As a follow-up, Jeff recently wrote another article for Truthout, providing further examples of the use of water as a torture technique, not only in Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to mark my return to work after two weeks away in Greece, I’m cross-posting his latest article as my own follow-up, because I cross-posted his earlier article just before my departure for Athens and Agistri, and I hope that making both articles available here will ensure that they reach new readers who have not yet come across Jeff’s work.

More Evidence of Water Torture “Depravity” in Rumsfeld’s Military
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 18, 2011

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past — most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld — have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about “waterboarding” were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month [cross-posted here] documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called “water treatment” in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had “no comment.”

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that “reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantánamo” lacked “any examples of the military’s using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead.”

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

“Waterboarding-style” torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA’s description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called “water treatment,” “water torture” and “drown-proofing.”

“The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11″

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not “confess”:

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [force] my head and shoulders [under] the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: “Have mercy on me.”

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, “a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry,” was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003″ by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism “czar” who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar’s intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar’s brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantánamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, “a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered.” The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the “water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run.”

More Water Torture at Guantánamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including “near asphyxiation from water,” were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantánamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantánamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

“They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting,” Dergoul reported. “In all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed.” They continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantánamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did — Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu’ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantánamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantánamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, “until tears stream down his cheeks.”

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme “Water Dousing”

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of “water dousing” that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on “counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities,” which looked at the implementation of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques of the Bush administration, “water dousing” involved “laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes.” The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact,” PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. “This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force — and I was writhing on the ground in pain,” Haydar said.

Another Guantánamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of “three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran.”

Such cases of “water dousing” by Guantánamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville “pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty,” and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because “Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid.”

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to “to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them.”

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, “We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren’t paid to think. We just followed orders.”

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general — including the use of water torture and drowning — that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave “special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs” [enemy prisoners of war], including “maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads.”

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantánamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantánamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be “immediately” re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague “preparation of” “combatant activities,” violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office “focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution.” He added he “did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution.”

Even so, Davis told Truthout, “I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo,” though “others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture.”

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantánamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, “In my time in Camp Delta, I didn’t see or hear of any waterboarding.”

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantánamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantánamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him “prisoners at Guantánamo were routinely waterboarded.” Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard “confirmed that waterboarding, which he called ‘drown-proofing’ took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.”

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantánamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, “The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration.”

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantánamo detainees, said, “It’s clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can’t talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It’s simply shameful.”

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, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), 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.

Neither was surprising, because the President announced in May 2009, during a major speech on national security at the National Archives, that the Military Commissions were back on the table, joining federal court trials as an option for trying those held at Guantánamo, and in that same speech he also announced that some prisoners would continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The return of the Military Commissions

Since then, Military Commissions already established under President Bush have proceeded to trial — or, in fact, to plea deals instead of a trial — in the cases of three prisoners: Ibrahim al-Qosi in July last year, Omar Khadr in October, and Noor Uthman Muhammed last month, and it seems probable that the trials of three other men recommended for trial by Military Commission in November 2009 and January 2010 by Attorney General Eric Holder will now proceed swiftly.

These men are: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi, and the alleged mastermind of the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000; Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan and accused of involvement in an unrealized plot to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz; and Obaidullah, an Afghan accused of playing a peripheral role in the insurgency against US forces in Afghanistan. All the cases have problems — al-Darbi’s, because of his detailed allegations that he was subjected to torture; Obaidullah’s, because he was a nobody involved in an insurgency, and did nothing that could remotely be described as a war crime; and al-Nashiri’s, in particular, because, after his capture in the UAE in the fall of 2002, he was rendered to secret CIA prisons in Thailand and Poland, where he was subjected to the torture technique known as waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning.

In the case of al-Darbi and Obaidullah, it seems probable that the administration will avoid, in one case, a torture-laced legal minefield, and in the other, a demonstration of how, embarrassingly, to equate the pursuit of terrorists with a legitimate insurgency, by reaching plea deals. However, it seems unlikely that anyone in a position of authority would want to strike plea deal with al-Nashiri, given the severity of his alleged crimes and his alleged role in al-Qaeda, and if this is the case then the authorities will not only be obliged to sidestep any mention of his torture, which may be difficult as it was covered in the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture in 2004, and al-Nashiri has also been granted “victim” status in an ongoing investigation of the CIA’s torture prison in Poland.

Just as significant is the fact that an actual trial — rather than a plea deal — runs the very real risk of exposing that the supposed war crimes included in the Military Commissions — conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism, for example — are not legitimate war crimes at all, but were, instead, invented by Congress in 2006 and maintained, despite high-level criticism by Obama administration officials, when a revived version of the Commissions was approved by Congress in the Military Commissions Act of 2009.

Beyond these difficulties, where Obama’s announcement breaks new ground is in opening up the probability that many of the other 30 prisoners still held who were recommended for trials by the Task Force will also be tried by Military Commission – - perhaps even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. These men were put forward for federal court trials in November 2009, but the plans were shelved in the wake of a backlash by Republicans and members of Obama’s own party.

Personally, I think that the Military Commissions remain illegitimate, but given Congress’s refusal to allow any Guantánamo prisoners to be brought to the US mainland to face trials (which was included in a major military defense spending bill last December, and was a nakedly political move, as well as being blatantly unconstitutional), Military Commissions are, at present, the only option for trials available to the prisoners. Pragmatically, if these continue to involve plea deals in exchange for short sentences — and the administration honors those plea deals — then, despite being fundamentally flawed, they provide what may be the only way in which prisoners can ever leave Guantánamo.

To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to reflect on the fact that 89 of the remaining 172 prisoners were cleared for release by the Task Force, but are going nowhere either because they are Yemenis, and Obama issued a moratorium on the release of any of the 58 cleared Yemenis last January, after it was discovered that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen, or because they cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture of other ill-treatment in their home countries. These 31 men cannot be resettled in the US, because of opposition by the President, by the D.C. Circuit Court, and by Congress, and it is uncertain if third countries will be prepared to offer them new homes. As a result, all 89 prisoners appear to have less chance of leaving Guantánamo than their fellow prisoners who reach plea deals in their trials by Military Commission, and can, as I have been explaining all year, legitimately be described as political prisoners.

The executive order establishing a periodic review of the cases of 47 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial

Also less fortunate than those facing trials by Military Commission are the 47 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial. The executive order formalizing their detention and providing for periodic reviews of their status, which was issued on March 7, was flagged up before Christmas, but was clearly on the cards from January 2010, when the Task Force submitted its report to the President, recommending that 48 of the remaining prisoners — one of the 48 died in Guantánamo last month — should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because “prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission.”

There are several problems with this proposal, of course — beyond their distressing reinforcement of the very basis on which George W. Bush established Guantánamo in the first place — not the least of which concerns the Task Force’s belief that these men can be regarded as dangerous without evidence that can be used to prove their case. As I explained in December:

The Task Force attempted to explain that “the principal obstacles to prosecution in the cases deemed infeasible by the Task Force typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that the evidence against the detainees was tainted,” but its explanations were unconvincing. Behind claims that “the intelligence about them may be accurate and reliable,” even though it was gathered in dubious circumstances, and that, in many cases, “there are no witnesses who are available to testify in any proceedings against them,” lies a blunter truth, as I explained [in an analysis of the Task Force's report in June 2010]: “that the intelligence, and whatever witness availability there might be, are both tainted by the circumstances under which ‘the gathering of intelligence’ took place — the coercive interrogations, and in some cases the torture, of the prisoners themselves, or of their fellow prisoners.”

To demonstrate this, I referred to the 59 habeas petitions examined by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., of which 38 have been won by the prisoners, noting:

[T]hese problems have been highlighted again and again by judges, with an objectivity that eluded the Task Force — as, for example, in the cases of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti put forward by President Bush for a trial by military commission, who was freed after a judge ruled that the entire case against him rested on a false narrative that he had come up with after torture and threats, and, to cite just two more examples, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni seized in a student guest house in Pakistan, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national, who was just 14 when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. In both cases, they were freed after judges ruled that the government’s witnesses — the men’s fellow prisoners — were irredeemably unreliable, and were, if not subjected to violence, then bribed to produce false statements.

It is, therefore, rather disingenuous of the Task Force to claim that “the principal obstacle to prosecution” for these [47] men “typically did not come from … concerns that the evidence against the detainee[s] was tainted,” when, to be frank, the record is replete with examples proving the opposite.

Another problem is that the executive order establishes a review process for the 47 men, consisting of Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), which are remarkably similar to the review process established by the Bush administration — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) — that the Supreme Court found inadequate when it granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008.

As with the CSRTs, the men will be presented with an unclassified summary of the allegations against them, will be represented by a “personal representative” (not a lawyer), will be allowed to refute the charges against them (although without the means to do so), will be able to “call witnesses who are reasonably available,” and will also run up against classified evidence that they will not be allowed to see — although there is a provision for them to “receive a sufficient substitute or summary, rather than the underlying information,” if the government plans to rely on classified evidence (as it undoubtedly will, or trials would be going ahead in these cases).

Although I am reassured that, as the administration describes it, the executive order “is intended solely to establish, as a discretionary matter, a process to review on a periodic basis the executive branch’s continued, discretionary exercise of existing detention authority in individual cases,” and also that it “does not create any additional or separate source of detention authority,” and “does not affect the scope of detention authority under existing law,” it is disingenuous of the administration to follow up by stating, “Detainees at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and nothing in this order is intended to affect the jurisdiction of Federal courts to determine the legality of their detention.”

This is because, despite its reassurances, the administration has always behaved as though the habeas legislation is a distraction, and that it has only ever believed in the Task Force’s findings — hence its decision to pre-judge 48 men whose habeas petitions might have delivered different outcomes, obviating the need for executive review.

In addition, the executive order demonstrates another fundamental problem with the administration’s approach to Guantánamo — and one that has also eluded the District Court dealing with the men’s habeas petitions. This relates to the legislation that underpins the Guantánamo detentions in the  first place — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” or harbored them, but failed to distinguish between al-Qaeda (a terrorist group) and the Taliban (a government, however reviled).

As the habeas legislation has showed, the majority of the men who have lost their petitions are nothing more than foot soldiers for the Taliban, who had no knowledge of al-Qaeda’s international terrorist operations, and who should, as a result, have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Included in the 47 men designated for indefinite detention, these soldiers remain tainted by the administration’s claims that they are “too dangerous to release,” when the truth is that the AUMF remains the flawed foundation document of the “War on Terror,” and those held at Guantánamo should either be released (without delay), charged in connection with terrorist offenses (which are crimes and not “acts of war”), or redesignated as prisoners of war, who can be held until the end of hostilities.

This, however, would involve recognizing them as soldiers, and not as the kind of shadowy, ill-defined terrorist threats that were invoked so successfully by the Bush administration, and that Obama has done nothing to dispel. This refusal to tackle the foundational problems of Guantánamo not only continues to fuel hysteria in the United States about the soldiers held in Guantánamo, but has also led to a shameful indifference towards putting on trial the handful of people genuinely accused of involvement in acts of international terrorism (including the 9/11 attacks), even though bringing these men to justice ought to have been the purpose of the “War on Terror” all along.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), 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.

This year the President’s bitter surprise for the prisoners (which has encouraged a widespread peaceful protest at the prison, as reported here) was two-fold. The first was his failure to veto a military spending bill passed by Congress, which contained cynical and unconstitutional provisions preventing the transfer of any prisoner to the US mainland, in which lawmakers also demanded the power to prevent the release of prisoners to countries regarded as dangerous.

While these were evidently unacceptable assaults on Presidential authority, dashing the administration’s hopes of holding federal court trials for any of the remaining 173 prisoners and confirming the intent of Congress to enshrine the Yemeni moratorium in legislation, and also to prevent any prisoners from being released to other countries including Afghanistan, Obama refused to veto the bill, feebly claiming that he would try to negotiate with Congress, but thereby conceding that there was no way that the prison would close in the foreseeable future — or, very probably, in the rest of his term in office.

The Return of the Military Commissions

The second bitter surprise for the prisoners was the announcement last week, first mentioned by the New York Times, that, although federal court trials have effectively been suspended, specifically derailing the administration’s stated intention to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks in federal court, the administration is preparing to push ahead instead with trials by Military Commission for at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by Obama’s Task Force.

This decision is particularly disappointing because it hands victory to the most ideologically misguided Republicans, who like the idea of Military Commissions because they reinforce their false notion of terrorist suspects as “warriors” in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” while enraging many of Obama’s own supporters, who are opposed to trials by Military Commission because they represent a second-tier system of justice, inferior to federal court trials, and, in particular, because they contain “war crimes” specifically invented by Congress.

As Lt. Col. David Frakt, a law professor and the military defense attorney for two prisoners at Guantánamo, explained in Congressional testimony in summer 2009:

If one were to review the charges brought against all of the approximately 25 defendants charged [under President Bush] in the military commissions, as I have, one would conclude that 99% of them do not involve traditionally recognized war crimes. Rather, virtually all the defendants are charged with non-war crimes, primarily criminal conspiracy, terrorism and material support to terrorism, all of which are properly crimes under federal criminal law, but not the laws of war.

The decision to revive the Commissions is also disappointing because, as ProPublica reported in a follow-up to the Times‘ story, last August, when “President Obama’s national security advisers, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, met in the White House situation room to decide whether and how to go forward with trials for some Guantánamo prisoners,” they reportedly “left the White House that August day committed to moving forward simultaneously with prosecutions in federal court and military commissions.” As ProPublica stated explicitly, “No military trials would be held anywhere unless trials in federal courtrooms were held at the same time.”

The only glimmer of hope, as ProPublica also reported, is that:

[S]ome experts have suggested that the restrictions [on moving prisoners to the US mainland] affect only the Pentagon. Justice Department funds could still be used to move prisoners to the United States. If that is the White House view, it will be known only when a prisoner is moved to the United States for trial. And only then will it be clear whether the White House policy to move simultaneously on prosecutions in federal court and military commissions still holds.

