (ISN 961, released in August 2008), 29-year old Hafizullah Shah (ISN 965, see below), and 22-year old Naserullah (ISN 967, released in November 2007) — who were captured in a minivan at a checkpoint and accused of wearing the infamous green jackets and suffering from hearing loss associated with the attack.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Rahmatullah was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 27, 2005, in which he was also identified as Ramatullah and Mullah Ramatullah Ustaz. It was also noted that he was born in 1981 and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he was married, and was a laborer and tractor driver.” It was also noted that he was illiterate, and had “no formal education, no military training and never traveled outside of Afghanistan.” He stated that, prior to his capture, he had been working in a field for fifteen days, but “was told by his employer, Manan, to go home and celebrate the Eid holiday.” The next day, he “caught a taxi with seven other individuals,” but, as he was passing through Lejay, “he heard explosions and saw airplanes and helicopters.”

He was then captured at a checkpoint, in what appeared to be a random arrest, although the USSF (the US/Coalition Special Forces) claimed to have observed him “climbing down a nearby mountain” following the ambush on the US convoy. He was then sent to Bagram, and was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban activities in the Baghran District.”

The Task Force assessed him as “an associate of Abdul Wahid,” who had “participated in attacks against US forces,” although all there was to indicate that this was the case, beyond his jacket, his alleged hearing loss and the claim that he was seen on a mountain, was a claim that, when he “was questioned about the ambush, his participation in the Taliban, and being a militant commander, he became nervous and showed visible signs of deception,” and was also “deceptive about his knowledge of the individuals who were in the taxi with him at his time of capture.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and, despite the lack of evidence, of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his “behavior ha[d] been generally compliant with very little disturbance to other detainees or guards,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated March 29, 2004), repeated the recommendation, although he was not released for another 19 months.

Hafizullah Shah (ISN 965, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Hafizullah Shah, who was 29 years old at the time of capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

Shah was one of four men — the others being 34-year old Abdul Wahab (ISN 961, released in August 2008), 20-year old Rahmatullah (ISN 964, see above), and 22-year old Naserullah (ISN 967, released in November 2007) — who were captured in a minivan at a checkpoint and accused of wearing the infamous green jackets and suffering from hearing loss associated with the attack.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Hafizullah Shah was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 20, 2005, in which he was also identified as Hafizullah and Rafizullah. It was also noted that he was born in 1974 and was “in good health” although he was “taking Aciphex for abdominal pain.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he was an orphan, raised by his future father-in-law, who “grew wheat on his land” (and “grew opium on his land prior to the switch to wheat”), and “helped his father-in-law farm wheat, barley and corn.” He apparently said that, on the day of his capture, he “walked for about three and a half hours and then got into a taxi” with six other people, who he claimed not to know, although an analyst noted that “three of the individuals captured with [him] claim[ed] to know him or to have met him before.”

Describing the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force claimed that, after the ambush, “US Special Forces (USSF) personnel set up a checkpoint after they observed the attackers hide their firearms,” and that, when the taxi was stopped, he “was captured and detained on suspicion he was one of the men who had just engaged USSF.” He was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban personalities and activities within Helmand Province.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that, as well as wearing a green jacket” and “suffering from hearing loss,” USSF “observed the men who conducted the attack at the top of mountain,” who “stopped, appeared to cache weapons, and then maneuvered down the mountain,” where some of them “entered a taxi,” while “others mounted motorcycles and proceeded to the checkpoint.” The US forces apparently “believed the detainees assumed they would not be arrested if they had no weapons on them.”

This was certainly a more detailed explanation than was provided in Hafizullah’s case, and it was also supposed to be reinforced by generalizations about the Baghran valley, which, it was claimed, had “provided a continuous safe-haven to hostile Taliban forces,” and was “dominated by a small number of Mullahs,” who were “allowed to maintain control of the valley and its drug profits as long as they support[ed] the Taliban, HIG [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the militia of the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar], and foreign Al-Qaida.”

It was also claimed, in a passage that implied that the US could have rounded up everyone in the valley, “Many of the people of the valley are either family members or employees. Those that aren’t must tacitly support the Mullah leaders or they will be killed. All adult males are forced to be members of the underground. A few are full-time guerrillas, with frequent operations outside the valley. However, in time of attack, all males pick up arms in defense of the valley against “invaders” (US or coalition forces).”

In further analysis of Hafizullah’s case, it was assessed that he had “failed to be truthful throughout his detainment, both at JTF GTMO and in Afghanistan,” and it was also noted that, in September 2004, interrogators remarked that he “was deceptive, demanding, and acted very sure of himself.” In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his “behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and slightly aggressive,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated March 29, 2004), repeated the recommendation, although he was not released for another 19 months.

Baridad (ISN 966, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Baridad, who was 50 years old at the time of his capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

Baridad told his tribunal, “I live in a place that if you see it, even an animal would not live there … If you come back home and see my life, I bet you will cry. You will come back and ask why [they] pick up this poor innocent guy.” He explained that on the day of his arrest, “I was sick … I couldn’t even go to the mosque and it was about eight feet away … I was so cold I was just sitting in the sunshine and that is when the Americans captured me.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Baridad was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1953. It was also noted that he was only “in moderate health,” which may well have indicated that he was quite ill, as he was being “treated for Depressive Disorder, Somatoform Disorder and Personality Disorder,” for which he was “being treated with Zoloft and Ambien,” and also had Gastroesophageal Reflux with a Hiatal Hernia,” for which he was taking Prilosec.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had lived in the Baghran valley for his whole life, and that he was “a farmer who grows wheat and does odd jobs,” who had “no military experience” and did “not know how to use weapons.” In a version of the story he told his tribunal, he said that he “was sunning himself with two of the village elders when USSF [US Special Forces] arrived and surrounded the village,” and that they waved [him] over to speak with him and the other two men he was with, and then proceeded to arrest him.”

According to “capturing unit reporting,” cited by an analyst, after the ambush “USSF conducted a search of the area and a group of personnel were observed boarding a vehicle and motorcycles in the vicinity of the attacks,” and, after establishing a checkpoint just outside the village, stopped the suspected vehicle, and questioned the passengers, who were all “wearing green OD jackets,” and were allegedly “suffering from hearing loss that was assessed to be caused by the firefight with USSF.” According to this account, Baridad was captured with the four men mentioned above — 34-year old Abdul Wahab (ISN 961, released in August 2008), 20-year old Rahmatullah (ISN 964, see above), 29-year old Hafizullah Shah (see above), 22-year old Naserullah (ISN 967, released in November 2007), and also Bismullah (ISN 960, released in September 2004).

It was also stated that, after initial questioning, the prisoners “were detained for further questioning at an advanced operations base in the vicinity of Lejay, AF, from 11 to 18 February 2003,” when he was sent to Bagram. He was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Biographical information regarding Taliban member, Abdul Wahid, Specific information regarding Taliban warning systems used when American/Coalition Forces are approaching villages in Afghanistan [and] Information regarding individuals in the Lejay area who disappear when US or Coalition Forces visit.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he had “tried to deceive interrogators,” and that he had “information concerning a possible spy network that warn[ed] Afghan villages of American/Coalition Forces entering or leaving an area,” although thee was nothing to prove that Barided was involved in the ambush.

Of particular interest, as well, were claims that he had photo-identified two other prisoners, even though there was no reason whatsoever for him to have known either man. One was Sami al-Haj (ISN 345, released May 2008), a cameraman for Al-Jazeera described as “a courier/facilitator using his employment in the Union Beverage Company (UBC) and Al-Jazeera to facilitate funds, travel and/or personnel for Al-Qaida’s global terrorist network,” who “was primarily involved in facilitating funds for fighters in Chechnya by funneling funds through [the] Al-Haramayn [charity] in Baku, Azerbaljan.” Not only was this description wildly implausible, but also there was no indication of why Baridad would ever have come across al-Haj. Similarly, there are doubts about his alleged photo-identification of Asd al-Hammer Mohammed (ISN 668, released in March 2004, and also identified as Abdul al-Hameed Andarr), who was described as “the cousin of Saifullah Rahman Mansour, a Taliban Commander who resided in Kabul,” because, again, there was no reason given as to why Baridad would ever have met him.

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because he was “assessed as a probable member of the Taliban,” and it was also claimed that, if he was released, “Abdul Wahid or other insurgent groups [would] most likely recruit him again for terrorist activity.” It was also noted that his “behavior [had] generally been non-compliant with guard orders,” because he had “insulted guards, failed to obey commands, and talked to other detainees across cellblocks.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated March 29, 2004), repeated the recommendation, although he was not released for another 18 months.

Kushky Yar (ISN 971, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Kushky Yar, who was 39 years old at the time of capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

As was explained in Guantánamo, he was seized with his nephew, Abdul Bagi (ISN 963, see above), who explained that they were captured in the street near their homes while heading to the bazaar to buy parts for a tractor.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kushky Yar was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated July 5, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1963. It was also noted that he was “in good health,” although he had “attempted to hang himself and received follow-up treatment from Behavioral Health Care Services.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force conceded upfront that, after two years and three months in detention, there was no indication that he had been involved in anti-US activities, explaining that, “Initially it was believed [he] was one of several individuals involved in ACM [anti-coalition militia] operations directed to deter US/Coalition Special Forces (USSF) conducting an operation called ‘Combined Special Operations Forces (CSOF) Eagle’ during February 2003 in Helmand Province,” one of whose primary objectives was to apprehend Abdul Wahid, “who was believed [to be] located at his compound.” As the Task Force explained, however, “It cannot be confirmed that detainee was actually part of this operation.”

