After this first success with the cleared prisoners — blocking entry to the US for the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, who had been cleared for release by a US court — Republicans, and, to a lesser extent, dissenters within Obama’s own party, realized that the power to shape national security issues was in their hands, particularly when the magic word “Guantánamo” was invoked.

As a result, when a young Nigerian, apparently recruited in Yemen, tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and the critics howled that no Yemenis in Guantánamo should be released, the President didn’t point out that this was unacceptable, and was, moreover, a call for him to endorse a policy of “guilt by nationality.” Instead, he immediately capitulated, imposing a moratorium on the release of Yemenis from Guantánamo that still stands 15 months later, and that, single-handedly, undermined the President’s own promise to close the prison.

A similar success for Obama’s critics took place after Attorney General Eric Holder announced on November 13, 2009 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would face a federal court trial in New York, on the same day that he announced that five other men would face trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo.

Although this announcement went down well initially, with most of the complaints coming from critics of the Commissions — myself included — who were dismayed that Obama and Holder had brought the much-criticized military trial system back from the dead, a cynical backlash soon started against the proposed federal court trial for the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. This was orchestrated by Keep America Safe, an organization founded by 9/11 widow Debra Burlingame, rightwing pundit William Krystol, and Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, which might, more appropriately, have been called “Keep America Afraid.” However, it succeeded in its mission, because, predictably by now, when the critics’ complaints were loud enough, Obama again backed down, effectively shelving the plans, and leaving Holder looking foolish.

Nevertheless, the Attorney General at least maintained some principles. Aware of the significance of the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators, Holder told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last February that he was “determined not to capitulate on the idea of holding a 9/11 trial.” Mayer’s report continued:

“I don’t apologize for what I’ve done,” he told me at one point. “History will show that the decisions we’ve made are the right ones.” Holder said that he regarded trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a courtroom as “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.” But, he added, “between now and then I suspect we’re in for some interesting times.”

Those “interesting times” have seen Holder’s boss make no effort to fight back against his critics, so that, by the end of last year, supporters of Guantánamo in Congress were so emboldened, and so certain that Obama would do nothing to oppose them, that they inserted provisions into an important military spending bill explicitly prohibiting the administration from bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland to face a trial — specifically mentioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by name, in case anyone missed the point.

When the bill was passed, Obama could have vetoed it and fought to remove the offending provision, or he could, more contentiously, have issued a signing statement refusing to accept it, but predictably he did neither, meaning that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused would either remain in Guantánamo without facing a trial at all, or that the President would accept that he had been bullied into putting them forward for trial by Military Commission.

Announcing the bullying option on Monday, Eric Holder did not even bother to disguise his disappointment. He began by explaining that, when he had examined the best option for the trial in 2009, he had done so with an open mind, and had concluded that “the best venue for prosecution was in federal court.” He added, pointedly, “I stand by that decision today,” and then provided a compelling defense of the federal court decision:

[W]e were prepared to bring a powerful case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators — one of the most well-researched and documented cases I have ever seen in my decades of experience as a prosecutor. We had carefully evaluated the evidence and concluded that we could prove the defendants’ guilt while adhering to the bedrock traditions and values of our laws. We had consulted extensively with the intelligence community and developed detailed plans for handling classified evidence. Had this case proceeded in Manhattan or in an alternative venue in the United States, as I seriously explored in the past year, I am confident that our justice system would have performed with the same distinction that has been its hallmark for over two hundred years.

Holder then proceeded to condemn Congress for interfering in the decision for political reasons, generously citing the President’s complaint that these “unwise and unwarranted restrictions undermine our counterterrorism efforts and could harm our national security,” but primarily expressing his own dismay far more eloquently, and inadvertently revealing how, in contrast, nothing that relates to Guantánamo is of particular importance to Obama, who has not spoken with conviction on the topic since becoming President:

Decisions about who, where and how to prosecute have always been — and must remain — the responsibility of the executive branch. Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence and other information necessary to make prosecution judgments. Yet they have taken one of the nation’s most tested counterterrorism tools off the table and tied our hands in a way that could have serious ramifications.

Although Holder proceeded to express faith in the Commissions as a system capable of delivering justice, his preference for federal courts was apparent, as he launched into a passionate defense of federal court trials, which was prompted by “a number of unfair, and often unfounded, criticisms.” This was probably a reference to the way in which Republican critics tried to make political capital out of the federal court trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the only Guantánamo prisoner brought to the US mainland (in May 2009), whose recent conviction and life sentence was portrayed by critics as a failure, because the judge barred the use of evidence derived through the use of torture (as he is required to do by law), and because the jury threw out all but one of the 285 counts against Ghailani.

In his defense of the federal court system, Holder wrote:

[F]ederal courts have proven to be an unparalleled instrument for bringing terrorists to justice. Our courts have convicted hundreds of terrorists since September 11, and our prisons safely and securely hold hundreds today, many of them serving long sentences. There is no other tool that has demonstrated the ability to both incapacitate terrorists and collect intelligence from them over such a diverse range of circumstances as our traditional justice system.

In conclusion, Holder lamented that the 9/11 case “has been marked by needless controversy since the beginning.” As he proceeded to explain, “the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators should never have been about settling ideological arguments or scoring political points,” but should “always [have] been about delivering justice for [the] victims of [9/11], and for their surviving loved ones. Nothing else.”

This is another poor day for justice, in an administration that has been marked by an absence of good news when it comes to dealing appropriately with national security issues. Eric Holder deserves only faint praise overall, because of the way in which he was evidently involved in sheltering Bush administration lawyers from prosecution for their involvement in the “torture memos” of August 2002, and for his failure to oversee the Guantánamo habeas legislation, which has proceeded as aggressively as if Bush was still in power. On the 9/11 trial, however, and through his obvious exasperation with a political climate in which terrorism — when related to Guantánamo — is shamelessly played by political opportunists or seized upon by rightwing ideologues who have whipped themselves up into an unseemly frenzy of hysteria and paranoia, Holder at least continues to express a belief in certain principles, however rmuch he has been obliged to ignore them.

Elsewhere in the administration, and particularly in the actions of Barack Obama, who has consistently failed to provide leadership when it is needed, there has not even been a glimmer of recognition that certain principles have been lost, and that, it seems to me, ought to be a cause for great concern as the cheerleaders for Guantánamo — and for the false thesis that terrorists are warriors who must be tried in war crimes trials — score another victory at Obama’s expense.

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 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 — 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.

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

Revolution Interview with Investigative Journalist Andy Worthington
The Outrage of the Bush-Obama Military Commissions

According to recent news reports, the Obama administration is getting ready to conduct a new series of Military Commissions trials for a number of prisoners being held at the U.S. torture camp at Guantánamo. These Military Commissions, begun under George W. Bush, basically deprive defendants of all rights, and have been part of the whole new level of fascistic repressive measures since 9/11. Revolution talked about the background and the new developments around the Military Commissions with Andy Worthington, 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 U.S.). His website is here.

The Revolution Interview is a special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own, and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Revolution: Before we get into the new developments, can you give us some background on the Military Commissions — what they are, their beginnings?

Andy Worthington: What they are is a specific type of military trial that has been used throughout American history. It was most recently used in the Second World War, in the cases of certain Nazi saboteurs. And when the Bush administration was fishing around for new ways to deal with people it had captured, in the early days of the “war on terror,” then it came across the Military Commissions, specifically as they were used in the Second World War. These were established through a “military order,” which was passed with virtually no oversight from anyone, signed by President Bush on November 13, 2001.

The background story to that is that it was essentially hustled through a couple of departments in the White House without anybody really seeing what was going on. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell later said that he’d not even heard about this, that he saw it on TV. This was essentially the document that established the notion of “enemy combatants” and said these guys can only be tried by Military Commissions, and evidence that would not be permitted in normal courts will be able to be used. I think what was obvious from that document to people who were looking closely was that it was an attempt to set up show trials that would be able to draw on evidence derived from torture and then execute people the administration said were guilty.

It then took quite a while for the administration to be able to put the trials in place. Almost before anything had gotten going, in 2005, a number of prosecutors resigned because they realized this was a bent system. From 2004 to 2006, 10 people were charged. There were various pretrial hearings that were held, but they were all shambolic. Pretty much everything that has ever taken place in a Military Commission hearing as part of the “war on terror” has been shambolic because the rules are so ill-defined, there are so many holes in all the procedures. And this went on until June 2006 when the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were illegal. They actually ruled that they contravened the Military Code of Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

So having been thrown out, the Bush administration then went to Congress to revise them. And in that amended form, they have had a second phase of activity. I think it’s quite important to note that at this point, Congress invented war crimes that were tryable by Military Commission. So although the initial idea of having Military Commissions for alleged terror suspects came from Dick Cheney and his chief legal advisor, David Addington, when it was revised by Congress, Congress specifically attempted to make war crimes out of crimes that are not recognized as war crimes, such as “murder by an unprivileged belligerent.”