However, given Obama’s history of bowing to Republican pressure on almost everything to do with Guantánamo, it strikes me as highly unlikely that he would willingly invite an avalanche of criticism to descend on him by stealthily moving prisoners to face trial to the US using Justice Department funds.

If that were the case, he would already have robustly defended federal court trials, whereas the sad truth is that, when tested, he withdrew from the fray. That test came in October and November, during the trial and conviction of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the only man to be moved by the Obama administration from Guantánamo to the US mainland to face a federal court trial (a move that took place in May 2009, before Congress decided to do all it could to usurp the President’s powers). When the jury in Ghailani’s case convicted him on one count of conspiracy, in connection with the bombing of the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in August 1998, and cleared him of 284 other charges, Obama refused to speak up to defend the court system, allowing his distorted critics to behave as though Ghailani had somehow beaten the system, even though he faced a minimum prison sentence of 20 years, and, when his sentence was delivered today, received a life sentence without parole.

The sad history of the Military Commissions

With the Commissions back in play, therefore, the only hope for those who believe, correctly, that federal courts are the only legitimate venue for trying offenses related to terrorism, is that the system first dragged from the grave by Dick Cheney in November 2001, and revived by Congress in the fall of 2006, and again in 2009 (under Obama), after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2006 that Cheney’s version violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will be as much of a failure as it has on all its other previous outings — the three convictions under Bush, and the two under Obama:

• David Hicks, an Australian, who, in March 2007, accepted a plea deal and was a free man nine months later;
• Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, and one of several drivers for Osama bin Laden, who was cleared of conspiracy charges by his military jury, and was a free man five months after being convicted and sentenced for providing material support to terrorism in August 2008;
• Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who made a promotional video for al-Qaeda, and received a life sentence in November 2008 after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense;
• Ibrahim al-Qosi, from Sudan, a sometime chef for al-Qaeda members in a compound used by Osama bin Laden, who accepted a plea deal in July last year, and is expected to be freed in July 2012; and
• Omar Khadr, a Canadian, and a former child prisoner, who was put forward for a trial by Obama despite his former status as a child (which should have guaranteed that he was rehabilitated rather than prosecuted), and who agreed to a plea deal in October, which involves him serving one more year in Guantánamo, and then being repatriated to serve seven more years in Canada.

Of these, the trial of Omar Khadr ought to have been the biggest humiliation for the Obama administration, and a sure sign of troubles to come, as his guilty plea involved the spurious war crimes invented by Congress, and it was both depressing and shameful to watch as Obama presided over a system in which Khadr was obliged to accept that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” whose participation in — or presence at — the firefight in July 2002 that led to his capture was illegal.

The men scheduled to face trials by Military Commission

As the New York Times explained last week, the men scheduled to face trials include three of the five men mentioned by Attorney General Eric Holder on November 13, 2009, on the same day that he announced the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. With al-Qosi and Khadr dealt with, the remaining three are Noor Uthman Mohammed, Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A fourth man is Obaidaullah, an Afghan. All of these men (like al-Qosi and Khadr) are hold-overs from the Bush-era Commissions, when 29 men in total were charged, but only three trials took place, as mentioned above.

Noor Uthman Muhammed

In the case of Noor Uthman Muhammed, accused of being the deputy emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, the main problems were summarized in a report from his most recent hearing at Guantánamo in September last year, by Raha Wala, a Georgetown Fellow in Law and Security, who attended the hearing on behalf of Human Rights First, and elaborated on some of the failures of the Commissions that I mentioned above. Wala wrote:

One reason Noor’s case is a bad fit for a war crimes prosecution is that it’s unclear whether a military commission can even exert jurisdiction over Noor for crimes that the government says he committed. Most of the criminal acts Noor allegedly committed took place from the mid-1990′s to 2000, purportedly before the United States was at war with anyone. Yet the military commissions were originally created in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks to try individuals for war crimes, raising questions about whether the military commission even has jurisdiction to hear Noor’s case. The crimes Noor allegedly committed — material support of terrorism and conspiracy — are not traditional law of war violations typically tried in military commissions. Moreover, attempts by Congress to codify material support and conspiracy as war crimes may very well be seen as imposing ex post facto punishment, with military commissions serving as a venue for trying individuals like Noor for “war crimes” that simply didn’t exist at the time these alleged unlawful acts took place.

Similarly, Noor must be considered an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” for the military commission to assert jurisdiction over him. This means that the prosecution needs to show that Noor was unlawfully taking part in hostilities during an armed conflict. Yet, as was mentioned above, the United States was not at war in the 90′s during Noor’s alleged crimes. And Noor denies that he was affiliated with any armed forces, although the US government claims he was providing support for a Taliban training camp [actually the Khaldan camp, which was independent of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda]. Even if the US government’s accusations are accurate, it’s not clear that the Taliban was involved in any armed conflict during the time of Noor’s alleged unlawful acts either.

Other problems for the government are that Muhammed’s case relates to two others that the administration ought be extremely wary of publicizing: that of Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA torture program was first developed, who, it turned out, was not a significant figure in al-Qaeda at all, and that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan, who was flown to Egypt by the CIA, tortured until he confessed to non-existent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and later returned to Libya, where he died in mysterious circumstances in May 2009. Despite this, in September, prosecutors in Muhammed’s case declared their intention to use Abu Zubaydah’s diaries as evidence when his case comes to trial.

Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi

In the case of Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and rendered to US custody in Bagram, Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo, the main problem for the government is that his case is tainted with torture. He is accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait Of Hormuz, meeting Osama bin Laden and attending a training camp in Afghanistan, but at a hearing in September 2009, his civilian lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, urged that all of the 119 statements that al-Darbi made to interrogators should be ruled out, because they were obtained through the use of torture and abuse, including beatings, threats of rape, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation, both at Bagram, where al-Darbi was held for eight months, and at Guantánamo (a full statement by al-Darbi is available here).

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

The most troubling case is that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, after being held in secret CIA prisons for nearly four years. I have written about the problems with al-Nashiri’s case since he was originally charged in June 2008, and these were summarized last week, when the New York Times noted that:

[His case] would attract global attention because he was previously held in secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons and is one of three detainees known to have been subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes of the Navy, a military lawyer assigned to defend Mr. Nashiri, declined to comment on any movement in the case. But he noted that two of Mr. Nashiri’s alleged co-conspirators were indicted in federal civilian court in 2003, and he made clear that the defense would highlight Mr. Nashiri’s treatment in CIA custody.

“Nashiri is being prosecuted at the commissions because of the torture issue,” Mr. Reyes said. “Otherwise he would be indicted in New York along with his alleged co-conspirators.”

The Times might also have mentioned that, shortly after al-Nashiri’s capture, he was threatened with a gun and a power drill in a secret CIA prison in Thailand, and was then moved to Poland, where, in September last year, he was granted “victim” status in an ongoing investigation into Polish complicity in the establishment of a secret CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany.

Obaidullah

For the last of the men, Obaidullah (also spelled Obaydullah), the decision to proceed with a trial by Military Commission demonstrates how, as under President Bush, the Commissions’ ill-conceived dragnet not only includes alleged terrorists, but also minor figures in the Afghan insurgency, whose connection to terrorism is only justifiable under the absurd terms of the “War on Terror,” which treats terrorists and soldiers equally, and attempts to criminalize soldiers, while denying criminal trials for terrorists.

A year ago, when Eric Holder announced that Obaidaullah had been charged, I revisited an article I wrote when he was first charged under President Bush in September 2008, noting not only that he had plausible compliants that he was tortured by US forces in Bagram, but also that he was

charged with “conspiracy” and “providing material support to terrorism,” based on the thinnest set of allegations to date: essentially, a single claim that, “[o]n or about 22 July 2002,” he “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment”; that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

As I also explained:

It doesn’t take much reflection on these charges to realize that it is a depressingly clear example of the US administration’s disturbing, post-9/11 redefinition of “war crimes,” which apparently allows the US authorities to claim that they can equate minor acts of insurgency committed by a citizen of an occupied nation with terrorism.

In conclusion, while the charges against Obaidullah remain incomprehensible, there is no reason to suppose that the invented war crimes misapplied to the other men will ensure that their trials by Military Commission — also dogged by evidence of torture — will secure credible convictions, or be regarded as legitimate outside the United States.

January really is the cruelest month, at least for those still languishing in the Pentagon’s prison at Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here), 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.

In the end, the whole event was a disappointment, as Col. Henley agreed to a request from the government to freeze the trial proceedings for another 60 days (on top of the two 120-day freezes to date), to allow time for the administration to work out whether it can persuade the House of Representatives to approve proposed changes to the much-criticized trial system, or whether to proceed with federal court trials instead (and I explained why the latter is the only viable option in an article entitled, “9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please?”).

As a result, none of the defendants showed up in court on Monday, and the authorities were obliged to temper their disappointment by releasing a statement from the men the following day, which was clearly intended to provide another piece of evidence for the prosecution in the absence of any actual proceedings.

A statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants

In a letter submitted to the judge acknowledging that they had no objections to the government’s proposed 60-day delay, Mohammed and two of his co-defendants, Walid Bin Attash, and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, sent greetings to Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar, and took the opportunity to refer triumphantly to the 9/11 attacks. “We send our greeting to them on the occasion of the anniversary of eight years past on the most noble victory known to history over the forces of oppression and tyranny in the Washington and Manhattan attack,” they wrote.

As the Associated Press described it, they also quoted from the Koran to explain their continuing desire to represent themselves, but to offer no defense to the charges against them. ”I put my trust in Allah,” they wrote, “So devise your plot … Then pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.” The men also — as is Mohammed’s habit — took the opportunity to refer to the torture to which they were subjected in secret CIA custody, before their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, and also criticized President Obama. “We spent three years moving around the black sites in the ‘dark ages’ of Bush, then we were transferred to the island of oppression, torture and terror, Guantánamo,” they wrote, adding, “Then, the lying Barack, the new American president was elected, and we entered the black ages of Barack.”

Afterwards, few reporters and observers stuck around for the rest of the week’s events, even though pre-trial hearings were also scheduled for two other Military Commission cases: of Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi, seized on arrival in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and “rendered” to US custody in Afghanistan two months later, who is accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait Of Hormuz, meeting Osama bin Laden and attending a training camp in Afghanistan, and Mohammed Kamin, an Afghan accused of training at “an al-Qaeda camp” and taking part in the insurgency against US forces. Two who did were Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald and Jane Sutton of Reuters, and I’m grateful to them for staying and capturing some disturbing allegations about the Commissions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Ahmed al-Darbi’s torture allegations

In al-Darbi’s pre-trial hearing last Wednesday, the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, also decided to abide by the President’s request for another stay in the Commission proceedings, but not until al-Darbi’s lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, had raised some uncomfortable questions about his client’s treatment in US custody. According to the Commissions’ rules, evidence derived through the use of torture is banned, but individual judges may use their discretion to accept evidence obtained through coercion. The demarcation line is clearly a gray area, as was demonstrated on Wednesday, when Col. Pohl refused to abandon al-Darbi’s proposed trial, setting a date of January 11, 2010 (the eighth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo) for a further hearing to decide which of the 119 statements made by al-Darbi to interrogators would be accepted as evidence.

This was in spite of protestations by Kassim that all the statements were tainted by the use of torture, because, as Carol Rosenberg described it, they were obtained “through beatings, threats of rape, sleep and sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation,” at the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (where al-Darbi was held for eight months) and also at Guantánamo.

Given the gravity of these allegations (explained in greater detail in a statement by al-Darbi that I’ve reproduced here, and which is well worth reading in its entirety), it was unsurprising that, following Col. Pohl’s ruling, Ramzi Kassem explained to reporters, “Either the Obama administration is duplicitously saying one thing to the public and the media and doing another here or, you know, Guantánamo and the military commissions are like a headless chicken that just keeps on moving after it’s been decapitated.”

Kassem also read out a statement prepared by al-Darbi, explaining that his client had “planned to read his statement in court but felt there wasn’t an opportunity during the brief hearing.” In the statement, al-Darbi, who, as the Associated Press described it, had held up a photo of Barack Obama “as a sign of hope” at a pre-trial hearing last December, and had stated that he hoped Obama would “earn back the legitimacy the United States has lost in the eyes of the world,” revised his opinion.

Although the statement was addressed to “his excellency, the American President Barack Obama, whose photo I held up in this place as though I had voted for him,” al-Darbi criticized Obama for “issuing certain orders and decisions” regarding the Military Commissions, telling the President that “he has gone astray.” He also criticized the government for holding a hearing during the post-Ramadan holiday of Eid, and also referred to Obama’s speech in Cairo in June, which was intended to build bridges with the countries of the Middle East. “I can tell you that the ugliness of this place and its continuing existence … have all covered up the beautiful smile that the American president directed at you,” al-Darbi wrote, directing his comments at Muslims who had watched the President’s speech in Egypt.

The futility of prosecuting Mohammed Kamin

If the case of Ahmed al-Darbi raises uncomfortable questions about the distinctions between coercion and torture, the case of Mohammed Kamin is simply inexplicable. As I explained in an article last March, when he was first charged, Kamin seems to be “an unworthy candidate for any kind of war crimes trial at all.” I continued:

In his charge sheet (PDF), he is accused of “providing material support for terrorism,” specifically by receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp,” conducting surveillance on US and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US and coalition forces. He is not charged with harming, let along killing US forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection — he apparently stated in interrogation that he was “recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader” — it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in “terrorism” at all. As it is, I’m prepared to state that his case seems to me to demonstrate how hopelessly blurred the distinctions between military resistance (aka insurgency) and terrorism have become, so that anyone caught fighting US occupation is not engaged in a war (with its own well-established laws) but is automatically part of a global terrorist movement.

