Lawyers and NGOs aware of Algeria’s poor human rights record disagreed, as did some of the Algerian prisoners themselves, to the extent that the last two Algerians sent home — Abdul Aziz Naji in July 2010 and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed in January 2011 — had actively resisted being sent home, and had taken their cases all the way to the US Supreme Court, which had paved the way for their enforced return by refusing to accept their appeals.

In assessing whether or not it was safe for Algerians to be repatriated from Guantánamo, the US government was required to weigh Algeria’s established reputation for using torture against the “diplomatic assurances” agreed between Washington and Algiers, whereby, as an Obama administration official told the Washington Post at the time of Naji’s repatriation, the Algerian government had promised that prisoners returned from Guantánamo “would not be mistreated.” The US official added, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.”

According to research I undertook after Abdul Aziz Naji’s enforced repatriation, by speaking to the men’s attorneys, the US government was able to justify its claims because there had been no recorded incidents of torture amongst the ten Algerians previously released from Guantánamo. Although they were held incommunicado for 12 days by the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS), as permitted under Algerian law, none of them reported being physically abused. In addition, although they all faced dubious trials after their return — generally about 15 months after their repatriation — and although they also suffered prejudice because of the perceived “taint” of Guantánamo, they had not been convicted on trumped-up charges, and had been released after their trials.

I cannot guarantee that I was able to ascertain the exact details of what happened to each of the ten men, but until two weeks ago the most troubling information from Algeria relating to the Guantánamo prisoners appeared to be the 20-year sentence delivered in absentia against Ahmed Belbacha, one of the four Algerians cleared for release but still held, on trumped-up charges of “membership of a terrorist group active overseas.” As far as his lawyers can ascertain, this sentence only came about because Belbacha had been vocal in his opposition to being repatriated, based on his fears about the government, and about the Islamists who had prompted him to flee the country in the first place when they threatened him while he was working for a government-owned oil company.

On January 16, however, any comfort to be gleaned from the Algerian government’s refusal to imprison those returned from Guantánamo for the other Algerians who do not wish to be repatriated — and who, by my reckoning, are Nabil Hadjarab (PDF), Motai Saib and Djamel Ameziane (PDF), who were all cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration — dissipated when, as AFP reported, Abdul Aziz Naji received a three-year sentence “for membership of an extremist group active overseas.”

As AFP explained, “The prosecution had sought a 10-year prison sentence and a 5,000-euro ($6,330) fine” for Naji (described as Nadji Abdelaziz). Following the ruling, Naji’s lawyer, Hassiba Boumerdassi, said she would appeal, describing it as “an unprecedented ruling” in Algeria, although AFP pointed out that there was a precedent — the in absentia sentence against Ahmed Belbacha, and those who have studied what happened when Algerians were repatriated from the UK with “assurances” a few years ago are even less convinced. As a friend with close knowledge of the Algerians’ cases explained to me, one of them “was given the same sentence with the same accusation in 2007 when he returned home and another is still serving an 8 year sentence on his return.” She added, “Yet the Home Office claims that Algeria is now a country where it is safe to return the Algerian detainees here despite some of them still bearing the torture marks of Algeria’s torture chambers,” and the echoes with the US government’s view of the “safety” of Algeria are surely not coincidental.

Neverthless, this was the first sentence delivered in person against a former Guantánamo prisoner, and, as the legal action charity Reprieve noted in a follow-up report, Naji, an amputee “who is suffering from serious health complications due to the amputation of his leg,” has had his worst fears confirmed with his conviction. As Reprieve also noted, the charge against him “derived from the unsubstantiated accusations the US administration made against him in 2002.”

In an appeal, the NGO Cageprisoners also noted that, although Naji “returned to his family and tried to start a new life,” he “was deprived of any identity documents and suffered from depression, anxiety and other symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder due to his treatment in American custody.” Cageprisoners also explained that he was under “judicial supervision” and “had to sign a register every week at the local police station,” and also explianed that on the day of his trial he had been arrested without warning and taken to the court.

Reprieve added that, during his trial, “the prosecutor presented no evidence of Mr. Naji’s guilt — rather, the judge simply questioned him and produced a guilty verdict,” and also noted that he “is being held in the notorious El Harache prison in Algiers, where violent abuse of prisoners has been reported by Amnesty International.”

Reprieve also stated:

His family is deeply concerned about his rapidly deteriorating health, and his lawyer reports that his condition has become critical and is worsening by the day. He has not had access to adequate medical treatment while in prison.

Mustafa Bouchachi, the president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, visited Mr. Naji in prison on Wednesday and attested to Mr. Naji’s critical health condition. He reports that Mr. Naji is on hunger strike as “the only way that he has to protest his unjust treatment — first by the US authorities in Guantánamo and now in his own country.” Mr Naji further explained that his imprisonment in Algeria is bringing back to him his horrible and unjustified years in Guantánamo.

Katie Taylor, of Reprieve’s “Life After Guantánamo” project, added, “It is outrageous that Mr. Naji is being punished again for the same discredited accusations that the US used to hold him in Guantánamo for eight years without charge or trial — this time in his own country. Algerian authorities must restore his right to a fair trial and overturn his conviction on faulty charges for which the prosecutor did not even bother to introduce evidence.”

As Reprieve also noted, Abdul Aziz Naji is represented in the US by Ellen Lubell and Doris Tennant, who prepared the following profile with the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Mr. Naji was born in Batna, Algeria in 1975. After sixth grade, he began work in his father’s blacksmith shop and later completed his required military service in the Algerian Army. After his service, Mr. Naji, like many young Muslims, travelled to Mecca on pilgrimage and then, during early 2001, worked briefly with a reputable Pakistani charity, providing humanitarian assistance to needy Muslims and Christians in Kashmir. Offering to volunteer his services was important to his religious beliefs. While carrying food and clothing to poor villages one night with a group of other volunteers, Mr. Naji stepped on a landmine (one of many unexploded ordnance that lace the region) and sustained a serious injury, resulting in the loss of his lower right leg. He was taken to a hospital in Lahore, Pakistan where he was treated for several months and fit with a prosthetic leg. He spent many months after that in rehabilitation, living with a few generous families in the city who offered to board him.

An amputee with few resources and in need of the most basic assistance, Mr. Naji was directed by acquaintances to an Algerian in Peshawar to help find a wife. While visiting this man in May 2002, he and his host were arrested during a raid of the man’s house by Pakistani police, one of the many house raids in the area. The reason for the arrests was never explained. In fact, the Pakistanis told Mr. Naji that they would release him. But instead, he was taken by Americans stationed in Peshawar and transferred first to Bagram and then to Guantánamo where he was held for eight years without charge or trial before being forcibly repatriated to Algeria.

Note: In the hope of securing clemency from the Algerian government, Cageprisoners has drafted the following message to the Algerian Minister of Justice:

Monsieur le Ministre,

A la suite d’informations reçues de l’organisation britanique de défense des droits de l’Homme CagePrisoners, je vous exprime ma vive préoccupation concernant l’affaire d’Abdel Aziz Naji arrété le 16 janvier 2012 et condamné le jour même à trois ans de prison, accusé d’appartenir à un groupe terroriste opérant à l’étranger. Il apparaît que cette condamnation n’a pas été prononcée dans des conditions compatibles avec celle d’un procès équitable.

Alors que l’Egypte a mis fin à la détention injuste d’Adel Al-Gazzar, alors que des anciens détenus tunisiens de Guantanmo ont pu regagner leur pays d’origine en toute sécurité et alors que les nouvelles autorités tunisiennes se sont engagées à tout faire pour obtenir la libération de ses cinq citoyens toujours détenus sur l’île cubaine, l’Algérie incarcère un homme qui a déjà passé 8 ans à Guantanamo sans procès, et ce sur la base de vagues accusations et, semble t-il, de manière expéditive.

Je vous demande donc la libération immédiate d’Abdel Aziz Naji.

Je vous prie de recevoir l’expression de mes salutations distinguées.

The message can be sent by email, or by post to: M. Tayeb Belaiz, Ministère de la Justice, 8 Place Bir Hakem, El-Biar, Alger. The phone number is (213) 021-92-41-83 and the fax number is (213) 021-92-17-01.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

This is Part 28 of the 70-part series. 348 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America. Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo. Part Seven featured more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006, and this part features more mental health issues, another juvenile, three men sent to live in Albania because it was not safe for them to be returned to their home countries, and the last of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. Also see Part Nine and Part Ten.

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

Abdullah Al Qahtani (ISN 652, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, after his release, Abdullah al-Qahtani, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, told the newspaper Asharq Alawsat that, in Afghanistan, he had taken part in the Taliban’s military conflict, which he described as “skirmishes with the Russians and allies such as Ahmad Shah Massoud,” and also said that, after the US-led invasion began, he and a number of other Arabs negotiated a surrender with the Northern Alliance, and were surprised when they were handed over to the Americans.” In contrast, the Pentagon’s limited allegations are here.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Qahtani was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated December 3, 2004, in which he was also identified as Abdulla Hamid al-Qahtani and Abdullah Mohammed, born in 1979, and it was also noted that he had latent TB, in common with many of the prisoners, but refused therapy “after three treatments.” It was also noted that he had “been seen for tooth decay” and “had a left 5th metatarsal fracture (foot) noted on x-ray after ankle injury,” for which he “received therapy” — for “chronic ankle pain.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after one year of high school, “he worked for his father in a family owned business,” and then, in January 2001, met Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi (ISN 5, released in December 2007, and also identified as Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi) who was identified as “the national director of Al-Wafa in Afghanistan/Pakistan.” A Saudi-based charity which was demonstrably involved in humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Al-Wafa was also regarded as a front for terrorism, and was blacklisted by the US, and defined by the Intelligence Interagency on Counter Terrorism (IITC) “as a Tier 2 NGO,” meaning an organization that has “demonstrated the intent and willingness to support terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests.”

Al-Matrafi apparently recruited al-Qahtani, and his cousin Jabir al-Qahtani (ISN 650, released in November 2007), “to establish an Al-Wafa organisation in Lahore, Pakistan,” and in early February 2001 gave him $200 for travel expenses. After he and his cousin took a three-week vacation in Egypt, they met al-Matrafi in Lahore in April 2001, and “were driven to a large storage facility in Lahore,” where al-Matrafi told them “they would be accountable for all goods received from the United Arab Emirates and take regular inventories.” They apparently “lived on the second floor of the storage facility and were told by [al-Matrafi] to keep a low profile and not to be seen by the local populace.” Al-Jabrani explained that he “was told this [was] because he was a foreigner and it would make people in the area suspicious,” and said that he was also “introduced to a local Pakistani, Muhammad Gola, who was the acting director of the Al-Wafa office in Lahore, PK, and was told if he needed anything [to] talk to Gola.”

In September 2001, having not been paid, al-Qahtani said that he asked al-Matrafi “to pay him so he could travel back to Saudi Arabia,” and al-Matrafi told him that “if they travel[ed] to Afghanistan they would be paid the back wages plus any time worked while in Afghanistan.” He and his cousin agreed and traveled to Kabul, where they met al-Matrafi “in his villa” in the Wazir Akbar Khan District of Kabul, and where, according to al-Qahtani, he “was only paid $3000.00 USD.” He and his cousin then “continued working for Al-Wafa in the Wazir Akbar Khan District until captured by Northern Alliance on [sic] November 2001.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 3, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Activities of the Al-Wafa organisation under Abdul Aziz aka Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi, Aspects of Al-Wafa funnelling financial support to illicit purposes, Lahore, PK, and Kabul, AF, offices of Al-Wafa [and] Recruitment procedures and network for Al-Wafa in Mecca, SA.”

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

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

Given what he said after his release, it may be worth considering that, in this latter period, he may not have been working for Al-Wafa as he stated, but I see no reason to dispute the whole of the story of his humanitarian work with Al-Wafa, although this is what the Task Force did. Noting that he was assessed as being “affiliated with Al-Wafa” and “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” the US authorities were deeply suspicious about al-Qahtani’s claim that he “was promised over $6000.00 USD for working six months in Pakistan,” which was regarded as “an excessive amount of money since the average employee of Al Wafa was paid between $250- $300 USD per month.” It was claimed that Al Wafa “was known for providing money transfers for Al-Qaida” (although this allegation was never actually tested in an objective manner), and that, as a result, it was “possible that [al-Qahtani] was involved in that activity or distributing money to Mujahideen as they were exiting Afghanistan.”

In addition, it was noted that it had been “assessed that he [was] possibly a higher-ranking employee in the Al-Wafa or other extremist organization and received weapons training at Al-Wafa’s training camp in Kabul, Afghanistan (AF), and did not work in an alleged ‘warehouse’ in Lahore, PK, which research has proven to be non-existent.”

As a result of all these doubts, al-Qahtani was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a high force protection threat,” with “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and “multiple acts of assault on his disciplinary record,” who had “routinely been aggressive and ha[d] two incidents of forced cell extractions,” had “incited disturbances on many different blocks and fail[ed] to act within the detention facility SOP.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although he was not released for another 17 months, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Khudaidad (ISN 655, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Khudaidad (aka Khudai Dad), who was 45 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in a night-time raid by Afghan soldiers in Uruzgan in April 2002. It was alleged that his compound was used by Mullah Berader, a senior figure in the Taliban, that he himself was a Taliban official and that he was supposed to “assume a prominent leadership role in Kandahar,” but he said that he was actually just a poor farmer.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khudaidad was an “Update Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Kudai Dat, born in 1957, and it was noted that he had been “diagnosed with Schizophrenia,” although it was also claimed that he was “otherwise in good health.”

In fact, Khudaidad had severe mental health problems, as was revealed in an attachment from the “JTF GTMO Behavioral Health Service and the Behavioral Science Consultation Team,” who reported that he “began to report symptoms of anxiety in November 2002, which resulted in his being hospitalized for acute symptoms of psychosis.” In January 2003, “he was referred to the transfer assessment team, which conducted a final interrogation,” and “was not interrogated again” for several months “while his file was being processed.” According to JTF GTMO’s daily incident reports, “he often refused his medication during this period,” but “[h]is condition improved, and he was cleared for a polygraph examination.” However, when this was to take place, he “began to have hallucinations again, and the polygraphers determined he was mentally unfit to examine.” It was also noted that it was “consistent with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, controlled with medication, for an individual to react to increased stress with psychotic symptoms.”

In July 2003, “he was started on a monthly dose of an antipsychotic to assist with compliance with his medication regimen.” It was noted that he then “responded well” to monthly does of Haldol Decanoate, and was “free of psychosis.” However, it was also noted that he could “be expected to experience intermittent difficulties related to psychosis over time without constant supervision of medication compliance,” and would “require continued psychiatric follow-up upon return to his native country.” Regarding his planned repatriation, it was noted that he would “require a mental health escort and supplemental medications ‘as needed’ in-flight,” and it was also noted that “[h]is long-term prognosis appear[ed] poor.”

Despite this, the “Update Recommendation,” following up on a recommendation that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another movement,” which was based on an assessment that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader” (dated March 22, 2003), included “New Information,” which led to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller’s recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, and was “contrary to his statements that he [was] nothing more than a farmer.”

According to “sensitive reporting,” which was not specified, Khudaidad was “referred to as a Mullah,” and “was possibly involved in negotiations between Mullah Omar and other Pashtun commanders for control of Kandahar during the disintegration of the Taliban regime.” According to this account, he “would have been acting in a leadership position,” but this was not convincing, given the use of the word “possibly.”

It was also noted that, “according to new information,” his claim that “he had only two brothers,” was untrue, as “he may have as many as seven brothers,” although, again, this was not presented as a hard fact. Related to this was a claim that he “supplied biographical information on a senior Taliban facilitator by the name of ‘Zainullah,’” who was regarded as a “possible brother” of his.

In addition, although it could not be confirmed that there was any significance to the claim that the compound where he was seized was “identified as the last known location of Mullah Berader and other top Taliban commanders,” and Khudaidad “denie[d] any knowledge of these individuals or of Taliban involvement in his town,” it was noted that his home “remain[ed] the center of Taliban resistance to the current government of Afghanistan,” and the authorities were deeply suspicious about that.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” It was also noted, evidently by the guard force, and evidently without having ever been apprised of his severe mental health issues, that he had “shown by his actions in the cell that he ha[d] little regard for himself and [would] not listen to authority,” and that he had “refused medications, banged his head against the floor, exposed himself to others, and in general ha[d] been non-compliant.” Most alarmingly, given what was indicated elsewhere about his mental health, it was also noted that, “at many times, [he] trie[d] to make it appear that he [was] suffering from a mental breakdown,” when, in fact, he probably was.

As a result of the Task Force’s intelligence and threat assessments, Maj. Gen. Miller made his recommendation, although the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as a low risk. However, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF [deferred] to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a medium risk.” CITF’s opinion may eventually have prevailed, but not for another 23 months.

Rashid Al Uwaydah (ISN 664, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Rashid al-Uwaydah, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he arrived in Pakistan in July 2001 “to escape possible arrest by the Saudi authorities for drug dealing,” but hoped nevertheless to buy drugs in Pakistan to sell in Saudi Arabia. After losing his passport, he was arrested in Islamabad with some Libyans he had met, who, he said, were from an official group recognized by the Libyan government, but who the Americans claimed were “helping Arabs get out of Pakistan.” It has not, to date, been possible to identify what happened to the Libyans seized with al-Uwaydah.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Uwaydah was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 15, 2004, in which he was also identified as Rashid Awwad Rashid al-Uwaydha, born in 1976, and it was noted that he was “in good health, although he complain[ed] of acid reflux.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he said, as he did in his review board at Guantánamo, that he “left Saudi Arabia to avoid being arrested for selling and smuggling pills in Saudi Arabia,” and “was advised by a Pakistani hashish smuggler” to go to Pakistan, where he was provided with a contact. He apparently arrived in Pakistan in June 2001, and planned to stay for a month before returning to Saudi Arabia.

Al-Uwaydah said that “he never attended any Taliban or Al-Qaida (AQ) affiliated training camps,” either in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, where, he said, he had never set foot. On approximately January 20, 2002, he was arrested by the Pakistani police “while residing at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Islamabad.” He was transferred to US custody on April 5, 2002, and the circumstances of his transfer to Guantánamo were not known to the Task Force, as it was stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, which was obviously impossible, and, in addition, it was “not documented in [his] file why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

In assessing his story, the Joint Task Force noted, bluntly, that his “cover story of going to Pakistan to buy drugs and never entering Afghanistan [was] untrue,” although there was little information provided to establish if this was indeed the case. The Task Force noted that it was “unclear if [he] was arrested with a group of Libyans that were operating in the same hotel,” as he claimed, but the US authorities had no witnesses to any of his activities, only a few dubious claims that his name was found on Al-Qaida-related documents recovered from house raids.

Particularly significant was the fact that his name “was listed as one of 77 Saudi nationals whom a visiting Saudi Delegation considered to be of low intelligence value,” and “indicated the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to have these 77 detainees transferred to Saudi Custody for possible prosecution.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it should be noted that he was assessed as being a high risk, and the words “medium to” were added in a hand-written note. In assessing the risk he allegedly posed, the Task Force claimed that he “appear[ed] to be well connected to key facilitators in the Al-Qaida’s [sic] intemational terrorist network, ha[d] probably participated in terrorist training and hostilities against the US and coalition forces, and maintain[ed] the capability to continue to do so if released,” and therefore, it was “imperative” that he be ”retained in the custody of the US Government or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Govenment,” because his “continued detention [would] allow for further exploitation of his past affiliation with various terrorist groups and prevent him from engaging in further terrorist activity.”

The Task Force also declared him to be “an extremely hostile, radical Islamic,” whose threat assessment was “high,” because he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” had “aggressively assaulted the guards and ha[d] made many threats towards the guards.” As a result, it was perhaps surprising that Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although it was noted that this decision only applied “if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence,” and that, “If a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached for his continued detention in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he should be retained under DoD control.”

The Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as “a medium risk on 7 May 2004,” but CITF deferred to JTF GTMO’s assessment that he posed “a medium to high risk,” in “the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” but even with the Task Force’s conditions, he was not released for another 19 months, and was then put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, Russia) Released in November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Zakirjan Asam (aka Zakirjan Hassam), from Saratov Oblast, part of the Russian Federation bordering Kazakhstan, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled below — the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718).

In Chapter 14, I explained how Asam, a refugee, said in Guantánamo that he was deported from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan in spring 2001, and was betrayed, after the US-led invasion began, by Afghan villagers anxious to avail themselves of the reward money offered by the Americans for vulnerable individuals who could be passed off as members of Al-Qaida or the Taliban. He explained that the inhabitants of two villages in Kunduz province negotiated between themselves and asked him to pay them a $3,000 bribe or they would hand him over to the Americans. He said that “they knew they could sell me to the Americans for $5,000,” and that they explained to him that “because I am a Muslim they lowered the price for me.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Asam was  an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 25, 2005, in which he was misidentified as an Uzbek, and it was noted that he was born in May 1974. It was also noted that he “was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder with psychotic features and a non-specific psychosis,” and that he “suffer[ed] from migraine headaches.” It was also noted that he was taking “three psychiatric medications to control his illness,” and that the only restriction on his ability to travel (in other words, to be released from Guantánamo) was the requirement “to have his migraine and psychiatric medications available for the flight.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, after working as an auto mechanic, he moved to Kazakhstan in 1999, where he “was employed as a wheat farmer and construction laborer” until the spring of 2001, when Kazakh officials arrested him “due to lack of identification paperwork.” He was then apparently turned over to Tajik government officials “and was housed for two and a half months in a house with two unarmed guards,” before being “placed on a helicopter with a ‘Red Crescent’ emblem on the side and flown to Afghanistan,” where he was “put in a truck and transported to Kunduz.”

There, he said, he studied in a mosque, and, from May to November 2001, shared a house outside of the city “with eight women and three other males,” where he “maintained the generator for room and board.” When the US-led invasion reached Kunduz, he “fled to the mountains where he stayed for three days,” until Northern Alliances forces captured him “while he and two Uzbek-ethnic Afghans were sitting by a fire,” although “he was the only individual arrested.”

He was then taken to Dasht-e-Archi, where he was held in a house with “a group of unidentified Afghans for 25 days,” and where his captors said that, if he could raise $300, he would be freed. They then “released him to be able to acquire the funds,” but he “was later recaptured and jailed for one month before being turned over to US forces.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] and their activities in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that Asam was “assessed as being a probable member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” although no witnesses were found who had identified him, and all that the Task Force had to go on were similarities to the stories of others, which is hardly very convincing. It may be that he was an IMU recruit, as his story was full of holes, although there were certainly also a number of other strange stories circulating, concerning Afghanistan, the IMU and the countries to the north, indicating that men like Asam had been deported to Afghanistan, or deported and pressed into military service, meaning that his willingness, if he was indeed recruited, was difficult to gauge.

Above all, though, his mental health problems plagued his case, and, it seems to me, made any kind of objective assessment impossible. He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” but part of that assessment involved a claim that his “psychological disorders may make him vulnerable to recruitment or manipulation by Islamic extremist organisations, who would exploit this vulnerability to utilize him to conduct terrorist activities.” It was also noted, in an analysis of his conduct (presumably submitted by the guard force) that he was “extremely violent and ha[d] been labeled as a psychiatric patient,” that he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and that he had “six self-harm incident reports on record.”

Although it had been recommended that he be retained in DoD control on December 20, 2003, Brig. Gen. Hood drew on “information obtained since [his] previous assessment” to recommend that he be transferred to another country for continued detention, although this “information” was not specified. Of course, as the government evidently regarded it as unsafe to return him to Russia, the transfer recommendation was meaningless, as no third country would accept a former prisoner and then imprison them on America’s behalf. As a result, the trigger for his release was the decision, by his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, that he was not an ‘enemy combatant,” although it still took over a year and a half for a country to be found — Albania — that was prepared to accept him.

Since his release, no information has been provided regarding his mental health issues or how he has coped with his new life in a country that has offered him shelter, but very little in the way of support.

Salah Ahmed Al Salami (ISN 693, Yemen) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, al-Salami (generally identified in Guantánamo as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), who was 25 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi (who was just 17 at the time of his capture), and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, and all three were long-term hunger strikers, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before their deaths.

The administration’s response to the deaths was extraordinarily callous. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.” Stung by international criticism, the administration rapidly back-tracked, and Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was put forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. In the case of al-Salami, one of 15 men seized in a raid on a student house in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, the same night that Abu Zubaydah, who was later tortured and became one of the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoners,” was seized. After al-Salami’s death, the Pentagon alleged, without providing any evidence at all, that he was “a mid- to high-level Al-Qaida operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Although none of the men had taken part in any tribunals, more detailed allegations against al-Salami surfaced in the alleged evidence against him in his CSRT, although a close inspection of the allegations reveals that they were mostly made by unidentified “members” of Al-Qaida, either in Guantánamo or in other secret prisons: “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator” identified him, another senior Al-Qaida figure — a “lieutenant” — identified him as being “associated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the “Al-Qaida weapons trainer from Tora Bora” allegedly identified him from his time in Kabul and at the Khaldan training camp. He was also identified as “an Al-Qaida courier,” and as someone who “worked directly for Osama bin Laden’s family.” Shorn of these allegations, which summon up images of various supposedly “significant” prisoners being shown photos of tier fellow prisoners — in what was known as the “family album” — in painful circumstances, the only other allegation was that the “Issa” guest house received the equivalent of jihadi junk mail: apparently, the residents of the house “routinely received endorsement letters from a well-known Al-Qaida operative” to attend the Khaldan camp.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Salami was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated October 1, 2004, in which he was not identified by his real name, but only as Ali Abdullah Ahmed and Ali Abdullah Saleh, and it was noted that he was born in August 1979, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had “a history of hunger striking and nephrolithiasis (kidney stones).”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, he “was a street vendor who sold clothing,” but “had been thinking about religious education for a long time and was prompted to travel to Pakistan to receive this education upon hearing God’s calling.” Around May 2001, “he quit his job, left his young wife, spent $500 USD on a passport, visa, and plane ticket,” which “was good for a return trip up to one year after purchase,” and flew from Sana’a to Karachi.”

After a week in Karachi, he took a bus to Faisalabad, where he “enrolled in Jamea Salafia University and began religious studies.” He said that he “was living in on-campus dormitories for five to six months,” but, about one month after the 9/11 attacks, “was asked to move out of the dorms on-campus,” and, “with several other Arab students, moved to an off-campus safehouse ran [sic] by a man named Issa.” He explained that, by the end of March 2002, he “was planning on staying in Pakistan until his plane ticket was just about to expire (another month and a half), but his plans were cut short” when Pakistani authorities raided the house, which was identified as the Crescent Textile Mill, on March 28, 2002.

He was then turned over to US authorities, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 19, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on: The safehouse in Faisalabad, PK, which was used to house foreign students who were attending the Jamea Salafia University [and] Routes of ingress between Yemen and Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force stated its belief that he was “using the guise of studying Islam at the Jamea Salafia University while residing at the Issa safehouse as a cover story to conceal his true activities in Pakistan/Afghanistan.” An analyst pointed out that the Jamea Salafia University was “a religious madrassa (school) and not a state-funded or state-regulated school,” and that “[r]eligious madrassas in Pakistan are perceived to encourage militancy, religious extremism, and intolerance while thriving on anti-Western sentiment,” which may well have been true, but it did not mean that al-Salami was not a student.

It was also noted that he was captured “with fifteen others, many of whom have been identified by senior Al-Qaida personnel,” although this claim was extremely difficult to corroborate. What was clear was that Abu Zubaydah had some sort of connection with the house, but it was unclear exactly what that connection was, beyond being a place where, on occasion, men fleeing Afghanistan — whether as combatants of civilians was unclear — could be housed.

It was certainly not appropriate for the Task Force to declare that “The Issa safehouse was under the control of Abu Zubaydah, an Al-Qaida top lieutenant and aid to Osama bin Laden,” as the house was under the control of the Pakistani named Issa, and the claims about Zubaydah were and are wildly exaggerated.

As  a result, it was worth regarding with skepticism an analyst’s note that, although ”[s]everal Arabs captured at the Issa safehouse ha[d] used the same rigid cover story that they were merely educating themselves and studying Islam,” it was possible that “the house could have been used as a collection point for Al-Qaida members seeking and returning from Al-Qaida terrorist training.”

There are also grave doubts about the legitimacy of a raft of other claims made by Zubaydah and others seized with him in another house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002. Zubaydah, for example, allegedly “identified” al-Salami, claiming that he had seen him in Kandahar with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and that “he might have seen detainee in Kandahar three or four times,” but there is no reason to trust this statement, and nor is there any reason to trust a statement made by Abu Yasir Al-Jaza’iri, described as “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator,” who “identified” al-Salami, and made a number of outlandish claims about him, as al-Jaza’iri was a “ghost prisoner,” also seized in Pakistan in March 2003, whose whereabouts have never been explained by the US government. Either held in secret CIA torture prisons, or in Pakistani custody, his testimony is, therefore, probably as unreliable as that of Abu Zubaydah.

Al-Jaza’iri apparently said that al-Salami’s cousin was arrested on arrival in Karachi in 1999 “due to visa violation issues,” and al-Salami “was sent by the family to secure his cousin’s release from jail.” He also said that he first met al-Salami at a guesthouse in Kandahar in the spring of 2000 and “place[d] him back in Pakistan in late 2000 assisting in efforts to release his cousin.” It was also al-Jaza’iri who claimed that he was “an Al-Qaida courier,” and he also claimed that he “was the younger brother of Assadallah al-Sindhi, a popular Al-Qaida member killed in 1996,” and also, most outrageously, it seems to me, that al-Salami “and his cousin Nadim were responsible for caring for the logistics of the families of [Osama bin Laden]‘s son-in-laws, Awa al-Madani and Abdallah al-Madani, that included travel arrangements, lodging, and healthcare arrangements.” An analyst noted that this claim “establishe[d] the detainee’s stature in relation to UBL and adds validity to Zubaydah’s statements identifying that detainee associated with Senior Al-Qaida Operational Planner KSM,” but it does no such thing, as there is no indication that any of it is true.

Other dubious claims were made by Noor Uthman Muhammed (ISN 707, captured with Zubyadah), and described as the “Al-Qaida trainer from Tora Bora,” who allegedly identified al-Salami as having been in Kabul and at the Khaldan camp, although no further details were provided to corroborate his claims, and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014), another “high-value detainee” held in secret CIA prisons, and sent to Guantánamo in September 2006 with Zubaydah, KSM and 11 others. Bin Attash, described as a “senior Al-Qaida operational planner,” said that he “recognized detainee by his distinct birthmark, but cannot remember any details,” which is also meaningless as an allegation.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium to high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he had “a history of aggressive behaviour in the camp, often defiantly failing to comply with instructions.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be retained under DoD control, and he went on to resume the “history of hunger striking” and resistance to his detention identified in his file until his death 20 months later. What is particularly sad, reading through this file, is that, although JTF GTMO notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of its recommendations on October 1, 2004, CITF did not agree, having “assessed [him] as a low risk on 12 April 2004.”

In spite of the government’s official account of the men’s deaths, the claim that they committed suicide was doubted by their fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

In December 2009, the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the official investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and in January 2010, Harper’s Magazine published an extraordinary article by law professor Scott Horton (which I discussed here), revealing the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed” by the NCIS — who suggested that, earlier in the evening on which the men allegedly committed suicide, they had been taken from the cell block in which they were held to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions. “They didn’t die in their cells,” Sgt. Hickman explained to me in March 2010.

Despite these claims, the Justice Department shut the door on a proposed inquiry in November 2009, and an attempt by family members (including al-Zahrani’s father) to pursue accountability in the US courts was turned down in September 2010, and is currently being appealed.

Jamal Kiyemba (ISN 701, Uganda) Released February 2006

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Jamal Kiyemba, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born in Uganda, but had been a British resident since the age of 14, when he was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK following the death of his father and came to live in the UK with his mother, eventually embarking on a degree in pharmacy at Leicester De Montfort University that he never completed.

Although he lived in the UK for eight years, Kiyemba never claimed British citizenship, and on his release, he was sent to Uganda, and home secretary Charles Clarke prohibited him from setting foot in the UK again. As was reported in an article about him in the Mail on Sunday after his release, he told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, “I may not be British according to some bit of paper but in reality I am a Brit and always will be. My doctor, my local mosque, my teens, my education, employment, friends, taxes, home and above all else my family — it is all in Britain.” In contrast to this account, the limited allegations against him in Guantánamo are available here.

Kiyemba was arrested in March 2002 in Pakistan, where he went to study Arabic and the Koran because it was “very cheap,” without ever having set foot in Afghanistan, although he admitted that he was taught how to use a Kalashnikov by a Pakistani he met, and that he “left England with the intention of finding a way to fight jihad” in Afghanistan, “to defend the Muslims who were being killed.” After his arrest, he was held for two months, beaten by Pakistani intelligence officers, threatened with torture and then transferred to Bagram.

In Chapter 14, I explained how, in describing Bagram, Kiyemba recalled a 48-hour period, when he was “hung on the door for two hours and then allowed to sit for half an hour but never allowed to sleep,” and was then taken for interrogation for two hours at a time, adding, “I had to kneel on the cold concrete throughout the interrogations with my cuffed hands above my head.” He was also interviewed by MI5 officers, who showed him photos of supposed terrorists in the UK and told him they would only be able to help him if he helped them, but he didn’t know any of them. He recognized Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, but had only ever seen them on TV.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kiyemba was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated November 3, 2004, in which the Joint Task Force recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” following his last assessment, dated August 2, 2004, in which he was actually recommended for “Release or transfer to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD).” The full details of this assessment were not included , although it was noted that he was assessed as being of low intelligence value, and of posing a medium risk.

In assessing his threat level, the Task Force claimed that he was “an admitted jihadist who attempted travel to Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks,” and that he was “committed to defending Islamic nations against aggression, citing any system like democracy which tries to end Islamic law is worthy of Jihad against it,” and “adding that such systems are ultimately oppressive.”

It was also claimed that he “had acquired support in the UK and abroad from tiered organisations” including the vast, apolitical missionary organization Jamaat al-Tablighi (which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for terrorism), and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and, additionally, it was claimed that he “received military training in the use of the AK-47 while in Peshawar, PK, from support members belonging to the LET.”

It was also noted that “Pakistani police arrested [him] near Peshawar where he was attempting to enter Afghanistan with three other men who also ended up in Guantánamo — Mohammed al-Amin (ISN 706, a Mauritanian released in September 2007, but described as having been “assessed as a low level jihadist”), Mustafa al-Hassan (ISN 719, a Sudanese prisoner released in October 2008, but described as “a suspected Al-Qaida operative”), and Amir Yacoub al-Amir (ISN 720, another Sudanese prisoner, released in May 2008, but “assessed as a probable Al-Qaida operative”).

On his return to Uganda, Kiyemba was “confined to a ‘safe house’” for two months, according to the Ugandan press, although it would seem fairer to explain that he was held under a form of house arrest for this period. On April 17, 2006, he told a reporter, Emmy Allio, “I am now a very happy man because I am free to live my life. I have visited all my relatives. This is the first time I am free since 2002.” He also said, “I did not expect anything good in Uganda but I was instead treated quite fairly. I thank the Uganda security for being good to me. I thank all Muslims in Uganda and elsewhere who have been praying for me.”

He added, “Last week, the Uganda security told me that I am a free man. The officer told me, ‘You are free to go out and live your life but be careful with wrong groups out there.’” A security source told the reporter that the Ugandan government “did not find any cause to continue to detain him,” although the official added, “He is a free man, but we shall nab him if he falls in wrong groups.”

Even so, as the reporter described it, “his joy upon being released has quickly brought misery. Kiyemba is afraid of the future, saying he does not know what to do, having dropped out of university in 2001 to join ‘an Islamic cause against western imperialists in Afghanistan’ after the Taliban fell.” At the time, he said, “I was ready to assist my brothers there in any possible way, financially or by holding a gun, to defend them,” but now, he said, “I am looking for a job. I want to complete the university course. I want to be independent. I need help. I am determined to complete my studies but I need my independence. I need to sustain myself, not be a burden to relatives.”

He was unwilling to speak about his experiences in US custody, stating only, “In Guantánamo Bay, it was more of psychological torture. As a Muslim, you must be prepared to suffer and die for your religion. Being in Guantánamo Bay taught me one thing: to be patient and to put my trust in God.”

There have been no recent reports about Jamal Kiyemba.

Ala Salim (ISN 716, Egypt) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ala Salim (aka Allah Saleem), a religious scholar who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, see below).

In Chapter 13, I explained, drawing on the Pentagon’s documents, how Salim was one of several dozen prisoners seized in house raids in Pakistan in 2002 (mainly in April and May) who were mostly working for charities regarded by the US authorities as fronts for terrorism. Those seized were, in general, office workers or teachers, but in some cases people who just happened to live at an address regarded as a house where “terror suspects” were being “harbored” were also seized.

Salim, who became an influential figure to the Arabs in Guantánamo, had lived until the age of 22 in Egypt, where, like thousands of other young men, he was arrested several times but never charged, and after living in Saudi Arabia he moved to Pakistan, where he was distributing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan for the International Islamic Relief Organization at the time of his capture.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Salim, identified as Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh, spoke to reporter Matthew Schofield, although the reporter noted upfront that, “After years of imprisonment, alleged torture, countless interrogations and unrelenting psychological pressure, there are some things that Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh won’t talk about. He won’t say why he was in Pakistan in late 2001 or early 2002, when he was arrested. He won’t talk about how he made a living. He won’t discuss why he can never return to Egypt, his country of birth, or his three previous arrests and — according to documents filed with the Albanian government — torture in those prisons.”

He did, however, discuss why he thought “there can be no doubt that he’s innocent of all terrorism charges and suspicions, and why “there can be no doubt that the US never had any evidence against him.” As he said (via an interpreter), “I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Is there any reason to believe that if the United States could produce any evidence against me, any evidence at all, they would have set me free? I was innocent when I was arrested. I am innocent now.”

Mazruh (Salim) said that “a US military tribunal at Guantánamo told him in 2005 that he was innocent.” McClatchy noted that “there are no public records to confirm that,” but added that the decision to “declare him no longer an enemy combatant” was “the closest [the US government has] come to admitting that it made mistakes.”

Describing him as a “timid, soft man,” the McClatchy article also noted that he recalled that the allegations against him — and specifically, a claim that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — “created waves of laughter” from his fellow prisoners, who, he said, told him, “You were his bodyguard? And he’s still alive? He’s still free, and he hires the likes of you to protect him? You need a bodyguard; how could you be one?”

Turning to his limited freedom in Albania, McClatchy noted that it was not “a freedom he cherishes.” Living in “a small room in a refugee center, in a walled complex on the edge of the capital, in a neighborhood of rutted and pitted gravel roads cut through by a trash-filled creek,” he was, in Schofield’s words, “trapped without knowing the language, without work or even a permit to work. His wife and children wait in northern Africa, and he’s filed a petition with the Albanian government to allow them to join him, a petition that other former detainees are watching closely because they haven’t seen their families since they were arrested, either.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Salim was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated July 2, 2004, in which he was identified as Allah Muhammed Salim, born in January 1967, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he “had a lung biopsy prior to detention,” had “a history of migraines,” and had also been a hunger striker.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after graduating from an Egyptian university in 1989, he was sponsored by a mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to travel to Islamabad to assist Afghan refugees. After explaining that he was “not allowed to train or fight in the Soviet-Afghan War due to his poor hearing and vision,” he said that he traveled to Peshawar, where he worked as an assistant storage supervisor for the [International] Islamic Relief Organization” until 1991, when he began ten years of religious study — six at a university in Peshawar, and four more at a university in Sadiqabad.

