Releasing prisoners to Algeria has always been a dubious business, akin to Russian roulette, as I explained when two men were released by the Bush administration in July 2008, because there appears to be no way of knowing whether these men will be released on their return or imprisoned and subjected to trials that fail to meet internationally recognized standards of fairness and objectivity.

As a result, frustratingly little is known about the eight Algerians repatriated from Guantánamo between July 2008 and January 2009, although one indication of how the Algerian justice system deals with returned Guantánamo prisoners was provided in November 2009, when the BBC reported that, 15 months after two of these men were repatriated, they had been acquitted after a trial in which the prosecutor had called for prison sentences of 20 years.

The stories of the two men released last week deserve to be heard, because, as so often with Guantánamo, they reveal how shockingly misplaced is the still prevalent rhetoric regarding Guantánamo’s role as a repository for the “worst of the worst” terrorists. Just as disturbingly, their stories also reveal how two men, who were unconnected to terrorism, were nevertheless tortured in an attempt to make them admit that they were.

Ahcene Zemiri: wrong place, wrong time (in Canada and Afghanistan)

The first of the men released last week, Ahcene Zemiri (identified on his release as Hasan Zemiri), was born in Algiers on September 8, 1967, the youngest of ten children. At the age of 20, having completed his two years of mandatory military service, and finding no prospects for work in Algeria, he moved to France, where, for several years, he and his brother made money exporting electrical goods to Algeria.

In 1994, he moved to Canada, settling in Montreal, where he met his future wife, Karina. The couple married in May 1996, but life was difficult for Zemiri. Unable to find work, he hung out with other Algerian expatriates, including one man, Ahmed Ressam, whose future activities were to have a profound effect on Zemiri’s life. In December 1999, Ressam was seized as he arrived in the United States, and was charged with planning a terrorist attack on Los Angeles International Airport (the so-called “Millennium Plot.”). After a trial in 2005, he received a 22-year prison sentence.

Neither Zemiri nor the rest of his friends had any idea about the plot, but after his conviction, and before he was sentenced, when he was apparently exploited to make confessions in exchange for a sentence less than the 130 years that was proposed to him, Ressam claimed that Zemiri had lent him $3,500 and a camera in connection with the plot. Ressam recanted this claim in December 2006, sending a letter to the judge who had sentenced him, explaining that Zemiri had “no relation or connection to the operation I was about to carry out” and that he “didn’t know anything about it and he did not assist me in anything.” As Zemiri’s attorneys added, he also declared that his statements “had been misconstrued and were made under the severe psychological duress of an FBI interrogation and in the face of a lengthy prison sentence.” Nevertheless, the false claims were to haunt Zemiri for the next nine years.

First, Zemiri and his compatriots were repeatedly questioned by Canadian intelligence agents and the police. Zemiri himself was never arrested, but some of his friends were, and a few later fled the country. In early 2001, after being questioned about whether it would be safe for President Bush to visit Canada, Zemiri became convinced that he would be deported to Algeria, and that, if returned, his decade of globe-trotting in the West would not play well with Islamist groups in his homeland.

As a result, having been sold a rosy picture of Afghanistan by a friend, he decided to travel there with Karina, intending to establish himself and raise a family. Arriving in Jalalabad in August 2001, they lived in a house owned by an Algerian/Swedish family who had returned to Sweden, in an Algerian neighborhood that was relatively clean and safe. The house had electricity, water, and a walled compound, and although many Taliban lived in the area, it was also home to Europeans, Australians, Uzbeks and Chechens, and the offices of the UN, Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam were also nearby.

Nevertheless, the decision to relocate to Afghanistan was clearly a foolish dream. Zemiri “disliked Afghanistan,” as his attorneys stated in a court submission in October 2007. His wife explained that he had become used to Western society, and the poverty was too much for him. She “thought that he would make it a year, at most, before deciding that they should move elsewhere.”

The US-led invasion in October 2001 changed everything, of course, although the couple stayed put until the cities in northern Afghanistan fell, and the country was no longer safe for Arabs and other foreigners. Splitting up, for reasons of safety, Karina escaped to Pakistan, and then to Canada, where she gave birth to their son, Karim, on June 17, 2002, but her husband was less fortunate.

After hooking up with a group of around 200 mostly Arab men, who were seeking to leave the country, Zemiri — wearing the Hugo Boss suit that he had brought with him — found himself caught up on the fringes of the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, who were preparing for a final showdown with the US military’s proxy Afghan army, until two Afghan guides showed up, offering, for a price, to lead the men to safety in Pakistan.

Around 60 of the group accepted, but as they made their way through a valley, they were spotted by a US plane, and targeted in a bombing raid. One of the men, Ghanim al-Harbi, a Saudi, later explained that “40 of the Arabs with me were killed and 20 were injured,” and many of the survivors, including Zemiri, ended up in Guantánamo.

With a broken arm, Zemiri made it to an Afghan village after the raid, but was sold to Northern Alliance troops just a few days later. Soon after, he was sold to US forces, and, according to the court submission, was held in Kabul — possibly, for a brief spell, in the CIA’s notorious “Dark Prison” — and Kandahar before being flown to Guantánamo in April or May 2002. In statements to his attorneys, he explained that, while in custody in Afghanistan, he was “subjected to brutal physical abuse,” stating that he was “repeatedly beaten by guards,” and that he “lost a tooth as a result of one such beating.”

In Guantánamo, despite maintaining his story (as he did throughout his detention), Zemiri came under suspicion because of Ahmed Ressam’s allegation. and was subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” introduced by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which, though nominally intended for use on Mohammed al-Qahtani (allegedly the 20th 9/11 hijacker), were actually applied to over a hundred prisoners.

As his attorneys explained, he was “tortured and/or subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, sound bombardment, and strobe lighting.” As they also explained, he was “splashed with fake menstrual blood, short-shackled, and forced to maintain a stress position for long periods of time.”

Despite this, Zemiri refused to accept that he was involved with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and also refused to accept Ahmed Ressam’s allegations, but it was not until Ressam wrote his letter, and another witness came forward, that, effectively, any case against him collapsed.

This second witness, Mokhtar Haouari, who was also convicted for playing a part in the “Millennium Plot,” wrote a letter from a prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he is serving a 24-year sentence, which first came to light during a military review board at Guantánamo in 2005, when it was submitted by Zemiri’s attorneys. In it, Haouari, stated, “As for these allegations leveled against Mr. Zemiri by Ressam, well I know they are false. Mr. Zemiri and I were close friends, unlike Ressam, who was not either of our friend. I never, in 5 yrs of knowing Mr. Zemiri, heard him speak of jihad, anti-American feelings or so-called terrorist activities … He’s never been a threat to America or any other country. Ressam is trying to use Mr. Zemiri like he used myself and others to decrease his prison term. The government doesn’t care if his accusations are true or false as long as it brings about a conviction.”

Adil al-Jazeeri: a child of the mujahideen

The second man released last week, Adil Hadi al-Jazairi Bin Hamlili (also identified in Guantánamo as Adil al-Jazeeri), was 27 years old when he was seized outside a restaurant in Peshawar on June 17, 2003 with five other men who were later released. Although almost everything about his story is confusing, it is clear is that he arrived in Pakistan with several family members in 1985, during the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when he was just nine years old, and spent many years in Afghanistan, before relocating to Pakistan sometime in the 1990s, where he was married and had four children.