The Task Force noted that he “was a self-employed tractor driver and motorcycle mechanic,” who had “no formal education, and cannot read or write.” It was also noted, “There is no outside reporting associating [him] with Al-Qaida or the Taliban.” On February 10, 2003, he “was awakened by US vehicle noise near his village,” and “also heard sporadic gunfire in the mountains nearby his village,” as Abdul Bagi also reported, and that, later that morning, he and Abdul Bagi (here identified as Abdul Bari) “were walking to the bazaar to obtain oil and a filter for a tractor when five US forces vehicles approached them,” and they “stepped off the road and into a shallow depression,” in order to “let the vehicles pass,” because, “during previous encounters with US Forces, a translator had told them to stay clear of passing US vehicles.” Seized and taken to Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo on May 8, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Specific Taliban personnel, Possible resistance to Coalition Forces [and] Anti-US sentiment in the Bahgran District of Afghanistan.”

As was also noted in Abdul Bagi’s file, Kushky Yar “claimed unknown personnel approached him, and gave him an RPG and told him he was to take part in an ambush against the Americans.” However, “When he learned the Americans were on the way, he threw the RPG in a well and hid in the hole.” An analyst noted, correctly, that it was “unlikely” that Kushky Yar “would not know the people who provided the RPG to him,” but the bigger question was whether this had actually happened, or if it was a lie produced under duress, and this latter interpretation was suggested through additional notes that he “denied the report that claimed he hid a weapon at the well and also claimed he had no weapons at the time of his arrest,” that he “denied the report that he admitted to US Forces upon capture that he was involved in the attacks,” that both he and Abdul Bagi “have maintained the same story since capture,” and, in addition, that “[n]o one searched the well where the RPG had allegedly been thrown; therefore, no RPG was recovered” — if, indeed, an RPG had ever been thrown into the well in the first place.

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although he was still “assessed as a supporter of the Taliban,” and was “suspected to be a probable low-level member of an Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) group headed by former Taliban Commander, Abdul Rais Wahid.” In addition, in an analysis of his conduct at Guantánamo, it was noted that his “overall behaviour ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff,” although he had “one reported incident” on August 18, 2003, when he “was reported for trying to commit suicide,” which is a new twist on the insensitivity of the detention machine at Guantánamo. It was also noted that he had “made no other outward appearance of trying to commit self-harm, since the last reported instance and [was] expected to maintain his current behavior trend.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated January 19, 2004), recommended his release “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” even though this information was not spelled out explicitly. He was released seven months later.

Alif Mohammed (ISN 972, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Alif Mohammed, who was 56 years old at the time of capture, was one of ten men seized after an attack on US forces in Lejay, in Helmand province, on February 10, 2003, all of whom, it seems, were wearing olive drab jackets when they were seized. According to the US authorities, US Special Forces were “viciously attacked” by a 40-man pro-Taliban guerrilla unit led by Abdul Wahid, a local warlord, although the men who were sent to Guantánamo (out of at least 70 who were originally rounded up) seem to have been nothing more than poor farmers.

Alif Mohammed was accused of orchestrating the attack using a satellite phone, but he said that he was just a poor tinsmith, and pointed out that he would never work for Abdul Wahid because he killed his nephew and his nephew’s pregnant wife. In his tribunal, Abdul Bagi (ISN 963, see above) spoke in his defence, saying, “Alif Mohammed is a drug addict and he is a very poor guy … The Taliban beat [him] too much because he is a drug addict and was close to killing him. How could he be their commander?”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Alif Mohammed was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1946. It was also noted that he was “in good health,” although he had been “diagnosed with adjustment disorder with depression,” for which he was prescribed Zoloft.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he “worked as a farmer, gunsmith, and ironworker,” who had fought against the Russians as a mujahideen commander in the 1980s, but was unable to ascertain exactly how he was captured. In one version of events, an analyst noted that Mohammed’s “capture data” stated that US Special Forces (USSF) “found him with weapons and magazines in a culvert system trying to hide and escape,” and “assessed him as a security or military commander of Abdul Wahid’s compound in Lejay and believed he was responsible for orchestrating an ambush on USSF.” However, as the analyst also noted, “This information was subsequently countered by a screening report that stated [he] was captured while washing himself in a river and did not possess weapons at [the] time of capture.” He was then sent to Bagram, and on to Guantánamo, although no date was given in the file, and his “file does not indicate why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “associated with members of Al-Qaida’s terrorist network” operating in Helmand province, and, as an example, stated that, “In debriefings, [he had] discussed communication between Abdul Wahid and Sher Mohammed, the governor [of] Helmand province,” which “indicates knowledge not typically associated with a low level individual or a loose association.” However, it is not known if there is any truth in this. Certainly, one other allegation — that he had “briefly described an association” between Abdul Wahid and Abdul Razzaq Hekmati (ISN 942, who died of cancer in Guantánamo in December 2007) — was nonsense. Hekmati was “assessed as a mid-to-high level member of the Taliban who is associated with high-level members of the Taliban and Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” whereas he had actually been responsible for liberating three significant anti-Taliban figures from a Taliban jail, as I explained in a front-page New York Times story with Carlotta Gall in February 2008, and had then had to live in exile in Iran.

In conclusion, Alif Mohammed was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because, despite a lack of actual evidence, he was “assessed as a possible Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) member,” who was also “affiliated with Al-Qaida’s terrorist network due to his extensive history with mujahideen (Islamic holy warrior) networks” and other associations. It was also noted that his “behavior ha[d] been for the most part compliant and non-aggressive,” who had “a few cases of refusing to comply with the rules of the guard force and the cellblock,” which, on May 26, 2003, at 11.30 pm, involved him trying “to commit self-harm by tying a sheet around his neck.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated March 29, 2004), repeated the recommendation, although he was not released for another 18 months.

Abdul Halim Sadiqi (ISN 1007, Pakistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 15 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Halim Sadiqi (also known as Abdul Halim Sidiqi), who was 33 years old at the time of his capture, was one of many prisoners subjected to ludicrous allegations whose provenance was not disclosed, but which were clearly implausible. Sadiqi, who was married with a baby daughter, ran a small store in Pakistan. Caught up in the fall of Kunduz, after traveling to Afghanistan to look for his brother, he spent a year in Sheberghan and another three years attempting to convince the US authorities that he was not a military commander who ran a “network of madrassas,” through which he was able to recruit 2,000 fighters for al-Qaida, and that he had led this vast fighting force — which included “300 Arab al-Qaida operatives” — in combat against the Northern Alliance until he was captured in Kunduz.

In his review board hearing in November 2005, he said, “The person who made these allegations, either he was drunk or he doesn’t even have a brain,” and finally someone believed him. A Board Member told him, “I don’t believe that you were a mastermind, or a great general, or this person who could command 2,000 recruits to come with you on a moment’s notice. I believe you.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Sadiqi (described as Abdul Haleem) repeated his story, telling a McClatchy reporter in Karachi that, when he “wanted to find his brother in Afghanistan in September 2001, he knew where to go first [and] visited the local chapter of [the Pakistani militant group] Jaish-e- Mohammed in his Pakistani town of Sadiqabad,” who gave him “a pass of sorts to travel to Afghanistan and meet with Jaish-e-Mohammed officials there.”

He explained that his brother, Abdullah, “was preparing to fight the Americans and their allies after running away from his madrassas,” and also said that he had found his brother “close to the Tajikistan border,” but were trapped in the city of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last stronghold in northern Afghanistan, as it fell to the Northern Alliance.

Quite where the US claim that he commanded 2,000 Pakistani and Arab fighters came from was not explained. McClatchy noted that, in his tribunal and review board at Guantánamo, it was alleged that he “drew many of those fighters from a network of 10 madrassas that he oversaw in Pakistan,” and that he “allegedly did so after he met with an al-Qaida logistics officer at the wedding of one of Osama bin Laden’s children in Kandahar in 2001.”

It was also noted that, in denying these allegations, he insisted “he was an innocent shopkeeper sent by his family to retrieve an errant brother,” and that “the charges were the result of bad information that Afghan troops had passed along.” He also “pointed out that he went though the trouble of getting a visa at the Afghan embassy and entering the country at a legal checkpoint,” which, as he noted, was “hardly the course of action of a militant commander.”

The Pakistani government refused to comment on his case, but McClatchy noted that Bashir Ahmad (ISN 1005, released in September 2004), who was seized with him, admitted that he had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, and, although Ahmad “wouldn’t say” what Haleem was doing at the time of his capture, “the fact that the two were arrested together” suggested to McClatchy that Haleem “may have traveled to Afghanistan with permission from Jaish-e Mohammed not to find his brother but to join him in fighting US troops.”

That, however, was a far cry form being a commander in charge of 2,000 soldiers, and, in reflecting on this, Tom Lasseter of McClatchy noted that Haleem, like a majority of the prisoners, “wasn’t captured by US soldiers,” but “was rounded up by Afghan troops loyal to warlords who made a small fortune selling their prisoners to the American military.” It was also noted, “The higher the profile of the prisoner, the more money the warlords could demand. An al-Qaida-affiliated commander, for instance, fetched a much higher price than an ordinary foot soldier.”