After the 9/11 attacks, however, “he heard that Americans were rounding up Arabs in Pakistan,” and an acquaintance “advised him to go to a larger city [Lahore] and stay with a Pakistani man called Wasim.” He did so, staying at the house “with five unidentified men,” but just ten days after his arrival he was seized by Pakistani police. he said that he “spent nearly 70 days in a Lahore, PK, prison, followed by two months in an Afghanistan prison.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “possibly has information pertaining to: Beit Al-Ansar, a Saudi charitable organization operating in Peshawar, PK [who he stayed with for ten days in 1989], A facility near the Pakistan border belonging to Jalal Al-Din Al-Haqqani [the Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani] in 1989 [and] Refugee operations and weapons training taking place at the “Center” [elsewhere described as being close to the Afghan/Pakistan border, and a place where, in 1989, he reportedly "went to see a famous, but unidentified, fighter who fought against the Russians"]. Ironically, when it came to attempts to justify his detention, the Task Force noted that he had “admitted that he [was] a jihadist, that he traveled to Pakistan to assist the Muslims in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviets,and that he would kill Russians if he had the opportunity” — exactly the same sentiments that, when he traveled to Pakistan in 1989, were being financially supported by the US government to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

Despite having no information about him indicating that he was involved in any way with militancy or terrorism, the Task Force nevertheless stated that he had been “associated with three terrorist organisations” — Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaida and Harkat Ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a Pakistani militant group that he allegedly “attempted to train with,” and with whom he allegedly worked, at “the Center,” which was “affiliated” with Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to US analysts. The main problem with this allegation was that this alleged involvement took place in 1989, when Haqqani was a US-funded ally against the Soviet Union.

The US authorities suggested that he had been “arrested twice in Egypt for distributing propaganda for the EIG [Egyptian Islamic Jihad],” and that he admitted in one interrogation that he was actually deported from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, rather than being sponsored by a mosque, but it is uncertain how much truth there is to these accounts, or how relevant what Salim was doing in the late 1980s was to his activities nearly 15 years later.

No satisfactory reason was given for his alleged involvement with Al-Qaida, although, in assessing the risk he posed, the Task Force stated that it was assessed that he was “very intelligent/educated” and had “provided support to multiple terrorist groups by organizing their finances and personnel.” Even though no evidence was provided to support this assertion, it was further claimed that his “poor vision and hearing and other medical problems [we]re probably valid, but this would make the perfect cover as being not useful to the fighting force and being underestimated by anti-terrorist forces.” In addition, it was claimed that “[t]hese disabilities would not hinder him from distributing material, collecting data, organizing records and delegating tasks to be completed by junior personnel.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because of the groundless assessment above, and an additional claim that, “by examining his attitude to pursue jihad,” the Task Force had decided that he had “performed hostilities against the US and coalition forces by supporting terrorist organizations in an administrative role.” It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally non-compliant and aggressive,” that he had been “preaching and teaching to the other detainees in an angry manner,” and, “[w]hen asked to stop, he continue[d],” that he had “involved himself in a riot,” had “participated in hunger strikes,” and had been “caught hoarding food.” In general, this section concluded, he had “refused to follow the guard force’s instructions.”

For this, he was, no doubt, regularly punished, but for the authorities, all that counted were the assessments of the risk he posed and his intelligence value, leading to Brig. Gen. Hood’s recommendation that he should be retained in DoD control, which lasted until a tribunal concluded, instead, that he was not an “enemy combatant,” and should be released, setting in motion the process that eventually led to his release in Albania.

Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, Algeria) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Fethi Boucetta, a teacher who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716, also see above).

In his tribunal in Guantánamo, Hamad Gadallah (ISN 712, released in July 2005), who was a Sudanese accountant for a charity, the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, that had fallen under US suspicion, mentioned that his downstairs neighbor, who did not work for the RIHS, had also been seized on the same day as him, May 27, 2002. The neighbour was Fethi Boucetta, one of three teachers, working in a school run by the Saudi Red Crescent, and the other two teachers were also captured at the same time. The Pentagon’s limited allegations against him are available here.

A doctor who fled Algeria in 1996 to avoid military service, Boucetta sought asylum in Pakistan, where he was taken on as a teacher by the Red Crescent. Speaking of the circumstances of his arrest, his lawyer told the Washington Post in May 2006 that the Pakistani police “went to his house and asked to speak with somebody else [Hamad Gadallah], and Fethi said he didn’t know that person and that he wasn’t there. [They] came back with Americans in plain clothes, and they said they wanted to question him. That’s when he was arrested.”

Despite being arrested by mistake, it took until May 2005 for the Americans to accept that he was a completely innocent man, and in the meantime the allegations that mounted up against him were staggering. It was alleged that he “reportedly was an active member of the Islamic Salvation Front” (the Algerian political party whose suppression by the army in 1992 provoked the civil war that began the following year), that he traveled to Afghanistan from the Yemen, where he taught from 1993 to 1996, “at the request of the Taliban” (he actually travelled to Pakistan and carried on teaching), that he “reportedly organized combatants to fight for the Taliban,” and that he “reportedly has organized extremist networks in Arab countries and has contacts throughout the Middle East.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Boucetta, identified as Abu Mohammed, told the reporter Matthew Schofield that, “[o]n the night the soldiers came for him, [he] was resting at home with his pregnant wife and five children.” He added that they “showed him a list of the men they were looking for,” and that “[t]he address for his building was on the list, but his name was not.” He added, “As they turned to leave, he asked the soldiers what they needed, but was told it was none of his concern.”

However, the soldiers returned 15 minutes later, and “asked whether they could look through his apartment.” He said that he remembered “thinking he had nothing to hide, so he stepped aside,” and was handcuffed, while the soldiers searched the house. They then “uncuffed him, apologized for the inconvenience and departed,” but they returned for a third time, and it was on this occasion that his nightmare began, when “they asked him to accompany them to a nearby office, to answer questions.”

Boucetta told McClatchy’s reporter, “I did not like to leave my family at night, but knew in my heart I had done nothing wrong, and I was not on their list — they showed it to me — so I knew I had nothing to fear.” That should have been the case, but instead, he did not see his wife and children again, and still had no idea “why he was taken away that night or why he then was told he was being taken home but instead was shackled, then flown to a US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Or why, after two months there, he was told that he was being taken home to his family but instead was flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, half a world away, where he was kept locked up for four more years, including 18 months after he was told that he was, in effect, innocent of charges that he says were never fully articulated.”

After asking, “So why was he arrested?” McClatchy analysed the supposed evidence, noting that, beyond simply dismissing the charges against him as laughable — the claim that he was a member of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, that he left Yemen for Afghanistan at the request of Al-Qaida, and that he helped recruit fighters — Boucetta “said he doubted that these could really be the reasons he was picked up.”

He explained that the Islamic Salvation Front “formed after he left Algeria in 1989,” and in any case he “was never a member,” and he also explained that he had ”worked as a doctor for a non-governmental organization in Afghanistan until 1992,” adding that it “would have been easy to find out that he hadn’t been back since,” and that “he’d been working for and with the United Nations and Red Crescent, the Islamic-nations version of the Red Cross, from that point on.”

The details in his story were pretty compelling. He explained that, from 1996 to 2002, his “medical license and passport needed to be renewed,” but he had “refused to return to Algeria and instead lived in a United Nations refugee camp in Pakistan,” where “he taught math and Arabic in a Red Crescent-sponsored school.” As a result, “there were multiple witnesses to his presence and many sign-in documents, none of which was brought before the tribunal” at Guantánamo. This was unsurprising, as the presumption was that everyone had been correctly designated as an ‘enemy combatant” on capture, even though no effort was made to ascertain whether or not prisoners had been seized by mistake, and it was, therefore, something of a miracle that even 38 prisoners were, like Boucetta, found not to be “enemy combatants” by their tribunals.

Highlighting further omissions, Boucetta said that, “although United Nations workers could have vouched for his presence in Pakistan — and, according to his attorney, spent years working for his release — US officials refused to listen to them,” and in the end he “boycotted his own hearing because he thought it was a sham.”

He also explained that throughout his detention — “both in Afghanistan, where he was made to stand for hours with his hands cuffed high above him, and in Cuba, where the punishment was far more psychologically than physically challenging” — he was repeatedly interrogated about Algeria, even though, as he said, “I told them, ‘I have not been in Algeria for 15 years.’” Despite this, he said, “They would ask about political movements there, and I had to say, honestly, that I had no idea what they were talking about.” All the questions, he explained, related to radical Islamist groups which “formed after he’d left Algeria.”

After explaining that he had been in Guantánamo “with two men he used to commute to work with in Pakistan, men with whom he was seen every day teaching at school and who, like him, were subjected to occasional home searches as refugees,” he said that the fact that he had become a refugee in Pakistan had aroused US suspicions, but stated that the reasons he didn’t want to return home had nothing to do with terrorism, and were, instead, to do with “a personal feud.”

As a result, he was stuck in Albania, reflecting on a broken promise by officials at Guantánamo, who “had promised him a home, a place where he could bring his family and start a new life.” Instead, he said, there was no work, and “no hopes of ever being able to provide a home and education for his children.” When asked about his life, he replied, “My life here? I wake in time to go to breakfast at the refugee center. That’s my life. There is nothing more.”

Even though he had so obviously been seized by mistake, the US authorities were determined to find reasons to justify his detention, hence the long list of allegations that I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, which duly surfaced in the classified documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. The file relating to him was a “Transfer Recommendation to Another Country for Continued Detention,” dated August 30, 2003, in which he was identified as Fatai Busita, born in 1963, and it was noted that he had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force presented all the allegations that were later dismissed by his tribunal at Guantánamo. It was noted that the left Algeria in 1987 after completing medical school, but an analyst claimed that this was because of the alleged terrorist connections that he later dismissed. It was also noted that he stated that he then traveled extensively through Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1989 to 1993, working for five different NGOs, including the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, which were all regarded as “known cover organisations for several terrorist groups including Al-Qaida,” even though this was generalized scaremongering at its worst, as the organizations he was working for were actually involved in humanitarian aid and charitable work.

The Task Force noted that he then traveled to Yemen in 1993, where, he said, he “got married, and found employment until 1996, when he bought a forged passport, and moved back to PK because he feared a crackdown on non-Yemeni Arabs,” and added that he “claimed” that “he worked as a teacher for primary and middle school, and as an Arabic teacher at a school funded by the Saudi Red Crescent Organization.”

Regarding his capture, it was stated that the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Directorate arrested him in Lahore “as part of a crackdown on Arabs in Pakistan in May 2002,” which was perhaps not meant to be what it sounded like — a confession that social cleansing was taking place, using terrorism as a cover. In further explanation, the Task Force claimed that the ISI “conducted a series of raids against suspected Al-Qaida residences and support facilities connected with the Afghan Support Committee,” adding that “[n]ine individuals were arrested including the detainee, all on suspicion of being Islamic extremists,” but neglecting to mention that Boucetta’s arrest was, very literally, an afterthought. It was also noted that he was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of NGOs in the Peshawar, PK area.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” but posed “a medium threat to the US,” because he had been “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and, more specifically — again without anything resembling evidence — that he was “an Al-Qaida member and ha[d] severed [sic] in that capacity for many years, becoming a hardened and trusted terrorist operative.” It was, however, particularly noted that he was “considered a high threat risk to the government of Algeria,” and also “a significant threat,” who “may be wanted there for his subversive activities.” In addition, although the Task Force claimed that he “refuse[d] to be cooperative concerning his role as an operative” — because he had no role as an “operative” — it was nevertheless claimed that he “may still also possess intelligence information that the Algerian government would find beneficial in its efforts to curtail extremism within Algeria.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended him for transfer to another country for continued detention, although he was not actually released for another three years and three months, and, after his tribunal intervened to discredit the allegations against him and to conclude that he was not an “enemy combatant,” it was also obvious that he could not be returned to Algeria, hence the long search for another country that was prepared to take him.

Shams Ullah (ISN 783, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners’,” I explained how Shams Ullah was seized by US forces, some months before his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, and, as I also explained in “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” was just 16 or 17 years of age when he was seized.

According to the US military, he had fired “a whole magazine of ammunition” at the American and Afghan soldiers who had stopped him during a patrol, but although Shams himself had vague recollections of the events, his uncle, Bostan Karim (ISN 975), who was seized some months later by US forces (and is still held in Guantánamo), noted that he had “a mental problem,” and gave an alternative explanation for the circumstances surrounding his capture, when he appeared as a witness at his review board hearing. “When the Americans came to our house there was a Kalashnikov in our house and he knew that the Americans would take this gun,” Karim said. “So, he took the gun and went to the mosque. The Americans asked him to stop and he didn’t stop, so they shot him and he became lame.”

As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles held at Guantánamo, Shams was never treated with anything approaching the kind of care that juveniles are required to receive under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, and in fact, in his book Enemy Combatant, the released British prisoner Moazzam Begg explained how the authorities’ disregard for Shams’ age — and his wounds — was apparent when they were held together at the US prison in Kandahar airport. “Shams had been shot in the upper thigh, and the bone was shattered so he couldn’t walk,” Begg wrote. “He couldn’t make it to the toilet, he couldn’t get his own medications, or his water, or his food. And he couldn’t wash, so he started smelling quite badly.”

Begg ended up teaching the boy how to walk again, and also explained the story of his capture, as it had been explained to him, which backed up the story told by Bostan Karim: “Shams told me the story of his wounds: US helicopters had descended one night and attacked his house during a sweep of the area. He fired his uncle’s weapon at them. They fired back. He was hit, and captured.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Shams Ullah was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated October 26, 2004, in which, essentially confirming his story, it was noted that he “was captured during a raid on his family compound in Khost, Afghanistan (AF), conducted by US Special Forces and Afghani Military Force (AMF) personnel,” and that, when the raid began, “he grabbed his AK-47 and went to hide it,” and, when the AMF ordered him to stop, “a firefight broke out,” and he fired his magazine full of ammo at the AMF forces, threw down his weapon and attempted to flee,” but “was shot in the hip and captured.”

It was also noted that the compound he was captured in belonged to his uncle, Bostan Karim, described as “a suspected Al-Qaida cell leader and bomb-maker” (although this has not been proved) “who was captured by Pakistani Forces at the Khurgi checkpoint in Pakistan on 13 August 2002 along with Abdallah Muhammad aka Wazir” (ISN 976, released in December 2007).

In addition, it was claimed that he was “a member of the Arbaqi security group,” which “provide[d] security to all merchants and their businesses at the bazaar located in Khost,” and, when it came to assessing him, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value,” and that, “[a]fter extensive searches on national-level counter-terrorism databases, no further intelligence ha[d] been collected or found” concerning him. It was also noted that he was assessed as posing “a Medium threat to the US and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, dated November 11, 2003, in which he was assessed as being a high risk, and of medium intelligence value, recommended instead that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD),” although he was not released for another two years.

Abdul Salaam (ISN 826, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Salaam, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was part of a family of businessmen from Bermel, in Paktika province, who were caught up in what the Americans described as “a sweep of the Bermel town bazaar,” which was as random as it sounds. Khan was seized with his brother Haji Osman Khan (ISN 818, released in March 2004), who was 50 years old, and 19-year old Noor Aslam (ISN 822, also released in March 2004), who was his cousin, and the family ran a hawala (a money exchange/forwarding business) with branches in Pakistan and the UAE. Salaam explained in a review board at Guantánamo that he was seized at his shop by American and Afghan soldiers, but he insisted that he was an honest businessman and had never received money on behalf of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He also explained that the money the family received at the hawala was from families outside the country who were supporting their families in Afghanistan.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Salaam was an “Update Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was also identified as Abdul Salam Ghulamjohn, born in 1975, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had been seen for “chronic low back pain, acid reflux, and constipation,” and was “currently on Zantac and Metamucil.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force managed only to flesh out the story he and his relatives had repeatedly told, Abdul Salaam said that his family business, established 30 years before, consisted of a “Hawala (money exchange/forwarding business), telephone public call office business, and limited travel reservations,” and that, after living with his family as a refugee in Miram Shah, Pakistan from 1983 to 2000, where he and his cousin opened a money transferring business that they operated for nine years, returned to Afghanistan and opened another money transferring business in Bermal with his brother, Haji Osman Khan.

It was also noted that, when pressed about the money transferring business, he “finally admitted to transferring large amounts of money, the largest being 2.5 million rupees, which equals to [sic] about 42 thousand US dollars,” and also explained how the business also involved another branch in the UAE, couriers, and an accountant in Afghanistan responsible for keeping money in a safe and distributing it.

The intention of all these questions was, of course, to demonstrate that the hawalas had been involved in transferring significant funds for Al-Qaida and/or the Taliban, but there was no truth in those suspicions, as the US authorities finally realized, although not until after he had been seized, sent to Guantánamo and held for up to three years before his innocence was more or less admitted.

In telling the story of his capture, he said that he “went to work on the morning of 7 September 2002,” but, approximately twenty minutes later, “three Afghan army soldiers and three US soldiers entered his shop” and “took his telephones and searched his store,” and “also confiscated five personal photographs that he had of himself, relatives and friends.” The soldiers also searched the shop next to his, where his accountant had his shop (and the safe), and then “led him away from his shop and took him to the Afghanistan Government building in town.” He “did not know why he was arrested, but believed that someone must have provided false information to the US or Afghan Governments,” which sounds like an accurate analysis.

After his capture, he was held first at Bagram, and was then sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Economic issues in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Foreign trade in Pakistan, Afghanistan,and the United Arab Emirates [and] Hawala money transfer system in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value to the US,” and also that he posed “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” This was, to be honest, another example of over-classification, as he was clearly of no intelligence value and did not pose a threat to the US at all, because, in a more thorough analysis of his case, it was stated unequivocally that he was “assessed as not being a member of the Taliban and/or Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” and that, although it “was first assessed [that he] was involved in money laundering operations,” the Task Force had concluded that “nothing ha[d] been found to support this claim,” after “reviewing all of the available documentation.”

It was also noted that it was “highly probable” that his “statements that he and his family [we]re honest businesspeople, ha[d] no connections to the Taliban or Al- Qaida, and ha[d] never transferred any money for or on behalf of the Taliban or Al-Qaida [we]re truthful.” The Task Force added “Through debriefings with relatives of detainee and other individuals who operated Hawalas in Pakistan (PK) and Afghanistan, it cannot be confirmed [he] was doing anything illegal.”

It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” and, as a result, the only remaining problems with his case were that, even after his release was recommended by Brig. Gen. Hood, it took another nine months for him to be freed, at which point he had pointlessly spent three years and four months in Guantánamo.

Qadir Khandan (ISN 831, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Qadir Khandan, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, was a pharmacist, who seems to have been a victim of the warlord Pacha Khan Zadran and his nephew, Jan Baz Khan, who lied about him to the Americans to get him arrested. Zadran was a US ally until it was finally realized that he was using them for his own ends, but along the way he was responsible for sending several men to Guantánamo on the basis that they were involved in anti-coalition activities, when they were actually his own enemies.

Khandan insisted in Guantánamo that he was “enemy number one of Jan Baz and Pacha Khan,” and got into trouble with them because, he said, he realized that, when they were working with the Americans, they were using them for their own ends. Arrested at his home in September 2002 and accused of running a safe house for a bomb-making cell, Khandan pointed out that he was working for the Karzai government in the National Security Office in Khost, and that, as a pharmacist, bombs were “truly against my ideology.”