So at the start of 2007 the Military Commissions were back. From then until the end of the Bush administration, they again stumbled on from one disaster to another. Twenty-eight men were put forward for trials by Military Commission, but only three ever went to trial. The first of those cases was David Hicks, the Australian, and a plea deal had been arranged between Dick Cheney and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Hicks had been picked up on the radar in Australia — there was a movement around the injustices against him. So there was a deal that was struck that was supposed to help get John Howard reelected. It failed. But Hicks was “encouraged” to file for a plea deal, whereby he spent another six months in prison back in Australia, in exchange for admitting to “material support for terrorism” — which is one of the key ingredients in federal court terrorism prosecutions, but is one of the invented “war crimes.” It’s not traditionally been viewed as a war crime.

The second case in the summer of 2007 was Salim Hamdan, who was one of a number of drivers who worked for Osama bin Laden, a Yemeni who had taken the job for money. The military jury in his case threw out the conspiracy charge, correctly understanding that one of the many guys who drove bin Laden around wasn’t privy to any secrets, although they did find him guilty of “material support for terrorism.” The jury gave him a five and a half year sentence but the judge back-dated that to the time of his capture. He was a free man five months after that.

The only other case under Bush — the week before the presidential election in November 2008 — was Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who had made a propaganda video for al-Qaida, which he admitted to. Al-Bahlul refused to take part in the process at all. As a result he was not represented legally, because lawyers are not allowed to represent an unwilling client, and even though the military was pushing his lawyer to do so, he refused to take part. So they had a trial for a week, which was a completely one-sided trial because he refused to mount a defense at all. And at the end of that, almost on the eve of the presidential elections, he was found guilty and sentenced to life — in Guantánamo, which he is serving. So that is the background under Bush.

Revolution: Stepping back a little, looking at the Military Commissions under Bush, wasn’t this a significant departure from the legal “norms” in the U.S.? In the history of the U.S., there have been many instances of politically motivated cases and injustices, especially involving people who those in power see as threats, or oppressed people on a daily basis. But still, the Military Commissions represented a major leap in repressive measures — in throwing out basic rights, allowing torture, and so on.

Andy Worthington: Well when they were brought back by Congress, there was an attempt by Congress to say that the use of torture wouldn’t be allowed. The fundamental problem with the Military Commissions is that terrorism is a crime, but the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, were trying to prosecute people in military settings for crimes, which they were trying to turn into war crimes. And that’s the fundamental misconception about the whole thing, why it doesn’t fit together.

Revolution: Barack Obama campaigned with pledges to shut Guantánamo down and stop the Military Commissions, among other promises. So what has happened under Obama?

Andy Worthington: He suspended the Military Commissions on his first day in office in order to review them, and on his second day in office he also issued executive orders that promised to close Guantánamo within a year, upheld the absolute ban on torture, and promised humane interrogations of detainees in the future. However, in May 2009, he delivered a major national security speech at the National Archives, where he put Military Commissions back on the table. He also put the indefinite detention without charge or trial of some prisoners back on the table as well. And all the dreams and hopes that he was going to either charge or release prisoners, and if charged, try them in federal courts began to unravel at that point. So that’s a simple answer, that on May 2009 he was told, or persuaded to change his mind.

Revolution: So what about these recent reports that Obama is planning to ramp up the Military Commissions again?

Andy Worthington: What’s happened under President Obama is that very little was happening for the first 18 months — there were hearings still going on, but the plan was that the administration wanted to have both federal court trials and Military Commissions. In May 2009 the administration moved one man from Guantánamo, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, to the U.S. mainland (and he was sentenced to life without parole in federal court last week). However, in November 2009, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused in involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be brought to the U.S. mainland to face trial, the backlash against that meant that the administration shelved its plan.

That refusal to follow through on its initial statement meant that it gave Congress time to pass a law prohibiting it, which is what lawmakers did just before Christmas, when they passed legislation preventing President Obama from bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trial. So Obama’s only option is Military Commissions, but their history, under Obama, has not been better than it was under Bush. Last summer, when I think they had been hoping that federal courts and Military Commissions would be coexisting, they reached the trial phase of Ibrahim al-Qosi, another peripheral figure in the al-Qaida picture, really, a man who from what I can see sometimes was a cook in a compound that was sometimes used by Osama bin Laden. So, you know, pretty tangential to everything. When the administration was faced with the prospect of actually going ahead with a trial, it pushed for a plea deal instead. We don’t officially know how long he’s going to serve but the rumor is that he’ll serve two more years and then go back to Sudan.

And in autumn there was the trial of Omar Khadr, the former child prisoner from Canada, who also accepted a plea deal. And he’s apparently serving eight years, one more year in Guantánamo and seven in Canada. That was a total disgrace because he was a child when he was captured after a battle in Afghanistan.

Revolution: He was also tortured in Bagram prison in Afghanistan and threatened with rape…

Andy Worthington: Absolutely. Was tortured. Was never treated as a juvenile prisoner should be treated according to the UN Convention on the rights of a child in war time—which the U.S. signed after his capture, signed in January 2003, and which require the rehabilitation rather than punishment of juveniles who are under 18 when the alleged crime took place. Plus Khadr had to confess to invented war crimes, that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” who was not allowed to be in a combat situation with U.S. forces. It was “illegal” for him to do so. That’s just a complete disgrace. But, unperturbed [laughs] the administration has now announced — it hasn’t been officially announced, but it has been indicated that they’re revving up to hold more trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo. There are four guys we’ve been told about, who are likely the ones who are going to be put on trial.

Revolution: One of them is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and it has been openly acknowledged that he is one of the detainees that the U.S. tortured with waterboarding. And one of the outrageous things about the Military Commissions is that so-called evidence obtained under torture and hearsay evidence can be used against the defendant, who has no way of challenging them.

Andy Worthington: Yeah, absolutely. And the administration has tried to fudge this. When in November 2009 Holder announced the apparently imminent prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men, he also said that the Military Commissions are officially back, and here are five guys that we’re going to put on trial, and he tried to distinguish between the two systems by saying Military Commissions are more connected with activities that took place in the military context, claiming that, in al-Nashiri’s case, which allegedly involved the attack on the USS Cole [in 2000], was a military target, whereas they were saying 9/11 was a civilian target. I don’t think that really stands up to scrutiny because as you’ve indicated, what lies behind this are issues of evidence. And what they’ve actually done is decide what they think they can get away with in whatever forum. And it’s part of the reason that, the more confident they are, then they’ll go for a federal court trial, where torture evidence is definitely excluded, and hearsay evidence isn’t going to wash. They’ve got more leeway in the Military Commissions.

And of course, beyond the federal courts and the Military Commissions, there is a third category of people — those they want to hold indefinitely without charge or trial, because they have said: we think these people are too dangerous, but we don’t even have the evidence that would stand up in a Military Commission — i.e., they really don’t have anything resembling evidence at all. So it would all have to be hearsay. And yes, it’s troubling that they rely on hearsay because it’s so much tied in with the torture program, essentially. Not just the “high-value detainee” program and extraordinary renditions and CIA secret prisons where torture was clearly central, but the fact is that torture permeates so much of the way in which the men were held and interrogated in Afghanistan before they went to Guantánamo. So in Kandahar and primarily in Bagram, as in Guantánamo itself, where there was a regime in place, certainly for two years, that was a version of the torture program that had been used by the CIA in their secret prisons. It didn’t involve waterboarding, but it did involve torture.

Revolution: How many prisoners are there currently at Guantánamo, and what are their conditions of imprisonment?

Andy Worthington: There are 173 men being held at Guantánamo. In general, conditions improved under Obama. This doesn’t apply to all of them. There are still some men held in solitary. In general though, they have been allowed to mingle more and to have some recreational facilities. Although recently we’ve heard from prisoners, who have unclassified phone calls with their lawyers, that there’s something going on there, that they’re actually moving people back into spending more time in isolation. But there has been in general an improvement, which I think has indicated that they’re in it for the long haul.

After all, Guantánamo’s purpose as an interrogation center is long gone. That was the whole point, really, about what the Bush administration wanted, was to hold people outside the law, so that it could do whatever it wanted to do to them, to get what it described as “actionable intelligence.” It wasn’t concerned with what the hell it was going to do with these people, and it wasn’t concerned with prosecution. It was about intelligence. And sadly what happened was that when people didn’t tell them what they thought they should be telling them, whether that was because they were withholding it or they were completely wrong people, then they introduced torture, having fooled themselves into thinking that torture was going to be a good way of getting the truth. But it doesn’t necessarily get you anything even resembling the truth, or you can’t separate the truth from fiction. You end up accusing someone falsely, kicking so many doors down in the middle of the night, and dragging off to dungeons other people whose name was divulged because someone’s been tortured, not because they did anything. That web of where torture leads is absolutely horrible.