No explanation has ever been publicly provided for his capture, but it may be related to the interrogation of his distant cousin, Mustafa Hamlili (also transferred to Guantánamo, but released in July 2008), who was seized in a village near Peshawar in May 2002. In Guantánamo, al-Jazeeri claimed that the Pakistanis had told him that the FBI had ordered his capture, but he may have been seized because he was a convenient target for the Pakistanis to sell to US forces.

Certainly, it is noticeable that the younger Hamlili was an irritant to the Pakistani authorities, if his own words in Guantánamo are to be believed. At a military review board hearing in 2005, in response to an allegation that he had stolen a car with three Pakistani friends, had been imprisoned for a year and a half, and had then been expelled to Afghanistan, he explained that he had actually been expelled “because I did not have the legal papers.”

Whatever the truth was regarding his capture, it was obvious that allegations against him were taken seriously at some level in the US government, because, after a month in Pakistani custody, he was rendered to Afghanistan on July 13, 2003, and held for some time in a secret CIA prison near Kabul (either the “Dark Prison” or the “Salt Pit”), before being moved to Bagram. He was also one of ten supposedly significant prisoners — including the British resident Binyam Mohamed — who were flown to Guantánamo on September 20, 2004, after being held as “high-value detainees,” and then, it appears, being downgraded to “medium-value detainees.”

According to a news report published in 2006, the Pakistani authorities believed that he had “served as a contact between al-Qaeda and the Taliban and also as an aide to the former Afghan foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil in Kabul,” and although there may be something in this latter claim, as al-Jazeeri admitted in a review board that he had found a job with the Taliban working in their media and translation department, he refused to admit that he had any connection to al-Qaeda. Despite being presented with a barrage of allegations in his tribunal and review boards — including claims that he was involved with Algerian and Tunisian terrorist groups, and that he moved al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan to Pakistan — he refuted them all, saying that most were false statements that had been obtained under duress in Guantánamo, Bagram or Kabul.

Noticeably, however, he also pointed out that a few allegations were made prisoners who had some involvement with al-Qaeda. “All al-Qaeda members they lie,” he said, “and most of them they really apologized to me in Camp 5. [One] asked for my forgiveness because he had had to do so. He had to say something like this because he was under pressure.’”

Interviewed in 2006, his wife also denied the allegations. Speaking from “a crowded mud-brick house in the village of Regi,” near Peshawar, she insisted that her husband was innocent. “My husband had no links with al-Qaeda and if he had any links with al-Qaeda then al-Qaeda people would take care of us because we are living very miserable lives,” she said.

Presumably, the President’s Guantánamo Review Task Force would not have released al-Jazeeri had they too not concluded that somewhere along the line his story had been overblown. Certainly, he gave the authorities no cause for alarm during his five years in Guantánamo, when he was apparently a thoroughly cooperative prisoner throughout his imprisonment. It seems, therefore, as with Ahcene Zemiri, that, despite the promise of terrorist related activities — and the use of torture in an attempt to prove it — neither man, in the end, proved anything beyond Guantánamo’s most enduring truth: that when you round people up in a random manner, or on the basis of untested intelligence, and then fly them halfway around the world to an experimental prison intended to be outside the law, you end up with nothing.

I suppose, however, that both these men should count themselves fortunate that they don’t fit into a category of prisoner embraced by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and, it seems, by the President himself: those regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the supposed evidence against them would not stand up to any kind of independent scrutiny. These men — 47 in total, as the Task Force announced on Friday — will continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Compared to that, the Russian roulette of Algerian justice may not be so bad after all.

POSTSCRIPT: Just as this article was being published, the Justice Department announced that, on Sunday, three more prisoners had been transferred to Slovakia. The men’s identities were not revealed, but Reuters reported that, according to Slovak police, the three men “were being placed in a camp for asylum seekers in the eastern part of Slovakia, Humenne, which is run by the interior ministry.” RTT News added that, “Following an 18-month process of acclimatization to Slovakia, including language instruction and a search for employment, the prisoners will be released. However, they will be under surveillance for an unspecified period.”

In addition, a Czech website added that the Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak pointed out last week, “The three are not criminals, none of them has been either accused or convicted.” The paper also explained that the men “cannot return to their homeland as they could face persecution there in view of a ‘low level of democracy and human rights protection,’” adding that Lajcak had made a point of adding that “Slovak residents face no risk in this connection.”

And finally, for now, as I was adding this postscript, Carol Rosenberg reported in the Miami Herald that a fourth prisoner had also been released, although she explained that US officials had stated only that he was being resettled in an “undisclosed location.”

These releases bring the total number of prisoners still held in Guantánamo to 192.

POSTSCRIPT 2: On Tuesday, the nationality of this man — and his new home — were announced by the Swiss government. An Uzbek (one of the last two Uzbeks in Guantánamo, who were cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s Task Force), he was resettled in the canton of Geneva. As a Swiss website, Swissinfo, explained, “The government stressed that he is a free man who has never been charged with any offence; he has committed to learning one of the national languages and intends to look for work to support himself. The man’s identity and location will be kept secret so as to protect his integration into the country.”

Swissinfo added, “The cabinet agreed in December to grant him asylum on humanitarian grounds,” and also explained, that “an Algerian, whose asylum application was rejected by the Swiss Migration Office, won an appeal to Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court on December 18, and will have his case re-examined,” and that “Switzerland is also studying the case of two brothers from the Chinese province of Xinjiang.”

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 42 prisoners released from February to December 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody, December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah), December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis.

It is also likely that her ruling will, as in all the other successful petitions, involve lambasting the government for relying on statements made by other prisoners whose unreliability has been noted by the authorities, and who were either tortured, coerced or bribed, or on statements made by the prisoners themselves while subjected to grueling and often abusive conditions, It also seems probable that the ruling will refute the government’s claims that its rag-bag of hearsay, innuendo and snippets of intelligence is coherent enough to constitute real evidence.

As reported in the Miami Herald by Carol Rosenberg, who was the first journalist to write about the story, bin Mohammed has been represented for four years by Boston lawyer Jerry Cohen, who said that his client “fled his homeland and lived between Britain, France and Italy as an itinerant laborer in the 1990s before going to Afghanistan months before the 9/11 attacks. He fled the US invasion to Pakistan, where he was captured and sent to Guantánamo in February 2002.” Cohen added, “He’s an easy guy to like, and certainly not the worst of the worst and not even close to it.”

According to the Pentagon, bin Mohammed, who was a transcript in the Algerian army from 1981 to 1983, lived and worked illegally in Rome using a stolen French passport. As Rosenberg noted, he was also “fingered by another detainee for having stayed in an al-Qaeda safehouse in Afghanistan,” a typical, unsubstantiated allegation that has provoked skepticism in many of the habeas judges. The Pentagon also claimed that he trained in Afghanistan, after traveling there from Europe, but as Cohen maintained, “He never fought anyone anywhere, never handled a weapon since his service in the Algerian army.”

This is a fair précis of the government’s supposed case against bin Mohammed, which contained no actual allegations of militant activity when the first “Unclassified Summary of Evidence” was compiled in 2004. In that short document, it was noted that bin Mohammed stated that he traveled to Afghanistan to find a wife (apparently a Swedish woman recommended by a Moroccan friend in England), and, in an attempt to portray him as a danger, the Pentagon resorted to claiming that he visited two “known extremist mosques” in London.

It was only later that further allegations emerged, made by other prisoners whose reliability has presumably been called into doubt by Judge Kessler. His first annual Administrative Review Board, in March 2005, featured an unsubstantiated claim that he “received weapons training at the Bagram Front,” and another claim that he “saw Osama bin Laden” while attending a funeral in Kabul shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and in his review the following year it was reported that “Another detainee identified [him] as an individual who trained at the Algerian camp and they eventually traveled to Kandahar.” It was also noted, in this second review, that he only saw bin Laden because he and a friend “happened to be passing by on the street and stopped to attend the funeral.”