At the time, the Bush administration was unconcerned that providing material support for terrorism was not a recognized war crime, but whereas Ahmed al-Darbi is charged with both conspiracy and material support for terrorism, Mohammed Kamin faces nothing but a material support charge, and the Obama administration, to its credit, has already accepted, in its plans to review the Military Commissions Act in Congress, that the charge of material support for terrorism should be dropped. Assistant Attorney General David Kris conceded, in Congressional testimony in July, that there is a “significant risk” that, on appeal, judges would not regard it as a legitimate war crime, and the Justice Department’s position is also held by the Pentagon, where General Counsel Jeh Johnson also accepted in July that “material support is not a viable offense to be charged before a military commission because it is not a law of war offense.”

As a result, although the Commissions definitely seem to be proceeding like a “headless chicken” in Kamin’s case, his lawyers asked the judge to schedule a meeting with Jeh Johnson, and are hopeful that they will be able to persuade him to accept that it would be absurd to proceed with his proposed trial. In a detailed submission (PDF), they noted that, as recently as September 10, Johnson told a national security panel of American Bar Association lawyers that, although material support for terrorism was included in the Senate’s bill for amending the Commission, “We don’t believe that material support is a law of war offense. That’s still our position.”

The situation is further complicated because Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ Convening Authority (and a close friend of both Dick Cheney and David Addington), whose conflicted role overseeing the Commissions I have written about at length (here, here and most recently here), responded in July to a request from Kamin’s lawyers to withdraw or dismiss the charges by noting that Johnson had only stated that “appellate courts may find that material support for terrorism is not a traditional violation of the law of war” (emphasis added), and that, at present, it remained a viable charge under the MCA.

Despite Crawford’s insistence that, in the trial of Salim Hamdan, the judge ruled that “the conduct embraced within the specification [of material support] included conduct which the United States has considered a violation of the law of war since at least the Civil War,” I’m reasonably optimistic that neither Crawford nor the Congress will prevail in their arguments. Even so, it remains disgraceful that Mohammed Kamin is still waiting for justice, nearly six and a half years since his capture, and, more worryingly, that Ahmed al-Darbi, who, unlike Kamin, is clearly regarded as a significant prisoner, is still no closer than he was six and a half years ago to establishing whether he will ever be allowed to address, in a fair and open hearing, his claims that he was tortured in Bagram and Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The Public Record.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009).

Declaration of Ahmed Al Darbi, July 1, 2009

Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746, I certify that the following is true and correct to the best of my knowledge:

INTRODUCTION

1. My name is Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Al Darbi.

2. I am a Saudi national who has been imprisoned at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (“Guantánamo”) for nearly six years. The U.S. military has assigned me Internment Serial Number (“ISN”) 768 at Guantánamo.

3. In June 2002, I traveled by air from Dubai, United Arab Emirates to Baku, Azerbaijan. While I was at customs in the Baku airport, waiting to be processed for entry, I was taken into custody by local Azerbaijani authorities. I did not know why Azerbaijani authorities apprehended me and I had no reason to know that they would. I was held in Azerbaijani custody for about two months.

4. In August 2002, the Azerbaijani authorities turned me over to U.S. agents. These agents [REDACTED]. They then blindfolded me, wrapped their arms around my neck in a way that strangled me, and cursed at me. [REDACTED], and somebody else kept saying, “fuck you” in my ear. I was terrified and feared for my life, because I did not know who had seized me, which government’s custody I was in, or where they were taking me. They did not tell me where we were going.

5. I was eventually taken to a place that I now know was Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan (“Bagram”). I was imprisoned at Bagram for about eight months. At Bagram, my detainee number was 264.

6. In late March 2003, I was transferred to Guantánamo.

BAGRAM

Treatment and interrogations during the first two weeks at Bagram

7. During about the first two weeks at Bagram, I was kept in complete isolation, and I did not even know I was in Afghanistan.

8. U.S. agents began interrogating me on my second day at Bagram. These interrogations took place in a room different from the isolation cell where I was held the rest of the time.

9. While I was questioned, I was kept for many hours in painful positions. For example, I would be forced to kneel with my hands cuffed above my head, often through the night, so that I was not allowed to sleep. This position caused very sharp pain in my knee-caps. If my hands began to fall or I tried to stretch to relieve the pain in my back while I knelt, the interrogators kicked me in the back.

10. Sometimes I was also forced to lean against a wall with my forehead pressing against the wall and my hands shackled behind my back, but with my feet away from the wall. In this position, all my weight rested on my forehead. I had to hold this position for hours. This hurt my head and neck. It was impossible to sleep in this position.

11. I was often hooded during these interrogations. The hood they used had a sort of rope or drawstring that they would pull tight around my neck. The darkness, combined with little sleep, would leave me disoriented.

12. During these interrogations, they would ask me repeatedly about Osama Bin Laden and his whereabouts. Of course, I knew nothing about this.

13. When I was not being interrogated in an interrogation room, I was put in an isolation cell where the temperature was high and the light was kept brightly lit most of the time. Often they also would blast loud music into my cell.

14. During these first two weeks, I hardly slept at all. I was purposely kept awake much of the time, and it seemed that every time I started to fall asleep, they would hit me to keep me awake. Also, during that period, I was not allowed to pray.

15. I was not allowed to use a normal restroom during this time. Instead, [REDACTED]. The only thing that helped this problem was that I often did not eat much. I was not given much food at the time and the food they did give me was inedible, so I didn’t have very much in my stomach. Due to the constant strain and stress this situation placed on me, [REDACTED].

16. The U.S. military guards and interrogators also took many photographs of me that humiliated me. [REDACTED] and take off my hood so that I could see what was going on, and so that I would be recognizable. There would be several U.S. agents, male and female, standing around when these photographs were taken.

17. After approximately the first two weeks, I was taken out of isolation. I was moved to a cage attached to a holding pen for other prisoners. This was a small cage surrounded by fencing and razor wire. The cages doubled as a passageway for the guards between the general holding pens and a public area or walkway in front of the cages. From what I remember, there were six holding pens in total, and each one connected to a cage that was used to isolate and suspend detainees by the arms. There were signs outside the holding pens displaying the names New York, Pennsylvania and Nairobi, which I understood to be the sites of different terrorist attacks after one of the guards, in a state of agitation and rage, once shouted at me, “your brothers did this!” as he pushed me from behind.

18. I was hooded or goggled for much of this time. I recall that there was a whiteboard outside of the cage, where the numbers assigned to me and other detainees were recorded in red, green and blue. Next to the numbers were symbols indicating what techniques were to be used on us. Next to the whiteboard was another board, where they hung baseball bats, chains, cuffs, hoods, and other instruments guards would use on the prisoners at Bagram.

19. Much of the time I was in this cage, U.S. military personnel shackled my hands above my head to the upper part of the cage’s door, so that I would swing with the gate as it opened and shut. Sometimes, military personnel would cuff my hands to the gate outstretched in different directions so that my back would be twisted, almost horizontal. This was very painful. Frequently, U.S. personnel beat me while I was hanging in the cage.

20. Occasionally, the guards would unlock the cuffs and tell me I could sleep. To me it felt like they only allowed me to sleep once or twice a week, but I do not know for certain. I do know that I was very sleep-deprived at this time. After what felt like a short time of sleep to me, the guards would wake me abruptly by rushing in as a group, shouting loudly, and they would then hang me from the top of the cage’s gate by my wrists again.

21. I had to insist to be allowed to use the restroom. The guards and interrogators would not always release me, and I often could not relieve myself because of how long I had gone without relieving myself, which caused me sharp pains. When I was allowed to use the restroom, I had to remain completely shackled.

Interrogations during the next three months at Bagram

22. After the first two weeks, approximately, for about the next three months at Bagram, the interrogations that began on my second day at Bagram continued and became more abusive. U.S. personnel would play blaring music, shine bright lights in my eyes, kick me, and drag me around the room. Some kneed me in the chest, stomach and genitals and threw me against the wall. I was often thrown to the ground and then pulled around the room by my handcuffs.

23. Other times a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered. Also, I was sometimes forced to hold a chair over my head for a long period of time during interrogations.

24. On several occasions, the U.S. agents sprayed water on my face and then blew a powder that I think was pepper onto me. The water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run. At other times hairs were ripped from my chest and my head by the U.S. agents. Other times agents blew cigarette smoke in my face and they would also throw their cigarette butts at me along with the full contents of the trash can.

25. Sometimes, during interrogations, U.S. personnel would throw me to the ground and make me lie on my stomach, with my arms outstretched above my head. I remember that a U.S. military guard or interrogator by the name of Damien Corsetti was often present during my interrogations. Corsetti was a big, heavy man and he had a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his left arm. He sometimes stepped on my handcuffs while I was lying on the floor with my arms above my head. This caused my handcuffs to tighten painfully around my wrists. These particular handcuffs were not of the “double-lock” sort that could not be tightened past a given point.

26. There are a few incidents that occurred only once but that I remember very well because they were so shocking to me. During one interrogation, a U.S. agent that I recall was Corsetti kneeled on my chest. Corsetti was a big, heavy man. He put his knees on my chest and pressed down on me with all his weight. I couldn’t breathe, and he stayed on me for so long that I thought I was going to die. Another guard or interrogator pulled him off me because I stopped breathing.

27. Another time, about a month after my transfer to Bagram, I was suspended in the cage, and a guard or interrogator called me [REDACTED]. There was a U.S. military guard in the cage who pressed his finger hard into the soft flesh under my jaw. I started to choke, and afterwards the area swelled badly.

28. There are other things that happened to me during these interrogations that I do not wish to describe in a document that might become public. I do not want my family to know the details about what happened to me [REDACTED].

29. [REDACTED]. The U.S. agents also threatened to send me to Israeli, Egyptian, or Afghan jails for torture and rape.

30. [REDACTED].

31. [REDACTED].

32. [REDACTED].

33. [REDACTED].

34. [REDACTED].

35. These are only some of the humiliating things that were done to me. I was frightened, and there were times I wished I would die. I felt that anything could happen to me and that everything was out of control. During this time the interrogators took my “confessions,” pressuring me into making false statements about myself and others.

36. The military guards and interrogators would show me pictures of people, and told me I must identify them and confess things about them. After they tortured me, I would say what they wanted me to say. I was fed detailed statements and names of individuals to whom I was to attribute certain activities.

37. The military guards and interrogators told me that I had to repeat these same statements to other interrogators, and threatened to continue abusing me — or to make it even worse — if I did not cooperate. I found out that these “other interrogators” were FBI interrogators, because they identified themselves. After I had been interrogated and tortured by the military guards and interrogators, they would let the FBI interrogators into the room. The FBI interrogators would interrogate me without the military guards and interrogators. They would ask for the same details that I had discussed with the military interrogators and guards. I tried to repeat the same statements, because I was afraid of the threats made by the military guards and interrogators. I never signed anything at Bagram.

38. I remember that I usually spoke to the same three FBI interrogators. They identified themselves as “Tom,” “Jerry,” and there was third one whose name I cannot remember, but those were not their real names anyway. Tom was tall, Jerry was short; both were young, white males.

39. I do not think the FBI interrogators were present during the interrogations by the U.S. military interrogators or guards, or when the torture was happening. Also, I do not think the military guards and interrogators were present during the interrogations by the FBI. But the military interrogators continued to abuse me during the time I was being interrogated by the FBI — even though I did what the military guards and interrogators told me to do and tried to repeat statements the military guards and interrogators had fed me to the FBI.

40. Eventually, the FBI interrogators stopped questioning me. I was then moved to the communal holding pen with the other prisoners.

Hard labor at Bagram

41. I also was forced to perform degrading, hard labor at Bagram, in full view of the other detainees and the guards.

42. Many mornings I had to replace the full port-a-potty buckets with empty buckets. I had to do this in front of everybody. [REDACTED]. Once, when I complained that I could not change the port-a-potty while shackled, a guard punched me in the side, and kept hitting me even after I was on the floor. Other U.S. military personnel came over and one of them choked me while the other punched me in the kidneys and ribs.

43. Often I was forced to sweep the floor in the public, walkway area. Once, I was forced to scrub the entire floor using only a toothbrush [REDACTED].

44. I was also forced to carry boxes filled with water bottles while my hands were cuffed together. I could carry two boxes but the guards often tried to make me carry as many as four, and would hit me when I struggled. This labor caused me sciatic pain and back pain for several years.

Witnessing the abuse of Dilawar

45. When I was in the communal holding pen, an Afghan prisoner by the name of Dilawar was shackled in a hanging position in the cage adjacent to my pen. I remember that this was the same cage where I had been suspended.

46. I recall that Dilawar had been hanging hooded for about two days and was screaming and moaning. A U.S. guard told Dilawar that he would release him if he would clean the floor. I spoke a little Pashto and some English, so the guard ordered me to translate this instruction for Dilawar. I was then ordered to clean the floor with him. After we were done, the guard chained Dilawar to the top of the cage once more. Dilawar started screaming again.

47. Then the next shift of guards came on. They ordered Dilawar to stop screaming. They then brought a shorter chain and used it to suspend him wholly off the floor by his wrists. Dilawar moved his body only slightly and that is when the guards began beating him.

48. At first two guards were beating Dilawar, kneeing him in the legs and punching him in the chest as he was suspended in the cage. They then moved him to the walkway area, outside the cage, and several guards beat him. By this point, Dilawar had stopped moving or crying. I witnessed this entire event.

49. Dilawar was then moved somewhere out of my sight. Days later, I heard Dilawar had died. This made me fearful that I would meet the same fate.

GUANTÁNAMO

50. On or about March 23, 2003, I was moved to Guantánamo. Once there, I was kept in solitary confinement for two months. I was held in Camp Delta, Camp 2, Oscar Block.

51. Painfully loud music was often played in my cell. Sometimes they played a repetitive song composed of what sounded like a cat’s meow. It was very hard to sleep because the cells were chilled to extremely cold temperatures, and there was extremely bright lighting and also the loud music.

52. Sometimes, U.S. personnel would throw my Koran to the ground, and they would scatter gruesome photos of bloodied and mutilated bodies on the ground.