He also explained that he was badly abused by American soldiers in a prison in Khost. “They put tight round glasses around my eyes, had my ears shut with plugs and I was covered with a bag,” he said, adding, “I was ordered to stand up 24 hours for 20 days in a row. I had blood coming out of my body and my nose for days because I was tortured so much.” Describing what appear to be otherwise unreported murders in US custody, he also said, “I saw four people die right in front of me.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khandan (identified as Qadar Khandan) he said that, “no matter how many times the American soldiers struck him,” he insisted that “he’d worked as a nurse for warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization during its fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s — when the US supported Hekmatyar — but that he’d broken off all links afterward.”

He told the same story to McClatchy’s reporter, but Ismail Khosti, the head of the Khost office of the Afghan Commission for Peace and Reconciliation, said that, despite sticking to is story, Khandan “was closely aligned with Hekmatyar.” Khosti said, “He was a commander for them in this province, not the top commander, but a commander. When the Taliban left Khost, there was a mujahideen (holy warriors) council formed, and Khandan was the only representative of Hezb-e-Islami on that council.”

McClatchy’s reporter noted that this association “appear[ed] to be what sent US troops to his door,” although Khandan was concerned to explain how US forces had abused him, stating that, when Special Forces operatives “took him to a nearby base and questioned him,” they “made him stand for two days straight with no food or water,” and “frequently punched him” and “played loud music and brought dogs in to bark and snap at him.”

Khandan “said he wouldn’t break down and confess,” and, McClatchy’s reporter noted, “it appears that he never did,” also noting that he remained angry about his experiences in US custody. From Khost, where, he said, he was deprived of food and water, he was sent to Kandahar for four days and then to Bagram for about five months.

On arrival at Bagram, he said, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped naked and photographed,” and then the questioning began again, and the Hekmatyar allegations that he persistently denied. “They told me to accept their charges or they would send me to isolation,” he said. “I told them they could send me to isolation for 10 years and those things would still not be true.”

He added that he was indeed sent to an isolation cell, “a small plywood box with metal bars over the top,” where guards “hung him by his wrists from the bars” and “left him there for 20 days, taking him down only for three 15-minute meal breaks and for the bathroom when he needed it.” He explained, “My heels weren’t touching the ground, only my toes, and I had on earphones, goggles and a hood. Three or four times I became unconscious. The guards would open the gate and come in and punch me in the stomach.”

Discussing Guantánamo, where he was sent early in 2003, Khandan said that his “experience with the interrogators was the same,” but that “no one hit him at Guantánamo.” He also said that he “told them, repeatedly, that he’d left Hekmatyar’s fold many years before,” but “was questioned every day during his first month,” although “then the sessions dropped to once a month, then once every two months and, at one point, almost a year.” He also said that “he spent much of the time between interrogations in isolation cells, twice for seven-month stretches,” and estimated that “he spent some 17 months in isolation” during his three and a half years at Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khandan was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated September 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Khadan Kadir and Khandan Kadir, born in 1969, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had “a history of a panic disorder with agoraphobia.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he attended school at a refugee camp in Pakistan, and then “participated in an Afghan refugee medical training program,” and “received his nursing certification in 1989 and worked at a Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) hospital during the war against the Soviets.” It was also stated that he “worked with HIG between 1987 and 1992, and completed high school in Peshawar, PK, in 1991.”

It was also noted that, from 1995 to 2002, he worked at his own pharmacy in Khost, and claimed he also worked in the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Khost, during the Karzai government, “working in office number 7, which was responsible for monitoring open sources  i.e. radio, newspapers.” He also admitted that “he owned a Kalashnikov and a pistol, but he only used these weapons for protection,” and also insisted that he had “never been a member of any terrorist organization.”

The Task Force also noted that US and Afghan forces came to his house in Khost on September 20, 2002, but he “jumped a fence, and hid in a room housing women and children,” until one of the women told US forces that the was hiding there. After he surrendered, he was “found to have several documents and a small address book.” After being held at Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, to “provide information on the following: Security services, Security forces, Intelligence, security programs and capabilities, Counter Intelligence services [and] International terrorism.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was apparently seized with Pacha Khan Zadran’s son, Abdul Walid, and his nephew,Jan Baz, but an analyst, revising history to erase the fact that Zadran was initially a US ally, described him as “a significant warlord who appointed himself governor of the Paktia province, AF, undermined US and Coalition forces along the Afghan/Pakistan border, [and] opposed the Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA), and President Hamid Karzai’s appointments for local leadership positions in Khost, Paktia, and Paktika Provinces.” It was also claimed that he was related to Pacha Khan Zadran, and it was noted that he said he “was jailed for not supporting Zadran’s bid for Provincial Governor.”

There were more allegations concerning Khandan’s supposed ties to three other Guantánamo prisoners — Bostan Karim (ISN 975, still held), Obaidullah (ISN 762, also still held) and Shams Ullah (ISN 783, released in October 2006, see above), which will be discussed in detail in articles dealing with Karim’s and Obaidullah’s cases.

Overall, his story was quite confusing, and I’m not sure that the US authorities knew what to make of it either. However, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low-moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] recently been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan (on August 20, 2004), recommended him for “transfer with conditions,” although he was not released for another 13 months.

After his release, following the McClatchy interview, Khandan was also interviewed by the BBC, when, in a broadcast in June 2009, he said, “They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans. They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death.” He added, “They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you.”

Nothing more was heard about Khandan until January 15, 2010, when the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU in April 2009, and released the first ever list of prisoners held at Bagram, as of September 22, 2009, when Khandan, identified by his Guantánamo number, and named as Khadan Kadir, was included, although no further information has been provided to explain what he was supposed to have done to be recaptured, when it took place, and whether he was still held.

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I’m delighted to discover that people remain interested in the Bush administration’s use of torture, and questions of accountability that have been brushed under the carpet by President Obama, not just because terrible crimes have been committed and no one has been held accountable, but also because the topic of America’s torture program has generally slipped off the media’s radar (as has that other abiding topic of interest of mine, Guantánamo, and the 171 prisoners still held).

Jeff has done a great job in pulling together examples of prisoners who were subjected not to waterboarding, but to other forms of torture using water that the Bush administration largely managed to avoid mentioning or being asked to justify, including Murat Kurnaz, who discussed having his head held under water in his book, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, first published in 2007, Mohammed al-Qahtani, the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, and others — the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was, notoriously, “broken” by torture at Guantánamo, and who had water poured over him to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake,” the British resident Omar Deghayes, the Algerian Djamel Ameziane (still held, desperate being cleared for release many years ago), and Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, released in 2008 after winning his habeas petition, whose torture using water I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, and in my article, After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims. Also of interest are examples from Iraq, which have also not been publicized widely.

Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 5, 2011

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo, period.”

In his memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees, not at Guantánamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantánamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Kandahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

According to a report on Kurnaz’s testimony at the time by The Christian Science Monitor, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon replied to the torture charges: “The abuses Mr. Kurnaz alleges are not only unsubstantiated and implausible, they are simply outlandish.”

Whether implausible or not, waterboarding was one of a number of “counter-resistance techniques” requested for use at Guantánamo by Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy, commander of Task Force 170. In an October 2002 memo from Dunleavy’s intelligence chief requesting use of a number of techniques, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions, forced nudity and death threats, there was also a proposal for “Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

In a follow-up memo approving most, but not all of the requested techniques, Department of Defense (DoD) general counsel William J. Haynes II said of the “wet towel” and other so-called “aggressive” “Category III” techniques, “While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

Water Torture at Guantánamo

Evidence regarding waterboarding or other forms of water torture by suffocation or choking at Guantánamo has been reported, but this article is the first collection of the various reports in one place.

Last April, a report by two doctors who were allowed to examine “medical records and relevant case files … of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment,” found at least one case of “near asphyxiation from water (i.e., hose forced into the detainee’s mouth)” and another case where a detainee’s head was forced into a toilet.

The report, by doctors Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis, was published at PLoS Medicine. Dr. Xenakis is also a retired brigadier general in the Army, who has worked as a medical consultant on a number of Guantánamo legal cases.

Additionally, accusations of military waterboarding turned up in a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) report on “FBI Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations” that was released at almost the same time as Kurnaz’s testimony (May 2008). The IG noted that the chief of the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit at Guantánamo told DoD Assistant Attorney General Dave Nahmias, “one of the planned or actual techniques used on [purported 9/11 would-be hijacker, Mohammed] al-Qahtani was simulated drowning.”

In fact, the military admits the use of pouring water over al-Qahtani’s head, as is discussed below.

At another point in the report, the IG describes one FBI agent who “once heard a discussion at GTMO when someone mentioned using water as an interrogation tool and someone else in the group said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that.’” According to the IG report, no FBI agent actually reported seeing waterboarding or water torture him or herself.

Whether or not waterboarding was observed by FBI agents at Guantánamo, we know from the minutes of a “Counter-resistance Strategy meeting” at Guantánamo on October 22, 2002, that waterboarding (called the “wet towel” technique) was discussed (see Tab 7 at link). The meeting included legal officials from the CIA, DIA, the Guantánamo intelligence chief, as well as members of the Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consulting Team (BSCT).

At one point, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantánamo, asked whether SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) employed “the ‘wet towel’ technique.” Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, replied:

If a well-trained individual is used to perform [sic] this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them (i.e., insects, snakes, claustrophobia). The level of resistance is directly related to a person’s experience.

At this point, a BSCT psychiatrist noted, “Whether or not significant stress occurs lies in the eye of the beholder. The burden of proof is the big issue.” Fredman replied, “These techniques need involvement from interrogators, psych, medical, legal, etc.”

Fredman continued, “The CIA makes the call internally on most of the types of techniques found in the BSCT paper and this discussion.” In a reference to the approvals for waterboarding and other techniques given the CIA by Office of Legal Counsel memos a few months before, he added, “Significantly harsh techniques are approved through the DOJ.” There was no indication in the minutes from the meeting that waterboarding was not allowed for Defense Department use.

Waterboarding of Mohammed al-Qahtani

Mohammed al-Qahtani was a Saudi Arabian citizen brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. Ostensibly believed to be a part of the 9/11 plot, when interrogators became frustrated at their inability to get information out of him, or force his compliance, they turned to methods of interrogation that the Guantánamo Convening Authority Susan Crawford would later herself conclude amounted to torture.

By November 2002, al-Qahtani had become the “first subject of a Special Interrogation Plan,” which relied heavily on the military’s SERE torture school techniques, including isolation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and apparently, a form of waterboarding. SERE was created to provide US military personnel with training to resist torture.

Even years before Crawford’s admission, DoD’s Schmidt-Furlow report, looking at early allegations of detainee abuse, concluded that “the creative, aggressive and persistent interrogation of the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan [al-Qahtani] resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment.” No one has ever been charged for such crimes committed against this or any other Guantánamo detainee.

The Schmidt-Furlow report details the use of water torture on al-Qahtani, an aspect of his torture that has been little reported:

On seventeen occasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan['s] head …

There is evidence that the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan regularly had water poured on his head. The interrogation logs indicate that this was done as a control measure only.

Time Magazine published al-Qahtani’s interrogation logs in 2005. The use of water to drench al-Qahtani’s head does not appear to be a “control measure” when it is discussed in the logs themselves.

On December 23, 2002, a log selection describes how interrogators hung pictures of swimsuit models around al-Qahtani’s neck. Then the lead interrogator “pulled pictures of swimsuit models off detainee and told him the test of his ability to answer questions would begin. Detainee refused to answer and finally stated that he would after [the] lead [interrogator] poured water over detainees [sic] head and was told he would be subjected to this treatment day after day. Detainee was told to think about his decision to answer questions.”

The day before, when al Qahtani had refused to look at “fitness photos,” saying it was against his religion, interrogators had “poured a 24 oz. bottle of water over detainee’s head.” The log notes dryly, “Detainee then began to look at photos.”

In their investigation of detainee abuse, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) noted in a 2008 report that the Navy limited waterboard demonstrations to two pints (32 oz.) of water. A January 13, 2003, memo, described in the SASC report, underreported how much water was poured over Qahtani, saying that “up to eight ounces of water” was poured over Qahtani’s head as a “method of asserting control” when Khatani exhibited ”undesired behavior.”

The SASC report also said that the interrogation plan for another Guantánamo detainee, Mohamadou Ould Slahi, included the practice of pouring water over Slahi’s head to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake.”

Three More Guantánamo Detainees Report Suffocation by Drowning

Besides Kurnaz and al-Qahtani, at least three other detainees have reported being tortured at Guantánamo by application of water meant to cause suffocation, choking or the sensation of drowning.

A 2009 article by Jeremy Scahill outlined the torture and abuse endured by former Guantánamo detainee and British resident Omar Deghayes. Scahill mentions two incidents where the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force, or ERF) used forms of water torture on Deghayes. In one case, the detainee was shackled, his head put into a toilet. The IRF team “pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.”

The IRF or ERF team also came into Deghayes’ cell on another occasion and conducted a simulated or partial drowning:

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. [Deghayes] was totally shackled and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present and they would join in.

According to Scahill, the IRF team conducted this form of waterboarding three times on Deghayes. Note that the presence of medical staff is consistent with the use of medical personnel under CIA descriptions of how they conducted waterboarding.

Another example of water torture involving Guantánamo guards appears in a document related to the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Berber who has been held at Guantánamo for over eight years, despite the fact he never received military or terrorist training, nor fought against the US. According to a 2008 legal filing for Ameziane by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.” [Emphasis added.]

In March 2008, six Guantánamo detainees filed suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for failure “for many years to take any steps to negotiate and secure the men’s release from Guantánamo.” One of the men, Mustafa Ait Idr, who had been rendered to Guantánamo and “taken from his pregnant wife in violation of a Bosnian court order to free him,” also reported use of water torture in a manner remarkably similar to that of Ameziane.

A CCR report on “Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” said that on one occasion prison guards demanded to search Idr’s cell. Idr cooperated, but they came in, sprayed him in the face with a chemical irritant and put him into restraints.

According to the CCR report, “Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet — submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat.” As a result, Idr’s face was paralyzed for several months.

Other threats to use waterboarding on DoD prisoners, or to rendition detainees for water torture, are also on record. According to journalist Robert Windrem in a 2009 story at The Daily Beast, then-Vice President Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, the head of the M-14 section of the Mukhabarat. According to the article, the official in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials at the time, Charles Duelfer, declined the request.

According to the SASC detainee report, the lead agency for SERE, Joint Forces Personnel Agency, constructed a CONOP (Concept of Operations) plan for use at a Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation center in Iraq. The CONOP recommended use of the “water board.” Military legal figures reportedly objected to that and other techniques, but it is not known whether Special Forces in Iraq used waterboarding or other water torture techniques and the SASC report does not enlighten us on that point.

In another case, former Italian resident and Guantánamo detainee, Tunisian-born Saleh Sassi, reported that in late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and interrogated him. They “left no doubt about what awaited ex-Guantánamo inmates back in Tunisia: ‘water torture in the barrel’ and other horrors.” Sassi was released and sent to Albania in 2010.

Finally, the DOJ IG report on FBI interrogations referenced earlier describes how an Abu Ghraib prisoner, Saleh Muklef Saleh, was restrained and had cold water poured over him on more than one occasion. One time, according to Saleh’s own testimony, “They gave me one or two bottles of water and they asked me to drink it while I was hungry and they forced me to drink it and I did and I felt vomiting, then they ordered me to drink again and they were looking at me and laughing” (pp. 279-280).

Back in 2008, during the Congressional meeting where Murat Kurnaz testified to the use of water torture upon him, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee commented, “It seems that we have a new definition … If you were wedded to the language of waterboarding, now we have new language called ‘water treatment,’ which may bear on being torture as well.”

To date, there has been no investigation that specifically has looked at the use of types of water torture, including waterboarding or water treatment, on detainees. The military’s current Army Field Manual on interrogation forbids the use of “waterboarding.” It is the only “prohibited action” term that is described with quotation marks around it.

A Human Rights Watch report issued on July 12 called for President Barack Obama “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”

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

Abdul Razak Ali, a 40-year old Algerian, whose real name is, apparently, Saeed Bakhouche, never stood a chance of winning his habeas petition, as it was his great misfortune to have been staying at a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, when it was raided by Pakistani forces, and he, along with several other men staying in the house, were seized and sent to Guantánamo.

For Ali, the biggest problem was not these other men (although many of them came to be regarded as significant figures), but the fact that another man, touted as the biggest catch in the raid, was Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who had served as a gatekeeper for a training camp in Afghanistan.

After the raid, Zubaydah was immediately flown to Thailand, where a plan to torture him — later applied to dozens more “high-value detainees” seized in the “War on Terror” — was implemented, which was formally approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — in what are now referred to as the “torture memos” — on August 1, 2002. Zubaydah eventually surfaced at Guantánamo in September 2006, with 13 other “high-value detainees” previously held in secret CIA prisons, but others seized in the raid were even less fortunate. A handful of other prisoners seized with Zubaydah, including at least one teenager, were rendered to a torture prison in Syria, never to be seen or heard from again.

Why Abdul Razak Ali may not be as significant as the US alleges

Ali arrived at Guantánamo in June 2002, after being subjected to abuse in Pakistani custody and in US custody in Afghanistan, and has, presumably, always been thought of as being part of a group associated with Abu Zubyadah, even though there are verifiable problems with this presumption.

The first is that, when four of the other men seized in the raid were put forward for a trial by Military Commission in June 2008, he was not included; the second is that, in November 2008, another Algerian seized in the house, Labed Ahmed, was freed, after the Bush administration accepted his explanation that he had been delivered to the house by mistake, but had nevertheless been allowed to stay; and the third is because the government’s reliance on claims that Abu Zubaydah was a significant terrorist have been thoroughly discredited.

In its allegations against Ali, the government contended that:

[He] was a member of Abu Zubaydah’s force that was reorganizing at a guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and preparing for future operations against US and Allied forces. In particular, the Government contends that the petitioner: (1) lived with Abu Zubaydah and a cadre of his lieutenants during a two week period; (2) previously traveled with Abu Zubaydah’s force through Afghanistan and ultimately fled with them through Afghanistan to Pakistan; and (3) took an English course (with an American accent) when he was staying at Abu Zubaydah’s guesthouse.

In response, Ali stated that:

Although he acknowledges being captured in the same guesthouse as Abu Zubaydah, he denies: (1) ever being in Afghanistan, let alone being with Abu Zubaydah’s force there; (2) ever taking an English course from Abu Zubaydah’s trainers at the guesthouse; and (3) ever being a member, permanent or otherwise, of Abu Zubaydah’s force. In essence, he claims that the Government has mistakenly identified him as a member of Abu Zubaydah’s force, who traveled with Abu Zubaydah in Afghanistan and fled with him to Pakistan before gathering at this particular guesthouse to start preparing for their next offensive against US and Allied forces.

In denying Ali’s habeas claim, Judge Leon failed to recognize that, if he was so significant, he would, in all likelihood, have been put forward for a trial by Military Commission in May or June 2008, when four other men seized in the raid — Noor Uthman Muhammed (from Sudan), Ghassan al-Sharbi and Jabran al-Qahtani (both Saudis), and Sufyian Barhoumi (another Algerian) — were charged. In addition, he might also have recognized that Labed Ahmed (also captured in the house and also not put forward for a trial by Military Commissions) had spelled out how he had been staying at the house but had not been involved in any way with Abu Zubaydah.

Before his release in November 2008, after being “approved for transfer” by a military review board, Ahmed explained how he had ended up at Zubaydah’s house by accident, and how he had been allowed to stay, despite not knowing anyone in the house, for 12 days — a stay that would clearly have lasted longer had the house not been raided.

After explaining that he had traveled from Germany to Afghanistan at the start of September 2001, and had left for Pakistan in December, Ahmed said that he had stayed for three months in safe houses in Bannu and Lahore, and had then been advised to go to Faisalabad, where some people would come to give him his passport and send him back to Germany. He explained that he was with two other people, a Russian and a Yemeni, but that, after they arrived at Shabaz Cottage (the house where he was captured with Zubaydah and the others), they were told that they had been brought there by mistake and would be moved to another house after the evening prayer.