By the time of his third review, in March 2007, the authorities had evidently secured the services of another unreliable informer, and claimed that, even though bin Mohammed was only in Afghanistan for a few months before the 9/11 attacks, and had clearly spent time in both Jalalabad and Kabul, he “reportedly attended training at al-Qaeda’s Durunta and al-Farouq Training Camps,” and was, therefore, “a suspected member of al-Qaeda.”

Sadly for bin Mohammed, it is unlikely that his victory will lead to his release from Guantánamo anytime soon. Although Judge Kessler ordered the government “to take all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate petitioner’s release forthwith,” and also “ordered the Justice Department to give her an update on his status or release by Dec. 17,’” Carol Rosenberg added that, according to Jerry Cohen, he “fears return to his homeland,” and “seek[s] resettlement in a third country, where he would like to work in construction and marry.”

This is a depressingly familiar story. Of the 31 prisoners cleared in the last 13 months, 12 still remain at Guantánamo. Some, like the seven remaining Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their homeland, while others, like Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti who was tortured until he made a false confession that was used by the government to justify his ongoing detention until a judge saw through it, remain only because the government is dragging its heels over his release. The Kuwaiti government would have him back tomorrow, and his lawyers have been obliged to threaten the government with contempt of court in an attempt to secure his release.

Judge Kessler’s ruling comes at an inconvenient time for the administration, which has just conceded that it will miss President Obama’s deadline of January 22, 2010 for the prison’s closure, although many Americans may not notice, as they are likely to remain transfixed by the unprincipled right-wing assault on the administration’s decision to bring five prisoners to New York to face a federal court trial for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the attacks. This is a shame, as Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed is a more typical prisoner than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants.

Because of Congressional obstruction, the administration is currently prevented from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason other than to be put on trial, leaving around 175 of the remaining 215 prisoners in a disturbing limbo that closely resembles the conditions in which they were held throughout the long years of the Bush administration. Around half of these men have been cleared for release, and the others have been tarred by the administration as being “too dangerous to release,” but impossible to put on trial because of difficulties with the evidence against them (in other words, because it was obtained through torture or coercion, or is as unreliable as the supposed evidence against bin Mohammed).

It is not known to which category bin Mohammed belonged, although he had been cleared by an Administrative Review Board before the Bush administration left office, and it seems likely, therefore, that he was also probably cleared by the Obama administration’s interagency Task Force, which has been reviewing the prisoners’ cases all year, and which announced last month that seven of the remaining nine Algerians at Guantánamo had been cleared for release.

Sadly, however, his court victory, which probably means that he has now been cleared for release on three occasions, does not guarantee that he will finally regain his freedom. Like the Uighurs and dozens of other prisoners from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, he cannot be repatriated because of fears that he will be tortured on his return, and must wait to see if another country can be found that is prepared to take him, while the government responsible for his long and unjust detention continues to wash its hands of all responsibility, hiding behind Republican fearmongering and refusing to allow cleared prisoners to be rehoused in the United States.

Without a concerted effort by the administration, by lawmakers or by the American people to address their responsibility for these men, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed will be left to reflect that it actually makes no difference whether you have been cleared for release on three occasions, or whether you are still regarded as a threat, despite the lack of any credible evidence against you, as the end result is the same: you will, in the end, remain at Guantánamo, possibly for the rest of your life, while those who could do something about your plight either ignore the fact that there is no evidence against you, and continue to smear you as a terrorist, or remain paralyzed by inertia.

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

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009).

The trigger for this sudden shifting of legal protections for some of the most vulnerable prisoners in Guantánamo (from countries with notoriously poor human rights records, including Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan) was the response to a ruling last October, by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina, after the government (reeling from a shocking court defeat in June) conceded that it could no longer claim that the Uighurs were “enemy combatants.” Judge Urbina ruled that they should be relocated to the US mainland, because the government conceded that it was unsafe to return them to China, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because continuing to hold them in Guantánamo was unconstitutional.

The government disagreed, and appealed Judge Urbina’s ruling, and when the Court of Appeals came to review the case, a panel of three judges — including Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a man noted for endorsing every Bush administration policy regarding the “War on Terror” that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court — reversed Judge Urbina’s ruling, deciding that the courts had no business interfering in immigration policies that were the preserve of the Executive.

The judges were seemingly unmoved that this would leave the Uighurs (and, very possibly, others in Guantánamo) with no means of leaving the prison, and that it stripped the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2008, granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights, of all practical meaning, if it was not possible for judges to order their release. In the judges’ words, however, “the political branches have the exclusive power … to decide which aliens may, and which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.”

In response to the ruling, the Uighurs’ lawyers filed a petition with the Supreme Court (a writ of certiorari, essentially a petition asking for a judicial review). A date in June was set for a hearing, amid fears from the lawyers that the government would find other countries to take the Uighurs before that date, so that the Supreme Court could be persuaded not to review the Circuit Court’s ruling, and to rule on whether it was indeed acceptable that the Executive should be able to gut the lower courts’ habeas rulings of all meaning by refusing to allow judges to order the prisoners’ release.

In the end, the government managed only to dispose of four of the Uighurs before the deadline (sending them to Bermuda), but the Supreme Court then decided to refrain from hearing the case until October, perhaps to give the government time to resolve the issue itself.

This case, Kiyemba v. Bush (which became Kiyemba v. Obama) is now known as “Kiyemba I,” because, in response to the ruling by the Court of Appeals, the Uighurs’ lawyers submitted an appeal on their clients’ behalf, also filed as Kiyemba v. Obama, and now known as “Kiyemba II.” In the brief, they asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider its opinion en banc (in other words, with all the judges ruling, instead of just a panel of three), and also sought assurances that the courts would be able to act if the government proposed sending their clients to countries where they faced the risk of torture.

However, not only did the court refuse to reconsider its ruling, but the judges also refused the Uighurs’ request for the court’s assistance “to prevent their transfer to a country where they are likely to be subjected to further detention of to torture” (PDF), drawing 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, although “The Court held the district court had jurisdiction over the petitions,” it also 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.”

The court added that strenuous efforts had been made by the US government not to transfer prisoners to countries where they might face torture, and “The upshot is that the detainees are not liable to be cast around willy-nilly without regard to their likely treatment in any country that will take them,” but in any case, as the judges also explained, “the district court may not question the Government’s determination that a potential recipient country is not likely to torture a detainee,” because “The judiciary is not suited to second-guess such determinations.”

With that decision, effectively, the case was lost. The Uighurs’ lawyers announced their intention to appeal this second ruling to the Supreme Court, and it is currently anticipated that the Supreme Court will address both “Kiyemba I” and “Kiyemba II” sometime next month.

However, the fallout from the Court of Appeals’ insistence that no court is empowered to prevent the government from sending prisoners wherever it wishes has had a disturbing knock-on effect on other cases (as many as 150 of the remaining 225 prisoners, according to SCOTUSblog), in which lawyers have, since 2005, persuaded the courts to order the government to provide 30 days’ notice in advance of any proposed transfer, and, in some cases, including that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, have secured injunctions preventing any attempt to repatriate their clients.