Interrogations at Guantánamo

53. I remember that I was interrogated every day for what seemed like five to six hours, and sometimes also at night, from the middle of the night until dawn. The interrogation rooms stank of urine.

54. During the interrogations, they did not let me go to the restroom to relieve myself, [REDACTED].

55. The interrogations at Guantánamo were conducted mostly by the FBI interrogators. Tom, the FBI interrogator who had questioned me at Bagram, was the first who interrogated me in Guantánamo, as I recall. I remember that he told me that if I did not stick with my Bagram confessions, I would not “escape Bagram.” I was told that if I did not cooperate, I would be sentenced to death and executed, or that I would be tortured, raped, and sexually abused in either Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo, or sent back to Bagram or to other countries.

56. Shortly after I arrived at Guantánamo, Tom asked me to sign a written statement but I refused to sign the statement.

57. In or about April or May 2003, while I was still in solitary confinement, the FBI interrogators again told me to sign a written statement. Tom told me that prison authorities could send me to Camp X-Ray where horrible things could happen to me or send me to another country, such as Egypt or Israel, where people would make me sign the statement. I was scared that the abuse I suffered at Bagram would be renewed at Guantánamo or elsewhere, or that I might be sent back to Bagram.

58. The interrogators at Bagram and Guantánamo fed me particular details in my statements and forced me to identify individuals based on photographs or to ascribe to those individuals certain conduct. Although I never signed any written statements, I made numerous false statements to the interrogators at Bagram and Guantánamo because of the abuse and coercion I suffered.

CONTINUING EFFECTS OF TORTURE

59. To this day, I frequently feel anxious, depressed and worried. I feel not quite right, not quite like myself. I have recurring nightmares of the U.S. guards and interrogators from Bagram chasing me. Whenever anybody wakes me, I wake up screaming in shock and panic. I have headaches. I feel that I am emotionally unstable, and I know that I go through personality changes and mood swings, which were not typical for me before I came into U.S. custody. Sometimes I lose physical control.

60. I feel that I need mental health counseling, but I do not feel comfortable talking with the mental health or medical personnel here at Guantánamo. They have been complicit in the torture: I have seen and heard that they put patients in garments that leave them practically nude, that they forcibly medicate patients, and that they prescribe addictive drugs to patients so that interrogators can manipulate those men during interrogations. I would prefer an independent mental health expert identified by my attorney and defense counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

RETURNING TO SAUDI ARABIA

61. If I am released, I would like to go home to Saudi Arabia and move on with my life. I want to put this chapter behind me, find work, and take care of my wife and two children. My daughter is nine years old now and my son is seven. I have never met my son. I have already missed many years of their lives. Also, my parents are elderly and I have heard that my father is sick. I would like to join my brothers and sisters in taking care of them in their old days.

62. Of course, I am willing to participate in the Saudi reintegration program for repatriated detainees and abide by its rules and conditions upon my return home.

I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct.

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
Executed on this 1 day of July, 2009

(signed)
Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Al Darbi

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, and if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009) and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Since the last blowout at Guantánamo on December 8, when dozens of reporters and relatives of victims of the 9/11 attacks watched as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and his alleged co-conspirators tried — and failed — to plead guilty so that they could die martyr’s deaths, few observers have witnessed the Commissions go through the motions in the Bush administration’s last days, like a preprogrammed machine, unaware that major changes are afoot, or, less charitably, like a decapitated chicken on its last round of the farmyard.

“We serve the sitting president and will continue to do so until the president-elect is inaugurated, at which time we will implement whatever policies are enacted by the next president,” Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, explained last month.

An ignoble history

The Military Commissions have rarely attracted the media attention that a novel, flagship program to try “terror suspects” should have attracted, even though the administration has persistently tried to sell Guantánamo as a place full of the world’s toughest terrorists, rather than what it really is: a place where a few dozen members of a small, fanatical and deeply secretive terror network have been vastly outnumbered by Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11 and had no connection to al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, or completely innocent men, sold for bounty payments by the United States’ opportunistic allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The rot was there from the beginning, as military defense lawyers, appointed by the government, realized to their horror that the Military Commissions were designed to secure convictions and to facilitate the use of evidence obtained through torture. The entire system should have died in June 2006, when the Supreme Court ruled it illegal, but when Congress revived the monster that fall, its new-found legitimacy was soon punctured when the first prisoner to face a trial, the Australian David Hicks, was repatriated in May 2007 following a plea bargain negotiated by Vice President Dick Cheney as a political favor to his ailing ally, Prime Minister John Howard.

Such cynicism has always been readily apparent when it comes to releasing prisoners from the general population, but for the first trial by Military Commission to be undermined in such a manner appeared to take hypocrisy to a new level, even though a trial, had it proceeded, would have been hard-pushed to present Hicks as a terrorist. Hyperbole of this kind was possible in the early days of the “War on Terror,” when the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh received a 20-year sentence, but as John Howard found to his chagrin, by 2007 the public was less willing to indulge such hyperbole. As I discovered while writing The Guantánamo Files, far from being caught on the battlefield, Hicks was actually betrayed by an Afghan van driver as he fled northern Afghanistan, trying in vain to hide his blue eyes and blond hair, and was then brutalized mercilessly in US hands.

In the last seven months, as the Bush administration sought to construct a “War on Terror” legacy that would not consist solely of hubris and ridicule, the pressure on the Commissions to press ahead with trials intensified. To a small degree, the ploy was successful. The arraignment and pre-trial hearings of KSM et al. attracted widespread attention in June, September and December, and the trial of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, also drew a flurry of interest in the summer — although this was largely mitigated when Hamdan received an extraordinarily lenient sentence (freeing him by the end of the year), which effectively destroyed Guantánamo’s rationale.

There was further bad news in September, when, as a result of his crusading pro-prosecution bias, the Commissions’ legal adviser, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, was sacked after being disqualified by three military judges, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a prosecutor and a previously staunch supporter of the regime, resigned after seeking advice from a Jesuit peace activist, and left cursing the administration for its deliberate suppression of evidence vital to the defense in the case of the Afghan prisoner Mohamed Jawad. Although Jawad was accused of a grenade attack on a jeep containing US soldiers, it transpired that he was a juvenile when seized, was drugged at the time of the attack by the insurgents who had tricked him into being recruited, and had been tortured in Afghan custody until he confessed. One of Vandeveld’s discoveries was that two other men, neither of whom is held at Guantánamo, had also confessed to the attack.

However, while these stories were widely reported — and there was also sporadic interest in the baleful saga of the Canadian Omar Khadr, the other juvenile facing a trial by Military Commission — the media as a whole (with the valiant exceptions of the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, the Toronto Star’s Michelle Shephard and Jane Sutton of Reuters) showed little appetite for covering the cases of the other 16 prisoners put forward for trial. This ability to find almost anything else more newsworthy was aptly demonstrated on the eve of the Presidential election when a prisoner named Ali Hamza al-Bahlul received a life sentence — ostensibly to be served in Guantánamo in total isolation — after a one-sided show trial in which, under the Commissions’ deeply flawed rules, he had been allowed to mount no defense whatsoever.

Derailing the cases of Mohamed Jawad and Omar Khadr

Just two days after the last appearance of the KSM circus, when most of the reporters had gone home, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the judge in Mohamed Jawad’s case, “indefinitely delayed” Jawad’s trial, as Jane Sutton explained. The trial had been scheduled to begin on January 5, but Henley gave the prosecution an unspecified amount of time to work out how to appeal his earlier decision to exclude the confession obtained by the Afghan authorities shortly after Jawad’s capture in Kabul in December 2002, because it was “obtained through death threats that constituted torture,” and another confession, which he made to US interrogators the following day, because that too was the “fruit of that torture.” Whether the prosecution can come up with any further evidence is doubtful. As Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained in November, Jawad’s confession to Afghan officials was “among the most important evidence for his upcoming war crimes trial.” Vandeveld added, “To me, the case is not only eviscerated, it is now impossible to prosecute with any credibility.”

Two days later, on December 12, there was a further shock in the case of Omar Khadr. Although the US government has always claimed that Khadr was responsible for throwing a grenade that killed US Sgt. Christopher Speer during the firefight that led to Khadr’s capture in Afghanistan in July 2002, it was revealed in November 2007 — just 36 hours before Khadr’s trial was supposed to begin — that a previously undisclosed “US government employee,” who was an eye-witness to the gunfight, had “potentially exculpatory evidence” proving that another man was alive at the time, and that this other man may have thrown the grenade.

At another pre-trial hearing in March last year, Khadr’s military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, revealed that the report of the circumstances that led to Khadr’s capture, written by an officer identified only as “Lt. Col. W.,” had been altered after the event to implicate Khadr, and on December 12 another witness, identified only as “Soldier No. 2,” produced further evidence indicating that Khadr could not have thrown the grenade, explaining, as Michelle Shephard described it, that the teenager “was buried under rubble from a collapsed roof before he was captured.”

In a motion submitted by Khadr’s lawyers, the soldier explained that he “thought he was standing on a ‘trap door’ because the ground did not seem solid.” He then “bent down to move the brush away to see what was beneath him and discovered that he was standing on a person; and that Mr. Khadr appeared to be ‘acting dead.’” Speaking to reporters, Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler explained that photographs taken at the scene, which were not shown to observers of the trial proceedings, “show a pile of rubble from the collapsed roof, and then show the debris moved aside to reveal Khadr lying facedown in the dirt,” which “make it abundantly clear Omar Khadr could not have thrown the hand grenade that killed 1st Sgt. Speer.”

A new chief judge

As prosecutors vowed to press ahead with Khadr’s trial on January 26, brushing off the defense team’s perennial cry that juveniles should not be prosecuted for war crimes, and apparently secure that they have other evidence of Khadr making and planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan which will prove that he “knowingly” carried out crimes, the next example of the Commissions’ blinkered view of reality came on December 15, when the Pentagon announced that Army Col. James Pohl, who had presided over the courts martial of several soldiers in the Abu Ghraib scandal, had been appointed as the new chief judge.

Pohl replaced Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann (whose retirement plans had enabled KSM to mock him for his lack of commitment in September), and had already established himself as an independent-minded judge at Guantánamo. As Carol Rosenberg explained, in March, he “sternly informed” prosecutors in the case of Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan and accused of “plotting a never-realized attack on an unnamed ship in the Strait of Hormuz,” that defense lawyers “should have easy access to their clients.” Lawyers for the 33-year old father of two maintain that al-Darbi was tortured in US custody and that the government’s allegations are reliant on 119 self-incriminating statements.

Col. Pohl also refused to endorse a request from prison commanders to approve violent “Forced Cell Extractions” when prisoners refused to come to the courtroom, and on his first day in his new job, at a pre-trial hearing for al-Darbi, allowed the Saudi to make an appeal to Barack Obama. “Waving a copy of an American Civil Liberties Union poster with a pensive Obama and his campaign’s closure pledge on it,” as Rosenberg explained, al-Darbi said, “I hope this location will be closed as he promised. He will earn back the legitimacy the United States has lost as a world leader.”

This was the last hearing before the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, when final pre-trial hearings are supposed to begin in Omar Khadr’s case, and a mental competency hearing is scheduled for alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, but although Col. Pohl acknowledged that he was “aware that on Jan. 20 there will be a new commander-in-chief, which may or may not impact on these proceedings,” he advised everyone connected with the Commissions to stay focused “unless and until a competent authority tells us not to.”

While this was a fair warning, Col. Pohl’s awareness of political realities was not reflected elsewhere in the Pentagon, nor, I suspect, in the Office of the Vice President, where, as I explained in my article in October that also looked at the sacking of Brig. Gen. Hartmann and the resignation of Lt. Col. Vandeveld, the architects of the Commissions — Dick Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington — seem determined to continue playing out their deranged fantasies until the moment they leave office.

A new prisoner is charged: the story of Tarek El-Sawah

On December 16, just as three Bosnian Algerians flew home from Guantánamo, after Judge Richard Leon, a Bush appointee, threw their cases out of his habeas court for lack of evidence, the Pentagon announced that another Bosnian prisoner, Tarek El-Sawah (aka Tariq al-Sawah), a 51-year old originally from Egypt, was the 27th prisoner to be put forward for trial by Military Commission. The Pentagon also reinstated the charges (PDF) against the Sudanese prisoner Noor Uthman Muhammed, allegedly the deputy emir of the Khaldan training camp, which had been dropped in October.

In El-Sawah’s charge sheet (PDF), in which he was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, it was alleged that, between October 2000 and November 2001, he had trained at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before the 9/11 attacks), had taught “the fundamentals of how to use explosives to members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban and others,” and had “developed and successfully tested a remote controlled limpet mine for use against US warships” at the Tarnak farms training camp, which he had undertaken “at the direction of a member of al-Qaeda’s Shura Council.” It was also alleged that he had written a 400-page manual on bomb-making, and had fought against US and coalition forces in the Tora Bora mountains, until he was wounded and captured.

How much truth there is to these charges is difficult to ascertain. El-Sawah was certainly a militant, but in 2004, at his only appearance before a tribunal at Guantánamo, there was no mention of the bomb-making manual or the limpet mine, and he insisted that both his military commitment — and the training he briefly gave to others in August 2001 — was directed exclusively at the Northern Alliance.

El-Sawah explained that he had traveled to Bosnia as an aid worker in 1992, had married a Bosnian woman and had only gone to Afghanistan to see if it was suitable place to take his family. Once there, however, he clearly succumbed to the most virulent Taliban propaganda against Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated by al-Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001. He told his tribunal, “One time in a jihad, Massoud killed about 10,000 Muslims in an hour.” Reiterating that it was his intention solely to support those who were being oppressed by the Northern Alliance, he said, “There are no rules in the United States to prevent it if you want to fight for religion. There are no rules to direct me not to defend people.” He also pointed out that he went to Afghanistan to fight the Northern Alliance before 9/11, when it was no business of the Americans, and asked, “If Massoud and Dostum are American allies, they were not an alliance before September 11th, were they?”