Revolution: There are still U.S. prisons, in Afghanistan for example, where people are still being held in conditions of torture…

Andy Worthington: There’s the prison in Bagram. There are persistent stories of a secret prison that is part of Bagram. And I think it’s very credible that, although there has been in general an effort to learn from a lot of the mistakes of the Bush administration, operationally there are certainly people who find it useful to have some leeway in how people can be treated. And I think more fundamentally the problem that is demonstrated by Afghanistan is that Bagram, which is the main prison for the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan, is not a place that has been returned to the rule of the Geneva Conventions. It’s a place where people are held for a significant amount of time without any adequate screening to determine whether they should be there and then are given a review which actually resembles the review process at Guantánamo, which the Supreme Court found inadequate in 2008. The military is not operating according to the Geneva Conventions. That’s the kind of major change that happened, I think, that hasn’t been addressed.

The more disturbing aspect is that around the edges of this amended military detention scenario are people that are kept off the books for a while completely so that they can be leaned on a bit. We’re dealing definitely with torture. All the stories demonstrate that we’re dealing with torture. The magic word for most people with torture is: were they waterboarded. Well that’s not the issue here, really. It’s people that have been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, for example. That’s a form of torture.

Revolution: Are there any other points about these reports of new Military Commission hearings we should be aware of?

Andy Worthington: What we know is that the administration initiated a Task Force when Obama came into office. They spent a year going through all the Guantánamo cases, deciding what to do with them. This involved officials and lawyers from government departments and agencies — I describe them as pretty sober set of career officials — who carefully went through what information they could about the men held to decide what should be done with them. Now I have a problem with that because there’s already a legal process underway, which is their habeas corpus decisions. President Obama had set up essentially a kind of executive parallel review process. So I have a problem with that anyway, but this is their basis for deciding what to do with the men held.

And they said, of the 173 men held — and bear in mind three of the ones are held because of the results of their Military Commissions — they want to put 33 men on trial, they want to hold 48 indefinitely without charge or trial, and the rest ought to be released. And so clearly, there’s a big problem — 89 men recommended for release who are still held. Another big problem — 48 men held indefinitely without charge or trial because any evidence against them you can’t use, so it’s not evidence. And that’s a fundamental problem. Thirty-three men are supposed to be put on trial. So are they going to give up on holding federal court trials? Are they possibly going to, as has been suggested, use Justice Department funds to bypass Congressional ban on bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland using the Defense budget and put them on trial?

The trial of Ghailani, which resulted in a jury convicting him of only one count out of 285, was portrayed by the supporters of the Military Commissions as a failure. I mean, if you had not been paying attention, you could think that the man was acquitted. He wasn’t. That one charge carried a maximum of life without parole. And last week the judge sentenced him to life without parole. That also proved to Obama’s critics that the federal courts are a safe venue for prosecuting terrorists. I think it’s easy to say that actually it also demonstrated federal court trials are too successful because they deliver punitive sentences. Because if you survey the whole landscape of terrorism-related offenses prosecuted in federal courts, there are very, very worrying sentences being handed down for people doing virtually nothing, receiving enormous sentences.

But if they want to proceed with these trials, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, and the four other men in a venue that will be internationally recognized, if they want to attempt to draw a line under the whole of this “war on terror,” which started because of 9/11, and here are the guys who are supposed to have done the whole thing — are they going to do that? Or are they going to accept that, no it’s too unpopular to do that, just leave them in Guantánamo, and we’ll start picking away at people, one by one, and put them on trial in Military Commissions and see if that works? I don’t quite know which course of action they’re going to take. But first of all they’re going to have to get through the trials of the men they’ve put forward.

We’ve spoken about al-Nashiri. But another of the three other men they’ve put forward — Ahmed al-Darbi, picked up in Azerbaijan — seems also to have a history that’s replete with torture, particularly in Bagram, probably in the secret part of Bagram that was running under the Bush administration. One of them, to me, is completely pointless — a minor insurgent, if anything, in Afghanistan, an Afghan named Obaidullah. What on earth is going on here, with an attempt to prosecute him? We’ll have to see how it goes. My feeling is that they will carry on trying to secure plea deals in these Military Commission trials, as it’s the only venue where they can do trials at all at the moment. And it may be that, if you look on average at how the Commissions have worked out, they’re actually working out better for the prisoners in terms of getting out of Guantánamo than any other way.

Revolution: Aside from the individual cases of these prisoners, there is the overall moral and legal implications of the continuing existence of Guantánamo, of indefinite detentions, and so on.

Andy Worthington: I don’t know how it’s possible to shift the discussion to where it should be. But all of this, whatever Obama has tried to do the last few years, has really failed to shift the structure of detention, from what was so falsely established by the Bush administration. This is a new kind of thing in history. We’re not dealing with soldiers. We’re not dealing with criminals. We’re dealing with a new category of human beings who don’t deserve to have any rights, the “enemy combatants.” Now Obama dropped that terminology. But when they want to put the people in Guantánamo on trial in Military Commissions as we saw with Omar Khadr, they have to be declared by a judge to be “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” which they think is more in spirit with the Geneva Conventions. But again, it’s a legacy of this fundamental problem that hasn’t been addressed, which is, there is not a third category of prisoner, there are only two types of people that you hold. They are either criminal suspects and you put them on trial — speedily, I believe, is an important aspect of that — or they’re prisoners of war, they’re soldiers who you’ve captured in wartime, whether they’re wearing a regular uniform or not, and that’s it.

There’s an enormous resistance to going back to the world that existed before 9/11 in that sense. The Bush position is ferociously defended by numerous Republicans now. But it’s also essentially, fundamentally defended by the Obama administration as well, however much they may try to dance around that — and if challenged, they would probably talk about how this isn’t about projecting into the future, this is a legacy problem they’re trying to deal with, and under the terms of this legacy problem, that detention situation exists. They could redefine people as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention. Then we could all be debating about how long the war lasts and how long it’s appropriate to hold these men.

So it’s a disastrous confusion, really, the position we’re in now, with all these different factions fighting their own corners, and the people in Guantánamo ultimately being the losers. If they’re cleared for release, they’re not going anywhere. If they were recommended to be put forward for trial, then one avenue for trial has been cut off, the other one doesn’t look promising. Then behind that are men to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, which was exactly what the Bush administration intended in the first place. And however that’s dressed up, that’s not fundamentally any different either.

I hope that at some point we will be able to push the debate onto these issues of scrapping the whole terminology that underpins detentions in the “war on terror” and get back to an understanding that people are either criminals or soldiers, and that’s the end of the story.

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.

Like a dark magic spell capable of banishing all sensible discourse in an instant, the merest mention of the words “Guantánamo” and “terrorism” in the same sentence is sufficient to send lawmakers into paroxyms of hysteria, and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to proposals to put any of the Guantánamo prisoners on trial for their alleged offenses.

Guantánamo’s supporters are so wedded to the Bush administration’s false and damaging nation that, in the “War on Terror,” terrorists are no longer criminals but are “warriors,” that when Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would face a federal court trial in New York, they raised a cacophonous roar of opposition, bleating that establishing security at the courthouse would be prohibitively expensive, and warning that the trial would lead to a terrorist attack by al-Qaeda.

Last month, emboldened by their success in persuading Obama to shelve the plans for the 9/11 trial, lawmakers followed up by including a provision in a military spending bill prohibiting the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason (and explicitly mentioning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by name), even though it was clearly unconstitutional to do so.

Conveniently ignored by the fearmongers was the rather more mundane reality that, when Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” and the only Guantánamo detainee to be moved to the US to face a federal court trial before Congress decided to impose unconstitutional demands on the President, was put on trial in New York in October, there was no need for wildly expensive security, and no notion that terrorists would swoop from the skies to attack the courtroom.

Instead, the apologists for Guantánamo immediately changed their approach, blasting Judge Lewis Kaplan for obeying US law and refusing to accept information derived through the use of torture — the name of an allegedly important witness who later testified under dubious circumstances, and whose name was only divulged by Ghailani while he was being tortured in a secret CIA prison.

While this was despicable enough, as it indicated that, so long as the words “Guantánamo” and “terrorism” were uttered together, it ought to be acceptable for a District Court judge to ignore the US anti-torture statute, the critics of federal court trials then proceeded to decry the trial’s conclusion — a guilty verdict on one count of conspiracy in connection with the US embassy bombing in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998, along with the dismissal of 284 other charges — even though, as we saw yesterday in the sentence handed down by Judge Kaplan, that single conviction has led to a life sentence without parole.

What is particularly depressing about this topsy-turvy “Alice in Wonderland” world, in which success is portrayed as failure, and no one even blinks in dissent, is that the manufactured hysteria when “Guantánamo” and “terrorism” are mentioned together not only disguises the fact that federal courts have a proven track record of successfully prosecuting terrorism cases (and are, in fact, empowered to deliver punitive sentences on the flimsiest of bases), but also disguises a fundamentally bleak truth about Guantánamo.

The bleak truth is that, in a prison with such a notorious and demonstrable history of torture — particularly in connection with Ghailani, KSM and 12 other “high-value detainees,” as well as dozens of other men tortured in secret CIA prisons, or in proxy facilities in other countries — the presumption ought to be that the government’s assertions about these men are fundamentally unreliable, because torture is unreliable as well as illegal, and should not be taken at face value.