Belbacha’s case is, in many ways, emblematic of the issues at stake. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in February 2007, he is terrified of returning to Algeria, where he fears persecution both by the government and by the Islamists whose threats forced him to flee his homeland in the first place. His case has attracted widespread support from human rights organizations, and has also received international media coverage.

Since the Court of Appeals made its ruling in “Kiyemba II,” lawyers have been aware that the 30-day notices and injunctions were under threat, but it was not until September 8, when the court issued its mandate regarding “Kiyemba II”, which formally implements its ruling, that the way was paved for the government, if it wishes, to lawfully repatriate prisoners who, like Belbacha, would rather remain in Guantánamo than return home.

As a result, Belbacha’s lawyers have filed a motion with the Court of Appeals asking the judges “to hold this case in abeyance pending the Supreme Court’s disposition of a petition for certiorari that the petitioners in Kiyemba intend to file.” The judges may well respond by reiterating that they are secure in assurances from the government that “the detainees are not liable to be cast around willy-nilly without regard to their likely treatment in any country that will take them,” but with just four months to go until the deadline is reached for Obama’s promised closure of Guantánamo, it is, I believe, legitimate to entertain fears that the administration may wish to repatriate cleared prisoners to countries it regards as safe (following “intense diplomatic negotiations,” or some such explanation), but which the prisoners and their lawyers still regard as a profound threat.

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

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

In some ways, of course, it is not. The British government, while clearly complicit, to some extent, in the rendition and torture of prisoners by or on behalf of the Bush administration, and in interrogating them while they were held in illegal and unjustifiable conditions, was not directly involved in their industrial-scale rendition, in the establishment of a vast offshore prison devoted to coercive intelligence-gathering, or in the direct implementation of torture, under the cover of flawed legal advice which included blatant attempts to redefine its very meaning.

That said, there are, in fact, many unnerving similarities between the Bush administration’s policies, which prompted universal condemnation on an unprecedented scale, and those implemented in the UK, which have caused barely a ripple of protest.

The similarities between Guantánamo and the UK terror laws

At Guantánamo, since January 2002, the US government has, at various times, held 779 men, mostly without charge or trial, who were picked up in 20 different countries but detained neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, to be tried in a recognized court. When, after three and a half years, the Supreme Court ruled that they had habeas corpus rights, the government responded not by allowing them access to the US courts, but by holding military tribunals, designed to justify their detention through the use of secret evidence that the prisoners — known as “detainees” — were not allowed to see.

In the UK, since December 2001, the British government has, at various times, held around 70 men without charge or trial, refusing to try them as criminal suspects in recognized courts. The policy began with the imprisonment of 17 men in Belmarsh high-security prison, but when, after three years, the Law Lords ruled that their imprisonment was in contravention of the Human Rights Act, the government responded by introducing control orders and deportation bail, both of which involve draconian restrictions that amount to house arrest. Throughout this whole period, the government has justified the men’s detention through the use of secret evidence that the prisoners — known as “detainees” — are not allowed to see.

Another similarity concerns attempts by both the British and American governments to bypass their obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture — which prevents the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture — by reaching diplomatic agreements with various dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East. These purport to guarantee that repatriated prisoners will be treated humanely, but in reality they have proved worthless.

Deportation to Tunisia

In June 2007, for example, after the US government signed a “diplomatic assurance” with the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, so that prisoners cleared for release from Guantánamo could be repatriated, two prisoners who were returned — Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar — reported that they were threatened and mistreated in Tunisian custody. They were then subjected to show trials, apparently based on evidence obtained through the torture of other prisoners, and received prison sentences of three and seven years.

In the UK, the British government has been involved in a similar policy, signing “memoranda of understanding” (MoUs) in 2005 with Jordan, Libya and Lebanon, and attempting, without success, to do the same with Algeria, in order to deport “detainees” held on the basis of secret evidence, instead of putting them forward for trial in the UK. This is apparently because of the British government’s refusal to join the rest of the world in finding ways to use information obtained by the intelligence services in court, while preserving the confidentiality of sources and methods (PDF), but it is difficult not to conclude that, in fact, the government has been swept up in its own rhetoric, and has actually lost sight of the correct balance between liberty and security.

There are further disturbing parallels. After the demonstrable failure of the Americans’ “diplomatic assurance” with Tunisia, a District Court judge intervened to prevent the return of a third Tunisian — Lotfi bin Ali — in November 2007, arguing that he could suffer “irreparable harm” that the US courts would be powerless to reverse. Since then, no other Tunisians have been repatriated from Guantánamo, and, although the British government subsequently persisted in attempts to deport Tunisians from Europe, intervening in an Italian case, Saadi v. Italy, which was being considered by the European Court of Human Rights at the same time, the British attempts were struck down by the Court, which ruled, in March 2008, that attempts to return Nassim Saadi to Tunisia would be a clear breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which states that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”).

Deportation to Libya

Both the US and the UK have faced struggles with repatriating foreign nationals to Libya, not because of any difficulties either government has with its enemy-turned-ally, the dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but because courts on both sides of the Atlantic have intervened to prevent Libyans from being repatriated: a Libyan in Guantánamo, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, has been resisting his enforced return since June 2007, and in the UK, attempts to return 12 Libyans accused of having connections with terrorism were scuppered when, in April 2008, as the Independent described it, the Court of Appeal “gave a damning verdict on promises” that two men — identified only as AS and DD — “would not be tortured in their home country.” The judges ruled that the government “failed to give enough weight to the risk of torture.”

What is particularly galling in the Libyans’ case is that nowhere along the line has a single voice in authority been heard pointing out that those who once opposed Colonel Gaddafi’s regime — and are now wanted in his dungeons — would, not so long ago, have been regarded as our friends, but that observation, of course, succinctly demonstrates an uncomfortable truth: that yesterday’s freedom fighters can all too easily become today’s terrorists when the winds of politics change.

Deportation to Algeria

Where both the British and American governments seem to be in accord — and seem also to be meeting with some success in their mission to discard the UN Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights — is with Algeria. Although some Algerians in Guantánamo — most notably Ahmed Belbacha, who had lived peacefully in the UK for two years before he took an ill-timed holiday in Pakistan — are still striving to prevent their enforced repatriation from Guantánamo, others are on record as having returned willingly, even though the fate that awaited them — whether freedom, or a bent trial followed by further imprisonment — seems to be akin to a round of Russian Roulette.

Given the choice of two evils, eight Algerians (see here, here, here, here and here) settled for Algeria over Guantánamo between July 2008 and January 2009, and the same thing has happened with a number of “terror suspects” in the UK, who, exhausted by the imprisonment and house arrest foisted on them by the British government, on the basis of unknowable and unchallengeable secret evidence, opted to return “voluntarily “ to Algeria, with mixed results, as Amnesty International has reported (PDF). Some were released without charge, while others received prison sentences after dubious trials, and in all cases it has been next to impossible for human rights observers to monitor what has been happening with the kind of diligence that is necessary.

The British government — or the Law Lords, at least — know how shaky is the assumption that Algerians returned from the UK will be treated humanely and given fair trials, for two particular reasons: firstly, because the Algerian government has refused even to sign a worthless “memorandum of understanding” and has also refused to allow any British representatives to monitor what happens to those who are returned, and secondly, because, when the Lords approved the deportation in February of two prisoners — BB and U — they resorted, as I explained in an article at the time, to claiming that President Bouteflika has improved Algeria’s human rights record, and has “acknowledged and approved a letter from the Prime Minster which included the statement that ‘this exchange of letters underscores the absolute commitment of our two governments to human rights and fundamental freedoms.’”