El-Sawah also denied an allegation that he had admitted being a member of al-Qaeda, denied an allegation that he met Osama bin Laden, saying that he saw him once at a meeting of about 250 people, but had no opportunity to actually meet him, and also denied an allegation that he had engaged in hostilities against the United States. In a comment that cut to the heart of what was essentially a proxy war, fought by Afghans with US air support, he said, “There was no fighting against Americans. If there were any American soldiers saying they were fighting in Afghanistan, bring them here to me and show the evidence.”

He also explained that he was sold for money, telling his tribunal, “because the Americans offered $5,000 to anyone who captured us, they [the Northern Alliance] were fighting us and they kept us alive to get the $5,000,” and gave a poignant description of his departure from Jalalabad into the Tora Bora mountains, in which he emphasized that the war in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban had triggered an exodus of all kinds of people, not just al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. “We left everything,” he said. “We were moving through mountains and caves; there were hundreds of families, children, women and people were climbing through the mountains. What were we to do? Some people were escaping from other fronts, near Jalalabad and Kabul. There were too many people there.”

Charges referred in the case of torture victim Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri

The administration’s final gesture, before the Christmas break, was for Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ “Convening Authority” — and a close friend of both Dick Cheney and David Addington — to confirm the charges that were filed last July against Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri. A Saudi, and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, al-Nashiri, who was seized in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, was charged for his alleged role in the attacks on the USS The Sullivans and the USS Cole in 2000, and the French tanker Limburg in 2002.

Al-Nashiri faces the death penalty if convicted, although his trial, should it proceed, will undoubtedly be complicated by the fact that he is one of three “high-value detainees” whom CIA director Michael Hayden admitted last February had been subjected to waterboarding in secret CIA custody. In his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, al-Nashiri made a point of mentioning that he had made up false confessions after being tortured. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

Charges dropped against Abdul Ghani, a minor Afghan insurgent

On the same day that the charges against al-Nashiri were confirmed, there was better news for Abdul Ghani, an Afghan prisoner put forward for trial at the end of July. Without providing any explanation, Susan Crawford dismissed the charges “without prejudice,” which meant, as the Pentagon explained, “that the government has the option of charging Ghani at a later date,” but it would surely be better for the 36-year old to sent back to Afghanistan instead, where the Afghan authorities can work out if he actually constitutes a threat.

At best a minor Afghan insurgent, Ghani was charged with firing rockets at US forces, planting “land mines and other explosive devices on more than one occasion for use against US and coalition forces,” attacking Afghan soldiers, and “accept[ing] monetary payments, including payment from al-Qaeda and others known and unknown, to commit attacks on US forces and bases.” As I wrote at the time, however, “Apart from the inclusion of the magic words ‘al-Qaeda,’ there was nothing in Abdul Ghani’s charge sheet to indicate that he should find himself in the same trial system as those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the African embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, or even, in fact, that he should have been sent to Guantánamo at all.”

Time for change

With less than two weeks until Dick Cheney and David Addington are obliged to leave the White House, when a new broom will also no doubt sweep the corridors of the Pentagon, it remains possible that the architects of the Commissions will indulge in a final round of last-minute tinkering, hoping that their failed experiment will live on, but for the rest of us, Barack Obama’s inauguration cannot come soon enough, nor, indeed, can the fulfillment of a promise that he made in August 2007:

As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists … The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example to the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

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

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

POSTSCRIPT: On January 14, the Miami Herald reported that Noor Uthman Muhammed had been arraigned, and that the Office of Military Commissions had filed new charges against Ghassan al-Sharbi, Jabran al-Qahtani and Sufyian Barhoumi, whose charges, like those against Muhammed, had been dropped in November. What happened at the arriagnment was not noted, but the Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg noted that, bizarrely, the Defense Department “airlifted TV journalists from China Central TV, The Times of London and Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo Daily” into the prison for the arraignment.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

His case is enormously significant, as I explained in a recent article, The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, because it involved a plea bargain negotiated by Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ newly-appointed Convening Authority (the overseer of the trial system), which completely sidelined the prosecutors — and in particular, the chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who later resigned, citing political interference in the process and a desire on the part of those directing the trials to allow the use of evidence obtained through torture. Crawford, a protégée of Dick Cheney and a close friend of Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington (the prime architect of the administration’s post-9/11 flight from the law) negotiated the plea in March 2007 as a favor to Australian Premier John Howard, following a visit from Cheney. In exchange for admitting to providing “material support for terrorism,” and dropping well-documented claims that he was abused in US custody, Hicks received a nine-month sentence, most of which was served in Australia.

2. Salim Hamdan. One of a pool of seven drivers for Osama bin Laden, the Yemeni — a father with two young daughters — was, like many of the prisoners, charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. After a two-week trial this summer, which was the Commissions’ first real test, a military jury cleared him of the conspiracy charge and gave him a five-and-a-half year sentence on the lesser charge of supporting terrorism. The judge, Capt. Keith Allred, then allowed credit for time served, which means that Hamdan’s sentence will be completed by the end of the year.

Critics of the system refused to accept the trial as legitimate (in particular, because the gray area regarding the admissibility of coerced evidence was never adequately addressed), but were delighted with the result. The government, however, which had been pressing for a 30-year sentence, was livid. After noting that Hamdan could still be held as an “enemy combatant” after his sentence is over (a notion which would surely shame all but the most hardened dictators), the Defense Department resorted to claiming that Allred was not entitled to reduce Hamdan’s sentence for time served, and called for the jury to be reconvened. Allred dismissed these claims in a terse judgment on October 30, when, having “read the filings and legal citations, as well as reviewing the sentencing hearing transcript” (as the Wall Street Journal explained), he declared, simply, “The prosecution motion to reconsider, reassemble, reinstruct and re-announce a sentence is denied.”

3. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. Al-Bahlul’s trial — the second US “war crimes” trial since the Second World War — took place at Guantánamo in the week before the Presidential election. Unlike Salim Hamdan’s trial, however, in which justice could at least be seen to be done (even if it was refracted through a dark mirror of unspoken abuse), al-Bahlul, a Yemeni accused of producing videos for al-Qaeda and serving as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, refused to mount a defense, and his lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, respected his client’s wishes, and also refused to speak. As I pointed out in a recent article, Frakt was obliged to remain silent because of issues of compelled representation, which could lead to lawyers being punished in the real world outside Guantánamo for representing an unwilling client. As a result, al-Bahlul’s trial highlighted another grave problem with the Commissions: if a prisoner wished to represent himself, this was acceptable, but if he boycotted the proceedings entirely, his trial proceeded as a one-sided show trial.

On November 3, the military jury gave al-Bahlul a life sentence, but without a case for the defense, the administration was allowed to sidestep the question of al-Bahlul’s alleged torture in US custody, and was also allowed to ignore Maj. Frakt’s assertion, made before the trial began, that al-Bahlul “was not an operational combatant,” “had no role in planning terrorist activities,” and “did not engage in terrorist activities.” As I wrote at the time, “The administration will crow that it has achieved a significant victory in the ‘War on Terror,’ but al-Bahlul’s guilt should have been confirmed in a federal courtroom, where he would not have been able to score a propaganda victory for al-Qaeda by being convicted in a one-sided trial.”

4. Omar Khadr. A Canadian, Omar Khadr was just 15 years old when he was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, and, as a juvenile, should therefore have been rehabilitated rather then punished, according to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict). He is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier, although the disclosure of previously suppressed evidence in the last year indicates that another man threw the grenade. Because of obstruction by the prosecution, Khadr’s trial has been repeatedly delayed, and is now scheduled to begin on January 26, 2009, five days into the new US administration.

At the time of writing, there are hopes that the Canadian government will be obliged to demand his return to Canada, after it was revealed, in a Canadian court, that the government knew about his torture in Guantánamo and that their repeated claims that they had received assurances from the US authorities that he was being treated humanely were untrue. His civilian lawyer, Nate Whitling, told the court, “I don’t want to use the word ‘lie,’ but it was a demonstratively false statement that was made to the Canadian public.”

5. Mohamed Jawad. An Afghan, who was just 16 or 17 years old at the time of his capture, Jawad is accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in December 2002, although he has always claimed that Afghan police obtained his “confession” through torture.

In the last month, Jawad’s case has threatened the legitimacy of the entire Commission process, after his prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned. He explained that the system was designed to prevent the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense, and described how evidence proving that Jawad was a juvenile, that he was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged before the attack, and that two other men had confessed to the crime, had been deliberately suppressed. Terrified that Vandeveld has more damaging revelations, the administration recently dropped the charges against five other prisoners — Noor Uthman Muhammed, Ghassan al-Sharbi, Jabran al-Qahtani, Sufyian Barhoumi and Binyam Mohamed — for whom Vandeveld was the prosecutor. The government added that it intended to refile charges against the five men in November, but did not explain how it intended to silence Vandeveld indefinitely.

All five were reportedly connected with Abu Zubaydah (photo, left), a training camp facilitator who is regarded by the US administration as a senior al-Qaeda operative, even though the FBI regards him only as a minor logistician with a personality disorder. The government has not explained why Zubaydah has not been charged, but in May it charged Muhammed, a Sudanese prisoner, with serving as the deputy emir and a weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, even though Muhammed has insisted that Khaldan had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In June, al-Sharbi and al-Qahtani (both Saudis) and Barhoumi (an Algerian) were charged with various plots involving explosives, and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose lawyers have been engaged in a transatlantic struggle to secure evidence relating to the two years he spent being tortured in Morocco and in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, was charged with plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city (the same non-existent plot that was used to hold US citizen Jose Padilla for three and a half years as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland).

At the time of writing, the judge in Jawad’s case, Army Col. Stephen Henley, moved one step closer to dismissing the case by ruling that his “confession,” obtained in Afghan custody, was inadmissible, because it had been extracted through the use of torture (confirming Jawad’s repeated claims). As the Miami Herald reported, Henley found that there was “reason to believe Jawad was under the influence of drugs at the time of his capture and forced confession,” and also “accepted the accused’s account of how he was threatened, while armed senior Afghan officials allied with US forces watched his interrogation.” He stated that he believed Jawad’s account of an interrogator telling him, “You will be killed if you do not confess to the grenade attack. We will arrest your family and kill them if you do not confess.” He also made a point of stating that he was accepting Jawad’s account because the government had failed to provide “timely disclosure of evidence” for his trial, which is scheduled to begin on January 5, 2009.

Noting that Henley was explicitly rejecting the administration’s notorious attempts to redefine torture, Maj. David Frakt, Jawad’s tenacious defense attorney, congratulated the judge for “adopting a traditional legal definition of torture, rather than making one up,” and Lt. Col. Vandeveld also spoke out, telling the Associated Press that Jawad’s “confession” to Afghan officials was “among the most important evidence for his upcoming war crimes trial,” and adding, “To me, the case is not only eviscerated, it is now impossible to prosecute with any credibility.”

6. Ahmed al-Darbi. A Saudi, who is accused of plotting attacks on shipping for al-Qaeda, al-Darbi was kidnapped in Azerbaijan and rendered to Guantánamo in 2002, via the US prison at Bagram airbase, where he has claimed that he was severely abused. At his arraignment in April, he refused to take part in the Commissions, prompting his military-appointed lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, to comment that, in order to comply with established legal rules that prevent lawyers from representing clients who refuse their services (as in Ali Hamza al-Bahlul’s case), his role in al-Darbi’s forthcoming trial was now equivalent to that of a “potted plant.”

At a short pre-trial hearing in September, Broyles announced his resignation from the case, reiterating his complaints about compelled representation, and explaining that al-Darbi never came to trust him because “the attorney-client relationship is close to impossible to establish” in a system in which a lawyer is imposed on a prisoner, and that it was “compounded by the fact that counsel wear the same uniform as [the prisoner's] interrogators.” As a parting shot, Broyles was asked what he thought about the chief prosecutor’s claim that al-Darbi’s trial would be completed before the new administration takes office. “It’s not about timing,” he said, “it’s about doing justice.” While a new defense team was being arranged, al-Darbi was represented by his civilian lawyer, Ramzi Kassem.

7. Ibrahim al-Qosi. A Sudanese, who is accused of being a bodyguard and a driver for Osama bin Laden, and a quartermaster for al-Qaeda, al-Qosi was previously charged in the Commissions’ first aborted incarnation. In April, he also boycotted his pre-trial hearing, telling the judge, “I do not recognize the justice or the lawfulness of this court,” and adding, “What is happening in your courts is in fact a sham, which aims solely that the cases move at the pace of a turtle in order to gain some time to keep us in these boxes without any human or legal rights.” To the best of my knowledge, no date has yet been set for al-Qosi’s trial, even though it was one of the cases that the chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, wanted to see completed before the new administration takes office in January 2009.

8. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Reportedly the third most important figure in al-Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, KSM, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, and the four men described below are among the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 after being held for years in secret prisons run by the CIA. KSM confessed in his military tribunal in Guantánamo last year (convened to confirm that he was an “enemy combatant” who could be tried by Military Commission) that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” He is one of three “high-value detainees” whom CIA director Michael Hayden admitted had been subjected to waterboarding (a torture technique that involves controlled drowning) while held in CIA custody.

KSM and his co-defendants were charged in February, and arraigned in June. In September, at a pre-trial hearing, KSM dominated the proceedings. Taking advantage of the fact that the Military Commissions Act allows prisoners to represent themselves (but only if they are willing to mount a defense, as revealed in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul), he cheekily quizzed the judge, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, about his beliefs, as part of the voir dire process (which allows lawyers to question the judge’s impartiality), and enjoyed a media platform which, ironically, would not have been available to him if he was being prosecuted in a courtroom on the US mainland.