As I explained in an article after Ahmed’s release:

Ahmed insisted that he didn’t want to leave, because the previous houses had been crowded, whereas this house was “big and nice” and “everybody had their own room,” and explained that he refused to leave in the vehicle that was brought in the evening. Several days later, he said, “The guy from al-Qaeda, Daoud [identified in the hearing as Zubaydah] questioned me as to who I was, what I was doing here and who brought me. I said I’m from Germany waiting on my passport. When I get it, I will leave. He said, no problem, you can stay here for a week. I stayed there for about 12 days and the Pakistani police came. They took us to prison. Daoud was arrested with us, you can ask him about us.”

While this example should have provided a precedent for Judge Leon, he chose to ignore it, describing “the obvious and common-sense inference that a terrorist leader like Abu Zubaydah would not tolerate an unknown and untrusted stranger to dwell in a modest, two-story guesthouse for two weeks with himself and ten or so of his senior leadership, while they [were] preparing for their next operation against US and Allied forces.”

How the US courts are ignoring the bitter truth about Abu Zubaydah

Leon also chose to focus on the Washington courts’ history of believing a discredited narrative about Abu Zubaydah. As I have been explaining in articles for many years, Zubaydah, although intitially considered as a senior al-Qaeda operative — perhaps even the number three in the organization — was no such thing, and was, instead, the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp, Khaldan, that had little to do with al-Qaeda, and was, in fact, closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to cooperate with Osama bin Laden.

In 2006, the author Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine that FBI agents, who had been involved in Zubaydah’s interrogations before the CIA’s torturers took over, had concluded that he was mentally ill, and was not a major player in al-Qaeda, and further statements from knowledgeable insiders downplaying Zubaydah’s alleged role were the focus of articles in the Washington Post in December 2007 and March 2009.

By October 2009, the government officially conceded that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda. In response to 213 requests by his lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, officials turned down the requests by stating (PDF) that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

This was enormously significant, although it was entirely ignored by the D.C. Circuit Court in June last year, as I explained in a detailed article last July, In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies. In that article, I noted that, in reviewing an appeal by Sufyian Barhoumi, who lost his habeas petition in September 2009, the court claimed, based on long-discredited information, that Zubaydah was “the person in charge” of the Khaldan training camp, and that he was “an associate of [Osama bin Laden]” who “coordinates and cooperates with [bin Laden] in the conduct of training and trainee movements between [redacted] camps and al-Qaeda camps.”

For his part, Judge Leon also chose to ignore this evidence, not only describing Zubaydah as a “terrorist leader” (as mentioned above), but also citing a District Court opinion from last May, in which it was stated, “There appears to be no dispute that Abu Zubaydah was an al-Qaeda operative and that al-Qaeda-related activities took place in his [Faisalabad] house.” He also drew on the Circuit Court’s ruling in Barhoumi’s appeal, stating:

It is worth noting that our Circuit Court has unequivocally recognized that Abu Zubaydah and his band of followers have well established ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban and thus constitute an “associated force” under the AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which is used by the government to justify the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo]. See Barhoumi v. Obama (affirming the district court’s conclusion that Barhoumi was part of “Abu Zubaydah’s militia — an ‘associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners’” and affirming denial of petitioner Barhoumi’s writ).

Why the government’s new ploy in Abu Zubaydah’s case is troubling

Here, the problem is not only Judge Leon’s reliance on a discredited appraisal of Zubaydah’s significance, but a new ploy introduced by the government after it acknowledged that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda, which first surfaced in its response to Zubaydah’s lawyers in October 2009, and was then used in Barhoumi’s case. In this new scenario, the government claimed that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah was “based on conduct and actions that establish [that he] was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Zubaydah’s lawyers countered this by stating that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has “evidence to support those assertions,” but in Barhoumi’s case, the government pushed the line that Zubaydah “was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” persuading the judges to accept, as evidence, the diary of an alleged associate of Zubaydah, Abu Kamil al-Suri, to demonstrate that Zubaydah was in charge of a militia, which included Sufyian Barhoumi.

As I explained at the time, “Whether there is any truth in this is difficult to ascertain, as Abu Kamil al-Suri is not available to ask about his diary, [because] his whereabouts are unknown.” I also noted other problems:

Al-Suri’s diary also identifies 15 members of what is described as “Zubaydah’s militia,” although, in the translation of al-Suri’s own words, it is described, less spectacularly, as a “group,” and a fractious one, moreover, with al-Suri noting that several of the members were “trying to take over this group,” to “lead us to join Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”

Nevertheless, the shadowy figure of Abu Kamil al-Suri and his dubious diary resurfaced in Abdul Razak Ali’s habeas petition, clearly exciting Judge Leon, who noted that a man with the same alleged alias used by Ali — Usama al Jaza’iri — was listed “as a permanent member of Abu Zubaydah’s group,” and “also placed him in at least one of the same locations in which [an] eyewitness identified him.”

Why Judge Leon’s reliance on eyewitnesses is of dubious value, and why the goverment’s withdrawal of a key witness is unacceptable

Judge Leon was also happy to accept the word of the eyewitness mentioned above, and others included in the government’s submissions, describing “credible accounts by fellow guesthouse dwellers who not only positively identified the petitioner by one of the various names he was using at that time — i. e., Abdul Razak — but who also credibly account for petitioner participating in one of Abu Zubaydah’s various training programs while he was staying in the guesthouse (i.e., taking a class in English).”

The obvious problem with these accounts is the suspicion that the eyewitnesses — the “fellow guesthouse dwellers” described by Judge Leon — may not have produced their statements willingly. This is particularly true if one of them was Abu Zubaydah, as the extent of his torture and the false confessions it yielded has been thoroughly established over the years, but there are also reasons to suspect that any of the four men put forward for trials by Military Commission in 2008 (who are the likely source of the statements) would also have been subjected to interrogations in conditions that ought to cast doubt on the veracity of their allegations.

For Abdul Razak Ali, the only hope now is that an appeal willl be successful. This seems unlikely, in light of the D.C. Circuit Court’s bullish assertions that the government has more rights to continue holding priosners at Guantánamo than it has asserted itself, but there is clearly a flaw in Ali’s case, beyond the obvious problems with the statements of his “fellow guesthouse dwellers” — namely, that, on December 24, the government withdrew a key allegation on which, until that date, it had been relying, having discovered that it contained “potentially exculpatory information that the Government had not turned over to detainee counsel because it was classified at a higher classification level than detainee counsel was authorized to view.”

That statement, made by another Guantánamo prisoner who was not even seized with Zubaydah and Ali, but was captured in a house raid in Karachi six months later, apparently related to a claim by the prisoner in quesion that he had seen Ali in Afghanistan, and its removal not only emphasizes the general unreliability of the government’s supposed evidence, but also indicates how difficult it is for prisoners’ defense teams to be sure that they have been given given access to all the exculpatory material they need to defend their clients.

In any other circumstance, the withdrawal of a key piece of evidence would have led to a new hearing, but with Guantánamo the normal rules do not apply, and while Abdul Razak Ali clearly has grounds to appeal, it seems unlikely that he will be able to dislodge the lies and misconceptions about Abu Zubaydah that have become accepted in the D.C. Circuit Court, or to challenge the dubious nature of statements made by his fellow prisoners, or that he will be able to succeed in reminding judges about the clear precedent for releasing a man who had nothing to do with Abu Zubaydah, as was established in the case of Labed Ahmed.

Two years and seven months after the Supreme Court granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners, it is impossible to conclude that, for the majority of the men who have lost their petitions (including Abdul Razak Ali), anything resembling justice has been delivered.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases since the start of 2010, see: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (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), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part One) (July 2010), Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part Two) (July 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Mentally Ill Yemeni; 2nd Judge Approves Detention of Minor Taliban Recruit (August 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of Afghan Shopkeeper at Guantánamo (September 2010), Nine Years After 9/11, US Court Concedes that International Laws of War Restrict President’s Wartime Powers (September 2010), Fayiz Al-Kandari, A Kuwaiti Aid Worker in Guantánamo, Loses His Habeas Petition (September 2010), Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose: The Betrayal of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (September 2010), First Guantánamo Habeas Appeal to US Supreme Court (Fayiz al-Kandari, October 2010), Former Guantánamo Prisoner, Tortured by Al-Qaeda and the US, Launches Futile Attempt to Hold America Accountable (Abdul Rahim al-Ginco/al-Janko, October 2010), Judge Denies Guantánamo Prisoner’s Habeas Petition, Ignores Torture in Secret CIA Prisons (Tawfiq al-Bihani, October 2010), Court Orders Rethink on Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner’s Successful Habeas Petition (Mohamedou Ould Slahi, November 2010).

In reality, however, it is reasonable to propose that Guantánamo is now a permanent institution for a variety of reasons. The first concerns a number of cynical moves by lawmakers in recent months, inserting provisions into a military spending bill that are explicitly designed to keep Guantánamo open — a ban on using funds to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trials, a ban on using funds to buy or build a prison on the U.S. mainland to hold Guantánamo prisoners, and a ban on the release of any prisoner cleared for release by the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force (composed of representatives of government departments and the intelligence agencies) to countries considered dangerous by lawmakers — including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

On all of these challenges to his stated intentions — bringing at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force to the mainland to face federal court trials, holding them in a U.S. prison, and releasing some of the 89 prisoners “approved for transfer” by the Task Force — President Obama could have decided to override Congress. As was reported before Christmas, it was within the bounds of his authority to veto the legislation or to issue a signing statement striking down those parts of the spending bill that he considered to be an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential authority.

In the end, however, demonstrating what many observers now regard as typical cowardice, he chose not to do so. A veto was always out of the question, because it threatened Congressional authorization of billions of dollars to continue the ruinously expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that no one in authority has any wish to end, but a signing statement, declaring the provisions as an unconstitutional infringement of executive power, was a distinct possibly, despite the negative connotations of signing statements after George W. Bush’s excessive use of them during his Presidency. As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explained in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Congressional efforts to block future trials by imposing spending restrictions on the president are unconstitutional and should be abandoned.”

Nevertheless, despite such trenchant criticism of Congress from Conservative commentators, Obama refused to go as far as Rivkin and Casey, choosing instead to restrict his opposition to some fine sounding, but ultimately toothless grumbling. As the New York Times reported, “He sharply criticized those restrictions, but did not claim that he had the constitutional authority to disregard them,” and, instead, merely said he “would ask Congress to repeal the restrictions, seek to ‘mitigate their effects’ and oppose any attempt to extend or expand them after they expired in September, at the end of the current fiscal year.”

Criticizing the ban on bringing prisoners to the mainland to face trials, Obama defended the prosecution of terrorist suspects in federal court as “a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the nation,” and described the ban imposed by Congress as “a dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests.” As a result of his refusal to overturn the provision, however, the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force will, for the most part, remain held without trial.

The administration is reportedly unwilling to proceed with trials by Military Commission, rightfully criticized as a second-tier judicial system by opponents, especially after the unjust and undignified plea deal arranged with former child prisoner Omar Khadr in October, and the main effect of Obama’s capitulation, therefore, is to hand victory to the lawmakers who inserted this provision specifically to prevent the President from proceeding with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks This trial was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder last November, but it met with fierce resistance from misguided Republican ideologues who are still sold on the Bush administration’s ruinous and misguided notion that terrorist suspects are warriors and not criminals.

Criticizing the ban on using military funds to release any of the 89 prisoners cleared by the Task Force unless, as the Times described it, defense secretary Robert Gates “certifies that the country has met a strict set of security conditions,” the President stated this process of certification, adding to security concerns already undertaken by the government, would “hinder the conduct of delicate negotiations with foreign countries” and “interfere with the authority of the executive branch to make important and consequential foreign policy and national security determinations regarding whether and under what circumstances such transfers should occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict.”

On this point, the effect will be less noticeable, as 58 of the 89 men cleared for release by the Task Force have already been held indefinitely without charge or trial for a year because they are Yemenis, and last January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, the President announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners that is still in place, and shows no sign of being lifted. Of the other 31 men, the majority are awaiting third countries prepared to accept them, as they cannot be safely repatriated, because they face the risk of torture, and  the administration, Congress, and the D.C. Circuit Court have all acted to make sure that none of them can be released in the U.S. It is, therefore, unlikely that the Congressional ban will apply to any of these men.

The only prisoners not covered by this ban are those cleared for release after winning their habeas petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C. On this point, however, the President has done nothing but infuriate liberal supporters, when, on Monday, he repatriated an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, against his will. Bin Mohammed had won his habeas petition in November 2009, but was terrified of returning to his home country, where, primarily, he feared being attacked by Islamist militants. On his behalf, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, had strived to prevent his forcible repatriation, but had finally been overruled by the Supreme Court, paving the way for his return to Algeria on Monday.

The fact that the only man to be released since last August — and, very possibly, the only man to be released for the foreseeable future — was someone who was desperate not to be returned to his home country is a sad indictment of the position that President Obama has taken on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, two years after he promised to close the prison, and one year after he failed to do so.

As I have explained above, by refusing to tackle Congress over its unconstitutional intrusions on his authority — and through his moratorium on releasing any Yemenis — he has ensured that there is no practical distinction between the 33 men proposed for trials by the Task Force, and the 89 men cleared for release, because almost all of them have now been consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial for the foreseeable future.

Completing this picture are 48 other men, explicitly designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force. This has been an unacceptable proposal, ever since it was first signaled by the President in May 2009, as the men in question are regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though the administration concedes that it has no usable evidence to prove these assertions. This, of course, indicates that giving credence to unreliable information derived through torture played a key role in these determinations. The plans are also troubling because they so explicitly perpetuate the position taken by President Bush when he established Guantánamo, and because they give succor to those who want to see indefinite detention without charge or trial used again in future, and on this front it was thoroughly depressing to hear, before Christmas, that Obama was considering issuing an executive order formally approving the indefinite detention of these 48 men, but guaranteeing that they would receive some sort of regular review of their cases.

A decision on this is expected soon, and it should be fiercely resisted by anyone who believes that the malignant experiment at Guantánamo has gone on for far too long, and that holding prisoners is only acceptable when they are either criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, or prisoners of war who can, in any case, be held until the end of hostilities. And if President Obama does go ahead and sign this executive order, it is incumbent on everyone opposed to the ongoing scandal of Guantánamo to point out that, with Congressional interference and Obama’s moratorium, it is not just 48 prisoners who are proposed for indefinite detention without charge or trial, but almost every prisoner still held at Guantánamo — 170 men in total.

High hopes that Guantánamo would be closed by Obama may have been dashed within months of him taking office, but even the most cynical observer would have been hard pressed to say at the time that, after two years, Obama would be presiding over a situation that was so similar to that created by Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 — where the entire population of the prison is, in effect, arbitrarily detained, held indefinitely without charge or trial, regardless of whether or not the majority of them are supposed to have been freed or put on trial.

As the prison begins its 10th year of operations, this is a deeply depressing state of affairs, and one that anyone concerned with justice for the remaining prisoners should campaign about, complain about, and publicize relentlessly.

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

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.

In the time available, I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain, briefly, how, as the 9th anniversary approaches, we face the shocking possibility that very few prisoners at all will be released before the 2012 elections. With reference to the findings of the Obama administration’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, I explained how the 89 men cleared for release are, for the most part, going nowhere, because 58 are Yemenis, whose repatriation has been prevented by both President Obama and by Congress, and 31 others are awaiting third countries prepared to offer them a new home. As I explained with regard to the Yemenis, “It’s been a year now since the President announced a moratorium on releasing any prisoner from Guantánamo to Yemen because of the uproar that came about because, at Christmas 2009, a Nigerian man tried to blow up a plane, and it came out that he was apparently recruited in Yemen. So Yemen is now this entire terrorist country. Nobody cleared for release from Guantánamo can be released there because of these fears that they will join some terrorist cell. That’s guilt by nationality. It’s collective punishment. However you want to look at it, it’s grossly unfair.”

Speaking of the other 31 men and the need to secure third countries prepared to offer them homes, I pointed out how, in the recent WikiLeaks revelations about the international horse-trading regarding these men, the failure of the US to take responsibility for any of these men had been overlooked. As I told Amy and Juan, “It remains a problem that, at every level, at the highest levels of government in the United States, everybody who could — the courts, Congress, President Obama — refused to accept cleared prisoners to be brought to live on the US mainland.”

Moreover, just this week, President Obama showed his disdain for those seeking justice for the Guantánamo prisoners by forcibly repatriating the first prisoner released since last August — Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who had won his habeas corpus petition, but was desperate not to return home, and who, shockingly, was repatriated while a legal challenge to his forcible repatriation was underway.

I also spoke about the 48 men proposed for ongoing indefinite detention without charge or trial, noting how this designation — and the recent suggestion that President Obama will sign an executive order formalizing their indefinite detention, while providing for some sort of review process — is also fundamentally wrong. I also mentioned how the Task Force’s findings — through a secretive process initiated by the Executive — conflicts with the prisoners’ ongoing habeas corpus petitions, or involves designating for indefinite detention men who have lost their habeas petitions, even though the majority of the 19 men who have lost their petitions “were very peripheral foot soldiers in the military conflict that took place before the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan,” and are, explicitly, “not terrorists.”

Katie spoke about two submissions, filed in Spain today, relating to ongoing investigations of the US torture program, which are pending in the National Court of Spain. In the first, CCR and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) “submitted a dossier regarding former commander of Guantánamo, Geoffrey Miller, which collects and analyzes the evidence demonstrating his role in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo and in Iraq,” requesting that a subpoena be issued for Miller to testify before the court, and in the second, CCR and ECCHR “submitted an expert opinion that sets out the legal basis for holding the ‘Bush Six’ criminally liable under international criminal law,” which summarizes the key evidence against the defendants — David Addington, William J. Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. Further information about both cases — including the submissions — is available here, and also see this op-ed in the Guardian by CCR’s President, Michael Ratner.

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.

A former professional footballer, Ahmed Belbacha fled Algeria for the UK in 1999 after receiving death threats from the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), which, as Reprieve explained in its submission to the High Court (PDF), “targeted individuals who had served in Algeria’s military (and might again be called up), as well as employees of state-owned enterprises. Mr. Belbacha, who had completed a mandatory term of national service and worked for Sonatrach, the state-owned oil company, fitted both categories.”

Reprieve added that Belbacha “sought for a period to evade the GIA from within Algeria,” but that, “when the threats continued to escalate … he left the country for good,” subsequently settling in the UK, and living for nearly two years in Boscombe in Bournemouth, where, as has been previously reported, and as the Guardian explained, he “worked and studied English,” and, during one Labour Party conference, “was responsible for cleaning the hotel room of the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott,” who left him a tip and a thank-you note.

In the summer of 2001, Belbacha traveled from the UK to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan,” which he would not have done had he had any militant aims, as his asylum claim was still pending in the UK. After the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he returned to Pakistan, where he was seized. He was then held in a Pakistani prison (where he was abused), before being transferred to US custody, staying in the US prison at Kandahar from December 2001 until approximately February 9, 2002, when he was flown to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since.

In the court submission, Belbacha’s lawyer, Cori Crider, stated that her client “seeks disclosure from the Secretaries of State tending to show that certain statements he is said to have made during detention were obtained by torture and mistreatment.” She added, “This information is necessary for two purposes: first, to make representations to US executive officials (and in the US courts) against his transfer to Algeria, and second, to have his coerced statements suppressed in the litigation of his substantive habeas claim.”

The torture of Ahmed Belbacha

Crider proceeded to explain how Belbacha was subjected to torture and abuse in US custody in Kandahar and Guantánamo, and how British agents, who interrogated him in both locations, helped to provide information that formed the basis of the false confessions that resulted from the more brutal sessions at the hands of US interrogators:

Mr. Belbacha has on several occasions told me that, during his detention at Kandahar and Guantánamo, he suffered serious mistreatment and was tortured. He alleges that the mistreatment included, among other things, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and abuse, sensory deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes, dietary manipulation and the use of stress positions. [...]