Instead, however, the opposite is true, and Ghaliani, for example, was happily judged to be guilty until proven guilty, by those who will, no doubt, still complain that he received a life senternce on just one count of conspiracy, and not on all of the 285 charges he faced.

With Ghailani’s life sentence, it is time for this cynical nonsense to come to an end. Federal court trials for terrorists work, and opponents should now cease whining, let go of their ideologically misplaced obsession with trying “warriors” in military trials at Guantánamo, and allow the administration to proceed with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators.

Nine years and four months after the 9/11 attacks, the relatives of the victims of that dreadful day deserve justice, and not to be made playthings by cynical lawmakers — and their echo chambers in the right-wing media — who will soon realize that their beloved Military Commissions are fraught with problems, and will, if given the chance, shift their focus so that, in the not too distant future, we will be hearing that some people — like KSM and his co-accused — are so dangerous that they cannot even be put on trial at all.

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

Also included in the report is footage of the fine words used by President Obama, on his second day in office, when he announced that he was issuing an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, which, of course, failed to materialize, and footage of Obama announcing, a year ago, a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis (following the failed Christmas Day plane bomb plot by a Nigerian apparently recruited in Yemen), which, as I mentioned in my talk outside The White House, remains one of the major stumbling blocks to the closure of the prison, leaving 58 men cleared for relase held indefinitely as political prisoners.

Real News also picked up on Tom Parker’s assertion that men accused of involvement in terrorism at Guantánamo should be tried in federal court, as happened last year with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and CIA “ghost prisoner,” whose trial was a success, despite being spun as a failure by critics desperate to keep the Bush administration’s ill-conceibed “War on Terror” alive.

The Real News Network feature is below, and readers may also be interested in an analysis of Guantánamo delivered a year ago by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is available here.

Note: The photo above is by Sarah Hogarth. Please see here for all her photos from the day’s events, and if you’re interested in the issues raised in this film, then please watch this video of a panel discussion on the future of Guantánamo that I organized at the New America Foundation on the afternoon of January 11, featuring myself, Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in the Supreme Court, and Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

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

I had subjected the government’s claims to detailed scrutiny, based on a number of factors, including the fact that the majority of the men in Guantánamo were seized by the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were widespread (PDF), and the fact that they had never been screened on capture, and subjected to Article 5 competent tribunals under the Geneva Conventions. Held close to the time and place of capture, these tribunals allowed non-uniformed prisoners to call witnesses, and were designed to separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war. They had been implemented successfully up to and including the first Gulf War in 1991, when around 1200 competent tribunals were held, and in three-quarters of the cases, those seized were freed, because they were able to demonstrate that they were civilians seized by mistake. At Guantánamo, I contend that the population could easily have been halved — from 779 to around 400 — had the competent tribunals not been dismissed by the Bush administration, which arrogantly asserted that it was, essentially, incapable of making mistakes — or didn’t care that mistakes had been made on a colossal scale.

Where Wittes and I also fundamentally disagreed — and still do — was in our analysis of the government’s supposed evidence. Whereas his analysis reads, essentially, like a summary of the case for the prosecution, I was aware that torture, coercion and bribery had been used to secure confessions, and I am gratified that this has been confirmed, many times over, during the last two years in the District Court in Washington D.C., where judges have been subjecting the supposed evidence to independent scrutiny, and have discovered the extent to which the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, were tortured or coerced into making false confessions.

The judges have also found evidence of the government’s repeated reliance on informants, whose reliability has been questioned by the authorities themselves, which tallies with discoveries made by a military officer working on the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo in 2004-05 (the Bush administration’s belated and mocking echo of the Article 5 competent tribunals), who discovered that one particular Yemeni prisoner had told lies about 60 of his fellow prisoners.

Some of the judges have also dismissed the government’s attempts to create a “mosaic” of evidence through seemingly isolated pieces of information, and this echoes, in part, the revelations made by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, who worked on compiling the information used as evidence in the tribunals, and who asserted, in a statement submitted to the Supreme Court in 2007, that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Since he completed his project, Wittes — sometimes with Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — has become an enthusiast for new legislation authorizing indefinite detention for prisoners seized in the “War on Terror,” publishing numerous articles and papers, and also securing opportunities to disseminate these ideas through op-eds in the Washington Post.

They are entitled to their views, of course, but personally I find it chilling that “military detention without trial” is being proposed as “a means for incapacitating terrorists” that is preferable to federal court trials, as they stated in an op-ed for the Washington Post after the federal court trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner, and a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” who was acquited on all but one charge two weeks ago, but neverthless faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison.

Like Wittes and Goldsmith, I oppose the Military Commissions (brought back to life by Dick Cheney in November 2001, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006 and revived twice by Congress, in the fall of 2006, and last year under President Obama) as a failed system that is unsuitable for trying terror suspects, as Lt. Col. David Frakt, former defense attorney for two Guantánamo prisoners, has explained in depth, but unlike them I believe that federal court trials are the correct venue for trying terror suspects, and that prisoners associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan (or even with what could be called the military wing of al-Qaeda, which supported the Taliban, but was essentially unconnected to the organizations’s global terrorist operations) should have been held as prisoners of war rather than as “enemy combatants” in a prison that failed — and still fails — to distinguish between terrorists and soldiers.

I also believe that the legislation that currently exists and that is used by President Obama to justify the men’s ongoing detention (the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks) not only does not need replacing with the kind of alternative proposed by Wittes and Goldsmith, but should be scrapped, so that the United States can return to the pre-Bush world in which soldiers are prioners of war, and terrorists are criminals (as, in fact, has been acknowledged outside of Guantánamo and the CIA’s secret prison network, with the successful prosecution, since 2001, of numerous terror suspects in federal court).

On Wednesday, in response to an article, “The Rule of Law in the US Hangs on Obama’s Response to the Ghailani Trial,” in which I savaged Republican critics of the Ghailani verdict, who are using it to advance their own unjustifiable belief that terrorists are “warriors,” who should be tried by Military Commission at Guantánamo (despite the well-chronicled unsuitability of the Commissions as a venue for prosecuting terrorists), I also alluded to the work undertaken by Wittes and Goldsmith — and their colleague, law professor Robert Chesney — which, since September, has found a new outlet through their group blog, Lawfare.

In response, Benjamin Wittes published the article reproduced below, taking exception to some of the views I expressed, which prompted me to reply, to point out that he had mistaken part of my commentary, and to clarify other beliefs of mine which he had misinterpreted. Showing that dialogue is possible between those who hold differing views (unlike, for example, between those of us who oppose the existence of Guantánamo and the Republican lawmakers I referred to in my article about the Ghailani trial), Wittes then posted my reply, which I have cross-posted in response to his article.

I still regard his views with horror, as the very notion of passing legislation to endorse indefinite detention without trial, nine years after 9/11 and the beginning of the Bush adminstration’s descent into lawlessness, stands in such fundamental opposition to everything I hold dear about the law. I am, however, grateful that Wittes published my response, and that we were able to demonstrate that differing points of view can be challenged through dialogue, rather than through the kind of polarized politics that has crippled the Obama administration in its dealings with national security. Regular readers will know that I do not regard the President as blameless in this, as he has persistently lacked the courage to stand up to his critics, but it nevertheless remains true that, on national security issues, and on dealing with terror suspects and Guantánamo, there are far too many voices raised on a regular basis that resemble nothing less than the darkest days of the Bush and Cheney years, which is the last place that a responsible America needs to find itself.

Cross-posted below is my exchange with Benjamin Wittes:

“Blind Vengeance and a Thorough Disdain for the Law”
By Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, November 25, 2010

This is how the always-entertaining British journalist, Andy Worthington describes critics of federal court trials, including — it seems — Jack and Bobby and me, which is kind of funny considering that we are not really critics of federal court trials at all. Worthington has written a great deal about Guantánamo over the years, and to give him his due, he did an incredible job of identifying the population at the facility. On certain empirical questions, I have relied on his work extensively and admire it. On normative matters, however, we are as far apart as can be. I regard him as absurdly credulous of the innocence of just about everyone at the base; he comes from the school of thought that believes that any detainee who says he’s a sheep farmer or aid worker obviously is exactly that and that it’s an affront to the rule of law that American forces might, well, not believe some of them. For his part, he describes me as follows:

Fortunately, for now, few critics have rallied behind a small group of other critics — Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and law professor Robert Chesney — who have taken another troubling unconstitutional line, suggesting that Congress should enact legislation to hold terror suspects indefinitely without even bothering to think about putting them on trial.

However, without decisive action in support of US law and the Constitution on the part of the government, it may be that the idea of avoiding trials altogether for terrorist suspects will gain in strength. In this, Wittes, Goldsmith and Chesney may find that they are encouraged, disturbingly, by the Obama administration itself, which has already endorsed indefinite detention without charge or trial for 48 of the remaining 174 prisoners in Guantánamo, on the advice of the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was established by President Obama last year to review the cases of the remaining prisoners.