Furthermore, Haleem was held at Sheberghan, the prison run by Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum, for 17 months after his capture, and when he was finally transferred to Bagram, interrogators “didn’t have access to witnesses who could describe what was happening” when he was seized, and “also weren’t in touch with local leaders from places such as Sadiqabad, Pakistan, who could have shed light on whether Haleem was a local jihadist leader or a grocer.” Instead, the case against him consisted of “questionable information passed on by warlords, testimony gathered in often-hostile interrogation sessions and information supplied by other detainees who wanted to curry favor with their captors.”

Speaking to McClatchy’s reporter in Karachi in June 2007, Haleem explained that, after his capture, he first had to survive the journey from Kunduz to Sheberghan, when the prisoners, who surrendered in their thousands, were transported to Sheberghan in container trucks, and hundreds — or even thousands — of prisoners died of suffocation, or by being shot through the sides of the containers by Northern Alliance soldiers, in what has become known as “the convoy of death.”

Haleem told McClatchy’s reporter that he’d been transported “in a metal shipping container with about 200 other men, many of whom died from suffocation or bullets that Afghan troops fired through the side of the box,” and explained, “When they opened the door we were in the middle of Sheberghan jail. We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless. An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there.”

He also said that, in Sheberghan, the Afghan guards “occasionally came into his cell to punch him in the back of the head and kick him in the chest,” and at Bagram US soldiers “once threw him to the ground and kicked him in the head ‘like they were playing soccer.’” He also said that, although he “was never hit at Guantánamo,” the abuse there “was worse than a guard’s boot.” There, he said, interrogators “sent him repeatedly to isolation cells,” because “they thought he was lying to them.” The guards “stripped him naked and tossed him into the small rooms for a week, two weeks or, once, 25 days, and he came out filled with confusion and rage.”

He also said that “he thought often about his brother, Abdullah,” who had “died in the container that took them to Sheberghan, just another one of the bodies on the floor,” and added that “he began to have trouble sleeping and would go for weeks on end without sleeping through the night.” He also explained that he “often became violent, and many times got into fights with other detainees,” and, in conclusion, added that, eight months after his release, he still “woke up angry on most days,” and “hadn’t forgiven the Americans” for what they had done to him.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Sadiqi was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated September 28, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1968, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he “was seen by psychiatry for follow up after a suicide attempt,” and was also “treated for scrotal bleeding, genital pain, difficulty urinating, allergies, rashes and minor body aches.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted upfront that, although he “was previously assessed to be a high-level Taliban Commander and member of Al- Qaida,” further review of his file, “in conjunction with a thorough search of national-level counter-terrorism databases,” indicated that the was “not a Taliban Commander or a member of Al-Qaida,” and was “now assessed to be a probable Islamic extremist who traveled to Afghanistan for jihadist purposes.”

The Task Force also noted that he worked on a farm and as a store manager, and largely told the story Sadiqi later told to McClatchy — that he traveled to Afghanistan to find his brother Abdullah, locating him in Kunduz, and that the brothers then “found passage on a truck” leaving Kunduz, but, “[w]hile passing through a Northern Alliance checkpoint, the truck was stopped and searched by General Dostum’s Forces,” and Sadiqi and his brother “were taken into custody,” and “transported in a shipping container to Sheberghan Prison.” It was also noted bluntly, “Detainee’s brother did not survive.”

It was not recorded when he was sent to Bagram, but he was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban Techniques, Tactics and Procedures (TTPS) for fighting enemy dispositions and routes that may still be in use, Taliban personalities [and] Activities in Pakistan centering on recruitment and anti-American sentiment.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed, without providing anything resembling evidence, that he had “shown that he [was] a militant jihadist and [was] using deception to avoid providing incriminating evidence.” He was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been mostly compliant with limited hostility to the guard force and staff.”

As a result, Maj, Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated November 24, 2003), recommended him for transfer “with conditions,” although he was not released for another 13 months.

Haji Nasrat Khan (ISN 1009, Afghanistan) Released August 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Haji Nazrat Khan, who was 78 years old at the time of his capture, was seized after his son, Izatullah Nazrat Yar (ISN 977), a tribal leader who was working for the Karzai government, supervising the collection of weapons, and guarding them in a compound, was detained. His son was not freed until November 2007.

When Haji Nazrat Khan heard about the capture of his son, he made his way to the US compound to ask why and was promptly arrested himself. This was shameful behavior on the part of US forces, as Khan was a former commander for Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, who was President of Afghanistan for two months in 1992, and had been largely housebound since 1993, when his health deteriorated.

In Guantánamo, he was was scornful of allegations that he fought with the Taliban. “I was having problems with my legs,” he said. “I could not get out of my home. How could I fight for the Taliban the way that I am?” He was also particularly eloquent about Afghan history, and gave his tribunal a heartfelt summary of his people’s woes, in which he explained that, after the Soviet Union fell:

[W]e were expecting, waiting for Americans to help us to create and build up a new government. Unfortunately, they did not do it. Then the Taliban took over and they committed atrocities, killing, and any brutality they could. Talib means educated student or to learn things, but they were not that kind of people. Then, during the Taliban time, the opportunity opened for people to come from all over the world. The terrorist and any other kind of person came to Afghanistan and destroyed our honour and our dignity.

Bin Laden, we hate him more than you guys and you people do not realize who is an enemy and who is a friend. When you came to Afghanistan everybody was waiting for America to help us build up our country. We were looking for you guys and we were very happy that you would come to our country. The people that hated you were very few, but you just grabbed guys like me. Look at me. Our very happiness, you turned it to bitterness. I am still not mad at you guys, but in the future try to know the difference between your enemy and your friend.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khan (identified as Nusrat Khan) reiterated his story, after a powerful introduction by Tom Lasseter. “Nusrat Khan is disabled,” he wrote. “About 20 years ago, one side of his body went numb; then a year or two later, the other half did, too. In Afghanistan, the doctors said only that he was ill; in the United States, they probably would have said that he’d had at least two strokes. He’s barely able to move without a cane and one of his sons holding him on either side. He’s more than 75 years old. He might be 76; he might be 80. He’s not sure.”

Despite this, as Lasseter also noted, pointedly, “The American military held Khan, a member of the first US-backed Afghan congress after the fall of the Taliban, for more than three years at Guantánamo on charges that the elderly, illiterate and near-physically incapacitated man was an insurgent leader.” Confirming his story, it was noted that he was seized after he had “gone to live at his son’s house and be with his grandchildren,” after his son was seized on the basis of similarly empty allegations — the capturing forces found 700 weapons in the compound where he lived, but neglected to work out that he and 50 others were being paid by the Karzai government to guard them.

Nusrat Khan, the father, didn’t know anything about any of this, of course, but he was nevertheless opportunistically accused of being a member of Hezb-e-Gulbuddin (HIG), the anti-US militia headed by the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as was his son. “How could I be an enemy combatant if I was not able to stand up?” he asked his tribunal at Guantánamo, but his words fell on deaf ears.

Khan’s son had worked for Hekmatyar from 1992 to 1996, but “quit after the Taliban routed Hekmatyar’s forces and took over the country in 1996,” and his father denied fighting for Hekmatyar. In fact, as McClatchy noted, “he denied being anything other than an old man who’d once fought to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan but who for the past decade hadn’t done much of anything.”

McClatchy’s reporter also spoke to Mohammed Akram Mirhazar, the assistant director of the National Peace and Reconciliation office, which “checks the backgrounds of former Guantánamo detainees,” who said that Khan “was arrested because of a decades-old rivalry.” He said that certain Northern Alliance officials “had fed US troops false information about Khan.” They “had a long-standing grudge against Khan,” he added, because he had “led a rival faction during the war against Soviet occupation. They did this just to take revenge; it had to do with old feuds from the time of jihad” against the Soviet Union. Mirhazar also confirmed, “Nusrat had no links with the Taliban; he has been sitting at home for more than 10 years.”

After interviewing Khan at Guantánamo, Abdul Jabar Sabit, Afghanistan’s Attorney General, concluded that he “may once have had ties to Hekmatyar, but that in recent years, ‘He was sick and he was unable to do anything to anyone.’”

Khan met McClatchy’s reporter in the waiting room of a gas station in Sorobi, “in the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad,” where young men “came in frequently to see whether [he] needed anything.” Noting that he had kind eyes and talked slowly, and often with a profound effort, the reporter listened as he explained that, after his capture, he was held in Bagram for about a month, where, for most of that time, “he was kept in an isolation cell wearing a blindfold and earphones, with his hands tied behind his back.”

“My mind was not doing well,” he explained. “I don’t know how long I was in there. I didn’t know day from night. I don’t know how many days or months I was in Bagram. I didn’t understand anything.” Asked to describe his experiences, he “shook his head,” and said, “It is not necessary to remember that time again,” adding, “When I was in isolation, I couldn’t even see myself.”

“The only breaks from the darkness,” he said, were the interrogations, roughly every three days, with either the CIA or military interrogators. “They asked me very stupid questions like, ‘On what grounds did the Americans arrest you?’” he said. “I told them, ‘You are asking questions like a child — ask me what my real crime was. Tell me what my crime was.’ They never responded to this. I told them, ‘I am not important enough to meet Hekmatyar. This is a stupid question. You need to improve your intelligence-gathering. You want to control the world, but you don’t know why I’m here.’”

This was powerful criticism, as were his statements in Guantánamo, although first he had to get there. Because he was unable to walk, he was “strapped to a stretcher and hoisted into a plane,” as McClatchy described it. “I was taken to the plane to Guantánamo on a stretcher, like I was a corpse,” he said. “I told the doctors at Guantánamo, ‘Look, you cruel men, look at my age. You brought me here and I can barely walk.’”