In quiet desperation, the Lords also quoted the judges of SIAC (Britain’s secret terror court), who had noted that “Very considerable efforts have been made at the highest political levels on both sides to strengthen these ties,” and concluded that, as a result, “it is barely conceivable, let alone likely, that the Algerian government would put them at risk by reneging on solemn assurances.” As I noted at the time, it was hardly reassuring that, if returned prisoners did find themselves abused, they could be comforted by the fact that the government, SIAC and the Law Lords had thought that such abuse was “barely conceivable.”

Deportation to Jordan

And finally, while the US managed to return all the Jordanians it was holding in Guantánamo without apparent incident, the British government faced an even more uphill struggle to conclude that it most-celebrated would-be deportee, Abu Qatada, would be treated humanely on his return. In the same ruling in which the Law Lords declared that it was safe for BB and U to be returned to Algeria, they concluded that Abu Qatada would not be tortured, and would receive a fair trial — or at least, would not receive “a flagrant denial of a fair trial” — for two reasons; firstly, because, in October 2005, a human rights organization in Jordan “signed an agreement with the United Kingdom government under which it would monitor the due performance of the obligations undertaken by Jordan under the MoU,” and, secondly, because “the fact that he would have a very high profile, coupled with the MoU, and the diplomatic capital invested in it, meant that the Jordanian authorities were likely to make sure that he was not ill-treated in custody or when he emerged from it.”

The judges made their decision in spite of the fact that Abu Qatada had been previously tortured in Jordan, and had been convicted in absentia in a terror trial at which witnesses claimed they had been tortured to make false confessions. In addition, their ruling was disappointing because a “likelihood” that he would not be tortured is far from reassuring, and seems, instead, to be another form of Russian Roulette that plays games with a man’s life and with the universal torture ban.

An unnerving conclusion

For now, the deportations of Abu Qatada, BB and U are on hold, pending a review by the European Court of Human Rights, which may mean — if both torture and judicial secrecy are regarded with the horror and scorn that they deserve — that the British government will eventually be obliged to abandon its blanket use of secret evidence and its labyrinthine attempts to circumvent the universal torture ban, by allowing the use of intercept evidence and reintroducing fair trials.

Ministers might also want to reflect that, although Barack Obama has not magically dismantled the legacy of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” he is at least committed to closing Guantánamo within a year, has established a review of the prisoners’ cases that has started to approve the release of prisoners, and is continuing to allow judges — empowered by a Supreme Court ruling last June — to challenge the Bush administration’s secret evidence, with the result that, in 24 of the 28 cases so far reviewed, the judges involved have ordered the prisoners’ release because the government failed to provide sufficient evidence that they should ever have been held in the first place (a summary is here, and see here for the latest decision).

In Britain, in contrast, the government would still have us believe that all of its supposed “terror” evidence is infallible, and cannot be challenged, even though much of what is known appears to be misguided intelligence, or intelligence obtained through torture, and even though glaring errors on the part of the Home Office and the security services have been repeatedly noted over the last seven years. This not only makes a mockery of due process; it also leaves the government — and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in particular — looking like the last bastion of the kind of unprincipled and unfettered executive power embraced by former US Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington, the architects of the “War on Terror.”

As Jane Mayer explained in her book The Dark Side, in the summer of 2002, when John Bellinger, the National Security Council’s top lawyer, tried to approach the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to seek a review of the prisoners’ cases — expressing some of the same doubts about the US intelligence services that lawyers have sought to expose in relation to the intelligence services in the UK, and that judges in the US have finally been allowed to prove in some of the Guantánamo cases — he was met with the sternest of rebukes, when a scheduled meeting was hijacked by David Addington, who declared, imperiously, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”

Without fair trials for “terror suspects” in the UK, Jacqui Smith, like Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid before her, appears to be nothing less than David Addington’s Anglicized twin, and in Addington’s statement above, all that needs changing are the words “President” to “Tony Blair,” and “enemy combatants” to “terrorists,” and the picture is complete. In democracies founded on the rule of law, it is not sufficient for an elected minister to maintain, as President Bush declared for over seven years, that it was true because he said so.

This article is part of a series of four articles and five statements examining the use of secret evidence in the British courts. For an introduction, see Britain’s Guantánamo: An Introduction, and for the first two articles, see Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), and Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence. For the statements, see: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara and Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z.

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

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009).

The report was commissioned by the President, on his second day in office, as part of an Executive Order dealing with the closure of Guantánamo. In it, he directed defense secretary Robert Gates to ensure that the Guantánamo prisoners were being held in conditions that comply with the Geneva Conventions regarding the humane treatment of prisoners, adding, “Such review shall be completed within 30 days and any necessary corrections implemented immediately thereafter.”

According to the government official, the report’s only recommendations for improving conditions at Guantánamo are “to increase social contact among the 16 prisoners described by the Bush administration as ‘high-value detainees,’” who are held in seclusion in Camp 7, and to allow more communal recreation time for prisoners in Camps 5 and 6.

The former, modeled on the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana, and used, initially at least, to house non-compliant prisoners and those regarded as being of significant intelligence value, was long regarded as the most oppressive of Guantánamo’s cell blocks (outside of the specific isolation blocks, including the notorious Camp Echo, where a small number of prisoners are held in permanent solitary confinement), but it soon lost its reputation after Camp 6 opened in December 2006. Modeled on a maximum-security prison in Lenawee County, Michigan, Camp 6 is one of Guantánamo’s busier blocks, and is used to house prisoners of no particular significance, as well as others who have been cleared for release, even though their confinement involves incarceration in solid-walled, windowless cells for up to 23 hours a day.

Improvements at Guantánamo

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that the authorities at Guantánamo had “recently increased detainees’ opportunities for recreation and social interaction,” and her comments were endorsed by Candace Gorman, the lawyer for two prisoners, who described on her website, The Guantánamo Blog, a visit to her client Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi on February 4:

[I]n camp 6, they have now started “movie night.” Imagine my surprise when Mr. al-Ghizzawi mentioned a movie he was watching the week before my arrival. I actually stopped him in mid-thought and said, “Excuse me, movie night? When did that start?” He then explained that they have had movie nights once a week for a couple of weeks.

I of course asked if there was anything else that was new and he told me that the four cages that were the outdoor rec [recreation] area for Camp 6 were torn down and now there was one big cage and one little cage. Now eight men can go out together in the big cage and the small cage is for prisoners on punishment. How sad it is that this is a major improvement, but it is. It gives the men a chance to socialize, a chance to be a part of humanity, instead of being stuck in total isolation.

The last change he told me about was the opening of a new rec area, completely outside of Camp 6, a rec area where they can actually see the mountains in the distance, the trees, the sky, the sun (for four hours once every four or five days). The Camp 6 rec area is confined to the courtyard of Camp 6, so it is surrounded by the concrete facility that is several stories tall. All they could see in that outdoor area was the sand floor and the concrete building.

However, although these are significant changes, allowing the men, as Gorman observed, “a chance to socialize, a chance to be a part of humanity, instead of being stuck in total isolation,” it completely fails to address other outstanding problems with the treatment of the prisoners, which cannot be swept away by allowing them some limited respite from the prolonged isolation that has driven many of them to suffer severe mental health problems.