Moreover, in its apparent paralysis regarding trials either in federal court or by Military Commission for 34 prisoners (who were recommended for trial by the Task Force), the Obama administration is close to finding that it has enshrined indefinite detention without charge or trial as official US policy unless it acts immediately to put other Guantánamo prisoners on trial in federal court — starting, I suggest, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, whose federal court trial was announced by Eric Holder almost exactly a year ago.

If senior officials believe in the ability of federal courts to try terrorist suspects, they need to find the courage to say so, to say so boldly and with a courage that has been sadly lacking, and to follow through on their beliefs without caving in to criticism from opponents whose entire point of view is fueled by blind vengeance and a thorough disdain for the law.

A few points in response.

First, it is not quite fair to Bobby to group him in with Jack and me on this matter. His lust for blind vengeance and disdain for the law — though considerable, I’m sure — may not quite be on a par with ours. Specifically, I don’t know him to have endorsed the idea of not bringing Guantánamo detainees to trial at all. Indeed, while Bobby certainly supports detention legislation, his work was pivotal in opening up for question the Bush administration’s contention that federal courts were a wuss forum compared with military commissions. I don’t know what Bobby thinks about whether and when, at this stage, trials are desirable for this group of people, and Worthington should not presume he does either. At any rate, as Woody Allen might put it, I happen to have Bobby Chesney right here, so he can speak for himself on the point.

Second, I won’t argue with Worthington about whether my views on detention are “troubling” or not, but there is simply nothing unconstitutional about military detention. To be sure, it could be done in an unconstitutional fashion. But the core premise that some non-criminal detention of war-on-terror suspects is available to the executive is not at this point even constitutionally controversial, let alone in significant doubt. At least, it’s not controversial among the justices of the Supreme Court, the Congress of the United States, or the presidency of the United States — whether the presidency is held in Republican or Democratic hands. There are questions, of course, about the permissible legal boundaries of detention, questions that we bat around on Lawfare every day. But it just won’t do any more for the Left to dismiss detention per se as a lawless or unconstitutional option. The last time I checked, the Constitution doesn’t vest in British journalists the authority to interpret its meaning, and the officials in whom it does vest interpretive power do not share Worthington’s view.

Finally, there is an important point of agreement here: I wholly share Worthington’s frustration with the administration’s paralysis. I will support and defend just about any lawful disposition of these cases. If the administration decides to try people in federal court, I will defend that decision against the inevitable conservative attacks. If it decides to try people in military commissions, I will defend that decision against the inevitable attacks from, among other people, Worthington. If it affirmatively decides not to bring people to trial — the option that I tend to favor — I will defend that against their cries of lawlessness. I have suggested that the administration might thread the needle of federal courts vs. military commissions by using both forums in the September 11 case. And I am open to the creation of alternative trial venues if that will help too. The one approach I think is utterly indefensible is hand-wringing passivity — precisely what the administration has been doing for the last year. It’s just terrible leadership; Worthington is correct that it displays weakness to domestic critics, but the more important point is that it displays weakness and uncertainty to the enemy. At some point, and that point was long ago, one needs to make a decision, articulate it, stand by it, and implement it.

Andy Worthington Responds
By Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare, November 25, 2010

I received the following note from Andy Worthington in response to my earlier post about his article. I appreciate very much his clarifications, which read in relevant part:

My intention was not to describe you and Jack and Robert as “fueled by blind vengeance and a thorough disdain for the law” — and I apologize if that was unclear. I thought it was clear that I was referring back to the Republican lawmakers and their ideologically-driven disdain for federal court trials and for the absolute prohibition on the use of torture, and their mistaken enthusiasm for Military Commissions.

I also would like to clarify my position regarding the prisoners at Guantánamo, which also relates to your views on indefinite detention. You may, if you wish, describe me as “absurdly credulous of the innocence of just about everyone at the base,” but in fact I have never stated any such thing. I believe that around three dozen of the prisoners — maybe a little more, maybe a little less — have anything in their case histories to indicate that they had any involvement with terrorism, and that, of the rest, roughly half were innocent men, seized by mistake, or through the opportunism that develops in one’s allies when large bounty payments are offered for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and the other half were foot soldiers for the Taliban.

And as you also know, I’m sure, my problem with the detention policy is that I believe the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which, with a ruling by the Supreme Court in 2004, is used to justify the prisoners’ detention at Guantánamo, is an unacceptable alternative to the Geneva Conventions as a means of holding wartime prisoners until the end of hostilities. I also believe that those accused of terrorist activities should be tried in federal court, as they have been for many years both before and after the 9/11 attacks. What galls me, and will continue to gall me, is holding both soldiers and terror suspects indefinitely as “enemy combatants” — or, as they now are, “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents” — as though the Bush administration’s creation of a new category of prisoner — one without any rights at all — was fundamentally correct.

As a result, I don’t see the need for any new legislation, and, indeed, am deeply troubled by any proposal that would further undermine the Geneva Conventions and the success of the US courts in prosecuting terrorist suspects by refining the innovations introduced by the Bush administration, which showed a particular disdain for the strengths of domestic and international law, and for the robustness and importance of international treaties. Instead, I would like to see the AUMF repealed, wartime prisoners held according to the Geneva Conventions (and this applies to Bagram as well, and wartime detention in any future conflicts), and those accused of involvement in terrorist activities to be tried in federal court.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and Uruknet.

In fact, after deliberating for five days, the jury found him guilty on one count of conspiracy to destroy US property and buildings, which carries a mandatory 20-year sentence, although the judge in his case, Judge Lewis Kaplan, can decide that a life sentence is appropriate.

Why, then, did Representative Peter King (R-NY), who is poised to become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January, exclaim, “This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts?

The reason is naked ideology, of a very damaging kind, as Rep. King revealed in the comment that followed. “We must treat them as wartime enemies,” he said, “and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

For Rep. King and his fellow Republicans, who were queuing up to damn President Obama for his imperceptible failure, the naked truth is that they would have been even more dissatisfied if the jury had convicted Ghailani on the other 284 counts on which they found him not guilty, as it would have made it more difficult for them to attempt to justify their obsession with treating Ghailani — and all the other prisoners in Guantánamo — as “warriors” in the “War on Terror” launched by the Bush administration, for whom federal court trials are ideologically unsuitable.

Such is the blinkered obsession of these critics that they actively want information derived from torture to be used in the trials of alleged terrorists, and they blame Judge Kaplan for upholding the law by excluding from the trial the government’s alleged “star witness,” a Tanzanian named Hussein Abebe, whose name was revealed by Ghailani while he was being subjected to torture in a secret prison run by the CIA — part of a network of secret prisons in which he was held for two years and two months, after his capture in Pakistan in July 2004, until his transfer to Guantánamo, with 13 other alleged “high-value detainees,” in September 2006.

To these critics, it is irrelevant that information derived through the use of torture was excluded by Judge Kaplan because such information can never be used in federal court — and because the use of torture is a crime under domestic US law — just as it is irrelevant that Hussein Abebe’s testimony may also have been suspicious, as Marcy Wheeler pointed out in two articles on FireDogLake.

Nor, bizarrely, do they care that experts with deeper knowledge of the Commissions have pointed out that a military judge in a trial by Military Commission would also have excluded evidence derived through the use of torture, or that the Commissions themselves have a dismal record when it comes to successful prosecutions, having secured just five verdicts since their revival nine years ago: three through plea deals (in the cases of David Hicks, Ibrahim al-Qosi and Omar Khadr); one, in the case of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, after a trial in which the military jury threw out a charge of conspiracy; and another, in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who produced a propaganda video for al-Qaeda, after a one-sided trial in which al-Bahlul refused to mount a defense.

With the exception of al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence (although this is being appealed), all these supposed victories have perished under scrutiny: in 2007, Hicks was freed almost immediately, to serve just seven months in Australia; Hamdan received a sentence of five and a half years, but the judge decided it included time already served, and he was a free man after just five months; al-Qosi, a sometime cook for al-Qaeda, is expected to serve two years; and Omar Khadr’s plea deal means he will be freed from Guantánamo in a year, with seven years ahead of him in a Canadian prison.

Also irrelevant to these advocates of torture and bent trials is the fact that federal courts have an enormously successful track record of prosecuting terrorists, and that the fate of Ghailani’s alleged co-conspirators in the 1998 bombings provides a salutary lesson regarding these successes, providing a ringing endorsement of federal court trials for terrorists, and — along the way — also providing a damning repudiation of the extralegal novelties of the “War on Terror.” Rather than being diverted into a network of secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture was making an ill-advised renaissance, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-’Owhali, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh and Wadih el-Hage were interrogated by FBI officials without the use of torture, were successfully convicted in a federal court in New York in May 2001, and were sentenced to life without parole in October 2001 — when the “War on Terror” had already begun.

All of the above is supposedly irrelevant to critics of the verdict in Ghailani’s trials because these cheerleaders for the Commissions — and for the use of information derived through the use of torture — want to ignore reality and return to the world envisaged by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington in November 2001, when they first revived the Military Commissions, intending that they would be able to launder information derived through torture, and sentence supposed terrorist suspects to death without anything remotely resembling due process.