Mr. Belbacha alleges that he was questioned by UK interrogators at Kandahar and Guantánamo during the period of his mistreatment. The interrogators knew of Mr. Belbacha’s employment history in the UK and questioned him about his connection with certain mosques in the UK. [...]

During his interrogations, Mr. Belbacha informs me that he made false statements and confessions as a result of his torture and mistreatment during custody and, in particular, due to his fear that his abuse would otherwise continue. He is unable to specify the precise details of the statements and confessions, as he has been questioned hundreds of times over the past nine years and because the memories are in many instances too painful, but much of his questioning by British officials related to his alleged association with the Finsbury Park mosque in the United Kingdom and how individuals at the mosque had allegedly assisted him in travelling to Afghanistan. Mr. Belbacha’s false confessions obtained under torture are the sole source of a number of allegations made against him.

None of this is surprising, of course, as the array of techniques to which Belbacha was subjected were common, in various permutations, in both Kandahar and Guantánamo, and because it has been established, in court proceedings in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, that the British security services provided information to their US counterparts while he was being held and tortured in Morocco. However, the chain of events is of particular interest in Belbacha’s case, as it suggests that the US interrogators stepped in after their British counterparts had obtained information from him directly, and indicates a very clear example of complicity in torture.

Reprieve’s aim, however, is not primarily to expose this aspect of the British security services’ activities, but, as stated in the lawsuit, to secure information in the possession of the British government to help prevent Belbacha’s forcible repatriation, and also to provide important evidence as part of his ongoing habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., where, since the Supreme Court gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights in June 2008, 57 cases have been decided, two-thirds of which have been won by the prisoners.

Resisting involuntary repatriation and seeking a new home for Ahmed Belbacha

This information is of great significance because of the particular circumstances in which Belbacha finds himself. Although Reprieve was notified on February 22, 2007 that Belbacha had been cleared for release from Guantánamo after an Administrative Review Board hearing the year before, he was desperate not to return to Algeria, because, as Cori Crider explained, “he fears that he would be mistreated by the Algerian state, having spent nearly a decade in US custody stamped as a would-be terrorist (and having vocally objected to returning to Algeria for many of those years)” and he “also fears retaliation from the contemporary descendant of the GIA — al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — as he has been an equally vocal critic of the GIA’s attacks on civilians.”

On the former point, Belbacha’s fears appeared to be confirmed last November, when he was “convicted in absentia in Algeria of unspecified charges and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.” Reprieve has been unable to establish the grounds for his conviction, and, as Cori Crider noted in her submission, “The sentence is particularly troubling because no other Algerian in Guantánamo was thus singled out. It appears likely that the sentence reflects a decision by the Algerians to retaliate against Mr. Belbacha, the earliest and most vociferous opponent of repatriation to Algeria from Guantánamo. I am not aware of any diplomatic or political assurances (credible or otherwise) that have been given by the government of Algeria in relation to Mr. Belbacha’s treatment on his return.”

As a result of Belbacha’s credible fears, Reprieve has spent nearly four years trying to secure resettlement for him in a third country. The British government has persistently refused to help, an application for asylum in the US was turned down in 2007, and although the town of Amherst, Massachusetts passed a resolution last year offering him a new home, this cannot happen because of legislation passed by Congress preventing the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland except to face a trial (and even that last proviso is currently in doubt).

The closest Belbacha came to resettlement in a third country appears to have been in January this year, when representatives from Reprieve, Cageprisoners and the Center for Constitutional Rights traveled around Europe attempting to secure new homes for cleared prisoners who faced the risk — or the probability — of torture in their home countries. Crider noted that “The most advanced of those efforts, which targeted the government of Luxembourg, was apparently blocked by the US State Department,” and explained, in a footnote:

I know this because our efforts with the government of Luxembourg culminated in a meeting, on January 14, 2010, which was attended by myself for Reprieve, Moazzam Begg [for Cageprisoners], the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, and a member of staff at a partner group, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The discussion centred on two individuals — Mr. Belbacha and one of CCR’s clients — and during the meeting, Reprieve, with Mr. Begg’s support, proposed Mr. Belbacha as an appropriate candidate for resettlement in Luxembourg. We later learned from a contact in the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry that, as a result of this meeting, Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn had inquired of our client by name of the US authorities. The contact related that the US State Department officials had brushed off this approach, stating that Mr Belbacha “could go back to Algeria.”

This experience led Crider to conclude, as she explained, that “further efforts in this vein will be futile without additional exculpatory information or information that indicates that [Belbacha] will be at risk on return to Algeria. Without this information, the US government is unlikely to be willing to press [his] case for resettlement out of Algeria.”

Problems in the US courts

In seeking to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary return to Algeria, Reprieve has, after initial success, run up against renewed opposition from officials of the Obama administration and various US courts, which affects not only Belbacha but dozens of other prisoners as well. In July 2007, Reprieve asked the District Court in Washington D.C. to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary repatriation, and secured an injunction preventing his removal on June 13, 2008. This, however, only stood until the D.C. Circuit Court became involved, ruling in September 2009, in a case known as Kiyemba II, involving the Uighurs in Guantánamo (Muslims from China who won their habeas petition in October 2008, but feared torture in China) that questions relating to the transfer of prisoners — even when the risk of torture was involved — were solely for the executive branch of government to decide.

The court, out of nowhere, drew on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, the court ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

As a result of the Kiyemba II ruling, which the Supreme Court refused to reconsider in March this year, Belbacha’s injunction was vacated by a District Court judge (in February), and attempts to have it reconsidered were refused. The last straw for Belbacha came in July, when, after protracted court dealings (mostly conducted in secret), the Supreme Court refused to prevent the administration from repatriating any of the six Algerians in Guantánamo at the time, leading to the immediate repatriation of one of these men, Abdul Aziz Naji, who promptly disappeared for a few days, before resurfacing with the threat of a dubious terrorism trial hanging over him.

As Crider noted in her submission, “because there is no injunction in place, the US government may forcibly repatriate Mr. Belbacha at any time.” She also noted that public criticism of the decision to transfer Naji against his will appeared to have paused further transfers, but stressed that the current situation — in which all the government needs to do is assert that it is “government policy not to transfer prisoners to torture” for all judicial inquries to come to an end — is deeply unsatisfactory, and, as a result, Ahmed Belbacha is now seeking to win his habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., and needs the documents in the possession of the British government as an essential part of his defense.

Explaining the importance of his habeas petition, Crider noted, that although “under current Court of Appeals precedent, the judge has no power to order the production of the prisoner in the courtroom; no power to order that the prisoner be released into the United States (or, it would appear, anywhere else); and no power to order the US not to send a petitioner, prevailing or otherwise, anywhere,” and that “The scope of the habeas remedy left to the US judiciary, in other words, is remarkably slim … there remains a category of prisoners that the US has never forced back to a country unwillingly: habeas winners.”

The importance of the British information about Ahmed Belbacha

After running through the poor history of disclosure in the US courts, where “government lawyers litigating the habeas cases have repeatedly claimed that they do not have access to the full set of relevant documents that might be implicated in a habeas action, and that to be required to search all of every relevant agency’s files (the DOD, the CIA, and so forth) for relevant material would be ‘unduly burdensome,’” and where, in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was demonstrably sent to Morocco to be tortured, “Morocco never once appeared as a detention site on any document … in three separate orders from the district judge in [his] habeas action to the government to disclose all exculpatory information”, Crider’s submission ended with an appeal to the High Court to order disclosure of documents that might help prevent her client’s involuntary repatriation, and I believe this entire passage is worth quoting in its entirety:

A key category of information that is, in my experience, never disclosed is exculpatory information identifiably sourced from a foreign government. So, for example, even had the UK authorities generated reports of their interviews with the Claimants in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo and shared those reports with the US — something UK agents might well do — the US government has not disclosed and would not disclose such foreign-sourced material out of respect for the “control principle” [of not disclosing foreign intelligence sources] that was litigated at length in the English Binyam Mohamed litigation.

It is also, of course, likely that the UK produced internal reports about the situation in Afghanistan or Guantánamo that were never transferred to the US. Those reports, self-evidently, would be unavailable in any habeas disclosure process.

I am aware only of two instances in which exculpatory material originating with a foreign intelligence agency has been disclosed to a petitioner’s lawyer in a Guantánamo case: the case of Binyam Mohamed, and the case of Shaker Aamer. In both cases, the only reason such material was disclosed was as a result of Norwich Pharmacal litigation in England. I am cleared counsel of record in both cases, and have reviewed those disclosures at the Secure Facility in the US [where Guantánamo lawyers must travel to view all classified information]. In both instances, the UK disclosures were, by some margin, the most useful, illuminating, and exculpatory material that I saw in the habeas process.

For these reasons, the information sought is a vital part of having my client’s coerced statements suppressed in their habeas proceedings. I also believe it an essential component of persuading Obama administration officials not to transfer my client to Algeria against his will.

While I cannot know the scope of the information used by the Obama administration to determine whether and under what circumstances to transfer my clients, I do know that my own capacity to make effective representations to them has thus far been very limited. The reasons for this are simple: I have as yet had no information I could use to prove to the administration that my clients’ allegations of coercion, particularly during their early years in US military detention, were true. This, combined with the challenges of producing detailed statements on abuse (or, indeed, on the circumstances of capture) from prisoners who have been in Guantánamo for nearly nine years, has limited me to making fairly general statements: statements to the effect that I believe the clients were abused in custody, that the clients were never implicated in any terrorist act and never joined al-Qaida or the Taliban, and that the clients would pose no threat to anyone upon their release to a safe third country.

It is my view that the representations I could make if I had meaningful exculpatory information about Mr. Belbacha, and about how he was treated in US custody, would be qualitatively different. This, in turn, I believe would make the Obama administration more open to the prospect of resettling him, rather than simply forcing him back to abuse, an unfair trial and/or lengthy imprisonment in Algeria.

The Obama administration has stated, on more than one occasion, that it considers a prisoner’s individualized claim of fear of torture when it decides whether to repatriate a prisoner. In theory, of course, the question of the abuse a prisoner faces in Algeria and his fitness to be released elsewhere are distinct; in practice, however, I believe the lines blur. Proving to the Obama administration that Mr. Belbacha was tortured; that he gave false statements under torture; that, therefore, that allegations lodged against him are unreliable, particularly the most severe ones, is, I believe, an essential part of persuading the government that it would be unjust and inappropriate to return Mr. Belbacha to Algeria.

I wish Reprieve every success in this approach. The Norwich Pharmacal litigation mentioned above, which, in simple lay terms, involves appraisals of how parties (in these cases, the UK government) can become involved in “wrongdoing,” whether intentionally or not, for which a remedy may be sought, was invaluable in the case of Binyam Mohamed, and eventually led to his release. It has not yet had the same end result in Shaker Aamer’s case, although it led, last December, to the release of important documents in the possession of the British government, and it is clear, in the grounds for a judicial review submitted by Cori Crider (PDF), that it should also apply in Ahmed Belbacha’s case. As she explained:

Mr. Belbacha alleges that the Defendants have become involved in the wrongdoing of the US authorities in the following ways. UK officials:

(1) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where it was standard practice for detainees to be mistreated prior to interviews to secure their cooperation, thereby facilitating further mistreatment;

(2) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where this is likely to have prolonged his detention, in particular at Kandahar;

(3) failed to protest at the mistreatment, torture and/or unlawful detention of Mr. Belbacha, despite no doubt being aware of the circumstances of his detention;

(4) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure better treatment for Mr. Belbacha; and

(5) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure the release from detention of Mr. Belbacha.

If justice has not entirely vanished, it will lead, as intended, to Ahmed Belbacha winning his habeas petition, and the Obama administration accepting that it will no longer try to forcibly repatriate him, and will, instead, seek a third country prepared to take him.

And if there is any justice left over, that third country will be the UK, where he lived in a peaceful and law-abiding manner for nearly two years, and where there are many people wiling and able to help with his resettlement.

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.

Differing power blocs within the D.C. Circuit Court

The first bloc within the Circuit Court consists of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, both appointees of George W. Bush, and Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph.

In January, ruling on the appeal of Ghaleb al-Bihani, a Yemeni who had served as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and had lost his habeas petition in January 2009, Judges Brown and Kavanaugh claimed that the President’s detention powers in wartime were not limited by the international laws of war. These two judges were mounting a far-reaching defense of the legislation used to justify the detentions at Guantánamo — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — that even the Obama administration thought was excessive.

Judge Randolph’s interventions, meanwhile, have been even more troubling. Having defended every piece of legislation related to Guantánamo that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court during the Bush administration, he delighted, in July, in overturning the successful habeas petition of Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni who had accompanied his sister to Afghanistan to marry a man connected to al-Qaeda, but who had won his habeas petition because Judge Gladys Kessler had concluded that al-Adahi himself was not “part of” al-Qaeda.

This appeared to be correct, but in a ruling notable for personal slurs against Judge Kessler’s integrity, Judge Randolph not only reversed al-Adahi’s successful petition, but also indicated that he thought that the burden of proof in the habeas cases was too high, even though the government only has to establish, by a preponderance of the evidence (a potentially very vague balance of probabilities), that the petitioners were “part of” al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban to approve their ongoing detention.

The other bloc in the Circuit Court, consisting of Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judges Douglas H. Ginsburg, Karen LeCraft Henderson, Judith Ann Wilson Rogers, David S. Tatel, Merrick B. Garland, and Thomas B. Griffith, has proven to be rather less driven by ideology in dealing with the habeas appeals. In August, when they denied al-Bihani’s en banc habeas appeal, they nevertheless made a point of issuing a note demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the extreme position taken by Judges Brown and Kavanaugh regarding the President’s wartime powers, which effectively discredited it.

In addition, in June this year, Judges Ginsburg and Henderson and another judge, Senior Judge Harry T. Edwards, ordered the lower court to reconsider the case of Belkacem Bensayah, one of six Algerians living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who had been kidnapped and flown to Guantánamo in January 2002, on the basis of a spectral plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo. In November 2008, Judge Richard Leon had granted the habeas petitions of all these men, with the exception of Bensayah, but the Circuit Court found that “the evidence upon which the district court relied in concluding Bensayah ‘supported’ al-Qaeda is insufficient … to show he was part of that organization.”

These judges have not always been so alert. Just six days before the Bensayah ruling, for example, Judges Ginsburg and Tatel joined Judge Kavanaugh in denying the habeas appeal of Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian seized with Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002, drawing on discredited claims that Zubaydah, for whom the CIA torture program was specifically developed, was a major player in al-Qaeda, despite copious evidence in recent years to demonstrate that, in fact, the misappraisal of Abu Zubaydah’s significance is one of the most chronic intelligence failures in the whole of the “War on Terror.”

Nevertheless, on Friday, when Chief Judge Sentelle and Judge Tatel were joined by Judge Brown to consider the government’s appeal against the successful habeas petition of Mohamedou Ould Salahi (aka Slahi), a Mauritanian whose habeas petition was granted in April by Judge James Robertson, it was noticeable that reason was rather more in evidence than ideology.

Crucially, however, in every appeal from Al-Bihani onwards, the Circuit Court has agreed that being “part of” al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban is sufficient to justify detention, rather than being part of the “command structure” of either organization, as Judge John D. Bates had, for a while, established in the District Court rulings. This narrowing of the detention standard has had a knock-on effect on recent rulings, leading to more recent victories for the government, and it also played a major part in the deliberations of Judges Sentelle, Tatel and Brown.

The case of Mohamedou Ould Salahi: Torture, and Judge Robertson’s ruling

Salahi’s case is contentious for a variety of reasons, not least because, after his capture in Mauritania in November 2001, he was subjected to torture in Jordan, on behalf of the CIA, and was then subjected to a specifically tailored torture program in Guantánamo, which included:

prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, death threats, and threats that his mother would be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped. This program, which was implemented in May 2003, and augmented with further “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, culminated, in August 2003, in an incident when Salahi was taken out on a boat, wearing isolation goggles, while agents whispered, within earshot, that he was “about to be executed and made to disappear.”

Salahi’s torture was so severe that that, in May 2004, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marine Corps, who had been assigned his case as a prosecutor the year before, resigned rather than pursuing the case, telling his boss that, in addition to legal reasons, he was “morally opposed” to the interrogation techniques used on Salahi.

Quite what Salahi had done to warrant this treatment, and that had led to him once being described as the “highest-value detainee at the facility,” was thoroughly explored by Judge Robertson in April. Although the 9/11 Commission Report described him as “a significant al-Qaeda operative” who “recruited 9/11 hijackers in Germany,” along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the “high-value detainee” who allegedly coordinated the 9/11 attacks with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Judge Robertson was not convinced, noting that Salahi has stated that “he did nothing more than give bin al-Shibh and his friends lodging for one night,” and also noting that the government now “acknowledg[es] that Salahi probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.”

Judge Robertson accepted, as I explained in a previous article, that “Salahi was obviously no stranger to al-Qaeda. His cousin and brother-in-law is Mahfouz Walad al-Walid (better known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritania, a religious scholar regarded by US authorities as a spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden,” and he also lived briefly in Canada, where he moved in circles that included Ahmed Ressam, the failed “Millennium Bomber,” and was also in contact, at various points in the 1990s, with a handful of other men who were later convicted for terrorist activities. However, as I also pointed out:

[A]s Judge Robertson explained in his unclassified opinion, “Associations alone are not enough … to make detention lawful.” Although he accepted, as Salahi himself admitted, that “he traveled to Afghanistan in early 1990 to fight jihad against communists and that there he swore bayat [an oath of loyalty] to al-Qaeda,” he also, essentially, accepted Salahi’s assertion that “his association with al-Qaeda ended after 1992, and that, even though he remained in contact thereafter with people he knew to be al-Qaeda members, he did nothing for al-Qaeda after that time.”

The Circuit Court refers the case back to the District Court

In assessing the government’s appeal, the Circuit Court judges accepted (PDF) that the government had dropped claims that Salahi was involved in any way in the 9/11 attacks or had “’purposefully and materially support[ed]’ forces associated with al-Qaeda ‘in hostilities against US Coalition partners,’” but maintained that, following the Circuit Court’s narrowing of the definition of involvement with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban required to justify ongoing detention — that the prisoners were “part of” either organization — Judge Robertson’s opinion should be vacated and the case sent back to the District Court to reconsider in light of the revised definition.

This was, I believe, an acceptable compromise, as the government had urged the Circuit Court “to reverse and direct the district court to deny Salahi’s habeas petition,” whereas the Court accepted instead that further questions needed asking, which required further investigations by the lower court. Crucially, the Court noted that, “When Salahi took his oath of allegiance in March 1991, al-Qaeda and the United States shared a common objective: they both sought to topple Afghanistan’s Communist Government,” which is an important point, and the judges also included a list of possible questions for the District Court to consider, which demonstrate that they had given some thought to Salahi’s history:

For example, does the government’s evidence support the inference that even if Salahi was not acting under express orders, he nonetheless had a tacit understanding with al-Qaeda operatives that he would refer prospective jihadists to the organization? Has the government presented sufficient evidence for the court to make findings regarding what Salahi said to bin al-Shibh during their “discussion of jihad and Afghanistan”? Did al-Qaeda operatives ask Salahi to assist the organization with telecommunications projects in Sudan, Afghanistan, or Pakistan? Did Salahi provide any assistance to al-Qaeda in planning denial-of-service computer attacks, even if those attacks never came to fruition? May the court infer from Salahi’s numerous ties to known al-Qaeda operatives that he remained a trusted member of the organization?

The government’s unacceptable position regarding Salahi’s torture and his status as an informer

However, while the decision to “remand for further proceedings” is acceptable, it remains apparent that the government continues to play unacceptable games with Salahi for two reasons. The first is because its behavior begs the question of whether it is morally acceptable to seek a legal basis for Salahi’s ongoing detention when, as Judge Robertson stated (and as was cited by the Circuit Court), “The government’s problem is that its proof that Salahi gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution.”