He explained that the pointless interrogations continued at Guantánamo and he told his interrogators that “they had no idea what they were talking about,” while they took notes. “I told them, ‘The only issue here, the only reason I am here, is Islam. I am a Muslim, and that is why I’m here.’” Eventually, the message got through. After a few months of being interrogated every two or three days, “he went a year and a half without being called in for questioning,” and, after just a few months in the prison, was also moved to Camp Four, where compliant prisoners and/or prisoners regarded as insignificant were held, where he was held for three years, and where, at some point, his son was also moved.

Reflecting on this time, he said, “I cannot read, so I passed the time, the days and nights, with God. We were in the house of cruel men; all I was left to do was think, to think about my future.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khan was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated January 7, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1935. It was also noted that he had “non insulin-dependent diabetes that [was] controlled by oral medications,” that he “suffer[ed] from weakness in both lower extremities attributed to a left sided stroke in 1990,” that he had recently been “diagnosed with a prostate nodule that could be prostate cancer,” and that he had “high blood pressure controlled by medication.” It was also noted that he had “no psychiatric history” except for “a mild panic disorder,” that he had “a history of latent tuberculosis,” in common with many of the prisoners, and that he also had rheumatoid arthritis.

In terms of leaving Guantánamo, it was also noted that he had “the following travel requirements” — he “needs to have the ability to stretch and recline at least every three (3) hours due to chronic low back pain,” he “needs to have his diabetic and high blood pressure medications available every morning,” he “will need to have his non-narcotic pain medication available for the flight,” and “will require wheelchair transport to and from the aircraft.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, during the Soviet occupation, he moved his family to Pakistan, and, in 1991, became a commander for Sibghatullah Mojaddedi’s Jebh-e-Nejat-e Melli (National Liberation Front), although Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami group “was the most powerful resistance organization fighting the Soviet occupation due to US support,” and Hekmatyar told Mojaddedi that “his people should join the HIG against the Soviets since he had the support of the US.” When Hekmatyar took control, however, “he had all of the party’s leadership killed and forced the remaining members of [Jebh-e-Nejat-e Melli] to join the HIG.”

Khan said that, after he “aligned himself with the HIG, he was told he was not going to be allowed to fight anymore,” and was sent back to his village to be the local HIG militia commander.” Despite the fact that this took place during the time that Hekmatyar was supported by the US, an analyst insisted on describing HIG as a Tier 1 terrorist target for its opposition to the US, which simply doesn’t make any sense at all.

Continuing its ham-fisted analysis, the Task Force proceeded to note that Khan “was a local HIG commander until his health began to deteriorate” in 1991, when he turned over his command to a man named Lal Pasha, who, soon after, fled to Iran following the fall of the Communist regime. At that point, it was claimed that his son “was voted the new HIG village commander,” even though he was only 20 or 21 years old at the time.

From here, the story jumped incongruously to 2003, when Khan’s son was now a “commander under the Karzai government under General Engineer Wasil,” who “was instructed to collect all of the weapons from the villagers and store them until further notice,” and “was arrested by US and Afghan forces on 1 March 2003, in Sorobi, AF after he was reported to be a HIG commander involved in rocket attacks against US forces.” According to this account, Khan himself was seized on March 26, 2003, after US forces, who were “conducting a building search for hidden weapons,” which was “based off of a HUMINT source claiming a large number of weapons were being stored in [his] house.”

As the Task Force also explained, he “did not resist capture and was asked if any weapons were stored in the home, [to] which he replied, ‘there were no weapons stored in the house,’” However, when weapons were found, he allegedly “stated he had been directed to collect weapons from the local people for storage by General Wasil and Wasil had established a military/police post in his home with him in charge,” which is obviously preposterous, as Khan was barely able to move, let alone run a weapon-collecting organization.

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Current operations and leadership personalities of the HIG.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force decided that he was “not a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network, but [was] an admitted retired HIG commander who turned his command over to his sons,” Hizatullah Nasrat Yar and Abdul Wahid, who was “still at large.” It was claimed that his sons “were involved in the planning and support of attacks on US personnel in the Kunar Province,” that Khan “was also involved with the activities of his sons,” and that, “even after retiring, [he] still had influence among the HIG leadership through his sons and if released, he [would] still have the ability to plan, support or facilitate acts of terrorism against the US and its allies.”

To support these claims (which are ridiculous when Khan’s invalidity is taken into account), the Task Force alleged that Abdul Wahid “was the governor of Laghman Province when the Islamic Transitional Government of Afghanistan came to power, but was replaced due to his known connections with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the HIG,” and provided other claims about his son’s involvement with HIG, as well as claiming that, “In November 2002, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar reportedly stayed at [Khan's] compound,” which means nothing without further verification.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he had “a past history of passive behaviour,” and that he had “no recorded discipline history and no violent behaviour.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to continued detention (despite his age and his invalidity), updating a previous recommendation (whose date was not mentioned), although he was not released for another 19 months.

Sada Jan (ISN 1035, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (12) – The Last of the Afghans (Part Two),” I explained how Sada Jan (whose date of birth was not recorded) was seized from his house in Afghanistan’s tiny, mountainous north-eastern province of Kunar in May 2003. Throughout his imprisonment, he maintained that he was a carpenter, who had been working, for the eight months until his capture, as the district officer for the Karzai government. He explained that he had ended up in Guantánamo because rivals had told a false story about him to US forces, and had sold him for money.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Sada Jan (identified as Syed Ajan) repeated his story, and McClatchy’s reporter was able to confirm that he had been telling the truth, speaking to Mohammed Roze, the director of the Kunar branch of Afghanistan’s National Peace and Reconciliation Office, who explained that he had investigated Ajan’s case and had concluded that he “was framed by rivals in a nearby village.” He said that “the two men who passed false allegations about Ajan to the Americans were militants opposed to Karzai’s government,” and declared categorically, “Syed Ajan was not involved with any anti-government activities. The Americans arrested him mistakenly.”

Sadly, however, it is clear that the US military’s gullibility ruined Syed Ajan’s life. After his release from Guantánamo, he revealed that his wife and his eldest son had died in his absence. He also said that he “hadn’t found much work” since his return, and added that the Afghan government owed him several months’ back pay.

Moreover, this was not the only manner in which the US authorities had damaged him. He complained about his treatment in Bagram, where, he said, “the guards often kept him from sleeping at night, knocking on the door at odd hours and shouting for him to stand up,” adding that “he was pushed around during cell searches; and the guards liked to slam him into the walls on the way to interrogations.” He also complained that, at Guantánamo, he was subjected to long interrogations, and “was made to sit in a chair for hours before and after the questioning, sometimes with the heat turned up, sometimes with the air conditioning blasting.” However, he said that the worst abuse occurred just after he was seized, during the two days that he was held in a US base in Kunar.

“When they took me inside the base, they began hitting and kicking me,” he explained. “I lost consciousness. When I came to, I couldn’t stand up; I had a very hard time breathing. For a month, I had very sharp pains in my side.” This, however, was only the start of the abuse. “The soldiers came back to my cell,” he continued, “There were six of them. They said, ‘Stand up,’ and then they began kicking me like a football. They threw me back and forth and beat me against the wall. They put the muzzle of a rifle against my head. It just clicked; they’d taken the bullets out.”

He added, “I’m still sick since that time … I can’t control my urination, and sometimes I put toilet paper down there so I won’t wet my pants.” During a review at Guantánamo, he was even blunter in his assessment of the damage the US soldiers had caused him. “Americans hit me and beat me up so badly,” he said, “I believe I’m sexually dysfunctional.”

Throughout Ajan’s imprisonment, the US authorities showed no interest in verifying his story. During his seven months at Bagram, he said, he repeatedly told his interrogators, “I am a member of Karzai’s government, which apparently is a crime,” and did the same in Guantánamo. Although he was accused of working for the Taliban, firing rockets at US forces, and having bomb-making materials in his house, he persistently denied the charges. He explained that the Taliban “came and robbed my house, arrested my brother in Jalalabad, and took six rifles from me. Then they put us in jail for one and a half months, and didn’t release my brother.” As Tom Lasseter described it, he also stated that the US authorities “were presenting a mishmash of bad information from jailhouse snitches trying to earn favor at Guantánamo, informants in Afghanistan who wanted to settle political scores, bad translations during his interrogation sessions and misunderstandings.”

Ajan’s tribunal even ignored testimony provided by two witnesses in Guantánamo, who knew him from Kunar, both of whom swore that he had no connection with the Taliban. One was Taj Mohammed (ISN 902, also released in October 2006), who was a goat herder, and the other was Sabar Lal (ISN 801, released in September 2007), a military commander who had also been working for the Karzai government, although he was shot dead as a reported insurgent in September 2011.

Ajan spent his last 18 months in Guantánamo in Camp Four, where generally insignificant prisoners were allowed to live communally, but it was not until just before his release that he received anything approaching an apology, when an interrogator told him that US forces in Kunar “had stopped working with the people who’d informed on him.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Jan was an “Update Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated September 20, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1969, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he “claimed to be a carpenter by trade,” and that he “served in the jihad against the Soviets,” and then “served with the Northern Alliance during the Rabbani presidency” (Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was President from 1992 until the triumph of the Taliban in 1996). It was also noted that he “claimed not to be Taliban, but admit[ted] to being a former member of the Jama’at Ul-Dawa Al-Qurani (JDQ, also identified as Jamaat ul-Dawa al-Quran), which was described as “an Islamic extremist group with ties to Pakistani’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) and the Saudi Red Crescent Society(SRCS),” as though this was supposed to mean something, when it was a garbled collection of unrelated pieces of information, and, in addition, JDQ was not on any US watchlists, and there appeared to be nothing to suggest that Jan’s activities in connection with the group extended beyond the years of resistance to the Soviet occupation.