This is the system which, although still a second-rate system of justice, reserved for foreigners regarded as terrorist suspects, or as “alien unprivileged enemy combatants,” who are not allowed to raise arms against US forces under any circumstances, has been amended over the years, after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal in June 2006, demolishing Cheney’s dream so that information derived through the use of torture is banned, as it is in federal court trials. As a result, the only essential difference between the Commissions and federal court trials is that the military judges in the former can use their discretion to decide whether or not to allow the use of information that may have been derived through coercion rather than torture.

This may have made a difference in Ghailani’s case, but it seems unlikely, given the Commissions’ track record, that it would necessarily have led to a harsher sentence than the one Ghailani will receive after his federal court trial. In addition, it is worth considering that Ghailani’s trial took place with barely a mention of his treatment in secret CIA prisons or in Guantanamo, when the precedents from the Commissions indicate that military defense lawyers may have fought more tenaciously to raise it as an issue.

Once it becomes apparent that critics of the verdict in Ghailani’s trial are actually seeking a return to the lawless fantasy land envisaged by Dick Cheney and David Addington, and believe — contrary to the evidence — that US law is soft and useless, it also becomes apparent that the silence of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in response to these complaints is deeply troubling.

The Obama administration needs to put down those who are insulting US law through the prism of their own warped ideology, or there is no telling where the rot will stop. Fortunately, for now, few critics have rallied behind a small group of other critics — Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, Jack Goldsmith, former Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and law professor Robert Chesney — who have taken another troubling unconstitutional line, suggesting that Congress should enact legislation to hold terror suspects indefinitely without even bothering to think about putting them on trial.

However, without decisive action in support of US law and the Constitution on the part of the government, it may be that the idea of avoiding trials altogether for terrorist suspects will gain in strength. In this, Wittes, Goldsmith and Chesney may find that they are encouraged, disturbingly, by the Obama administration itself, which has already endorsed indefinite detention without charge or trial for 48 of the remaining 174 prisoners in Guantánamo, on the advice of the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was established by President Obama last year to review the cases of the remaining prisoners.

Moreover, in its apparent paralysis regarding trials either in federal court or by Military Commission for 34 prisoners (who were recommended for trial by the Task Force), the Obama administration is close to finding that it has enshrined indefinite detention without charge or trial as official US policy unless it acts immediately to put other Guantánamo prisoners on trial in federal court — starting, I suggest, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks, whose federal court trial was announced by Eric Holder almost exactly a year ago.

If senior officials believe in the ability of federal courts to try terrorist suspects, they need to find the courage to say so, to say so boldly and with a courage that has been sadly lacking, and to follow through on their beliefs without caving in to criticism from opponents whose entire point of view is fueled by blind vengeance and a thorough disdain for the law.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “The Rule of Law and the Ghailani Case.” Cross-posted on The Public Record, Cageprisoners and Uruknet.

Ghailani faces 20 years to life as a result of this decision, and critics of the trial, who oppose criminal trials for terrorists on an ideological basis, mistakenly concluding that terrorists are not criminals, but are warriors in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” are incapable of realizing that they are fortunate that Ghailani could be prosecuted at all, given that he was held in a secret CIA prison for two years and two months following his capture in Pakistan in July 2004, and that, for at least some of that time, was subjected to torture.

These critics railed against Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision, last month, to exclude the government’s star witness because it appeared that his name had only been revealed by Ghailani while he was being tortured, but even though this did not derail the trial, or prevent Ghailani from being successfully prosecuted, they now complain that the trial was a disaster and that he should have been tried  by Military Commission at Guantánamo.

Below, I cross-post an incisive op-ed published in yesterday’s New York Times by Morris Davis, the director of the Crimes of War Project. Davis is a former Air Force colonel, and was the chief prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from 2005 to 2007, when, crucially, he resigned after he was put in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s Chief Counsel, William J. Haynes II (part of Dick Cheney’s inner circle of advisors on the “War on Terror”) who wanted information derived through torture to be used in the Commissions, in spite of Davis’ implacable opposition to its use.

Davis points out that there is no guarantee that a judge in the Commissions would have decided to overlook the use of torture, given that information derived through the use of torture is prohibited in the Commissions, and the only difference between the Commissions and federal court trials is that judges in the former have some leeway in deciding whether to accept information that may have involved some sort of coercion.

Crucially, his conclusions — and my own — indicate that critics of the verdict in the Ghailani trial want the Commissions to be a punitive fantasy land, as originally envisaged by Dick Cheney when he first resurrected them in November 2001, where the use of torture is acceptable — and may, indeed, be positively encouraged — and where military judges and juries, like automata, endorse without question the case put forward by the prosecution, even though, as Davis points out, the reality of the Commissions is very different, and Ghailani will almost certainly serve longer in prison than four out of the five prisoners prosecuted in the Commissions.

A Terrorist Gets What He Deserves
By Morris Davis, New York Times, November 18, 2010

Critics of President Obama’s decision to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees in federal courts have seized on the verdict in the Ahmed Ghailani case as proof that federal trials are a disastrous failure. After the jury on Wednesday found Mr. Ghailani guilty of only one charge in the 1998 African embassy bombings, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, called on the administration to “admit it was wrong and assure us just as confidently that terrorists will be tried from now on in the military commission system.”

The verdict — in which Mr. Ghailani was found guilty of conspiring to blow up United States government buildings and not guilty on 284 other counts — came as a surprise to many, but the outcome does not justify allowing political rhetoric like Senator McConnell’s to trump reality.

True, prosecutors suffered a major setback when Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan refused to permit the testimony of the only witness who could connect Mr. Ghailani to the explosives used in the bombings. The judge did so because Mr. Ghailani claimed that he revealed the identity of this witness after being tortured by the CIA. The prosecution did not contest his claim, arguing instead that the identificationof this “giant witness for the government” was only remotely linked to Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation.

Judge Kaplan disagreed, saying that Americans cannot afford to let fear “overcome principles upon which our nation rests.” He said that, given the same circumstances, a military commission judge might have reached the same conclusion and barred the testimony.

Many have scoffed at this claim. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, insists that Judge Kaplan “doomed” the case. Yet a look at the record shows that Judge Kaplan’s assessment of what a military commission judge might have decided was well founded.

Consider Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan teenager who was charged with attempted murder for throwing a grenade at an American vehicle in Kabul in 2002. In 2008 a military judge, Col. Stephen Henley, suppressed incriminating statements Mr. Jawad had made after he was beaten and his family threatened while he was in Afghan custody. The military commission charges were later dropped and last year the United States sent Mr. Jawad home to Afghanistan.

We don’t know for certain whether a military judge would have reached the same conclusion as Judge Kaplan, but given the Jawad precedent it seems very possible. Those who claim to know that the government would have gotten a more favorable ruling in a military commission are ignoring the record.

In any case, Mr. Ghailani now faces a sentence of 20 years to life. Even if he gets the minimum, his sentence will be greater than those of four of the five detainees so far convicted in military commissions. Only one defendant, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, has been sentenced to life, and this was after he boycotted his tribunal and presented no defense.

Of the four detainees who participated in their military commissions, Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was 15 when arrested, is serving the longest sentence after pleading guilty to murder. Yet he will serve no more than eight years behind bars, less than half of Mr. Ghailani’s minimum incarceration. Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, was sentenced to five and half years in 2008 but given credit for time served; five months later he was free. There is no reason to assume that a military commission sentence will be more severe than one from a federal court.

In addition, Mr. Ghailani may well serve his sentence at the “supermax” federal prison in Florence, Colo., where others convicted in the embassy bombings are confined. If so, he will spend more time in solitary and enjoy fewer privileges than those under the most restrictive measures at Guantánamo.

President Obama is in a no-win situation when it comes to trying detainees — any forum he chooses will set off critics on one side of the debate or the other. I hope he pauses to reflect on what he said at the National Archives in May 2009: “Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists. They are wrong. Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists.”

The Ghailani trial delivered justice. It did so safely and securely, while upholding the values that have defined America. Now Mr. Obama should stand up to the fear-mongers who want to take us back to the wrong side of history.

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

In this first America, President Obama swept into office issuing executive orders promising to close Guantánamo and to uphold the absolute ban on torture, and also suspended the much-criticized system of trials by Military Commission used by the Bush administration to secure just three contentious convictions in seven years.

In addition, in April 2009 he complied with a court order to release four “torture memos” issued in 2002 and 2005 by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA (in 2002), or broadly upheld that decision (in 2005). As well as confirming the role of the courts in upholding the law, these documents contained important information for those hoping to hold senior Bush administration officials and lawyers accountable for their actions in the “War on Terror.”

The final flourish of this period was the decision to move a Guantánamo prisoner to New York to face a federal court trial, which took place in May 2009. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian seized in Pakistan in July 2004, was held in secret CIA custody for over two years, until he was moved to Guantánamo in September 2006, with 13 other men regarded as “high-value detainees.”