The second reason, as I have discussed before, is because, as Peter Finn explained for the Washington Post in an article in March this year, Salahi and another man, Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian explosives expert for al-Qaeda, have, over the years, become “two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo” — in al-Sawah’s case because he was thoroughly disillusioned with his former life, and in Salahi’s case because he began cooperating after his torture in 2003.

As a result of their cooperation, both men “are housed in a little fenced-in compound at the military prison, where they live a life of relative privilege — gardening, writing and painting — separated from other detainees in a cocoon designed to reward and protect … Each has a modular unit outfitted with a television. Each has a well-stocked refrigerator. They share a garden, where they grow mint for tea [and] are reported to have become close.”

Crucially, as I also explained:

[A]lthough the government has, to some extent, “rewarded them for cooperation,” no one in a position of authority has dared to propose the next logical step: releasing them under some sort of witness protection program. Finn explained that some military officials endorsed this proposal, believing that the establishment of a witness protection program, “in conjunction with allies,” might well “cultivate more informants.”

W. Patrick Lang, a retired senior military intelligence officer, told Finn bluntly, “I don’t see why they aren’t given asylum. If we don’t do this right, it will be that much harder to get other people to cooperate with us. And if I was still in the business, I’d want it known we protected them. It’s good advertising.”

As Guantánamo nears the ninth anniversary of its opening, however, no one in the Obama administration seems to care how counter-productive it is to treat informants this way. Instead, the Justice Department remains as determined as it was under George W. Bush to defeat every habeas petition, whether, as in most of the 19 cases won by the government, the men in question were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban in a military conflict that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or other acts of international terrorism, or whether, as in the cases of Salahi and Tariq al-Sawah, it would be useful to reflect on what message it sends to would-be informants when the government fights aggressively in court to continue detaining “two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo,” rewarding them only with mint tea.

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 “Terrorism, Habeas Corpus, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Habeas Petition.”

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases since the start of 2010, see: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (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), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part One) (July 2010), Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part Two) (July 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Mentally Ill Yemeni; 2nd Judge Approves Detention of Minor Taliban Recruit (August 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of Afghan Shopkeeper at Guantánamo (September 2010), Nine Years After 9/11, US Court Concedes that International Laws of War Restrict President’s Wartime Powers (September 2010), Fayiz Al-Kandari, A Kuwaiti Aid Worker in Guantánamo, Loses His Habeas Petition (September 2010), Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose: The Betrayal of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (September 2010), First Guantánamo Habeas Appeal to US Supreme Court (Fayiz al-Kandari, October 2010).

This sixth article tells the stories of 14 prisoners seized in two house raids in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, which led to the capture of the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah.

Of the hundred or so prisoners seized in Pakistan — mostly in house raids, but also in random raids on mosques, on buses and in the street — all but these 27 (and 13 more profiled in Part Seven) have been released. The cases of those released reveal, in general, how US intelligence was often horrendously inaccurate, and how opportunism often played a part in the actions of the Pakistani authorities, who were being rewarded financially. As President Musharraf admitted in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Moreover, of the 14 men whose stories are described in this chapter, many appear to be victims of the same failures of intelligence or opportunism as those already released. This is particularly true of nine men seized not with Abu Zubaydah (although there are, of course, serious doubts about his significance, as described below) but in a guest house close to a university, as five others seized in that raid have been released, two of whom won their habeas petitions in rulings that were notable for the level of criticism leveled at the government by the judges in question. In addition, one of the remaining nine also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared for release and, recently, came close to being offered a new home in Germany.

The following five men were seized in the house raid in Faisalabad that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Even so, the five men seized with him have, for the most part, been accused of having connections to al-Qaeda, although one other, an Algerian named Labed Ahmed, was released in November 2008, and all appear to be more fortunate than three others seized in the same raid — two young men named Omar Ghramesh and Noor al-Deen, and an unidentified teenager — who were rendered to Syria as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, and who have never resurfaced in any form.

ISN 682 Al Sharbi, Ghassan (Saudi Arabia)
Al-Sharbi, who speaks fluent English and graduated in electrical engineering from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, is one of very few Guantánamo prisoners to have publicly declared membership of al-Qaeda. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he accepted all the allegations against him, which included claims that he received specialized training in the manufacture and use of remote-controlled explosive devices to detonate bombs against Afghan and US forces, that he “was observed chatting and laughing like pals with Osama bin Laden,” and that he was known in Guantánamo as the “electronic builder” and “Abu Zubaydah’s right-hand man.” Charged in the first incarnation of the Military Commissions, he appeared at a pre-trial hearing on April 27, 2006, and was equally open about his activities, telling the judge, “I came here to tell you I did what I did and I’m willing to pay the price,” “Even if I spend hundreds of years in jail, that would be a matter of honor to me,” and “I fought the United States, I’m going to make it short and easy for you guys: I’m proud of what I did.” Perhaps surprisingly, al-Sharbi, who was a member of the short-lived Prisoners’ Council in the summer of 2005, along with Shaker Aamer (ISN 239) and four others who have been released, was befriended by Guantánamo’s warden, Col. Mike Bumgarner, despite his avowed allegiance to al-Qaeda, and despite the fact that he later became one of Guantánamo’s most persistent hunger strikers. In June 2008, he was again put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Sufyian Barhoumi, Jabran al-Qahtani and Noor Uthman Muhammed (see below), but the charges were dropped by the Pentagon in October 2008, after their prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned, stating that the trial system was designed to prevent the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense. New charges against all four men were filed in January 2009, in the dying days of the Bush administration, but with the exception of Noor Uthman Muhammed, have not been revived under President Obama, perhaps because, as in the majority of cases involving Abu Zubaydah, the government has stepped back from its discredited claims about his significance.

ISN 685 Ali, Abdelrazak (Algeria)
The story of Abdelrazak Ali is so confusing that I have no idea what to believe, and can only hope that the truth will emerge when the supposed evidence is examined by a District Court judge in his habeas corpus petition. In the Summary of Evidence for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he was identified as Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman, a Libyan, but by the time of his second Administrative Review Board in 2006, he was identified as Abdullah Azak, and in the third round of the ARBs, in 2007, he was identified as Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakush, an Algerian. This led to the US authorities accusing him of having “lied for a period of two years eight months prior to revealing his real name and actual place of birth,” and using this as part of the evidence against him, even though, as I have stated, this “may not have been advisable, but was understandable.” According to the US authorities, he was accused, by an unidentified “source,” of staying in various guest houses in Afghanistan from July to October 2001, and of attending the Khaldan training camp “circa 1996/1997,” and by an unidentified “al-Qaeda operative” of being “a member of his Martyrs’ Brigade.’” In response, he has stated that he traveled to Pakistan “to go to school to learn how to read and write,” and has also claimed, like Labed Ahmed (released in November 2008), that he was taken to Abu Zubaydah’s house by other people, and did not know the inhabitants. Given that the allegations against him are such clear examples of unverifiable hearsay, it may well be that this is the case.

ISN 694 Barhoumi, Sufyian (Algeria)
Barhoumi, who lost his habeas corpus petition in September 2009, was accused of being a trainer for the bomb-making group in the house rented by Abu Zubaydah, but has strenuously denied the allegations against him. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted traveling to Afghanistan for military training in 1999, but pointed out that this was long before 9/11, and insisted that, having been shown a video of atrocities in Chechnya at a mosque in the UK, where he lived for two years, his intention was to train to fight in Chechnya. He explained that, after leaving Afghanistan, he traveled “from house to house,” ending up at the safe house in Faisalabad where he was seized with Abu Zubaydah. He added, however, that he was only there for ten days before the raid, and claimed that the allegations were the result of “hearsay” and of “people testifying against me.” He claimed that his interrogators told him, “people are talking about you a lot,” and suggested that, because he was arrested with Abu Zubaydah, “they dumped everything on me and said I was al-Qaeda also.” In 2006, at a pre-trial hearing after he had been put forward for a trial by Military Commission, he, like Ghassan al-Sharbi, refused legal representation, but was primarily concerned with showing the courtroom his hand, which was severely damaged after a land mine accident in Afghanistan, and complaining about the conditions of his imprisonment. Although he was charged for a second time in June 2008, and the charges were dropped in October 2008 and refiled in January 2009, he has not been charged under President Obama, and the fact that his habeas petition proceeded to a ruling may indicate that he is one of the 48 men that the Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial. Noticeably, when his habeas appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year, and the reasons for the denial of his habeas petition were first publicly revealed, it became apparent that, although the judge in his case (Judge Rosemary Collyer) noted that Barhoumi “said that he is not now and has never been a member of al-Qaeda,” and added, “I have no reason not to believe that,” she nevertheless concluded that “he was with an associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners and therefore was properly detained.” That “associated force,” it transpired, was an alleged militia associated with Abu Zubaydah, whose existence was apparently revealed in the diary of another of Zubaydah’s associates, Abu Kamil al-Suri, (someone previously unheard of, and whose current whereabouts are unknown). It also became apparent that, in the absence of any other evidence, the government was using this not only as a new way of justifying Abu Zubaydah’s detention, but also to implicate others like Barhoumi.

ISN 696 Al Qahtani, Jabran (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in June 2008, when al-Qahtani, a graduate in electrical engineering from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, was put forward for a trial by Military Commission with Ghassan al-Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi and Noor Uthman Muhammed, he has had little to say about the allegations against him: that he traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 “with the intent to fight the Northern Alliance and the American forces, whom he expected would soon be fighting in Afghanistan,” and that he was part of a group at Abu Zubaydah’s house who were provided with money to buy the components to make remote-controlled explosive devices. He refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, and spoke very little in April 2006, during the pre-trial hearing for his first, aborted Military Commission, when he was concerned only to refuse the services of his military lawyer. As with the other three men, the charges against him were dropped in October 2008, and new charges were filed in January 2009, although he has not been charged under President Obama.

ISN 707 Muhammed, Noor Uthman (Sudan)
Muhammed was put forward for a trial by Military Commission on May 23, 2008, accused of serving as the deputy emir and a weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed. Noticeably, these charges do not relate to the 9/11 attacks, and in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business. Muhammed’s case ought to raise troubling questions about Khaldan — and, specifically, about how his claims about the camp’s lack of affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban echo the US authorities’ belated conclusions about Abu Zubaydah, and how his alleged role as the camp’s deputy emir ought to raise troubling questions about the camp’s emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in May 2009 after being rendered back to the country, having served his purpose when, in 2002, under torture in Egypt (where he had been flown by the CIA), he falsely confessed to connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. However, despite these problems, Muhammed is one of five prisoners put forward for a trial by Military Commission under the Obama administration, and although there are serious doubts about whether the court is empowered to try him for his alleged involvement with terrorism before the 9/11 attacks, prosecutors made a point, in a pre-trial hearing on September 21 this year, of stating that, “for a number of years,” Muhammed “was the principal trainer and in charge of all training at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan that provided numerous individuals who went on to serve for al-Qaeda.” His trial is scheduled to begin in February 2011.

The following nine men were seized in a separate house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, at the Crescent Mill guest house, also known as the “Issa house,” after its Pakistani owner (who was not seized) or the “Yemeni house,” because most of its inhabitants were Yemenis. Although the house was purported to have a connection to Abu Zubaydah, the majority of the 15 prisoners known to have been seized in the raid have always maintained that they were students at the nearby Salafia University, or that they had traveled to Pakistan for cheap medical treatment, and that the house was a student guest house. One of the prisoners, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, died in mysterious circumstances in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006 (on the night that two other men died in what was described as a triple suicide), and five others have been released. In May 2009, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the five, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who described himself as a student, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.” Ali Ahmed was finally released last September, and in the meantime another student in the house, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi who stated that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive cheap medical treatment for a back problem, was released last June, following the deliberations of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. In addition, two other Yemeni students, Mohammed Tahir and Fayad Yahya Ahmed, were released last December. Since then, one other man has also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared by the Task Force, and is seeking a third country to offer him a new home.

ISN 680 Hassan, Emad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Hassan has repeatedly stated that he never set foot in Afghanistan (until the US took him there after his capture), and that he was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the Koran when he was seized. He has also explained that, while in Pakistani custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.” Nevertheless, he has been subjected to numerous allegations made by unidentified individuals, who have claimed that he trained at al-Farouq, where he was one of 50 men chosen to be Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, and that he was present in Tora Bora, at the showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in December 2001. These dubious sounding allegations have not been tested in court, of course, and it may be that Hassan has simply aroused the wrath of the authorities in Guantánamo because of his refusal to accept the conditions in which he and the other prisoners are held. In 2006, one of his lawyers, Douglas Cox, explained how he was “regarded as a leader by other detainees,” and how he “went on a hunger strike. A few months into it, military doctors started force-feeding him by inserting a tube through his nose. The process was so painful that Hassan felt he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t want to quit, though, because he thought he would be letting down the other detainees.” Weight records released by the Pentagon show that, although Hassan only weighted 113 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped at one point in December 2005 to a skeletal 85 pounds (PDF).

ISN 684 Tahamuttan, Mohammed (Palestine)
Tahamuttan, who was 22 years old when seized, had been a member, since the age of 14, of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organization, with millions of members worldwide, which, in Guantánamo, was routinely described as a front for terrorism (a description that is akin to describing the Catholic Church as a front for the IRA). According to his own account, he had traveled to Pakistan in October 2001, and had been part of two missions from the Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, but in Guantánamo he was subjected to claims that he had traveled to Afghanistan for military training, even though a more plausible explanation of his activities was also provided by the government, in passages in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence in which it was stated that “he met two Afghani men during a lecture at the Jamaat-al-Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, Pakistan, who pressured him into traveling to Afghanistan … even though the Jamaat-al-Tablighi expressly forbade travel to Afghanistan as too dangerous.” However, although “he traveled with the two Afghan men to Quetta, Pakistan, where he was taken to a compound containing Afghan refugees and Arab men who looked like fighters,” he “was advised not to travel to Afghanistan, and his travel was arranged to Lahore, Pakistan.” Cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, he was recently considered for rehousing in Germany, but at the last minute the German government decided to accept only two of the three prisoners offered. However, on September 27, 2010, the Foreign Minister of the Maldives, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, said the government “was going to invite the sole remaining Palestinian detainee in Guantánamo Bay to live a ‘peaceful, free’ life in the Maldives,” and “expressed hope that the parliament would endorse the decision as a gesture of affection to the Palestinian brothers and as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

ISN 686 Hakim, Abdel (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, although Hakim stated in Guantánamo that he had studied the Koran for five months in Lahore, and had then been directed by a religious figure to the guest house near Salafia University, the US authorities alleged that he had trained at al-Farouq. When a tribunal member asked him, “If you were a student studying the Koran, how did you end up here?” he replied, “This is the question I always ask myself … why was I captured there, and why did they bring me here?”

ISN 688 Ahmed, Fahmi (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Fahmi Ahmed (also identified as Fahmi al-Tawlaqi) “said that he went to Pakistan to buy fabrics, taking $3,500 that he had borrowed from his mother, but explained that he actually spent most of his time in Pakistan ‘like a wild man,’ drinking and smoking hashish. After staying for a year and a half, during which time his visa expired, he was eventually advised to go to Faisalabad, where there was a big Arabic community, and where he was told he would be able to locate people who could tell him how to bribe the government to renew his visa. He said he ended up staying for two months with a Pakistani family, but just as he was planning to call his family to arrange to return home, because the house he was staying in was too small, he met Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami [aka Salah Ahmed al-Salami, one of the three prisoners who died in June 2006], who invited him to stay at a larger house, where he was also staying, and where ‘they were all university students.’” In contrast, the US authorities allege that he trained in Afghanistan, fought with the Taliban, and was a member of al-Qaeda, but this seems unlikely, because, as his lawyers explained in 2006, “Although he says he endured his share of abuse at Gitmo –once, soldiers shaved his head in the shape of a cross — he has also made an amazing discovery: rap music. Al-Tawlaqi adopted the rap name King Daniel, which he drew on his prison jumpsuit. He filled two notebooks with rap lyrics, in English, organized by subject. The lawyers can’t say what the songs are about because Justice Department officials wouldn’t declassify the lyrics, though they assured me they are ‘very lewd,’” and he “asked his lawyers if they could persuade Eminem to perform his songs.”

ISN 689 Salam, Mohammed (Yemen)
Salam, who was reportedly seen by “a senior al-Qaeda member” at al-Farouq, has actually presented a far more coherent narrative, which involved traveling to Pakistan to get treatment on his nose, and then meeting up with a missionary under whose guidance he traveled to Faisalabad to study the Koran, where he stayed for eight months until he was seized in the house raid. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, after explaining that a “generous person” paid for his trip, the following exchange took place, which demonstrated how wide the cultural gap was between the Americans and Muslims from the Gulf:

Tribunal Member: I don’t know your culture very well, but … in our culture people just don’t step up and say, “I’ll pay for the trip for you.”
Detainee: In our culture, in Islam, there is such a thing … Indeed, it is an obligation for any Muslim who is rich to pay for someone who is poor.

ISN 690 Qader, Ahmed Abdul (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Qader, who was just 18 years old when he was seized, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan “to help the needy and the poor,” and tried unsuccessfully to establish a charity organization. He admitted that he visited the “back line,” encouraged by friends connected to the Taliban, but insisted that he “never participated in any kind of military activities.” After leaving Afghanistan before the US-led invasion began, he said that he ended up in the house in Faisalabad, where he became friends with Fahmi Ahmed (ISN 688, above). “We shared the same vision and he has the same opinions,” Ahmed said of him, adding, “He used to use hashish with me,” whereas the other students in the house “were trying to inspire me to do the religious things, like look at my religion, because most of the students were studying the Koran and all things related to religious studies.”

ISN 691 Al Zarnuki, Mohammed (Yemen)
Although it was alleged, by unidentified sources, including “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” that al-Zarnuki was seen in various training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2001 (and even that, after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, he attended a meeting in Kandahar with Osama bin Laden to plan further operations), he has stated that he took a break from farming to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and has claimed that he spent four months preaching and then spent a month and a half at the guest house where he was seized, where he became ill.

ISN 702 Mingazov, Ravil (Russia)
A former ballet dancer and Russian army officer, Mingazov, who won his habeas corpus petition in May 2010, has always claimed that he traveled to Afghanistan in search of a new home for himself and his family, after he converted to Islam and faced dangerous discrimination from the Russian military. Following the US-led invasion, he said that he fled with other refugees to a center in Lahore, in Pakistan, run by the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, where he stayed from January to March 2002. Anxious to be reunited with his wife and child, but aware that foreigners in Pakistan were prey for bounty hunters, he then accepted an offer of safe passage to a house in Faisalabad with two other refugees, Labed Ahmed (an Algerian, released in November 2008) and Jamil Nassir (a Yemeni, see below), where, they were told, it would be easier for them to leave the country. After being accidentally delivered to Shabaz Cottage, where Abu Zubaydah was living (and where Ahmed insisted on staying), Mingazov and Nasser were then moved to the Crescent Mill guest house, where they were seized after about ten days. Any doubts about Mingazov’s innocence should have been removed not just by the ruling but also because, during a military review board at Guantánamo, Labed Ahmed had stated that, because he, Mingazov and Nassir “did not have a connection or relationship with Abu Zubaydah,” they “should have been placed in the Yemeni house.” As I have explained previously, “This indicates that, although Abu Zubaydah had some sort of contact with the [Crescent Mill guest] house, it was not a place that had any connection with terrorism, and was, at best, a place where a few foreigners fleeing from Afghanistan could be concealed alongside a group of students.” Despite this, however, the Obama administration recently announced that it would appeal Mingazov’s successful habeas petition.