Profound isolation

Consider, for example, how the Pentagon continues to defend holding men in profound isolation, who, for the most, have never been charged with a crime, and who, in all cases, have never been convicted in a court of law. As the Times described it, the Pentagon “has long insisted that none of the men are held in solitary confinement. Military officials instead have said the prisoners are held in ‘single-occupancy cells.’” This is the kind of semantic maneuvering that typified the Bush administration, and it is, of course, brazenly dishonest. Although the report apparently concedes that “some detainees have great difficulty communicating from cell to cell,” the truth is that they are held, almost permanently, in a state of chronic isolation, which cannot be wished away by describing it as detention in a “single-occupancy cell,” and cannot be effectively mitigated by allowing the prisoners a few hours’ escape to watch a movie or chat with their fellow inmates.

James Cohen, who visited Guantánamo in February 2007, soon after Camp 6 opened, explained that conditions were worse than in any Supermax prison on the US mainland. He described a system of almost complete isolation, and pointed out that, “although the prison was built with communal areas, such as those where US maximum-security prison inmates are permitted to spend their time during the day, the prisoners of Camp 6 are not permitted access to these areas.” He contrasted this with the conditions in maximum-security prisons on the mainland, where “it is common for inmates to have jobs, to eat communally, to receive visits from family and friends and to have social contact with other inmates.”

For some first-hand perspective on the profound isolation of the cells in Camp 6, this is how I described the experiences of the Bahraini prisoner Isa al-Murbati (who was released in August 2007), as related just before his release by his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan:

Colangelo-Bryan reported that the guards in Camp 6 “run large fans,” which “sound like jet engines and prevent captives from communicating and deprive them of sleep,” and explained, “In his cell, Isa cannot see other detainees and he can barely communicate with them. He told me that it is possible to speak with his brothers through an air conditioning vent in his cell. However, to reach the vent, Isa has to stand on his cement bunk. Most often if he tries to talk to others this way, guards tell him to get off his bunk. They also threaten to take away the few items that Isa has in his cell if he does not follow their directions,” which “forces him to crouch to talk under the door, for which he is also berated if caught.”

In May 2008, Sabin Willett, who represents the 17 Uighurs in Guantánamo who have been cleared of being “enemy combatants,” but who are still held because no other country has been found to accept them (and the United States will not take them), gave the following testimony about two of his clients to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight:

You try talking to a man who only wants to see the sun. You will never forget the experience … In his cell, Huzaifa Parhat can crouch at the door, and yell through the crack at the bottom. The fellow in the next cell may respond, or he might be curled in the fetal position, staring at the wall. Another Uighur told us of the voices in his head. The voices were getting the better of him. His foot was tapping on the floor. I don’t know what’s happened to him: he doesn’t come out of the cell to see us anymore.

Other reports were blunter still. “I am in my tomb,” Abdulli Feghoul, an Algerian released last August, explained. Another prisoner said, “I look alive, but actually I’m dead.”

The illegality of force-feeding prisoners

More worrying still are Adm. Walsh’s opinions about the hunger strike that has been raging at Guantánamo since the start of the year, and which involves at least one-sixth of the prison’s total population, who are being force-fed against their will, using restraint chairs and tubes inserted into the stomach through the nose.

As medical practitioners have made clear for decades, and as the Lancet explained in an editorial last September, force-feeding mentally competent prisoners has no place in civilized society. The editors, recognizing that “Refusing to eat may be a prisoner’s only weapon for making demands, to get access to justice or to protest against their conditions,” stated, “Prisoners or detainees who choose to become hunger strikers are entitled, worldwide, to the highest clinical standards of care available.” They added, pointedly, “Force-feeding has no place in that care,” and also explained, “Force-feeding used to be common in many countries, and is still used in Guantánamo Bay, despite the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the fact it is banned by the World Medical Association (WMA) in Declarations, to which the American Medical Association is a signatory.”

Despite this, Adm. Walsh’s report turns the medical community’s opinion on its head. According to the Washington Post, the report concludes that force-feeding prisoners in Guantánamo is actually “in compliance with the Geneva Conventions’ mandate that the lives of prisoners must be preserved.”

Presumably, Adm. Walsh also believes that any method used to coerce reluctant prisoners to be force-fed is also justified by the Geneva Conventions. Two weeks ago, I reported on a visit to Binyam Mohamed (the British torture victim who has just been released from Guantánamo), by his military defense attorney, Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley, who noted:

At least 50 people are on hunger strike, with 20 on the critical list, according to Binyam. The JTF [Joint Task Force] are not commenting because they do not want the public to know what is going on. Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell. Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten. Binyam has seen this and has not witnessed this before. Guantánamo Bay is in the grip of a mass hunger strike and the numbers are growing; things are worsening.

It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two- or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, “I don’t want to be beat, injured or killed.” Given his health situation, one good blow could be fatal.

Random violence at Guantánamo

What is particularly disturbing about this report is not just the mass force-feeding, but the violence used by the “Swat teams” — the armored five-man teams, known as the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF), or the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) — who have been used throughout Guantánamo’s history to quell even the most minor infractions of the rules with appalling brutality.

Moreover, the very latest report from Guantánamo suggests not only that the ERF teams are dealing heavy-handedly with the hunger strikers, but also that they are regularly involved in random assaults, as numerous prisoners have stated over the years, which have led to fractures and broken limbs, and, in two cases, to the loss of an eye, and damage to an Egyptian prisoner’s back that was so severe that he will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

In a report on the medical examinations of Binyam Mohamed that were undertaken last week by British doctors who were allowed to visit him to ascertain if he was well enough to be flown back to the UK, the Observer stated that Mohamed “will return to Britain suffering from a huge range of injuries after being beaten by US guards right up to the point of his departure from Guantánamo.” During the medical examinations, he “was found to be suffering from bruising, organ damage, stomach complaints, malnutrition, sores to feet and hands, severe damage to ligaments as well as profound emotional and psychological problems which have been exacerbated by the refusal of Guantánamo’s guards to give him counseling.”

Binyam’s civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said that his client has been beaten dozens of times “for no reason,” with “the most recent abuse occurring during recent weeks,” and Lt. Col. Bradley added, “He has been severely beaten. Sometimes I don’t like to think about it because my country is behind all this.”

A whitewash?

Clearly, the Guantánamo described by the British doctors who visited Binyam Mohamed last week is not the same as that envisaged by Adm. Walsh. Is this, then, a deliberate whitewash? Probably not. Like all official reports, Adm. Walsh’s report was not based on detailed, fly-on-the-wall observation of the conditions at Guantánamo, but on other reports submitted up the chain of command, in which the kind of brutality described — and suffered — by Binyam Mohamed simply does not register. Nevertheless, it will, presumably, be read as though it provides a true picture of the prison, even though what it leaves unsaid would drive anyone who truly believed in the humane treatment of the prisoners to fly out to Guantánamo immediately and personally direct an overhaul of the prison operations that, once and for all, did away with the casual brutality that is built into the fabric of the place, and that has dominated its malign history for the last seven years.

Speaking of the early days of Guantánamo, Asif Iqbal, a British prisoner who was released in 2004, explained how several guards told him they had been briefed that the prisoners were “wild animals,” who “would kill them with our toothbrushes at the first opportunity, that we were all members of al-Qaeda and that we had killed women and children indiscriminately.” That was seven years ago, of course, but I very much doubt that new guards arriving for their tour of duty at Guantánamo are now being told that the status of the prisoners is unknown, and that they should be regarded as innocent men until proven guilty in a court of law. Instead, I strongly suspect that the Bush administration’s myth of Guantánamo — as the repository of “the worst of the worst” — lingers on throughout the chain of command at the prison, essentially unchallenged, and still promoted virulently in the right-wing media, and, occasionally, in the liberal media too.