In terms of more relevant, up-to-date information, it was noted that Jan “served as district manager for the Pashad district, Kunar province, AF and bodyguard for Jan Daan Khan” (or Haji Jan Dad Khan), described as “the former governor of the Kunar Province after the fall of the Taliban,” although there does not appear to have been a governor of that name. In describing the circumstances of his capture, it was noted that, on May 2, 2003, “after an unidentified person identified [him] as bragging that he fired missiles at the base at MSS Asadabad, AF,” Operation Detachment Alpha 316 (ODA 316), described as “a team comprised of special forces soldiers whose goal was to capture high value targets,” captured him at his house along with his neighbor Ishmal Gul, about whom nothing more was heard. It was also noted that no weapons were found,” which was significant, although, more contentiously, “numerous documents were recovered,” allegedly “indicating [his] ties to the Taliban.”

It was also noted that he and Ishmal Gul “were transported to MSS Asadabad,” although no mention was made of the abuse Jan suffered there. It was also mentioned that he was then transferred to Bagram airbase, and he was sent to Guantánamo on November 21, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Mission, organization, operations, personnel, equipment, weapons, and dispositions of military forces in the Pashad district office, Mission, organisation, operations, and whereabouts of Taliban commanders and other Taliban personalities in Kunar and other areas in AF, Quantity, condition, description, and disposition of weapons and weapon caches located in Kunar and other areas in AF, Mission, organization, operations, personalities, dispositions, equipment and weapons of terrorists in Kunar and other areas in AF [and] Smuggling of Taliban, Al-Qaida, Arabs, other personnel and munitions through border crossings in Asadabad and Pashad district.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force was unable to add anything substantial to the mixed bag of allegations described above. In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.”

As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated November 26, 2004), recommended his release with conditions, “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” although this information was not specified, and he remained “assessed as a probable Taliban commander,” even though the “information obtained since [his] previous assessment” must, logically, have served to disprove that assertion, and therefore to also render him as someone who should no longer have even been regarded as “a medium risk.” But this, of course, was all part of the deep and multi-layered injustices of the detention system at Guantánamo.

Haji Mohammed Akhtiar (ISN 1036, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Haji Mohammed Akhtiar, who was 50 years old at the time of his capture, was one of six men seized in Gardez in July 2003 who were working for the Karzai government. As he explained in Guantánamo, he had been a mujahideen commander against the Russians in 1980s, but, after living as a refugee in Pakistan during the Taliban’s rule, he only returned to Gardez in 2002, when he was captured by long-standing enemies loyal to the anti-US warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, who only released him when he promised that he would not serve the Karzai government for the next nine months.

When he finally took up a government post at the end of this period, recruiting personnel for the Afghan army, he was seized by US forces and taken to Bagram. Like two of the others seized at this time — Abdullah Mujahid Haj (ISN 1100, the former security chief of Gardez, who was released in December 2007) and Dr. Said Mohammed Ali Shah (ISN 1001, see below, who was a prominent local dignitary chosen to be the People’s Representative of Gardez under the Karzai government) — he blamed long-standing Communist rivals, who were jockeying for positions of power in post-Taliban Afghanistan, for telling lies about him to the Americans, although he also blamed one of Haqqani’s commanders, who had become close to US forces.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Akhtiar repeated his story, but Tom Lasseter started his article by noting, “Death seemed to be waiting for Mohammed Akhtiar at every turn in Guantánamo. He didn’t worry about the American interrogators or guards; he got along well enough with them. It was the other prisoners who terrified him. Afghans loyal to the Taliban were ready to kill him. Arabs loyal to al-Qaida hated him, too.”

Akhtiar explained that he was the “head of a large tribe — comprising thousands of families — in southeast Afghanistan who didn’t support the Taliban when they seized power in 1996,” and, as a result, Akhtiar “fled to Pakistan under threat of execution.” He told McClatchy’s reporter, “I did not join the Taliban when they came to power, so they burned my house down.”

In US custody, first in Afghanistan and then in Guantánamo, he was accused of “participating in a rocket attack on American forces in Gardez, helping to plan an attack on a local governor and of being a militant commander in his district,” but he constantly refuted the allegations, on one occasion telling his review board at Guantánamo, “I wish that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.”

A senior Afghan intelligence officer “with thorough knowledge of Akhtiar’s case,” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns for his safety,” told McClatchy that Akhtiar “should never have been arrested, much less sent to Guantánamo,” explaining, “He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government.” He was seized by US forces, the source added, “because an Afghan who had a personal vendetta against Akhtiar had given them bad information.”

Interviewed in April 2007 in a compound of tribal offices in Gardez, Akhtiar’s eyes were “gaunt and troubled,” according to McClatchy’s reporter, who noted that “he frequently stared into space and had to be coaxed back to continue his sentence.” He explained that the area they were in “had seen frequent Taliban attacks in recent months, and he said he was nervous to be there. What if the Taliban captured him? he asked. He’d be killed immediately, he said, answering his own question.”

Reiterating what he said at Guantánamo, he explained that, when the Taliban were removed from power, he returned to his home in Paktia province, but in the summer of 2002 “a militant commander detained him in retribution for working with the US-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai,” and he “was almost executed before a council of tribal leaders intervened.” Released after “promising that he wouldn’t allow members of his tribe to join Karzai’s government for nine months,” he was free for just one month before US forces came calling.

This was just one of many chronic failures of intelligence the part of US forces, and it was compounded because no effort was made to ascertain whether the wrong men had been seized. Akhtiar told McClatchy that he “had a deep hatred” for the Taliban, “because they had beaten his brother to the brink of death and left him paralyzed,” and added that “Taliban leaders in Paktia province knew that Karzai’s Defense and Interior ministries had offered him jobs in exchange for hundreds of new police and army recruits from his tribe,” and also realized that a “local tribal leader working for Karzai’s regime, with a host of new troops loyal to the government, would have posed a substantial threat to the Taliban in the area.”

In order to stop him, Akhtiar said, the Taliban “orchestrated a barrage of false allegations, funneled through informants who worked with the American military,” leading to his wrongful imprisonment. When US soldiers came to seize him at his home in May 2003, he said he “let them in and went peacefully,” because “he knew he had nothing to fear,” as he was “just a month away from being hired by the Karzai government.”

After his capture, he said, he was sent first to Bagram, where “he endured harsh treatment.” He explained, “They did not let me sleep for 20 straight days. They played very loud music, and if they saw me sleeping, they woke me up … During that time, I managed to sleep for maybe one or two hours a day.” He added, “When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, ‘What is my crime?’ the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs … they would chain my hands to the ceiling, and put another chain around my chest and a third on my ankles. They would leave me like this for two or three hours and then take me down because I was so weak.”

He said he was sent to Guantánamo on July 17, 2003, and, although it was normal for prisoners to be put in solitary confinement for their first month, he said he was held in solitary for his first two months. “After those two months, I began to have mental problems,” he explained. “I had panic attacks, I had hallucinations — I thought there were dogs trying to bite me or people who wanted to fight me. I began yelling and screaming, but there was nothing there. They took me out of isolation and gave me sedatives; I slept for a very long time.”

He added that he “was moved to several camps during his first year at Guantánamo, then was transferred to Camp Four, an area reserved for men who were thought to pose little security threat” — or to have little intelligence value. Even there, however, he was not safe, as it “was home to a large group of Taliban and al-Qaida members and sympathizers,” who had heard that he didn’t back the Taliban. “They told me, ‘You are an infidel because you worked with Karzai’s government,’” he said, also noting that they “routinely spat at him and called him names.”

He was in Camp Four for about a year, and, near the end of his time, was attacked. “One late afternoon, I was sitting at a water tap, taking my ablution,” he said. “My eyes were closed and they walked up behind me and hit me with a piece of a bucket. The blood was pouring down my eyes.” Other former prisoners confirmed the story, explaining that his enemies had “removed a metal mop squeezer from a bucket and slammed him in the head with it.”

One witness was Mohammed Aman (ISN 1074, see below), who said, “Akhtiar went to the central bathroom, and all of a sudden I heard cries of ‘Allahu Akbar.’ They took him away to the hospital; there was blood all over his head.” He added that those who, like he and Akhtiar and other Afghans, refused to abide by fatwas “handed down by a group of al-Qaida and Taliban members made them frequent targets of abuse.” Aman said, “We tried to make the best of it. We played cards and chess together. The Arabs called our room the room of infidels and traitors.”

On his release from the hospital, Akhtiar was “moved to two different cellblocks in the next four months,” but each “had large al-Qaida and Taliban factions,” and, he said, “The Arabs decided they were going to kill me. I told my interrogator that my life was at risk. I spent an entire month in my cell, refusing to go out for exercise. I called the doctors and told them my mental state was getting worse, that my life was in danger, and that instead of helping me, the interrogator had moved me to live with even more Arabs … I told the doctors I would rather kill myself than risk what the Arabs would do to me.” Finally, he “was moved to an area with other Afghans who didn’t support the Taliban, and there he was able, he said, to sleep a little more easily.”