ISN 728 Nassir, Jamil (Yemen)
The outline of Nassir’s journey to Faisalabad, and the reasons that he should not be regarded as an associate of Abu Zubaydah, can be found in the story of Ravil Mingazov, above. As for what Nassir had been doing prior to his capture, the US authorities initially struggled to find evidence of any anti-US activities. In 2004, at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the only information they had about him, beyond the spurious connection with Zubaydah and the house, was a claim that he had stayed in “the Afghani house” in Kandahar, after traveling from Yemen to Pakistan in late July 2001. By 2007, the US authorities had established a much more exciting narrative, but its reliability is, of course, unknown. According to this version of events, Nassir had traveled to Afghanistan with his wife, had rented a house next door to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and was linked by unknown sources to “the purchase of equipment used to assist al-Qaeda operatives in the production of biological weapons.” According to this allegation, Nassir was working with al-Wafa, a Saudi charity that, for many years, the US authorities believed was working with al-Qaeda on chemical and biological weapons, although these claims appear to have evaporated in every case except Nassir’s, as the director of al-Wafa, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, and two other prisoners once accused of similar crimes — Ayman Batarfi and Jamal Mar’i — have all been released. Nassir has refuted the al-Wafa allegations, and, in light of his own claim that he traveled from Pakistan to Afghanistan to study and teach the Koran, it may be that the most reliable unidentified source is the one who stated that he was “not a guard nor affiliated with al-Qaeda,” but a civilian who had “moved to Afghanistan with his wife and children.”

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 Pacific Free Press, The Public Record and Uruknet.

This is the fourth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This fourth article tells the stories of 19 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan.  Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Three, where I told 22 more stories. Disturbingly, seven of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and at least five have been cleared for release (or “approved for transfer,” to use the language that the Obama administration learned so carefully from its predecessor).

ISN 249 Al Hamiri, Mohammed (Yemen)
Al-Hamiri, who was 19 when he was seized, claimed that he “left Yemen for medical treatment and was tricked by a British resident into going into Afghanistan where he did nothing for six months.” An unidentified source — or sources — claimed that he had trained at al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) and had spoken to bin Laden at a guest house in Kabul, but al-Hamiri denied the allegations, and only conceded that, in Kabul, he had stayed in the home of someone he “felt may have been associated with the Taliban.” His most critical comments were delivered in a statement that was read out in his absence during his tribunal. All the charges, he said, “were made up in order to keep him and other Muslims at the camp,” because he “never had a weapon, never carried one and never even killed a chicken.” According to weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 122 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, but his weight dropped to just 102 pounds in February 2003, probably during one of the many hunger strikes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s history (PDF).

ISN 251 Bin Salem, Mohammed (Yemen)
In a particularly thin set of allegations, the US authorities claim that bin Salem, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan in July 2001, and received training at al-Farouq. Noticeably, he is not accused of having taken part in combat against the Taliban (let alone US forces), as it is only alleged that he “supported al-Qaeda and Taliban forces by serving as a cook at a rest and relaxation facility for front line troops at Bagram,” and that he was captured by Pakistani forces after retreating directly from Bagram to Pakistan.

ISN 254 Khenaina, Muhammad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Khenaina has stated that he went to Afghanistan in August 2001 “to teach the Koran in Arabic,” although he admitted that he “did not actually teach the Koran.” After staying in a guest house in Kabul, he said that he heard of the 9/11 attacks and was “concerned about retaliation by the Americans and wanted to get out.” He explained that the owner of the house arranged for him to travel to Logar and then Khost, where he stayed with an Afghan, and then traveled through the mountains to Pakistan with five other Arabs and an Afghan guide. After joining up with another group of 19 men who were also fleeing Afghanistan, he reached the border, where he was detained by the authorities. Throughout this story, the only claim of militancy against Khenaina was an allegation that the manager of the guest house “arranged transportation for guests to a Taliban training area 35 minutes north of Kabul,” but Khenaina insisted that “he was not in Afghanistan to participate in jihad,” and that he “did not have a weapon while in Afghanistan.” He also condemned the 9/11 attacks, and explained that, if released, “he would return to Yemen and marry a cousin who has been betrothed to him and never leave again.”

ISN 255 Hatim, Saeed (Yemen)
In December 2009, Hatim won his habeas corpus petition, but it did not lead to his release. In fact, the Obama administration has appealed the ruling, even though the judge in Hatim’s case, Judge Ricardo Urbina, clearly established that the government’s allegations — that he trained at al-Farouq, stayed in al-Qaeda and Taliban guesthouses, “operated under the command of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the battlefront against the Northern Alliance,” and fought at the battle of Tora Bora — “rest[ed] almost entirely upon admissions made by the petitioner himself,” which he made “only because he had previously been tortured while in US custody” in Kandahar. In addition, Judge Urbina discredited the Tora Bora allegation, because it was made by a fellow prisoner who had made false allegations against dozens of other prisoners (first exposed publicly in 2006), and “whose grasp on reality,” as Judge Urbina explained, “appears to have been tenuous at best.” Distressingly, the Obama administration’s appeal has been filed despite knowledge that Hatim has suffered from what Judge Urbina described as “severe psychological problems” in Guantánamo, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions. Indeed, in May 2002, an interrogator stated, “I do not recommend [Hatim] for further exploitation due in part to mental and emotional problems [and] limited knowledgeability.”

ISN 259 Hintif, Fadil (Yemen)
Prior to traveling to Afghanistan, Hintif, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had spent many years working as a farmer on his family’s land, and had then moved to Sana’a to look for work. There he met a man at a mosque who asked him about “going to Afghanistan to help poor Afghans,” and he “felt this would be a chance to do something good in memory of his deceased father, so he thought it was a good idea.” He then apparently sold his car to raise funds for his trip, received some money from his brother and set off for Afghanistan. In Kabul, he “began living with an individual who previously taught the Koran in Afghanistan,” and when he asked him how he could help the Afghans, was told that “he could either work with the Afghani Red Crescent or he could help distribute food supplies.” Having decided to work for the Red Crescent, he said that he traveled with the instructor to Logar province, south of Kabul, but stopped his work after the US-led invasion began, when he was escorted to the Pakistani border. There, he said, he surrendered to the Pakistani police, who took him to a prison in Peshawar. He was then transferred to a larger prison in Kohat, and was eventually turned over to the Americans. Throughout his whole story, Hintif maintained that he “did not receive any training in Afghanistan” and “did not fight in Afghanistan because he was not convinced of the causes that were being fought for.” He explained that he “felt that the groups there were fighting for power, and that there was no reason to fight a jihad.” Disturbingly, apart from vague allegations about the guest houses in which he stayed, the only allegations that the US authorities have been able to come up with are that his name was on a document “recovered from a safe house raid associated with al-Qaeda in Karachi, Pakistan” (which is not necessarily reliable, as it may not have been his name, but a kunya or alias that does not necessarily refer to him) and a much-derided claim that his Casio watch was the same model as one used in improvised explosive devices “in bombings linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorist groups.”

ISN 263 Sultan, Ashraf (Libya)
Sultan, who is accused of being a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (opposed to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi), training at various camps in Afghanistan, and fighting at Tora Bora, has denied the allegations, stating that he left Libya because of religious persecution, and lived with other Libyan refugees in Jalalabad. He has also stated that he was not a member of the LIFG (or of al-Qaeda), and was not at Tora Bora, and has declared that he traveled to the Pakistani border, where he was seized on December 18, 2001, with an Afghan guide, and not with a group of soldiers. His disdain for the betrayal of justice at Guantánamo was revealed in his appearance at his tribunal in 2004, when he stated, “I know my fate is already predetermined and the judgment has been pronounced already. So this Tribunal is just for show and it is not real. Everybody is reading from papers that are already printed and everything is already predetermined. I know for sure my destiny is already predetermined. The judgment against me is already made up. My presence, me defending myself or not defending myself, will have no importance whatsoever.”

ISN 275 Abbas, Yusef (Abdusabar) (China)
Abbas is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. He is one of 17 of the men who were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and who, after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. 21 years old at the time of his capture, Abbas was a farmer, who, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “learned about the oppression of his people as he was growing up, and was determined to leave to find a better life, but could find little information about other countries, except through broadcasts that were made by a covert US radio station. Having finally obtained a passport, he decided to try to get to America. Taking $600 with him, he went first to Kyrgyzstan, where he was warned that the police planted false evidence on Uighurs and handed them over to the Chinese authorities, but where they took $300 from him instead, and laughed at him when he told them that he wanted to go to America. He then went to Pakistan, where a Uighur businessman, who befriended him at the airport, encouraged him to go to an Uzbek house in Jalalabad, where another Uighur took him to the camp in the Tora Bora mountains.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Abbas — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Yusef Abbas and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 280 Khalik, Saidullah (Khalid) (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), little is known of Khalik’s story, as he refused to engage with the tribunal process at Guantánamo. In his absence he was accused of being in Afghanistan during the US bombing campaign, and, in a sign of how information was twisted in a ridiculous manner to come up with anything that officials might find a way of using, of receiving “wounds to his face and arm as well as other flesh wounds” during the bombing. Like the other four remaining Uighurs, he is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 282 Abdulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantánamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), Abdulghupur told his tribunal at Guantánamo, when asked about the “training camp” in the Afghan mountains, where he and 16 others had lived before the bombing raid that destroyed the settlement, “They called this place a camp but that’s way too much of a name for that place we stayed. They did not have enough bathrooms to use or housing or anything. That is way too big of a name for the place where we stayed.” He added, “the conditions were really bad and stressful and there was lots of hard work, [but] I decided to stay there because our goal was to be against the Chinese government and I wouldn’t give up my goal even in the bad conditions to live.” After the bombing raid that completely destroyed the settlement, so that, as Abdulghupur explained, “it looked like no one ever even stayed in that place,” the men’s journey to Pakistan (and their betrayal by Pakistani villagers) was also described by Abdulghupur. “After that there was no stopping,” he said. “There was constantly bombing all the time. In the mountain we stayed in a cave because we didn’t know where to go … We were waiting for our leaders to come and tell us to go to the city or somewhere else but no one showed up and we decided to go to Pakistan. When we got to Pakistan, the local people came to us with tea, bread and meat, really good stuff. In the middle of the night they came to take us to the mosque. We went to the mosque and then they turned us over to the Pakistani authorities … They put us in cars and took us to jail. After that they turned us over to the US.” Like the other four remaining Uighurs, Abdulghupur is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 288 Saib, Motai (Algeria)
One of five Algerian prisoners facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Saib (also identified as Mutaj Sayab), had been living in Jalalabad prior to his capture (like many of the Algerians held at Guantánamo), and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. Throughout nearly nine years of detention, he has only been accused of “receiving small arms training” near Jalalabad. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, his lawyers explained, in a court filing in July 2008, that in February 2008 the Department of Defense notified them that he had been “approved to leave Guantánamo,” but stated obliquely that “such a decision does not equate [to] a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor does is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantánamo as his departure is subject to ongoing discussions.” As his lawyers noted, “Saib has serious concerns that this ambiguous and damaging language will prevent his safe release from Guantánamo” to a third country, and these fears have only heightened after the involuntary repatriation of another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji, in July this year.

ISN 290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria-UK)
Another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Belbacha was cleared for release in March 2007, and has repeatedly appealed to the US courts to prevent his return to Algeria — although in September 2009, the notoriously Conservative D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the lower courts were no longer able to grant injunctions preventing their forcible repatriation. A former footballer in Algeria, Belbacha then worked as an accountant for a government-owned oil company, but after receiving death threats from Islamist militants, fled to the UK in 1999, where he sought asylum and secured work in Bournemouth. During the Labour Party conference in 1999, he received a thank-you letter and a tip from Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott, whose room he was responsible for cleaning. In June 2001, he decided to take a holiday in Pakistan with a friend, and then traveled to Afghanistan to see the country, staying for several months in a guest house in Jalalabad, and then fleeing to Pakistan after the US-led invasion, where he was seized by opportunistic villagers and sold to US forces. Despite being cleared for release in 2007, the British government has persistently refused to accept Belbacha, so that his lawyers at Reprieve, and other organizations, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Cageprisoners, have sought help from the governments of Ireland and Luxembourg as well, although to date all these efforts have been unsuccessful. He has also been offered a home in Amherst, Massachusetts, although a law passed by Congress, banning any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland except to face a trial, has prevented him from taking up this offer. In case any doubt remains about the legitimacy of Belbacha’s fears of repatriation, it should be noted that, in November 2009, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for what his lawyers can only conclude was the crime of speaking out about his fears of being repatriated. As Reprieve explained, “In a disgraceful show trial, the court sentenced Ahmed to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group.’ Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction,’ which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about human rights abuses in Algeria.”

ISN 309 Abd Al Sattar, Muieen (UAE)
One of Guantánamo’s least-known prisoners, al-Satter is ostensibly from the United Arab Emirates, although the UAE claims not to know who he is, and his Unclassified Summary of Evidence also states that he “has a Pakistani passport and originally went to Pakistan on vacation in September 2001.” All that is known of this man — listed by the US authorities as Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd Al Fusal Abd Al Sattar — is contained in this slim document, released in September 2007, but it makes clear that al-Sattar taught at the Private Holy Koran School in Mecca, that he paid for his own travel, that he was “convinced by a friend to go to Afghanistan and teach the Five Pillars of Islam,” and that he “thought if he traveled to Afghanistan that he would get credit from God and that, since the trip was only going to be for a week, there would be no harm in going.” This seems fairly straightforward, and is certainly more comprehensible than other claims from unattributed sources: that he “was identified as a trainer at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan” (which would have been impossible if he arrived in Pakistan in September 2001, as al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks), and that he was “a fighter in Tora Bora who moved around encouraging people to fight and be religious.” Perhaps what actually happened, as was indicated in other passages in the Unclassified Summary, was that the “friend” who convinced him to travel to Afghanistan — a Syrian whom he had met in Karachi — tricked him into traveling to Tora Bora. According to the allegations, al-Sattar “advised that if he saw al-Moaz again, he would be very upset with him and would want to do him physical harm for getting him into so much trouble.”

ISN 310 Ameziane, Djamel (Algeria)
Ameziane, another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, had also been living in Jalalabad. A Berber, he left Algeria in 1992 “in order to escape persecution and make a better life for himself,” and unsuccessfully sought asylum in Austria, where he worked legally for three years, becoming the top chef at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, until a new government clamped down on immigrants, and his work permit was denied without explanation. From there, he moved to Canada, where he obtained a temporary work permit and worked for an office supply company and for various restaurants in Montreal. In 2000, after five years in Canada, his asylum claim was denied, and, as his lawyers explained, “Fearful of being forcibly returned to Algeria, and with few options, [he] went to Afghanistan, where he could live freely without discrimination as a Muslim man, and where he would not fear deportation to Algeria.” Apart from an allegation that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul that was associated with the Taliban, before traveling to Jalalabad, the US authorities failed to come up with a shred of evidence against him, with the exception of an evidently unreliable claim, by an unidentified “source,” who said that he “met the detainee” at al-Farouq. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, Ameziane fears returning to Algeria because of the stigma of Guantánamo and the instability in his hometown of Kabylie, where, as his lawyers have explained, practicing Muslims are “targeted for arrests and detention by the government based solely on their religious practices” and “The stigma of having spent time at Guantánamo would alone be enough to put him at risk of being imprisoned if he is returned.”

ISN 311 Bin Mohammed, Farhi Saeed (Algeria)
Bin Mohammed, who is 50 years old, is one of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. In his case, uniquely, he was also cleared for release by a US judge after winning his habeas corpus petition in November 2009.  A former conscript in the Algerian army, bin Mohammed had traveled around Europe for many years, working as a laborer in the UK, France and Italy, before traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, apparently in search of a wife. Although the US authorities alleged that he had undertaken military training in Afghanistan, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruled that the government’s evidence was unreliable because it came from statements made by Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and torture victim, who had been subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004. In an attempt to prevent his enforced repatriation, and to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Judge Kessler issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria in June this year, following up on his lawyers’ request for her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there.” After protracted wrangling with the notoriously Conservative judges of the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Kessler’s temporary order was overturned, and the Circuit Court’s decision — which drew on previous rulings preventing the lower courts from interfering in the Executive branch’s right to decide how and where to dispose of prisoners — was upheld in July this year, when the US Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court, just a few hours before the Supreme Court also approved the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, who was immediately sent home. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.” Despite the ruling, bin Mohammed remains at Guantánamo, still desperately hoping that a third country will offer him a new home, although he could, of course, be sent back to Algeria any time the Obama administration feels like doing so.

ISN 324 Al Sabri, Mashur (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, al-Sabri traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2000, lived in Jalalabad for a year, and traveled on occasion to the Taliban lines at Bagram and Kabul. Quite what else he did is difficult to ascertain — not because there are no allegations, but because their trustworthiness is hard to gauge. According to various unidentified sources, in May 2001 he was working as a facilitator for new arrivals at two guest houses in Kabul, and was “well known and well respected as an administrator in the guest houses.” It was also noted that he “was said to facilitate the transfer of weapons and other supplies to the front lines,” and, most worryingly (or most outrageously, depending on your point of view), was accused of working for Osama bin Laden. According to the unidentified allegations, he was “believed to have sworn bayat to Osama bin Laden,” because he and others around him knew bin Laden’s travel dates and routes, and another “source” identified him as “a member of al-Qaeda,” because he was “following Osama bin Laden’s orders to keep the guest house up and running.”

ISN 326 Ahjam, Ahmed (Syria)
Ahjam is one of four Syrians who had been living in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border. As one of these men, Maasoum Mouhammed (also known as Bilal Abdah Mohammed), was released in Bulgaria in May this year, despite having been accused of running “a safe house,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, it seems likely that Ahmed Ahjam and the other two men, Ali Husein Shaaban (ISN 327) and Abu Omar al-Hamawe (ISN 329) have also been approved for release. Certainly, there is nothing in the men’s story to indicate that they were connected in any way with al-Qaeda. At Guantánamo, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep,” and, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running.” According to his account in Guantánamo, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and, with a few exceptions (including Ahmed Ahjam), the many dozens of prisoners who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, have all been released.

ISN 327 Shaaban, Ali Husein (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), Shaaban, who was just 19 years old when he was seized, came from a poor family in Syria and had been an ironsmith in his father’s store. He told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there to seek a new life.

ISN 328 Mohamed, Ahmed (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), and also identified as Hammad Mohammed, he is one of an unknown number of prisoners subjected to “do-over” tribunals at Guantánamo, after the military panels responsible for reviewing their cases in 2004 and 2005 concluded that they were not “enemy combatants” and should be released. These “do-over” tribunals were convened in secret in Washington D.C. — often on more than one occasion — until the military officers delivered the desired verdict, and in Mohammed’s case he was not finally vindicated until a subsequent military review board cleared him for release in 2006. In his initial tribunal, he explained why his desire for military training was aimed at China and not America. “The Chinese people have tortured and pressured the Uighur people really bad,” he said. “The Uighur people are trying to go all over the world now. One sixth of the world’s population is in China. They are a threat to the whole world. If I have such a large enemy, why would I go and fight with another enemy?” Throughout his tribunal, the only explanation for the administration’s determination to continue holding him was an allegation that he was a weapons instructor from May to October 2001. In response, he called one of his compatriots as a witness, who explained, “I saw that he was sick during that time. He has a stomach problem and he was helping with the kitchen work and helping the cook. He was also studying the language.” The allegation was then dropped, but in the meantime ludicrous new allegations were added to his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, in which it was claimed that he “was identified as Abdul Jabar, an al-Qaeda member with the Islamic Movement of Turkistan,” and was also “identified as a visitor to known al-Qaeda guest houses.”

ISN 329 Al Hamawe, Abu Omar (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), al-Hamawe, who was just 20 years old when he was seized, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had been working at a store in Kabul, but that he planned to move on to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files. He also stated that the house in Kabul was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

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 Public Record, Uruknet and New Left Project.