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

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, see Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (June 2008), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009). Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

Many of these prisoners have been cleared since 2006, and yet the majority of them are still held in conditions of profound isolation. At the very least, President Obama should be ensuring that all the prisoners are held in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, as he promised in a Presidential order on his second day in office, and that the cleared prisoners are held in Camp 4, away from the isolation blocks, where the fortunate few are allowed to live communally.

However, as I reported yesterday, with a mass hunger strike currently raging at the prison, and at least 42 of the remaining 242 prisoners being force-fed, severe doubts remain about the ability of defense secretary Robert Gates to ensure that Guantánamo conforms to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions within the deadline of a month that was established by the President.

European support for accepting Guantánamo prisoners

For the prisoners who have been cleared for release, there was, however, some good news last week, when, by an overwhelming majority of 542 votes to 55 (with 51 abstentions), the European Parliament passed a resolution on Guantánamo, which, as the BBC reported, “called for EU states to accept low-risk prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear they might be mistreated.”

Although there were dissenters — the right-wing German politician Harthmuth Nassauer, for example, claimed that many of the men “remain potential terrorists” — British MEP Graham Watson caught the general tone of the decision when he said, “Europe cannot stand back and shrug its shoulders and say these things are for America alone to sort out.” He stated that a crucial lesson to be learned from the Bush administration was that, “in the administration of international justice, the go-it-alone mentality ends in a cul-de-sac of failure,” and urged member states to recall that, although the Bush administration had led the way in the “War on Terror,” European countries also bore their share of the blame. “Too often member states from our union were complicit in what the Bush administration did,” he said.

Since Barack Obama was elected in November, the countries of Europe have struggled to present a coherent view on Guantánamo. In December — on the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — Portugal was the first country to state openly that it would accept some of the cleared prisoners, but other countries were slow to follow the Portuguese example.

However, with Barack Obama now installed in the White House, the European Parliament’s enthusiastic support for resettling Guantánamo prisoners may now yield some tangible results. On Saturday, in his first visit to Europe, Vice President Joe Biden said that it was “time to press the reset button and revisit the many areas where we can and should work together.” Using Guantánamo as an example, he stated, “As we seek a lasting framework for our common struggle against extremism, we will have to work cooperatively with other nations around the world — and we will need your help.”

In the last few days, media outlets throughout Europe and beyond have been buzzing with claims that European countries are now prepared to help out. On Friday, it was reported that the Spanish government had “expressed its willingness” to consider accepting prisoners “on a case-by-case basis within the context of a European Union consensus on the issue,” and that the Czech foreign minister had said that, “if the United States asked the EU to accept some Guantánamo prisoners, the Czech Republic would consider the request.”

Courting the Uighurs

Even more significantly, the municipal council of Munich indicated that it was backing a motion submitted by the Green Party to accept Guantánamo’s most famous cleared prisoners, 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who had fled to Afghanistan to escape persecution by the Chinese government. The Uighurs are unique in that they are the only prisoners who, through a resounding court victory last June, managed to persuade the Bush administration to drop its claim that they were “enemy combatants,” and their settlement in Munich would make sense, as the Bavarian city is home to the largest Uighur community outside of China.

Munich’s municipal council is acting unilaterally (with no guarantee that the German Chancellor will back the motion), but is not the only party interested in accepting the Uighurs. Last week the Associated Press reported that three of the Uighurs had applied for settlement in Canada, although the reporters also pointed out that previous attempts by the US to re-house the Uighurs in Canada had been unsuccessful. In February 2007, notes prepared for Peter MacKay, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, indicated that it was probable that they would be “inadmissible under Canadian immigration law.”

When the news about the Uighurs’ claim was announced last Tuesday, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny, the former chairman of the Canadian Senate’s national security and defense committee, stated that he supported the return to Canada of its only citizen in Guantánamo, Omar Khadr, a teenager at the time of his capture who has been repeatedly ignored by successive Canadian governments, but added that he had no interest in accepting any other prisoners. “Why should people clean up their dirty business?” Kenny asked, adding, “I don’t have much sympathy with the Americans for creating that prison.”

On Wednesday, however, it was revealed that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney (no relation) was contemplating whether to accept the Uighurs’ request, and was looking at the viability of issuing “temporary residence permits,” valid for up to three years, which would “allow the detainees to bypass the backlogged refugee process.”

These developments are a positive step for the Uighurs, of course, especially as countries willing to take the Uighurs risk a diplomatic rift with China by doing so. As the Canadian story surfaced last week, the Chinese foreign ministry made a point of issuing a statement about the Uighurs. Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Fu said, “As for those Chinese terror suspects that are kept in Guantánamo, as we have stated before, we strongly oppose any country accepting these people.”

Why the Uighurs are an American problem

Nevertheless, there are two problems with this focus on the Uighurs. Firstly, as I have made clear in previous articles, when Judge Ricardo Urbina reviewed their case in October (almost exactly four months ago), he ruled that their continued detention in Guantánamo was unconstitutional, and, because no other country had been found that was prepared to accept them, ordered them to be delivered to his courtroom so that he could make arrangements for them to be resettled in the United States, in the care of communities in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida, who had prepared detailed plans for their welfare and support.

The Bush administration shamelessly appealed, protesting that the men still posed a threat — even though it had conceded that they did not — and insisting that a District Court judge did not have the right to order their release into the United States. This too was also a false assertion, as Judge Judith W. Rogers, one of the appeal court judges explained in a dissenting opinion, when her colleagues approved the stay on Judge Urbina’s ruling that had been requested by the government. As a result, I believe that the obligation to re-house the Uighurs still rests with the US government, and I join with Sabin Willett, a lawyer for the Uighurs, who has spent long years publicizing their plight, in asking Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder to release them into the United States.

As Willett stated in a letter on January 23:

We urge the government to release the Uighurs immediately in the only place they can be released — the United States. Not only would this be just, but it is in our national interest. By accepting the Uighurs, we would encourage other countries to accept the significant number of Guantánamo detainees who are cleared for release but who cannot be repatriated. Bringing the Uighurs here is thus an important early step toward carrying out President Obama’s Executive Order and removing a stain on our National character.

The second problem with the widespread focus on the Uighurs is that it detracts from the cases of the other men held at Guantánamo who desperately need third countries to re-house them. Of the 44 cleared prisoners who are not Uighurs, 23 more men are currently seeking new homes. Three — of Palestinian origin — are essentially stateless, as it has proven impossible to negotiate their return with the Israeli authorities, and the other 20 — five Algerians, an Egyptian, a Libyan, a Tajik, eight Tunisians and four Uzbeks — cannot be repatriated because their safety cannot be guaranteed in their home countries. Last year, when two Tunisians were repatriated, these dangers were demonstrated with an alarming clarity. On their return, despite an agreement with the US government that they would be treated fairly, the two men were subjected to show trials based on evidence extracted through the torture of another prisoner, and given jail sentences of three and seven years.

It is clear that none of the cleared prisoners poses a threat to anyone, for the simple reason that, in a prison based on the presumption of guilt — in which everyone has been held as an “enemy combatant” without rights, solely because the President said they were — those who have been approved for release, after multiple military reviews, have only succeeded in doing so because the authorities have concluded that they do not pose any danger to the United States or its allies.

So who are these other men?

There is not the space here to discuss all their stories, but they include Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who fled persecution by Islamists and came to the UK, where he settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, and received a tip and a thank-you note from Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, after cleaning his room during a political conference. Ahmed’s only mistakes were to take a holiday in Pakistan in the fall of 2001, and to do so before his asylum application was complete.