On his release, the Afghan government “gave him about $30 worth of Afghan currency, enough for a private taxi ride home.” Akhtiar said, “The local reporters were there. They asked me, ‘Who are you? Can you tell us your story?’ I told them, ‘I don’t know who I am.’ I didn’t know where to go.” Members of his tribe, he said, came to Kabul to pick him up, but he “moved back to Pakistan almost immediately.” He was warned that the Taliban and al-Qaida were “looking for him.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Akhtiar was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated September 10, 2005, in which all of the above was resolutely denied by the US authorities. In the file, he was also identified as Akhtiar Mohammad, and it was noted that he was born in 1953, and was “in good health,” although he “refused treatment for latent TB.” It was also noted that he was “followed by Behavioral Health Services for adjustment disorder,” that he had chronic constipation and insomnia, for which he was on medication, and that he was also prescribed “artificial tears for chronic dry eyes.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force reiterated Akhtiar’s own story, which involved him fighting the Soviet Union until 1981, living for ten years in Pakistan,  rejoining the Afghan army for a few years in 1991, returning to Pakistan again when the Taliban came to power, and then returning to Afghanistan in 1995 to join the Northern Alliance.

It was also noted that Akhtiar said that, in the fall of 2002, he visited General Aliqullah Lodin, described as “the Corps Commander for the Afghan provinces of Paktia, Khost, Logar, Paktika and Ghazni [actually Attiqullah Lodin, who became the governor of Logar province], who told him “he would give him a command, provided he could recruit 300 men who would be serving under him.” He “claimed Mullah Jailani [aka Jalani], an anti-coalition [word missing] and a member of the Taliban, arrested him,” and he “remained in jail for two months until he paid a fine of two million Pakistani rupees, and agreed not to join the Karzai government for nine months.”

Seized with Nazar Gul Chaman (ISN 1037, released in February 2007), on May 4, 2003, in what was described as “a raid on a suspected Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) compound. They were sent to Bagram, and Akhtiar was sent to Guantánamo on July 17, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Pacha Khan Zadran, Haji Zadran and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, The internal structure of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG and Seyyef [actually the Afghan warlord Abd al-Rasul Sayyaf]) [and] HIG and Seyyef [Sayyaf] ties to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID).”

In assessing his story, the Task Force maintained that he was “a high level Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander who was in the process of coordinating offensive operations against US/Coalition forces when he was captured,” claiming that, when Akhtiar and Nazar Gul Chaman were seized at his compound it was “because of reports of two high level HIG members conducting explosives training at the compound.” It was also noted that Chaman was “assessed as probably a high-ranking explosives expert in the HIG,” who was “reported to have served as the top HIG commander for all of Paktia province, Afghanistan,” and was “considered to be the 7th or 8th most senior HIG commander,” whereas Akhtiar was regarded as “the HIG commander in charge of the Sayyed Karam District in the Paktia province, AF, and a long time HIG commander.”

There is more, in direct contrast to Akhtiar’s own story, and what he and well-placed Afghan source told McClatchy, and, in conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” whose “overall behaviour ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.”

His case strikes me as one of the most glaring examples of the obsessively closed world in which the US gathered and assessed information, as the gulf between the various stories was so huge that it seems to make no sense that the US authorities made no effort to contact anyone in a position of authority in Afghanistan who might have been able to shed light on this story — as well as many other disputed Afghan stories. Nevertheless, in this claustrophobic, and generally abusive vacuum, Maj. Gen. Hood updated a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated August 27, 2004), with a similar recommendation that he be subjected to continued detention under DoD control. He was released 15 months later, although it is not clear why.

Sharbat Khan (ISN 1051, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sharbat Khan, like Taj Mohammed (ISN 902, released in October 2006), was a goat herder. 31 years old at the time of his capture, he said in Guantánamo that he was a nomad from the Kuchi tribe, and was captured after an IED attack on US forces, for no reason other than the fact that there was no one else around.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khan was an “Update Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated June 3, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1973, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted upfront that it was assessed that he was “not a member of Al-Qaida or the Taliban,” and that the supposed reason for his detention — that Afghan military forces arrested him because they suspected him of “assisting his brother in an attack against Coalition Forces using an Improvised Explosive Device (IED)” — was insufficient. The Task Force admitted that it was “assessed that [he] probably did not play a part in the IED attack,” although it was added that he “may be aware of his younger brother’s role in the ACM activity,” as though this was any excuse for years of detention.

Married with three sons and a daughter, Khan was a member of a sub-group of the nomadic Kuchi tribe, and the Task Force noted that he “and his family herd[ed] goats for a living and [paid] to use the property of others for grazing.” It was also noted that he “did not receive any military or extremist training,” and that, at the time of his capture, he “was harvesting grain for seven days and was away from his home that entire time,” but then he “returned from harvesting grain and went to visit his neighbor for some tea before going home.”

“Shortly after this,” however, “he was captured” — specifically, on May 27, 2003, when “Afghan Military Forces (AMF) apprehended [him] and his brother, Qadir, 500 meters from the site of an IED explosion.” Khan “was suspected of aiding his brother, who “was running from the American and Afghani forces on the backside of the hill where the IED detonated.” He was sent to Guantánamo on November 21, 2003, to “provide information on the following: Specific information concerning Anti-Coalition Militant activities to destabilize coalition and Afghanistan government reconstruction efforts in Khost Province, AF, Improvised explosives devices [and]Ingress/Egress from Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he had “consistently denied he aided his brother or had any involvement in the attack.” In addition, contradicting the claim that he “may be aware of his younger brother’s role” in the attack, it was noted that, “To date, there [was] no information associating [him] with this attack,” and it was also noted that he had “not altered his story or provided any further information associated with the IED attack in 25 interviews conducted in Bagram, AF, and JTF-GTMO.” Damningly, to my mind, he “was recommended for release by three interrogation teams while at Bagram,” but was not, of course, freed at that time.

In the most telling observation about him in Guantánamo, it was noted that, during an interview on June 13, 2004, an interpreter noted that he “uses tribal dialect and appears to be very uneducated,” and it was also noted that he spoke about “how he shepherded, [e]xplaining that he had 300 goats, five sheep, eight camels and two baby camels and how he migrated to other various areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan for grazing purposes,” and “also explained how he and his brothers shared and lived in tents as they moved.” An analyst noted, perceptively, that his “knowledge of herding animals, which he readily talks about, and his inability to discuss simple military and political concepts, tend to support [his] contention that he indeed is just a simple shepherd.”

It is not known what happened to Qadir Khan, as he was not sent to Guantánamo, but the Task Force assessed Sharbat Khan as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “behavior ha[d] been generally cooperative,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous assessment that he be retained in DoD control (dated March 29, 2004), recommended him for release, “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” which was not specified. However, he was not actually released for another 18 months.

Said Mohammed (ISN 1056, Afghanistan) Released August 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how the capture of Said Mohammed, who was 25 years old at the time, appeared to be another of the many stories of Afghan betrayal and US incompetence. A shopkeeper from a village near the Pakistani border, his only crime seems to have been that his youngest brother once gave a small piece of dry bread to a passing Arab. He was seized with his father, brother and two other villagers, and he said in Guantánamo, “I was arrested at my home. I was irrigating my land and the guards [US Special Forces] were in my home. As soon as I got into the house, I saw the guards and I went to them and I said hello. They pushed me to the ground, covered my head with a bag and took me to Bagram.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Mohammed was an “Update Recommendation to Retain in DoD Control,” dated June 3, 2005, in which he was also identified as Bazit Khan, and it was noted that he was born in 1977, and was “in good health,” although he had been “diagnosed with Psychotic Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder,” and was “currently on Haldol and Cogentin.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had moved to Pakistan during the time of the Soviet occupation, and again at the time of the US-led invasion. He also said that he “would go to the Sadar Bazaar in Lahore every winter and sell knives, screwdrivers, scissors, calculators, and radios.” It was also noted that, in Afghanistan, he “owned and operated a shoe store with his brother, Allah Mohammed.”

Turning to the circumstances of his capture, it was noted that, while irrigating his land, he ran into a man named Abdul Rahman, “who was speaking with three Arabs.” Without providing any further information about this meeting, it was then noted that he was seized by US forces on July 3, 2003 in his father’s compound,” because he “was suspected of assisting anti-coalition forces operating in Zormat district as well as actively aiding and abetting the Taliban and Al-Qaida.” He was sent to Guantánamo on November 21, 2003, to “provide information on the following: Cultural geography of Afghanistan, Terrorism related facilities, Biographies of the Taliban, Biographies of Al-Qaida personnel [and] Biographies on terrorists in Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force described him as “a possible member of Al- Qaida’s terrorist support network, a possible member of ACM (Anti-Coalition Militia) forces operating in Paktia province,” and as “having familial ties with members who  maintain strong ties with Taliban and Al-Qaida sympathizers and operatives in Shah-i-Kot.” One was obviously Abdul Rahman, mentioned above, who was identified as ISN 1054, a number that was only used in Bagram and not in Guantánamo, and another was his father, who was not named, but was identified as ISN 1055, another number not used in Guantánamo.

Under unknown circumstances, in Bagram, Abdul Rahman said that Mohammed’s brother, Allah Mohammed, was “an Al-Qaida sympathizer and leader of anti-coalition activities in the districts of Shah-i-Kot and Zormat,” who was also “tied to past and present Taliban leadership.” Abdul Rahman also said that Said Mohammed and his father were “both active sympathizers to terrorist causes, both Al-Qaida and Taliban,” adding, in a statement that probably ensured that Said Mohammed alone was sent to Guantánamo, that he was “more deeply involved than his father … in these activities.”