9. Ramzi bin al-Shibh. A Yemeni, and reportedly a friend of the 9/11 hijackers, who helped coordinate the attacks with KSM after he was unable to enter the United States to train as a pilot for the operation, bin al-Shibh was captured in Pakistan in September 2002. After being held in secret CIA custody for four years, he refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo, and only finally spoke at the pre-trial hearing in September. His lawyers, whom he is seeking to dismiss, are engaged in a legal tussle to secure an independent psychiatric evaluation of bin al-Shibh, who is receiving psychotropic drugs that are typically used for schizophrenia. At the hearing in September, Col. Kohlmann refused to allow the lawyers to visit Camp 7, the secret prison within Guantánamo where the “high-value detainees” are held, but on October 27 he relented, ruling that the lawyers should be allowed to visit the block to “inspect the defendant’s conditions of confinement as part of an inquiry into his mental health.”

10. Mustafa al-Hawsawi. A Saudi, who was captured with KSM, al-Hawsawi is accused of sourcing funding for the 9/11 attacks from Dubai. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted providing support for jihadists, including transferring money for some of the 9/11 hijackers, although he denied that he was a member of al-Qaeda. At the arraignment in June, it appeared that KSM and some of al-Hawsawi’s other co-defendants put pressure on him to refuse the services of his lawyer, Army Maj. Jon Jackson, but at the pre-trial hearing in September Jackson was still arguing his client’s corner. Explaining that his client “doesn’t understand about a quarter of the court proceedings because of incomprehensible interpretation,” he complained that the government had opposed a request for “transcripts of each day’s proceedings to be made available in English and Arabic so that they can go over each day’s events with their clients and make corrections for the record,” adding, “I could not believe my government would not provide transcripts in the native language of the accused that it wants to put to death.”

11. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. Also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, he is a nephew of KSM, and was captured in Pakistan with Walid bin Attash (see below) in April 2003. In his tribunal at Guantánamo last year, he admitted transferring money on behalf of some of the 9/11 hijackers, but insisted that he was a legitimate businessman, who regularly transferred money for Arabs, without knowing what it would be used for. At the arraignment and the pre-trial hearing, he has spoken little, but has demonstrated a firm command of English, and a desire to highlight the inadequacies of the system and his torture at the hands of US forces. At the arraignment, he responded to Col. Kohlmann’s assurance of his right to legal assistance by stating, “Everything that has happened here is unfair and unjust,” and added, referring specifically to the offer of free legal representation, “Since the first time I was arrested, I might have appreciated that. The government is talking about lawyers free of charge. The government also tortured me free of charge all these years.”

12. Walid bin Attash. A Saudi, who lost a leg in Afghanistan before 9/11, bin Attash stated in his tribunal at Guantánamo that he was the link between Osama bin Laden and the Nairobi cell during al-Qaeda’s African embassy bombings in 1998, and admitted that he played a major part in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, explaining that he “put together the plan for the operation for a year and a half,” and that he bought the explosives and the boat, and recruited the bombers. Like KSM and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, he has chosen to represent himself, although he is able to take advantage of the assistance of attorneys. In early October, Col. Kohlmann ruled that the men should be provided with “enough battery power to use their prison camp laptops [which contain the government’s unclassified evidence against them] 12 hours a day,” but stopped short of allowing them to “surf the Internet.”

Initially charged with the five men above, Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was reportedly intended to be the 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, but was refused entry into the United States by immigration officials, was tortured for several months at Guantánamo in late 2002 and early 2003. The charges against him were dropped in May, when the others were formally charged, either because evidence of his torture is admissible (whereas that obtained in secret prisons by the CIA is not), or because of a pronounced deterioration in his mental health since he was first charged, which led to a number of suicide attempts. It is unlikely that he will be charged again.

13. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. A Tanzanian, and one of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, Ghailani, who was captured after a gun battle in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, is accused of being a coordinator of the African embassy bombings, and of running a document-forging operation for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he described himself as a peripheral character in the African embassy bombings, who was duped by others around him, although he admitted forging documents for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

On October 22, Ghailani was formally arraigned. Judy Rabinovitz, an observer for the American Civil Liberties Union, reported that the occasion “was not particularly enlightening,” and that the judge “essentially followed a script,” advising Ghailani that he had “a right to obtain civilian counsel in addition to his assigned military counsel,” and “repeatedly asking [him] if he understood what was going on.” A trial date is scheduled for February 2009. As Rabinovitz also noted, Ghailani was indicted in the United States ten years ago for the same crimes with which he is now being charged, “and several of his co-defendants in the federal proceedings have already been convicted and sentenced,” whereas Ghailani faces a dubious trial following years of mistreatment in secret CIA custody.

14. Mohammed Kamin. An Afghan seized in 2003, Kamin’s case is one of the more farcical cases put forward for trial. He is not charged with harming, let alone killing US forces, and is, instead, accused of receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp.” For his arraignment in May, he refused to leave his cell, and was dragged to the court by guards, arriving with bruises, cuts and a swollen eye. The judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, explained that he was handcuffed and shackled because he had “attempted to spit on and bite one of the guards” on his way to the courtroom. Kamin then refused to be represented by a US military lawyer, and called the charges “a lie and a forgery.”

On October 23, a pre-trial hearing took place, although Kamin was not present. Judy Rabinovitz noted, “The officer who had been responsible for bringing him to court said that when she went to Kamin’s cell to notify him of the hearing, he ripped up the notice, began kicking and hitting the cell door and stated that he was innocent and it was President Bush who should be on trial.” She added that a prosecution motion “to compel Kamin’s presence by ‘forcibly extracting’ him from his cell was denied after defense lawyers objected on the grounds that it would put Kamin and others at risk,” although it was clear that the motion was denied in particular because the judge did not want a repeat of May’s proceedings.

The rest of the hearing was farcical. Rabinovitz explained that a mental status evaluation had found that Kamin was competent to participate in the proceedings, even though the two military doctors “had never met or observed the defendant,” and one, Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, “has been criticized for assisting in the interrogation process.” As with other cases — including that of Omar Khadr — the defense sought to appoint an independent psychiatric expert, a proposal which was vigorously opposed by the prosecution, and also raised the issue of obstruction, which was timely, in the wake of Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s resignation. Although they accused the intelligence agencies of a “systemic failure” to cooperate with their requests for discovery, and asked the judge to dismiss the case, “as a sanction for the government’s failure to comply with the discovery process in a timely manner, but also as a deterrent to the intelligence agencies that continue to drag their feet, jeopardizing the integrity of the process,” the judge refused.

15. Mohammed Hashim. Another minor Afghan insurgent (at best), Hashim was charged in June with spying for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and conducting a rocket attack on US forces. As with the case of Mohammed Kamin, it is difficult to work out how the administration construes these charges as “war crimes,” and in Hashim’s case this is complicated by the fact that his publicly available testimony — which is sprinkled with implausible references to 9/11, Osama bin Laden and links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — suggests that he either has mental health problems, or has dreamt up the biggest lies possible to secure more favorable treatment. Despite this, Susan Crawford approved the charges against Hashim on October 21.

16. Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri. A Saudi, and another of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, al-Nashiri, who was seized in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, was charged at the start of July for his alleged role in the attacks on the USS The Sullivans and the USS Cole in 2000, and the French tanker Limburg in 2002. What will undoubtedly complicate his case, should it come to trial, is the fact that he is one of three “high-value detainees” whom CIA director Michael Hayden admitted had been subjected to waterboarding in secret CIA custody, and in his tribunal at Guantánamo last year he made a point of mentioning that he had made up false confessions after being tortured. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

17. Abdul Ghani. Yet another minor Afghan insurgent, Ghani was charged at the end of July with firing rockets at US forces, planting “land mines and other explosive devices on more than one occasion for use against US and coalition forces,” attacking Afghan soldiers, and “accept[ing] monetary payments, including payment from al-Qaeda and others known and unknown, to commit attacks on US forces and bases.” As I wrote at the time, “Apart from the inclusion of the magic words ‘al-Qaeda,’ there was nothing in Abdul Ghani’s charge sheet to indicate that he should find himself in the same trial system as those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the African embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, or even, in fact, that he should have been sent to Guantánamo at all.”

18. Obaidullah. If anything, the case against Obaidullah, another Afghan, is even less explicable. In September, he was charged with hiding explosives, which he “knew or intended” would be “used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.” The charges were astonishing, because he was not actually accused of attacking US forces, and, according to the transcripts of his tribunal and review boards at Guantánamo, he made it clear that he had come up with false confessions while being threatened by US forces in a prison at the airport in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.

19. Faiz al-Kandari. The first of two Kuwaitis to be put forward for trial, al-Kandari was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism on October 22. Seized during the Tora Bora campaign in December 2001, when members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were holed up in the Afghan mountains near Pakistan, and numerous other civilians were attempting to flee the chaos of war, al-Kandari has always maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, but is accused or providing instruction to al-Qaeda members and trainees at the al-Farouq camp (the main training camp for Arabs), serving as an adviser to Osama bin Laden, and producing “recruitment audio and video tapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad,” even though he only arrived in Afghanistan a month before the 9/11 attacks.

20. Fouad al-Rabia. Also charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, al-Rabia, a businessman — and a father of four who was 42 years old when he was seized — is accused of raising funds for al-Qaeda, and being “in charge of an al-Qaeda supply depot at Tora Bora,” where he “distributed supplies to al-Qaeda fighters.” He has never denied meeting Osama bin Laden, but has explained that, as a good Muslim who undertook humanitarian aid missions every year, he was introduced to bin Laden in 2001 while visiting Afghanistan to research the opportunities for proving aid to the region.

He has also explained that he only ended up in Tora Bora as part of a vast exodus of people — civilians like himself, as well as members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban — who were fleeing the chaos of Afghanistan after the US-led invasion of October 2001, but had conceded that a senior figure in al-Qaeda forced him to look after the “issue counter,” where supplies — food and blankets, rather then weapons — were being handed out, in exchange for arranging for him to leave the mountains, when he was promptly sold by local villagers to the Northern Alliance.

In conjunction with the continuing setbacks described above, the one-sided show trial of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, investigations into the alleged misconduct of the Commissions’ former legal adviser (described here), and the continuing threat to the credibility of the system that is posed by Lt. Col. Vandeveld, the latest charges do nothing to suggest that the life of the Military Commissions should be extended beyond January 20, 2009.

President Obama should press Congress to repeal the Military Commissions Act, as he promised, and should rapidly establish an objective and intelligent body capable of reviewing the cases of those facing (or scheduled to face) trial by Military Commission, stripping out the juveniles and insignificant Afghan insurgents (who should be freed) from those regarded as genuinely dangerous terrorists involved with al-Qaeda and/or the 9/11 attacks, who should be moved to the US mainland to face trials in federal courts.

After the crimes of the Bush years, no solution is perfect (and these trials will inevitably involve a messy compromise over the use of torture), but I can see no other practical solution. Talk of moving prisoners to the federal court system has already provoked a rash of commentators to step forward and talk about the need for new legislation creating another new trial system or providing a mandate for special “preventive detention” for “terror suspects,” but all such innovations should be resisted. I can only wonder how it is that those proposing such ideas have managed to learn nothing at all from the abuse of the Constitution over the last seven years.

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

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

1. David Hicks. An Australian, who was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001, Hicks accepted a plea bargain in March 2007, admitting to providing “material support for terrorism,” and dropping well-documented claims that he was abused in US custody, in exchange for a nine-month sentence, the majority of which was served in Australia. It has been claimed, plausibly, that his plea bargain was the result of political maneuvering between US Vice President Dick Cheney and Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

2. Omar Khadr. A Canadian, who was just 15 years old when he was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, Khadr is accused of killing a US soldier, although developments over the last six months in his pre-trial hearings suggest that exculpatory evidence, indicating that he was not responsible for the murder, was withheld from his defense team. In the latest twist in Khadr’s case, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled last week that Canadian agents acted illegally when they interrogated Khadr at Guantánamo in 2003 and handed the intelligence to US authorities.

3. Salim Hamdan. A Yemeni, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden and was captured while attempting to cross the Pakistani border in December 2001, Hamdan is accused of being an active member of al-Qaeda, although his defense team argues that he was just a paid employee. It was Hamdan’s case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that caused the Supreme Court to rule that the first version of the Commissions were illegal in June 2006 (although they were later revived by Congress). In April, Hamdan decided to boycott his trial proceedings, and on May 9, following a blistering attack on the legitimacy of the Commissions by their former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, the judge in Hamdan’s case, Capt. Keith Allred, took the unprecedented step of barring the Commissions’ Pentagon-appointed legal adviser, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, from playing any further part in Hamdan’s trial. The following week, Capt. Allred made headlines again by postponing the start date of Hamdan’s trial until late July, citing the importance of a pending Supreme Court decision about the prisoners’ rights.

4. Mohamed Jawad. An Afghan, who was just 16 or 17 years old at the time of his capture, Jawad is accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in December 2002, although he has always claimed that Afghan police obtained his “confession” through torture. At his arraignment in March, he rejected the trial proceedings, and alleged that he had been tortured at the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and had been mistreated in Guantánamo. At a pre-trial hearing in May, Air Force Major David Frakt, who was assigned to represent him on April 28, told the court, “Mr. Jawad is an innocent man. He has been held for five years. He was a homeless boy wrongfully accused and beaten into confession by the Afghanistan police.”

5. Ahmed al-Darbi. A Saudi, who is accused of plotting attacks on shipping for al-Qaeda, al-Darbi was kidnapped in Azerbaijan and rendered to Guantánamo via Afghanistan in 2002. At his arraignment in April, he refused to take part in the Commissions, prompting his military-appointed lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, to comment that, in order to comply with established legal rules that prevent lawyers from representing clients who refuse their services (which are worryingly at odds with the Commissions’ own rules), his role in al-Darbi’s forthcoming trial was now equivalent to that of a “potted plant.”

6. Ibrahim al-Qosi. A Sudanese, who is accused of being a bodyguard and a driver for Osama bin Laden, and a quartermaster for al-Qaeda, al-Qosi, who was captured after crossing the Pakistani border in December 2001, was previously charged in the Commissions’ first aborted incarnation. In April, he also boycotted his pre-trial hearing, telling the judge, “I do not recognize the justice or the lawfulness of this court,” and adding, “What is happening in your courts is in fact a sham, which aims solely that the cases move at the pace of a turtle in order to gain some time to keep us in these boxes without any human or legal rights.”

7. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. A Yemeni, who is accused of producing videos for al-Qaeda and serving as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, al-Bahlul, who was captured after crossing the Pakistani border in December 2001, was previously charged in the Commissions’ first aborted incarnation. In May, he also boycotted his pre-trial hearing, proudly proclaiming his association with Osama bin Laden, and telling the judge, “We will continue our jihad and nothing’s going to stop us. You must not oppress the people in the land. Your oppression against us and your support to the strategic ally in the region is what made me leave my house and today, I’m telling you, and you’re a man of law, if you sentence me to life … me and the others will be the reason for the continuation of the war against America.”

8. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Reportedly the third most important figure in al-Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, KSM, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, and the four men described below are among the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 after being held for years in secret prisons run by the CIA. KSM confessed in his military tribunal in Guantánamo last year (convened to confirm that he was an “enemy combatant” who could be tried by Military Commission) that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” He is one of three “high-value detainees” whom CIA director Michael Hayden admitted had been subjected to waterboarding (a torture technique that involves controlled drowning) while held in a secret prison run by the CIA.

KSM and his co-defendants, who were charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks in February, are due to be arraigned on June 5, although his recently appointed military lawyer, Navy JAG Prescott Prince, recently told the Los Angeles Times, “I think it’s the constitutional case of our time. Because in the 221st year of America, the question is whether the Constitution applies to the government.” He added, “I have no idea whether he did even half of those things he is accused of doing. But if he did commit those offenses, there are still issues of whether this court has jurisdiction, whether he is an enemy combatant who should be tried in a tribunal of this nature.” Prince also said, “He (KSM) believes his treatment has been illegal. I believe it’s been illegal too. And I personally believe that he cannot, as a result of all these things, get a fair trial.”

9. Ramzi bin al-Shibh. A Yemeni, and reportedly a friend of the 9/11 hijackers, who helped coordinate the attacks with KSM after he was unable to enter the United States to train as a pilot for the operation, as he originally planned, bin al-Shibh was captured in Pakistan in September 2002. After being held in secret CIA custody for four years, he refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo, and if he speaks at his arraignment it will be his first publicly available statement since his capture.

10. Mustafa al-Hawsawi. A Saudi, who was captured with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Hawsawi is accused of sourcing funding for the 9/11 attacks from Dubai. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted providing support for jihadists, including transferring money for some of the 9/11 hijackers, although he denied that he was a member of al-Qaeda. Last week, his lawyer, Army Maj. Jon Jackson, sought fruitlessly to delay his arraignment, in particular because he has only been allowed to meet his client twice, and “has not received any potential evidence against al-Hawsawi supporting charges that ‘allege a complex conspiracy spanning several years,’” as the Associated Press put it.

11. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. Also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, he is a nephew of KSM, and was captured in Pakistan with Walid bin Attash (see below) in April 2003. In his tribunal at Guantánamo last year, he admitted transferring money on behalf of some of the 9/11 hijackers, but insisted that he was a legitimate businessman, who regularly transferred money for Arabs, without knowing what it would be used for.

12. Walid bin Attash. A Saudi, who lost a leg in Afghanistan before 9/11, bin Attash stated in his tribunal at Guantánamo that he was the link between Osama bin Laden and the Nairobi cell during al-Qaeda’s African embassy bombings in 1998, and admitted that he played a major part in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, explaining that he “put together the plan for the operation for a year and a half,” and that he bought the explosives and the boat, and recruited the bombers.

13. Mohammed al-Qahtani. A Saudi, who was reportedly recruited as the 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, but was refused entry into the United States by immigration officials, al-Qahtani was tortured for several months at Guantánamo in late 2002 and early 2003. Although he was put forward for trial by Military Commission in February, with KSM and the other four men described above, the charges against him were dropped in May, when the others were formally charged, either because evidence of his torture is admissible (whereas that obtained in secret prisons by the CIA is not), or because of a pronounced deterioration in his mental health since he was first charged, which led to a number of suicide attempts. It’s possible, but unlikely that he will be charged again.

14. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. A Tanzanian, and one of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, Ghailani, who was captured after a gun battle in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, is accused of being a coordinator of the African embassy bombings, and of running a document-forging operation for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he described himself as a peripheral character in the African embassy bombings, who was duped by others around him, although he admitted forging documents for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Evidence of a revealing false allegation that he made in Guantánamo, which I discovered during research for The Guantánamo Files, was reported here.

15. Mohammed Kamin. An Afghan, who was captured in 2003, Kamin is accused of “providing material support for terrorism,” specifically by receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp,” conducting surveillance on US and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US and coalition forces. He is not charged with harming, let alone killing US forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection — he apparently stated in interrogation that he was “recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader” — it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in “terrorism” at all.

For his arraignment on May 21, 2008, Kamin refused to leave his cell, and was dragged to the court by guards. The judge, Air Force Col. W. Thomas Cumbie, explained that he was handcuffed and shackled because he had “attempted to spit on and bite one of the guards” on his way to the courtroom. Refusing to be represented by a US military lawyer, Kamin called the charges “a lie and a forgery,” according to Reuters, adding that he had no connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and that he “did not recognize the court’s legitimacy and would not attend future hearings.” In a brief statement, he said, “My judge is the god that has created the sky and the land. He will be my lawyer and represent me. I wait for his decision. That’s enough.”

16. Noor Uthman Muhammed. A Sudanese, Muhammed was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, during the raid that netted the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah (whose significance is disputed, along with his mental health). While Abu Zubaydah has not been charged before the Military Commissions, Muhammed was charged with “conspiracy” and “providing material support for terrorism” on May 23, 2008. He is accused of serving as the deputy emir and a weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed. It is also alleged that he delivered a fax machine to Osama bin Laden at a training camp in 1999.

Noticeably, these charges do not relate to the 9/11 attacks, and in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business. This may well have been an evasive explanation on Muhammed’s part, but he is not the only prisoner to state that Khaldan was not connected with al-Qaeda, and that Abu Zubaydah did not have a close relationship with the leadership of al-Qaeda. Similar claims, as I reported here, were made by Abu Zubaydah himself, and by a released Saudi prisoner called Khalid al-Hubayshi, and it will be interesting to see what Muhammed will have to say when he is arraigned — unless, of course, he follows recent trends by boycotting the proceedings completely.

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

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

In what appears to be nothing more than propaganda masquerading as news, the US military has announced, as Reuters described it, that it will “televise the Guantánamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other suspects so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the US mainland.”

Five of the six prisoners charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks. From the top: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash.

Army Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor of Guantánamo’s system of trials by Military Commission, stated, “We’re going to broadcast in real time to several locations that will be available just to victim families,” adding that the footage would be “beamed to closed-circuit television viewing sites on military bases at Fort Hamilton in New York, Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Fort Meade in Maryland and Fort Devens in Massachusetts.”

While there seems little doubt that Col. Morris is sincere, it’s also apparent that the trial under discussion will not be taking place anytime soon, and that announcements of broadcasts designed to appeal to the families of 9/11 victims are premature, to say the least, and more judiciously regarded as attempts to shore up the disputed legitimacy of the Commission process.

Conceived by Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001, as an alternative to either the US court system or the US military’s own judicial processes, the Military Commissions have been heavily criticized for allowing the possibility of withholding evidence from the accused and of using evidence obtained through torture. This latter provision was later dropped, but the possibility of using evidence obtained through coercion remains at the discretion of the government-appointed military judge, and it should also be noted that this is an administration that has found it notoriously difficult to differentiate between acts of torture and acts of coercion.

The Commissions have also stumbled from one disaster to another. Dismissed as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, they were resuscitated by Congress just a few months later, but were then struck down by their own judges in June 2007, on the grounds that the legislation that had revived the process — the Military Commissions Act — had authorized the judges to try “illegal enemy combatants,” whereas the process at Guantánamo that had supposedly made the prisoners eligible for trial — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, themselves heavily criticized for relying on secret evidence obtained by dubious means — had only declared that the prisoners were “enemy combatants.”

Although this issue was resolved just a few months later, in a hastily-convened appeals court, the Commissions have never, even briefly, escaped from the deep shadows cast over their legitimacy by their own government-appointed military defense lawyers, who have maintained, from the moment that they first investigated the new trial system in any detail, that the Commissions are, to quote just a few examples, “implements for breaking the law” by concealing evidence of torture (Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, who represented Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, in the Supreme Court case that threw out the first system of Military Commissions), and rigged, ridiculous, unjust, farcical, and a sham (Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who represents the Canadian Omar Khadr).

Currently mired in controversy in the case of Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was captured — and, it was recently revealed, may not have killed the US soldier whose murder is the key charge against him — the Commissions have fared no better in any of the other pre-trial hearings that have taken place recently. Lawyers for Salim Hamdan have fought tenaciously to establish that he had no insider role in al-Qaeda and should therefore have rights as a Prisoner of War, and in the last month three other prisoners have resorted to disrupting their pre-trial hearings through a combination of non-cooperation and pleas for justice that have done little to reassure the wider world that the process is either valid or fair.

As I reported last month, the first of the three to boycott the process was Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who, like Omar Khadr, was also a juvenile when he was seized after allegedly throwing a grenade at a vehicle carrying two US soldiers and an Afghan translator. Dragged from his cell to attend his hearing, he told the judge in his case, Col. Ralph Kohlmann, “My right has not been given to me. I have not violated any international law. There are many accusations against me … they don’t make any sense … I am a human being.” He added that he “continued to be treated unjustly and interrogated, and that he wanted the ‘whole world’ to know it.”

Jawad was followed by Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi, a Saudi captured in Azerbaijan and rendered to Guantánamo via Afghanistan, who is accused of plotting attacks on shipping for al-Qaeda. After al-Darbi refused to take part in the Commission process, explaining that it lacked legitimacy, his military-appointed lawyer, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles pointed that he had no choice but to accept his client’s actions, which, as the Associated Press put it, he described as the result of a “reasoned decision.”

Although the judges in the Commissions attempted to insist that the lawyers “must carry on with their defense even if their clients boycott,” Lt. Col. Broyles was adamant, as he told reporters, that al-Darbi’s decision “should mean … that I sit very quietly, answer the judge’s direct questions and that’s it.” He added that his role in al-Darbi’s forthcoming trial was now equivalent to that of a “potted plant,” and that he would “almost certainly” file a challenge against any order demanding that he defend his client against his wishes.

Lt. Col. Broyles’ criticism is more significant than it may at first appear, as it highlights a conflict of interest that is genuinely troubling to defense lawyers called upon to defend clients who subsequently refuse their services. Under the terms of their military contracts, they are supposed to follow orders and insist on defending the men, even though they refuse counsel, but as civilian lawyers they could have their licenses revoked if they attempt to defend clients who have fired them.

This conflict of interest has arisen in the Commissions before. In their first incarnation, before the Supreme Court ruled that they were illegal, two of those charged –- Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni whose pre-trial hearing is expected imminently, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, a Saudi who has not yet been charged under the new system –- refused to be represented by the lawyers assigned to them: Major Tom Fleener and Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who now represents Omar Khadr.

In an article in GQ last summer, Major Fleener and Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler both explained that they were unable to find any justification for the administration’s insistence that the prisoners were not allowed to represent themselves. As Sean Flynn noted, “The right to self-representation [has] been a codified tenet of American law for 217 years. Under established rules, whether a man can competently defend himself is irrelevant; he need only be competent to make the decision to represent himself.” Kuebler believed that al-Sharbi was competent to make that decision. “Therefore,” Flynn continued, “Kuebler believed he had an ethical obligation to step aside. A lawyer can’t force himself upon an unwilling client, and no credible court would ever allow such a thing. To do so would be to replace a vigorous defender with a prop, an actor in a charade that only mimicked a proper trial.”

Major Fleener faced a similar problem in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. He told Flynn, “The concept of compelled representation has always bothered the crap out of me. You just don’t force lawyers on people. You don’t represent someone against his will. It’s never, ever, ever done.” Flynn then explained, “The reason it’s never done is that it undermines the concept of a fair trial. When a man’s life or liberty is at stake, he gets to decide who will speak for him. That’s the way American courts work, have always worked. To eliminate that right is to begin to transform a trial into a pageant.”

On April 10, when a third prisoner refused legal representation in his trial by Military Commission, what appeared to be a trend began to attract the interest of the world’s media. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner accused of working as an al-Qaeda operative, told Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, the judge at his pre-trial hearing, that “he did not want a lawyer and would not attend future hearings because he did not consider the court legitimate,” as the AP described it. “I do not recognize the justice or the lawfulness of this court,” he said, adding, “What is happening in your courts is in fact a sham, which aims solely that the cases move at the pace of a turtle in order to gain some time to keep us in these boxes without any human or legal rights.” As the AP report continued, “He later removed the headphones used to hear the translator and said he would participate no further, declining to answer the judge’s questions,” and saying, “I will leave the field and you can play as you want to play.”

Although Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal advisor to the Commissions’ convening authority, attempted to shore up the ailing process, pointing out that the Commissions’ rules “provide for the process to move forward whether or not the accused chooses to participate,” and defending the trials as “extraordinarily fair by any norm” and providing “substantial protections,” attorney Neal Sonnett, who monitors the Commissions for the American Bar Association, explained why proceeding with trials without the defendants being present would be potentially fatal for their perceived legitimacy. “If all these cases are going to proceed with empty chairs,” he said, “what has already been called a kangaroo court will just be highlighted as really a kangaroo court.”

It later transpired that al-Qosi’s defense lawyer, Navy Reserves Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, had not even been able to meet her client. As Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, she had asked the judge “to help her gain access to [al-]Qosi’s cell to try to persuade him — face to face — to accept her services. The judge refused. Prison camp commanders have said such access is against Pentagon policy.”