Ghailani’s transfer to face justice in New York for his involvement with the 1998 African embassy bombings was important not only because it confirmed that Guantánamo prisoners could be tried in federal court, rather than by Military Commission, but also because it established a connection with the way in which justice had been pursued before the 9/11 attacks. Ghailani had been indicted for his part in the African embassy bombings in 1998, and three of his alleged co-conspirators had been successfully tried and convicted in federal court in May 2001, prior to receiving life sentences in October 2001.

Unfortunately, in the second America, which emerged on the same day as Ghailani’s transfer, the rule of law has, for the most part, given way to political expediency and the blatant obstruction of justice, which have served only to reinforce the hideous novelties introduced by the Bush administration in its “War on Terror,” and to prevent any attempt to secure accountability for those responsible for the administration’s crimes.

This second America began with a major speech on national security in which the gains made by moving Ghailani to New York were offset by a decision to revive the Military Commissions, and also to hold some prisoners in Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, shattering the notion, prevalent until that date, that prisoners would either be released or charged in federal court.

This announcement came just five days after Obama changed his mind about complying with another court order — this one involving the release of photos showing the abuse of prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq — and although this decision was, perhaps, justified on the basis that it would inflame anti-American sentiment in both countries, it was later revealed that, around the same time, the President had also capitulated to far less justifiable criticism of a plan hatched by Greg Craig, the White House Counsel.

Craig, who had also been the driving force behind the President’s executive orders when he took office, had been close to resettling two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo on the US mainland, in order to break a deadlock involving cleared Guantánamo prisoners who could not be repatriated because they faced the risk of torture, and also to send out a clear message to America’s allies that, in closing Guantánamo, the administration was prepared to acknowledge its own mistakes, and was hoping that other countries would therefore help out by taking other cleared prisoners who could not return home.

The Uighurs are Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, and the 17 men in Guantánamo at that time were clearly innocent men, who had won their habeas corpus petition in a US court in October 2008, after the Bush administration gave up all pretence that they were “enemy combatants.” However, although Greg Craig had secured support for his plan from Hillary Clinton and defense secretary Robert Gates, Obama quashed it when Republicans got wind of it, leaving the Uighurs scrabbling around for a new home, and making the job of finding new homes for other cleared prisoners more difficult, especially as Republicans — and members of Obama’s own party — followed up on this successful attempt to intimidate the President by passing a law preventing him from bringing any cleared prisoner to the US mainland.

Since then, capitulation to pressure has been the name of the game. Last November, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the “high-value detainee” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and four other HVDs accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks, would, like Ghailani, face a federal court trial in New York. However, when a Republican-led backlash started, Obama caved in once more, refusing to press the advantage gained by having already moved Ghailani to New York, and freezing into inaction, taking the decision away from Holder about where and how the men would be tried, but refusing to make any decision at all.  Part of the problem was that, on the same day that Holder announced the 9/11 trial, he also announced that five prisoners would face trials by Military Commission, leaving an option open for critics of federal court trials that should have been slammed firmly shut.

By January this year, the hysteria about the proposed 9/11 trial was at its height, and Obama’s inability to fight back meant that, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, was seized after failing to blow up a plane on Christmas Day, and was discovered to have been recruited in Yemen, the President caved in again. This time around, his critics’ demands were that no Yemenis should be released from Guantánamo. Even though 59 Yemenis had been approved for transfer to Yemen by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, consisting of 60 career officials and lawyers and established by the President to review the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners, he announced a moratorium on the release of any Yemenis, which is still in place today and shows no sign of coming to an end.

In addition, Obama has done all in his power to ensure that nothing like the release of the “torture memos” in April 2009 will ever happen again. Early this year, he allowed a Justice Department “fixer,” David Margolis, to override the damning conclusion of a four-year internal investigation into the authors of the 2002 memos — John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee — in which Margolis downgraded the report’s conclusion that both men were deliberately guilty of “professional misconduct” with a mild rebuke for having apparently only exercised “poor judgment.”

In the courts, too, Obama has erected a seemingly impenetrable wall to accountability, invoking the little-known “state secrets” doctrine to block any attempt to have Bush-era crimes discussed in court, as, for example, in the case of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who tried to sue Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a Boeing subsidiary responsible for acting as the CIA’s torture travel agent, and expanding this abuse of “state secrets” to defend two shocking innovations of his own: a massive increase in drone killings in Pakistan, and a decision to endorse the assassination of US citizens anywhere in the world, even though both projects appear to be illegal, and have attracted severe international criticism.

In this second America, the loss of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in the mid-term elections appears to have led only to the final confirmation that, on Guantánamo and national security issues, Obama is content to do nothing for the rest of his term in office.

This is in spite of significant developments in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, which has been taking place in a federal court New York for the last month. Ghailani’s trial has demonstrated that the traditional manner of trying terrorist suspects is fully functional — and can operate adequately even with the exclusion of evidence obtained through torture — and a decision is expected from the jury this week.

If the trial leads to a conviction, the result should allow the administration to sweep aside all criticism and proceed with the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators, but as the Washington Post reported on Saturday, Obama administration officials have explained that the five men “will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future.” As the Post explained:

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

This may change, of course, as President Obama has not made an official announcement, but it seems unlikely, as everything else at Guantánamo has ground to a halt. Faced with ferocious opposition to any plans that made it through his wall of compromise and cowardice, Obama has demonstrated that he is content to continue holding the remaining 174 prisoners at Guantánamo on the basis of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, even though the AUMF perpetuates the false notion that the Guantánamo prisoners are neither prisoners of war, nor criminal suspects, but are still that third category of prisoner invented by the Bush administration: “enemy combatants,” or, as they now are, “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” who occupy a unique, and uniquely disturbing position, which, for the majority of the men, is still akin to a legal black hole, despite the fact that they were granted habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court in June 2008.

Consider the facts: On the trial front, even though the Task Force recommended that 34 of the remaining prisoners should face trials, the administration is currently proceeding with the trial of just one man, Noor Uthman Muhammed, in the Military Commissions (following the scandalous betrayal of justice last month in the case of the former child prisoner Omar Khadr), and in federal court, the officials who spoke to the Washington Post suggested that even a successful outcome in Ghailani’s trial would lead to nothing more than possibly a single “clean case against an unknown.”

As for the rest of the prisoners, there are 48 whom the Task Force recommended should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and 58 Yemenis who are going nowhere. Excluding Omar Khadr, Ibrahim al-Qosi and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, the three remaining men convicted in trials by Military Commission, this leaves just 33 prisoners “approved for transfer,” who, if new homes can be found, might be the only prisoners to be released from Guantánamo in the next two years, confirming the extent to which the closure of the prison has become irrelevant to President Obama and the Democrats in general.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Op-Ed News, Pulse, Uruknet and James Landrith.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The existence of the prisons was first revealed in the Washington Post on November 2, 2005, although the Post refrained from “publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior US officials.” However, on November 6, 2005, Human Rights Watch identified the countries as Poland and Romania, and stated that it had seen “flight records showing that a Boeing 737, registration number N313P — a plane that the CIA used to move several prisoners to and from Europe, Afghanistan, and the Middle East in 2003 and 2004 — landed in Poland and Romania on direct flights from Afghanistan on two occasions in 2003 and 2004.”

Although the Polish and Romanian governments denied the claims, Swiss Senator Dick Marty, a Rapporteur for the Council of Europe, concluded in a report in June 2007 (PDF), based on two years’ research and interviews with over 30 current and former members of the intelligence services in the United States and Europe, that he had enough “evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” Marty also identified both sites, noting that the flights to Romania flew into the Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield, and also explained how the flights were disguised using fake flight plans.

In September 2008, a Polish intelligence official confirmed that between 2002 and 2005 the CIA had held terror suspects inside a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland. He said that only the CIA had access to the prison, and that, although Prime Minister Leszek Miller and President Aleksander Kwasniewski knew about it, “it was unlikely either man knew if the prisoners were being tortured because the Poles had no control over the Americans’ activities.”

It was not until March 23, 2009, however, that the first details of specific flights into Szymany were officially confirmed in Poland, when the Polish Air Navigation Service Agency released information about a Lockheed L100-30 Hercules, registration number N8213G, which had flown in on February 4, 2003. This was followed up on September 16 with far more incriminating records, demonstrating that a notorious “torture jet,” a Gulfstream V, registration number N379P, had flown into Szymany on six occasions between February 8 and September 22, 2003 (see here and here), and on June 2 this year, a further release identified a Gulfstream IV, registration number N63MU, which had flown in on July 28, 2005.

Friday’s revelations by the Polish Border Guard Office are, however, even more significant, firstly because they include, for the first time, confirmation that N63MU flew into Poland on December 5, 2002, and secondly, because they provide details of the number of passengers on seven of the flights, as follows:

December 5, 2002: 8 passengers delivered
February 8, 2003: 7 passengers delivered; 4 others flown to an unknown destination
March 7, 2003: 2 passengers delivered
March 25, 2003: 1 passenger delivered
May 6, 2003: 1 passenger delivered
July 30, 2003: 1 passenger delivered
September 22, 2003: 0 passengers delivered; 5 flown to Romania

Who are the “high-value detainees” held in Poland?