This perhaps sounds like a reliable assessment, but it is not known whether it is true at all, as it relies almost entirely on statements made by Abdul Rahman, while he was being held at Bagram, where abuse was widespread, and not on any statements made by Said Mohammed himself. Nevertheless, the Task Force assessed him as being of “high intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his “behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and slightly aggressive,” because he had “harassed the guard staff on a number of occasions,” had “failed to comply with the rules of the cellblock and the guard force,” and had “threatened to commit self-harm on a number of occasions.” Because of this, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated March 29, 2004), repeated that recommendation, although this assessment was obviously revised by someone in a position of authority before his release 14 months later.

Mohammed Aman (ISN 1074, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how six men were seized in Gardez in July 2003 who were working for the Karzai government, and in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (12) – The Last of the Afghans (Part Two),” I told the story of one of these men, Mohammed Aman, who was 46 years old at the time of his capture. Aman was a drugstore owner, who had worked as a clerk — a local bureaucrat — for whichever government was in power (including the Taliban, who he despised), and was also a Captain in the Afghan Defense Ministry and the deputy officer for personnel in Gardez at the time of his capture.

However, he fell foul of the same rivals who were responsible for sending a number of other Pro-Karzai officials from Gardez to Guantánamo. Three of these men testified at his tribunal in 2004, and backed up his story, but as with many other prisoners, no serious attempt was made to verify his story by contacting the Afghan government, and the testimony of the three men was ignored. They were Dr. Said Mohammed Ali Shah, (ISN 1001, see below, a prominent local dignitary chosen to be the People’s Representative of Gardez under the Karzai government, also identified as Ali Shah Mousavi), Abdullah Mujahid Haj (ISN 1100, the former security chief of Gardez, who was released in December 2007), and Mohammed Mussa (ISN 1165, an electrician, who was released in July 2008).

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Aman explained that he had been seized during a house raid in spring 2003. At first, he said, “I thought they were searching the whole village and it was just my turn,” but then “They pointed their guns at my head and said, ‘Put your hands behind your back.’ Then they tied my hands. They did the same to my father, who was 83, and my son, who was 15. One of the Afghan soldiers said, ‘Do you know where they’re taking you?’ I said I didn’t. He said, ‘Guantánamo. Do you know what this place is?’ I said I had heard about it, and asked what it was for. He said that it was for enemies of the government, for enemies of humanity. I thought he was making a joke.”

The McClatchy reporter was able to verify, from “a senior Afghan intelligence officer with detailed knowledge of the case,” that Aman had been seized “on charges fabricated by men who worked with him in the Defense Ministry department of personnel in Gardez,” but no one cared at the time of his capture — or for years afterwards. After the raid, he was taken, along with his father and his son, to a US base outside Gardez, where all three “were handcuffed to the wire frame of sand barriers that lined the perimeter of the base.” Aman explained that he was held like that for five or six days, and was only fed on one occasion throughout the whole time, and added, “I had on a hood, so I couldn’t see if it was American or Afghan soldiers doing it, but when I was outside, people kicked me in the back all the time.”

He also said that he was interrogated frequently, based on the false information provided by those who had betrayed him. “One day they made me sit on my knees from night to daybreak, with a stick under my knee,” he recalled. “There was a soldier on each side of me, screaming. There were dogs tied to the wall, and the dogs were barking and snapping their jaws. Another soldier was behind me; he yelled now and then. And in front of me, an interrogator yelled questions out at me.” His pleas that he worked for the Afghan army were ignored.

After the ordeal in Gardez, the three were flown to Bagram. Aman’s father and son were released after about six weeks, but Aman stayed for six months, suffering from painful hemorrhoids and losing a substantial amount of weight, and he spent the last two months in solitary confinement, even though his interrogator had given up asking questions about the Taliban, and instead began asking about “security in Gardez and the loyalties of a long list of Afghan Defense Ministry officers.”

Transferred to Guantánamo in late 2003, he was sent immediately to the hospital, as he could “barely stand” after his experiences at Bagram. Within six months, he was placed in Camp Four (reserved for insignificant prisoners, and/or those perceived to be cooperative), but he said that he spent much of his time in the hospital. “During my entire time at Guantánamo I was interrogated maybe 10 times,” he explained. “But I went to the hospital at least 100 times. I went so many times that the other detainees laughed at me and said, ‘They have brought you here for medical treatment.’”

As with other prisoners, it was only before his release that his interrogators admitted, “You have been brought here with false information; you were sold to us.” They added, “We are trying to be much more careful now.” Understandably, he was not impressed. Asked what he thought about his experiences, he shrugged and said, “It was all lies. It was just a sham.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Mohammed Aman was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 22, 2004, in which he was also identified as Kandagha, Khan Agha, Mohammed Aman Ramazan, Toran Aman, Modir Sahib, Pejan Modir and Mullah Mohammed Amin.” It was also noted that he was born in 1957, and was “in good health,” although he “had surgery for chronic hemorrhoids.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he was an ethnic Tajik, who was at university when the Soviet occupation began. After fighting against the Soviet army, he traveled to Pakistan as a refugee in 1988, returning in 1992 “when the Mujahideen took over the country.” By his own account, he then “severed all ties with political groups and worked at his family pharmacy in Gardez” until the Taliban came to power (in 1996), when he “went into hiding for eight months.” In 1998, however, he took up a job with the Taliban as “the Deputy Chief of Personnel for Core #3 in Gardez,” and “also worked in the Personnel Management Office in an administrative capacity,responsible for keeping time cards and salary.” He worked for the Taliban until their collapse in November 2001, when he “received word from the Shura (governing Islamic council) that he was to return to his former life and profession.”

He was seized at his home on June 2, 2003 by US forces, who took him “on suspicion he was a member of HIG [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the anti-US militia headed by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar],” and was sent to Guantánamo on November 21, 2003, on the spurious basis that he “was assessed as being able to provide information on the following: HIG and the Taliban, Afghan military and tribal militia forces, Personalities, Historical perspectives of Afghanistan, Pharmacy supply structures [and] Financial support received from Saudi Arabian hotels in Riyadh, SA.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was “assessed as being a member of the HIG and involved in ACM activities,” and “claimed that he ha[d] been implicated in attending numerous operational planning meetings. and had “attended at least three meetings where Anti-Coalition participants discussed attacks against both US-led coalition forces and the government of Afghanistan.”

However, nothing resembling proof was provided. Instead, he was identified as the “Mullah Mohammed Amin” who attended a Taliban leadership council meeting on April 30, 2003, and it was also claimed that, on May 10, 2003, Asadullah, described as “a known HIG commander,” picked him up and they “drove around to provide secrecy to their discussions in the vehicle,” and, ”[a]s of late May 2003, HIG members were having secret meetings to discuss the placement of five magnetic anti-vehicle mines for use against coalition targets,” at which one of the attendees was supposed to be Mohammed Aman, apparently using the alias Toran Aman.

The other names mentioned in his file did not surface elsewhere in this analysis of the purported reasons for his continued detention, but they presumably also relate to other nebulous allegations that were supposed to establish his anti-coalition credentials. However, as with many of the other Afghan prisoners, it is astonishing that the US authorities failed to approach anyone in Afghanistan who might have been able to shed light on Aman’s story, like the “senior Afghan intelligence officer” who spoke to McClatchy’s reporter.

Despite the lack of anything resembling evidence in Aman’s case, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to Coalition forces operating in Afghanistan.” It was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non- aggressive.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan, although he was not released for another two years.

Kakai Khan (ISN 1075, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

Despite the litany of US errors outlined in Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained that my choice of the saddest Afghan story in the chapter was that of Kakai Khan, 31 years old at the time of his capture, for reasons that are unconnected with his alleged activities, and are solely to do with the attitude of one of his investigators at Guantánamo. For what it’s worth, Khan was accused of being responsible for a rocket attack on the Gardez firebase, although he said that he was betrayed by personal enemies.

His case stands out, however, because of comments made in “Defining Success at Guantánamo: By What Measure?,” an article in the July-August 2005 issue of Military Review by Jeffrey H. Norwitz, an investigator with the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Task Force, one of the many organizations responsible for interrogating prisoners at Guantánamo for possible prosecution. Norwitz did not make a pronouncement one way or another on Khan’s supposed guilt, regarding himself as part of an ongoing process — with no fixed conclusion — that bears no resemblance to established legal norms. After his final session in Guantánamo, he wrote, “I knew Kakai would never see the inside of a courtroom. Guilt ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ is still a daunting challenge, whether in a federal courthouse or before a military commission at Guantánamo. Kakai’s case could never meet that threshold.”

Even more astonishingly, Norwitz expressed his belief that being deprived of his liberty for years in a legal black hole was compensated for because, by being cooperative, Khan was well-fed, was being taught to read and write, and had received dental treatment, and suggested, moreover, that, in his case at least, Guantánamo was actually a benign beacon of democratic values. “Kakai will ultimately return home a healthier, more educated Afghan citizen,” Norwitz wrote. “He will be prepared to participate in political change, engage in rebuilding his country, or return to herding livestock. The choice will be his, but it will be a choice based on options he would not have had if not for his time in Guantánamo.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khan explained how, in Guantánamo, he sometimes “thought he’d gone completely mad.” He said that, “by reciting Quranic verses over and over, he’d try to bring order back into his life, to make the world around him make sense again.”