With the judge insisting that the case proceed as planned, and Cmdr. Lachelier left to consult the California bar to discover whether, as with the concerns of Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler, Major Tom Fleener and Lt. Col. Broyles, her license will be at risk for representing someone who fired her, the time was clearly ripe for a morale-boosting exercise by the authorities, which is where, I presume, the idea for the statement about televising the 9/11 trials arose.

What makes the announcement particularly premature is that those who have been studying the Commissions’ recent progress — or lack of it — know that the major obstacle preventing even the pre-trial hearings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices from proceeding is the fact that they do not yet have the required legal representation. Just last month, Col. Steve David, the Commissions’ chief defense lawyer, explained that, unlike the prosecution, which has a full roster of 30 lawyers, he has only nine lawyers on duty, who are already struggling to cope with their caseload.

It was, however, also ironic that the military’s announcement almost immediately backfired when one of the few military lawyers assigned so far — Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, who was recently appointed to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — added his own criticisms of the Commission process to the ever-growing list of insider complaints. As Reuters described it, Capt. Prince “said he doubts the defendants can get a fair trial in the Guantánamo court because it accepts hearsay evidence that may have been obtained through cruel and dehumanizing means,” and also pointed out that the Geneva Conventions ban “acts of violence or intimidation.”

He also explained, in Reuters’ words, that, “if the trials are indeed fair, then broadcasting them widely would prove that to the world, but he worried about setting a precedent by televising what he suspects will be show trials,” and added, “I can just imagine American soldiers and sailors and airmen being subjected to similar show trials worldwide.”

With his talk of show trials — and his fears that members of the US military are liable to be subjected to US-influenced show trials in future — Capt. Prince joins an ever-growing list of military defense lawyers who understand that the Military Commissions are both unjust and counter-productive. It is, as I have stated before, time to shut the system down and move trials to the US mainland.

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

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

The photo preceded excerpts from Star reporter Michelle Shephard’s long-awaited biography of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s Child, which does the most thorough job to date of humanizing the second youngest son of the generally unsympathetic Khadr family, whose late patriarch, Ahmed Khadr, was close to Osama bin Laden.

While serving as a terrifying trailer for the book, however, the photo’s publication also heightened tensions that had surfaced in pre-trial hearings in November, when, after five years of claims, on the administration’s part, that Khadr had been the last enemy soldier alive after the firefight, and had therefore thrown the grenade that killed a US soldier, it was revealed that the grenade could, in fact, have been thrown by one of his companions, who was alive at the time, but whose survival at that point had not previously been disclosed.

Omar Khadr and the fog of war

The day before Khadr’s pre-trial hearings resumed last Friday, his tenacious military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, duly raised these issues, telling journalists that the report of the circumstances that led to Khadr’s capture, written by an officer identified only as “Lt. Col. W.,” had been altered after the event to implicate the Canadian teenager. As Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler described it, the report initially said that the assailant who threw the grenade had been killed, but was then revised, about two months later, to say that the grenade thrower had been “engaged” (a change that clearly implicated Khadr). “We now know that story was false,” Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler told the reporters, adding, “It’s consistent with the proposition that the government manufactured evidence to make it look like Omar was guilty.”

On Friday, Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler asked the judge, Col. Peter Brownback, to allow the defense team to question “Lt. Col. W.” Col. Brownback not only agreed to this request; he also ordered prosecutors to give Khadr’s lawyers a list of all US personnel who had interrogated Khadr in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and to provide them with access to their notes, postponed the trial’s start date (scheduled for May 5) to allow more time for discussions of acceptable evidence, and rebuffed the government-appointed prosecutors, who claimed, as the Miami Herald described it, “that they had already searched available records and interviewed potential witnesses, and had found nothing more to provide in the discovery phase to defense lawyers.” As the Herald report continued, “Brownback was not persuaded,” and “sent prosecutors back to search US State Department communications with Canada, battlefield dispatches and messages around the time of the 2002 firefight and other records.” “We can’t try the case until we get the discovery done,” Col. Brownback insisted. “So if I have to come down here every week, I’ll do it, what the heck.”

Khadr alleges torture

Capping another difficult week in the administration’s attempts to prosecute Khadr, his lawyers released an eight-page affidavit, in which Khadr himself described his treatment at the hands of both the Americans — in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo — and the Canadian agents who also visited him at Guantánamo. Partly redacted by US censors, the document nevertheless reveals extensive allegations of abuse that, in some cases, seem to amount to torture.

In addition to Khadr’s previously documented claims that he was threatened with rape and was used as a human mop at Guantánamo to wipe up his own urine after he had been held for hours in a stress position and had soiled himself, he reported that he “told a Canadian delegation in 2003 that the Americans ‘would torture’ him — so he told them whatever they wanted’ to hear, but that “The Canadians called me a liar, and I began to sob. They screamed at me and told me they could not do anything for me.” In other sections, he described how, after he embarked on a hunger strike at Guantánamo, “Guards would grab me by pressure points behind my ears, under the jaw and on my neck. On a scale of one to 10, I would say the pain was an 11.”

Khadr also described abuse that took place in the days after his capture, in particular at the hands of a Hispanic MP, who “would often [redacted]. He would tell nurses not to [redacted] since he said that I had killed an American soldier. He would also [redacted] me quite often.” He also reported that something was done to his eyes — “Sometimes they would [redacted] particularly since both my eyes were badly injured” — and described being kneed “repeatedly in the thighs,” a brutal technique, known as the common peroneal strike, whose overuse in Bagram led to the murder of two prisoners, Mullah Habibullah, and a taxi driver named Dilawar, in December 2002.

This comment adds to the suspicion that Khadr was the victim of torture in Bagram, as it was also revealed last week that one of his interrogators was Sgt. Joshua Claus, who was later charged, along with 14 others, of various crimes, including assault and “maltreatment of a detainee” in connection with the murder of the two men, and was sentenced to five months in jail in 2006.

Mohamed Jawad

Omar Khadr was not the only defendant last week to raise the spectre of torture to haunt the Military Commissions. On Wednesday, Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who, according to his own account, was only 16 when he was seized after allegedly throwing a grenade that wounded two US soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, said, as Carol Williams described it in the Los Angeles Times, “that he had been tortured while in US custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan after his arrest, and that he had been mistreated in Guantánamo as well.” “The American government said the Taliban has been very cruel in Afghanistan, that they killed people without any trial and imprisoned people without trial,” Jawad told the judge, Col. Ralph Kohlmann. “When I was in detention at Bagram, Americans killed three people. They beat people and arrested us without trial. We’re not given any rights.”

This was a departure in some ways. As I reported in a detailed article when he was first charged last October, Jawad had not alleged that he had been tortured by US forces during his tribunal and his military reviews at Guantánamo, which were convened, in the first instance, to assess whether he had been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant” when he was captured, and subsequently to assess whether he still constituted a threat to the US or its interests. He had, however, claimed that a false confession had been forced out of him by the Afghan police who first captured him. “[T]hey tortured me,” he said in 2005. “They beat me. They beat me a lot. One person told me, ‘If you don’t confess, they are going to kill you’. So, I told them anything they wanted to hear.”

Although he explicitly stated in his review, “I have never seen or endured any torture in Bagram or here in Cuba by the Americans,” it’s possible that he had previously failed to mention being tortured by US forces because he had concluded that it was wiser not to raise the topic in front of the US military officers who appeared to offer him a chance — however slim — of escaping from Guantánamo for good. It certainly seems unlikely that Jawad was not subjected to abuse while at Bagram, as the period that he was there — from mid-December 2002, two months after Omar Khadr left for Guantánamo — is during that same period, from summer 2002 until sometime in 2003, at the earliest, that the prison was the venue for particularly savage and routine violence that led to the murders mentioned above, and, it should be noted, to an apparent third homicide mentioned not only by Mohamed Jawad, but also by the released British prisoners Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Jamal Kiyemba, as I discuss in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

This alone would make his trial problematical, but Jawad himself raised further hurdles to what the Pentagon clearly hoped would be a straightforward process by declaring the proceedings illegal and refusing to accept representation by his military lawyer, Col. Mike Sawyers. Apparently dragged from his cell to attend the hearing, and wearing the infamous orange garb that, for many years, has been reserved for those ruled “non-compliant,” he told Col. Kohlmann, “My right has not been given to me. I have not violated any international law. There are many accusations against me … they don’t make any sense … I am a human being.” He added, as Steven Edwards described it for the Canwest News Service, that he “continued to be treated unjustly and interrogated, and that he wanted the ‘whole world’ to know it.”

Despite being spurned by his client, Col. Sawyers was vigorous in his defense outside the courtroom, explaining to reporters that western concepts of justice were “completely foreign” to Jawad, and making a statement on his behalf that also resonates with the case of Omar Khadr. “I believe this is the direct result of taking a 16- or 17-year-old boy and putting him in confinement … with no contact with the outside world,” Col. Sawyers said. “He has been in a three-by-seven-(foot) cell … I do not believe he understands the proceedings … I don’t know if I were given ten years I could explain it to him.”

With Jawad’s refusal to engage with the Commissions (asked to enter a plea, he had, by that point, “slumped onto the defense table and refused to respond to Kohlmann’s questions”) and with Col. Sawyers’ active duty about to run out, the case is unlikely to resume in the near future. As Col. Steve David, the Commissions’ chief defense lawyer, explained, he will not be able to assign Jawad a new lawyer for some time, because, unlike the prosecution, which has a full roster of 30 lawyers, he has only nine lawyers on duty, who are already struggling to cope with their caseload.

Ahmed al-Darbi

The last of the cases considered last week — that of Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi, a 33-year old Saudi — also failed to advance the process. Apparently the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers, al-Darbi, described as “polite and responsive” during his arraignment, also refused to enter a plea, and was undecided about whether or not to accept the services of his military lawyer. The administration can, perhaps, count itself lucky that al-Darbi did not wish to speak out, although this is probably only a matter of putting off the inevitable.

Seized in Azerbaijan, al-Darbi was rendered to Afghanistan, and also ended up in Bagram, where, he later alleged, an interrogator named Damien Corsetti, known as “Monster” or “The King of Torture,” abused prisoners by poking them in the face with his naked penis and threatening them with sexual assault. Corsetti was later charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person, but although he was cleared of all the charges in June 2006, al-Darbi’s presence at Bagram during the period that both Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad were there suggests that the well-chronicled torture at the prison during that period — which Corsetti discussed, with refreshing frankness, in a recent interview — will also surface in his trial.

If, as Carol Williams suggested, Mohamed Jawad’s case had been pushed forward before those of the six men (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) who were charged last month in connection with the 9/11 attacks, because the process of finding lawyers for those men has only just begun, and because Jawad’s case — and, by extension, that of Ahmed al-Darbi — were presumed to be easier to win, last weeks’ events have served only to rock the Commissions’ legitimacy once more, highlighting allegations of torture in Bagram as a counter-point to the well-chronicled torture of those charged in connection with 9/11 in secret prisons run by the CIA (in five of the cases) and in Guantánamo in the case of the sixth, Mohammed al-Qahtani.

Ibrahim al-Qosi and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul

Nor, it seems, is it likely that torture will be sidestepped in the cases of the other prisoners awaiting arraignment. The Sudanese prisoner Ibrahim al-Qosi and the Yemeni Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (both charged last month for their alleged connections with al-Qaeda) are well-known to those who have been following the Commissions since they first spluttered into life in the summer of 2003. Both were previously charged in the first round of the trials, which were struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, without either man having had the opportunity to discuss the details of their treatment, but in a hearing in 2004 al-Bahlul’s military defense lawyer, Maj. Tom Fleener, told the judge, Col. Peter Brownback, “I believe Mr. al-Bahlul was tortured,” adding that it was “going to be an issue” in any trial faced by his client.

A sketch of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, made during his first appearance before the Military Commissions in 2004. Image from the Associated Press.

Similar territory was covered by Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, who was assigned to represent al-Qosi. According to a report in the Nation in December 2005, she “characterized his treatment as possibly torture but certainly inhumane treatment; he was held in stress positions for protracted periods, subjected to military dogs and sexually humiliated.”

A sketch of Ibrahim al-Qosi, made during his first appearance before the Military Commissions in 2004. Image: Art Lien/Getty Images.

If there is a “clean” case that can be presented to the Commissions without ensnaring the administration in ever more lengthy and damaging allegations relating to the use of torture by US forces, it has yet to be found. Just possibly, however, the Pentagon’s announcement, during the fallout from Mohamed Jawad’s boycott of his arraignment, that another Afghan — Mohammed Kamin — would also face a trial by Military Commission was intended to fulfil the administration’s elusive dream: the successful prosecution of a prisoner who will not claim that he was tortured.

Mohammed Kamin

On the surface, Mohammed Kamin fulfils this criterion, although he also seems, like many before him, to be an unworthy candidate for any kind of war crimes trial at all. In his charge sheet (PDF), he is accused of “providing material support for terrorism,” specifically by receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp,” conducting surveillance on US and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US and coalition forces. He is not charged with harming, let along killing US forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection — he apparently stated in interrogation that he was “recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader” — it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in “terrorism” at all. As it is, I’m prepared to state that his case seems to me to demonstrate how hopelessly blurred the distinctions between military resistance (aka insurgency) and terrorism have become, so that anyone caught fighting US occupation is not engaged in a war (with its own well-established laws) but is automatically part of a global terrorist movement.

In a courtroom, of course, it may well emerge that, like all the others mentioned above, Mohammed Kamin will reveal — or at least allege — that he too was tortured, adding to the increasing suspicion that there is no corner of the post-9/11 prison system that is beyond the cold hand of the torturer, whose actions were sanctioned at the highest levels of the government. In the full glare of the world’s media, the Military Commissions continue to expose the very torture and abuse that the administration has strived so hard to conceal, and I cannot see how they can ever result in a prosecution that will be recognized as valid. As the Bush administration counts down its last months in office, the only solution, it seems to me, is to maintain the pressure on the next administration to move the trials to federal courts on the US mainland.

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

As published on the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

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

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009).