In identifying these 20 passengers, the documents provide more questions than answers, as it is not known how many of them were prisoners, and how many were US government operatives accompanying them.

However, what can be stated with certainty is that three of the men who arrived on December 5, 2002 were the “high-value detainees” Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had all been held previously in a secret CIA prison in Thailand.

In the CIA Inspector General’s Report on “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003),” published in May 2004, but only made publicly available last August (PDF), it was stated that the “enhanced interrogation of al-Nashiri continued through 4 December 2002” and that, “after being moved, al-Nashiri was thought to have been withholding information”, indicating that it was at this time that he was rendered to Poland.

Moreover, in research for a “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” published by the United Nations in February this year (PDF, or see my cross-post here), an analyst

identified a flight from Bangkok to Szymany, Poland, on 5 December 2002 (stopping at Dubai) … though it was disguised under multiple layers of secrecy, including charter and sub-contracting arrangements that would avoid there being any discernible “fingerprints” of a United States Government operation, as well as the filing of “dummy” flight plans.

This, clearly, is the flight identified in the newly released documents as having flown into Poland via Dubai.

In addition, according to information provided to ABC News by “[c]urrent and former CIA officers” in December 2005, seven other “high-value detainees,” as well as Zubaydah, al-Nashiri and bin al-Shibh, were held in Poland, while an eleventh, Hambali, was held elsewhere (possibly on the British island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, which is leased to the US). ABC News identified these men as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Waleed bin Attash, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi, Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, Hassan Ghul and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

Of these seven, Hassan Ghul (whose whereabouts are still unknown, although he was reportedly held in a Pakistani prison in 2006) and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (who was one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006) were seized in 2004, outside of the period from December 2002 to September 2003 covered by the documents, but the other five may all have been held in Poland at this time.

In April 2009, Der Spiegel reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (another of the 14 HVDs, and the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) was flown to Szymany on March 7, 2003, and if this is the case (and the date, noticeably, corresponds with one of the dates in the newly released documents), then it is possible that Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who was seized with him on March 1, 2003 (and who was also transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006), was the other passenger who arrived with him on that date — although it is also, of course, possible that the second passenger was an interrogator or a psychologist.

As for the others identified by ABC News, Waleed bin Attash (another of the 14 HVDs), seized in Karachi, Pakistan on April 29, 2003, could be the passenger delivered on May 6, and Mohamed Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the sons of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” imprisoned in the US, could have been on any of the flights. Seized in Quetta in February 2003, his detention has never been officially acknowledged by the US authorities, and his current whereabouts are unknown.

More contentious are the claims that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi were held in Poland. Al-Libi, the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after he refused to cede control of it to Osama bin Laden, was, notoriously, rendered by the CIA to Egypt soon after his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, where, under torture, he came up with the false allegation that Saddam Hussein was working on a chemical weapons program with al-Qaeda, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

According to an account by the journalist Stephen Grey, al-Libi was rendered back to Afghanistan in November 2003, and according to another account, by a Libyan who talked to al-Libi in a prison in Tripoli before his suspicious death last May, he was rendered from Egypt to prisons in Mauritania, Morocco and Jordan, before his return to Afghanistan, where he was held in three separate prisons run by, or under the control of the CIA, before his eventual return to Libya (possibly in 2006). As a result, although it’s possible that he was also held in Poland for a while, it is by no means certain.

As for al-Sharqawi (also identified as Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj or Abdu Ali Sharqawi), the available reports suggest that, after he was seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002, he was rendered to Jordan, where he was held for nearly two years — and tortured on behalf of the CIA — before being transferred to the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul, and then, via Bagram, to Guantánamo, where he arrived in September 2004. As with al-Libi, however, it is possible that at some point he was transferred to Poland.

A program still shrouded in secrecy

Given the intense secrecy that still surrounds the “high-value detainee” program, all that we can state with certainty is that, in May 2005, Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury of the Office of Legal Counsel stated in a memo (updating the notorious “torture memos” of August 1, 2002, by John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee) that the CIA had, by that point, “taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and ha[d] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.” These figures do not include prisoners rendered to prisons in other countries that were not directly under CIA control.

As these are essentially the only details about the program’s scope that have ever been made publicly available, it is impossible to state with any certainty how many of these 94 prisoners were held in Poland. However, research undertaken for the UN’s secret detention report indicated that the majority of the 94 were probably held in secret prisons in Afghanistan, and the figure of ten men in Poland that was cited by ABC News is close to the figure quoted by Dick Marty, who noted that “a single CIA source told us that there were ‘up to a dozen’ high-value detainees in Poland in 2005, but we were unable to confirm this number.” If this is the case, then the 20 passengers referred to in the newly released documents may include just eight prisoners, with two more — Hassan Ghul and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — arriving in 2004, and the rest being interrogators and psychologists.

One more question, however, concerns the origin of one of the flights. Although the first flight came from Bangkok via Dubai, and the rest appear to have flown directly from Kabul, Afghanistan, the flight on February 8, 2003, which contained seven passengers, and left the next day with four passengers (again, perhaps US personnel) arrived from Rabat, Morocco. Given that Morocco was one of a handful of countries (along with Jordan, Egypt and Syria) that were used either as proxy torture prisons or in order to “disappear” prisoners entirely, it is possible that the flight picked up three prisoners in Morocco, and flew them on to Poland.

If this is the case, then three possible candidates are Abu Zubair al-Haili, a Saudi seized in Morocco in June 2002, who was known as “the Bear,” because of his size, and who was reported to be “one of the top 25 al-Qaeda leaders,” and to have had “a very close relationship to Abu Zubaydah,” plus two other Saudis seized with him. The whereabouts of all three men have never been explained by either the US or the Moroccan authorities, although in September 2002 the Independent reported that al-Haili was “in US custody.”

Romania’s role in the CIA’s secret prison program

The final piece of the jigsaw revealed by the new Polish documents concerns Romania, as it seems clear that, on September 22, 2003, five prisoners were taken from the Polish prison to what may, at the time, have been a new project in Romania. In his report for the Council of Europe (PDF), Dick Marty stated:

For reasons of both security and capacity, the CIA determined that the Polish strand of the HVD program should remain limited in size. Thus a “second European site” was sought to which the CIA could transfer its detainees with “no major logistical overhaul”. Romania, used extensively by United States forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom in early 2003, had distinct benefits in this regard: as a member of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Centre remarked about the location of the proposed detention facility, “our guys were familiar with the area.”

Marty added:

Romania was developed into a site to which more detainees were transferred only as the HVD program expanded. I understand that the Romanian “black site” was incorporated into the program in 2003, attained its greatest significance in 2004 and operated until the second half of 2005. The detainees who were held in Romania belonged to a category of HVDs whose intelligence value had been assessed as lower but in respect of whom the Agency still considered it worthwhile pursuing further investigations.

While this avenue remains to be explored, the UN secret detention report suggested that three of the men held in Romania may have been the Yemenis Salah Nasser Salim Ali (seized in Indonesia in August 2003), Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah (seized in Jordan in October 2003) and Mohammed al-Asad (seized in Tanzania in December 2003), who, after being held in secret prisons in Afghanistan, were transferred in April 2004 to “an unknown, modern facility apparently run by United States officials, which was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees … Research into flight durations and the observations of Mr. al-Asad, Mr. Ali, and Mr. Bashmilah suggest that the facility was likely located in Eastern Europe.”

All three were eventually transferred to Yemeni custody in May 2005, but they were clearly more fortunate than the other men rendered to Romania, whose stories have never emerged, and are as unknown as those of the five men transferred from Poland to Romania on September 22, 2003, whose existence has just been revealed.

In conclusion, while the release of these documents provides only a tantalizing glimpse into a program that is still shrouded in secrecy, it also provides some much needed information to be used in an attempt to compel the Polish government, the Romanian government, and, most of all, the US government, to stop pretending either that these prisons did not exist, or that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” and to come clean about both the prisons and the men held there.

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

As published exclusively on Truthout. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, Cageprisoners, The Smirking Chimp, War Criminals Watch, Little Alex in Wonderland, The Intel Hub, Question Everything, Human Rights House and No More Crusades.

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), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK (February 2010), Torture Whitewash: How “Professional Misconduct” Became “Poor Judgment” in the OPR Report (February 2010), Judges Restore Damning Passage on MI5 to the Binyam Mohamed Torture Ruling (February 2010), What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not “Poor Judgment” (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary (March 2010), Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney’s Torture and Lies (March 2010), Protests worldwide on Aafia Siddiqui Day, Sunday March 28, 2010 (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), How Binyam Mohammed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison” (June 2010), New Report Reveals How Bush Torture Program Involved Human Experimentation (June 2010), UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee” Program and Secret Prisons, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record (all June 2010), Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against Torture Architect James Mitchell (June 2010), The Torture of Abu Zubaydah: The Complaint Filed Against James Mitchell for Ethical Violations (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), How Jay Bybee Has Approved the Prosecution of CIA Operatives for Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.