Before his capture, he said, his life as a livestock trader had been “ordinary” –  there had been “a little violence in the community now and then, small-time dealings with the Taliban and years marked by the passing of the seasons and Islamic fasts.” Then, suddenly, he was seized by US soldiers and taken to a base near Gardez, where interrogators “asked him about a lot of names” he didn’t know. This, he said, “made the interrogators angry. They said he was involved with the bombings of two video shops in a market, that he was a die-hard Taliban fighter who’d attacked US troops.” His denials only made the interrogators more angry. He was forced to sleep “in a line of blindfolded men on the ground outside,” and for three days was given no food. “When we moved, they kicked us,” he said. “When we talked with others around us, they shouted, ‘Shut up,’ and kicked us.”

He was then moved to Bagram, where there were more interrogations. Again, he was told that “he’d helped bomb a pair of video stores as part of a Taliban campaign to reassert themselves in the Gardez area,” and again he denied the allegations. “They took me to interrogation many times,” he said. “I don’t remember how many times. They beat me a lot during interrogations. They had dogs with their jaws tied shut, and they let them jump at me. They would kick me; they would punch me.” The more he proclaimed his innocence, however, “the worse the treatment got,” he said, and explained, “One of the punishments during interrogation [at Bagram] was that they would take me to a room next door, and two soldiers would lift me in the air and shackle my hands to the ceiling; my feet could not touch the ground. I don’t know how long I was up there; I would lose consciousness.”

Khan’s innocence was not something that only he spoke about. McClatchy’s reporter approached “a senior Afghan intelligence official with detailed knowledge” of his case, who said that, “[w]hile Khan knew some Taliban members, and from time to time passed tidbits of information to them, he wasn’t involved in their operations, as was initially thought.” He added, in a startling statement, that once more raises questions about why the US authorities failed to consult with Afghan officials, “There were two explosions in a market, and we had information that … the people who carried out the bombings stayed at his house. But that proved not to be true.”

However, because traditional concepts of innocence and guilt seemed to be irrelevant to the US authorities, whose modus operandi seemed to involved establishing guilt by whatever means, Khan was sent to Guantánamo instead of being released. First he was “taken to a bathroom, and his head and beard were shaved,” and then he and 17 other men “were piled into a truck with their feet and hands shackled and sacks on their heads.” He said that the flight to Guantánamo was “long,” and, evidently, deeply unpleasant. “Men urinated on themselves,” he said. “The smell of feces hung over them.” He also said that “he screamed as loud as he could for someone to loosen the straps around him,” because he “felt as if he couldn’t breathe, as if he were going to suffocate.” As he put it, “I couldn’t feel anything; I was awake but unconscious; I didn’t know what was happening.”

In Guantánamo, after the customary first month in isolation, where sleep deprivation was also the norm, because, he said, the guards “were always banging on the door at night, yelling for him to wake up,” so that he “barely slept for the first three weeks,” he “was sent for a month to a cellblock for detainees with mental problems,” after a doctor came to examine him.

On his release from the psychiatric ward, he was sent to a regular cellblock, where confrontation was incessant. Because the guards shouted at the prisoners to disrupt their prayers, they responded by calling the guards over, and, “when they came, we threw water on them, we spit on them, we pissed on them.” In response, the prisoners, after a fight, “were dragged off to solitary confinement, where they were stripped to their underwear and left in small rooms where the air conditioning was turned up high, then low, leaving them to shiver, then sweat.”

Khan said “he was sent to isolation about 15 times — for 15 days to four months at a time — during his three years at Guantánamo,” and added, “Some trips were bearable. Others left him a wreck.” He explained that he “could tell how badly he was doing after a stint in isolation by how the men in the cells around him reacted when he returned,” telling McClatchy’s reporter, “I would have conversations with [the man] who was in the cell next to me. And sometimes he would say, you do not understand what you’re saying; it makes no sense.” He added that “[n]othing at Guantánamo ever did.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khan was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 8, 2004, in which he was also identified as Gul Baz Khan, and it was noted that he was born in 1971, and was “in good health.” Those assessing his health also noted that had been “successfully treated for active Tuberculosis,” and also had “a history of acid reflux,” which was “controlled with minimal medications.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force assessed that he “was not a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” but claimed that he had “ties to Anti-Coalition Militants in the Gardez region of Afghanistan,” and had been “identified as being an Anti-Coalition Militia member responsible for conducting a rocket attack on a US firebase near Gardez.” Khan, however, said that he was a farmer, whose only military experience was during the Soviet occupation, when he was “between the age of twelve to fifteen years old,” and “was taught the use of explosives.”

in dealing with the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force noted that US and Afghan forces seized him at his home on June 4, 2003, with his brother Sher Bara Khan, based on unspecified “accusations” that he was “involved in a bombing of a video store in Gardez.” Held at Bagram, after his initial detention in Gardez, he was sent to Guantánamo on November 21, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was because he “was assessed to be able to provide information on Mullah Naseem, HIG Commander and Mullah Zoi, Al-Qaida leader in Khamard, AF.”

Beyond the claim that he had been “identified as an Anti-Coalition Militia member responsible for conducting a rocket attack on a US firebase in the vicinity of Gardez,” the Task Force had little to go on to establish Khan as an enemy — for reasons that were, of course, obvious from the “senior Afghan intelligence official” who spoke to McClatchy. All that was provided, to incriminate Khan, was a claim that, when he “was initially interrogated about the bombing of the video store he completely denied any knowledge of the incident,” but “[d]uring follow on interrogations, [he] made a statement that only one bomb was used and he ha[d] knowledge of the construction of the bomb used.” There is, of course, no reason to presume that this “confession” was either reliable, or produced voluntarily.

It was, therefore, rather depressing that, just as Khan’s interrogator had claimed that establishing the truth was probably impossible, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it was a least noted that he had been well-behaved in Guantánamo, where he had “a past history of passive behavior,” with “no major incidents.” In conclusion, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan, although, like Mohammed Aman, he was not released for another two years.

Ali Shah Mousavi (ISN 1154, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how six men were seized in Gardez in July 2003 who were working for the Karzai government. One of these men was a doctor, Ali Shah Mousavi (identified as Dr. Said Mohammed Ali Shah), who was 43 years old at the time of his capture, and a Shiite from one of the most prominent families in Gardez. A former mujahideen commander against the Russians, he explained in Guantánamo that he fled to Iran during the Taliban’s rule, where he qualified as a doctor, and, after returning to his hometown in May 2002, he was chosen as the People’s Representative for Gardez, and attended the loya jirga in Kabul the following month. He then returned to Iran to arrange for the return of his family, visited Saudi Arabia for the hajj, and was greeted by crowds of well-wishers when he returned to Gardez in August 2003. Two days later, however, he was seized and taken to Bagram, where he was beaten regularly, kept awake by recordings of sirens that were played night and day, dragged around on a rope and subjected to extremes of heat and cold.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Ali Shah Mousavi explained how, while he was in front of a military tribunal at Guantánamo, he “tried to make sense of it all.” After all, he had been a member of Afghanistan’s interim loya jirga, the first democratic legislative body formed after the Taliban fell, as well as being a Shiite Muslim, “a sect that the Taliban brutally oppressed and al-Qaida often targeted for death as apostates,” as McClatchy explained, for readers who, like the US government, may have found themselves unable to distinguish between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Incomprehensibly, the US officers accused him of having “met with Taliban leaders in an effort to funnel cash to al-Qaida in early 2002,” of being “a key Taliban leader’s main representative in Iran,” and of having “taken about $150,000 from Iran to eastern Afghanistan to fund militants near his hometown of Gardez.”

As McClatchy noted, Mousavi had already done what should have been necessary to establish his innocence, presenting his tribunal with “a narrative that wove in the intricacies of Shiite Islam and the history of the Afghan revolt against Soviet occupation in the 1980s,” in which he “explained that Afghan political and tribal infighting after the 2001 US-led invasion often led to one side or the other peddling false information to the Americans in hopes that US troops would kill or arrest a rival.”

That, it should have been obvious, was what happened to him (and, of course, to many of the other Afghans described in this article and others), but when it failed to sway the members of his tribunal, he tried another approach, described by McClatchy as follows:

In Afghanistan, he said, schoolchildren study logic, and as part of that, teachers sometimes create logic problems that demonstrate the danger of false conclusions. For example, he said, a teacher might say that a tree is tall, that a person named Ahmed is tall, so it follows that Ahmed is a tree. Or, Mousavi said, the teacher might point out that rats live in the walls, that rats have ears, so it follows that the walls have ears. That, he said, was the essence of the United States of America’s case against him: Mousavi lived in Iran, Iran is an enemy of the United States, so it follows that Mousavi is an enemy of the United States. Or, Mousavi fought under a commander against the Soviet Union, that commander’s son is now with the Taliban, so it follows that Mousavi is with the Taliban. “That is how, logically, you are getting wrong this conclusion,” he said.

As McClatchy also noted, however, “The speech did not work.”When he was finally released, after more than three years in US custody, he still did not understand “why he’d been arrested in the first place.”

In another damning indictment of the US authorities’ indifference towards the guilt or innocence of their prisoners, McClatchy discovered that Abdul Jabar Sabit, Afghanistan’s Attorney General, had interviewed Mousavi at Guantánamo, and had told US officials about the mistakes they had made after he had been briefed about the charges against Mousavi. As a case in point, McClatchy’s reporter asked about “the $150,000 from Iran.” Sabit “shook his head,R