Another is Nabil Hadjarab, a young Algerian from a broken home, with relatives in Lyon, who was only persuaded to travel to Afghanistan because he was caught in limbo between Algeria and France as his family disintegrated around him, and another is Rafiq al-Hami, a 39-year old Tunisian who had lived in Germany, where he had worked in restaurants and for a Turkish cleaning company. Seized randomly in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, al-Rami was nevertheless sent to the CIA’s notorious “Dark Prison” near Kabul, which resembled a medieval torture dungeon, but with the addition of painfully loud music, blasted into the cells 24 hours a day.

Then there are seven Tunisians, who were all Italian residents. I covered the stories of five of these men last year, and one of them, to give just one example, is Adel al-Hakeemy, who had lived in Italy for eight years, working as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna, before traveling to Pakistan to get married. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he explained to his lawyers. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.”

While these prisoners already have connections with specific European countries, others, like the Libyan Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, do not. Cleared since 2006, al-Qassim — essentially a refugee from Libya who married an Afghan woman and had a daughter he has not seen since she was a baby — was also seized in Pakistan at a time when bounty payments for “terror suspects” were widespread, and foreign Arabs were easy prey, and he has been fighting in the US courts to prevent his repatriation for nearly two years.

Another is Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar, an accountant and a former officer in the Egyptian army, who had traveled to the Pakistani border to provide humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees, but was caught in a US bombing raid. “I saw a light and heard a voice and then I lost consciousness,” he explained in Guantánamo.  “When I woke up I was in a Pakistani hospital. I lost my coat, my passport, my money, everything. And I lost my leg also.”

Then there are the Palestinians: Ayman al-Shurafa, a student whose education in Gaza was disrupted by the Intifada, who was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan for jihad, but who regretted his decision and never raised arms against anybody; Assem Matruq al-Aasmi, another duped young recruit, who was wounded by a grenade; and Mahar al-Quwari, an older man, with a wife and children, who had drifted to Afghanistan in search of work after a fruitless trip to visit the UN in Pakistan, to sort out papers for his family, but who ended up being sold by Afghan villagers to the Northern Alliance, who in turn sold him to the Americans.

Completing this brief guide to the cleared prisoners are the Uzbeks, whose government’s human rights abuses are notorious: Shakrukh Hamiduva, just 18 years old at the time of his capture, who was working as a taxi driver in Afghanistan when he was seized by Afghan bounty hunters; Ali Sher Hamidullah, a drifter who explained in Guantánamo that the Uzbek intelligence agents who visited him told him that “the only thing that waits for me in Uzbekistan is a bullet in my head”; Kamalludin Kasimbekov, who had been forcibly recruited to join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, allies of the Taliban; and Oybek Jabbarov, a 30-year old father of two, who suffers from health problems related to a botched surgical procedure on a ruptured disk in his back in 2007.

Unwillingly transplanted to Afghanistan along with fighters from the IMU, Jabbarov explained in Guantánamo that he made a living “buying and selling sheep, chicken and goats,” and was told in December 2001 that the government was giving out ID cards to immigrants at Bagram airbase. “There, I saw American soldiers,” he said. “They just took me inside, they questioned me, and they kept me for a few days. I’ve been detained ever since.”

His lawyer, Michael Mone, who recently explained that he had taken on Jabbarov’s case because “I felt I could no longer stand on the sidelines and permit this gross executive power grab, which is how I view [Bush's] actions as they relate to torture, rendition, and the creation of Guantánamo as this [legal] black hole,” stated that his client had also been threatened by Uzbek intelligence agents. “They at one point showed him a photo array and asked him if he could identify any of the individuals,” Mone said in a recent interview. “And when he couldn’t identify any of them, one of the Uzbeks banged his fist on the table and said, ‘When you get back to Uzbekistan, you will know these things.’ And Oybek took that to mean that when he got back to Uzbekistan, they would torture him until he told them what they wanted to hear.”

I leave the final word to Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who has not always been a voice of reason when it comes to assessing the threat posed by terrorism, but who, on this occasion, captured a truth to which governments — including the US government — should pay close attention. As reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, Garzon said, “We have to confront the reality that some bad people will end up walking the streets, like the former rapists, robbers and terrorists whom we have walking the streets once they complete their sentence and are released. We have to take the risks that are necessary in a democratic society.”

The alternative, lest we forget, is Guantánamo, as conceived by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, a place where, ideally, everyone is presumed guilty, no one is ever charged or tried, and no one is ever released.

Note: For those who are keeping count, the other 21 cleared prisoners are not apparently in immediate need of the assistance of third countries. Six are Saudis, whose release should be straightforward, as the Saudi government has run a successful rehabilitation program and has processed 109 returned prisoners in the last two years (with a low rate of recidivism, contrary to recent reports), twelve are Yemenis (and there are hopes that the long diplomatic impasse between the US and Yemeni governments will soon be resolved, so that they can be repatriated), and the release of the other three — two Bosnians of Algerian origin, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a resident of Chad — was ordered by District Court Judge Richard Leon, when he recently ruled, in their habeas corpus reviews, that the government had failed to establish a case against them.

Additional note: Oybek Jabbarov is known to the Pentagon as Abu Bakir Jamaludinovich. For the story of the Tajik prisoner, Omar Abdulayev, see The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 9 – Seized in Pakistan (Part One). In addition, one of the Saudis cleared for release is the British resident Shaker Aamer, profiled here, and one of the other Tunisians is Lotfi bin Ali (known to the Pentagon as Mohammed Abdul Rahman), whose struggle to prevent his forcible return to Tunisia is described here.

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

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

With just two more online chapters to complete (hopefully in the coming week), the mission I set myself three years ago — to record the stories of all the prisoners in Guantánamo — is now within reach, and will be followed by the first definitive prisoner list, identifying not only those who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

This tenth chapter encapsulates many of the ongoing problems at Guantánamo in its eighth year of existence. Although three of the 12 prisoners discussed have been released, one returned to Tunisia to face ill-treatment and a jail sentence following a corrupt show trial. In addition, three other prisoners are amongst those who have been cleared but cannot be repatriated, and the other six demonstrate some of the fundamental problems with the government’s evidence that have plagued many other prisoners, as claims of their involvement with terrorism rub up against other exculpatory material, with no clear indication as to which sources are the most trustworthy.

However, based on a close examination of the government’s allegations over the last three years, my conclusion, as I explain in the introduction to this online chapter, is that the majority of the supposed evidence consists primarily of dubious allegations made by other prisoners, which, as Judge Richard Leon recently demonstrated in two sets of habeas corpus cases, does not stand up to any kind of independent scrutiny. Rather than indicating terrorist involvement, as intended, these allegations tend, instead, to demonstrate “how the Bush administration tried to build cases against prisoners based not on evidence that led to their capture but on interrogations — often in deeply unpleasant circumstances — that were designed to justify rounding them up in the first place.”

Note: See the column on the left for the first nine online chapters, and the last two.

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Cheney’s statement came just days after Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, had ruled in the habeas corpus review of one of the supposed “hardcore” prisoners  — a Chadian national called Mohammed El-Gharani, who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a random raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, and was later sold to US forces — that the government had failed to establish a case against El-Gharani, and ordered his release “forthwith.”

Leon ruled that what purported to be evidence had been supplied by two of El-Gharani’s fellow prisoners whose reliability had been called into doubt by government officials, and when it came to a key allegation, which, in Cheney’s version of reality, ought to have bolstered his claims — an allegation that El-Gharani had been part of an al-Qaeda cell in London in 1998 — Leon was particularly dismissive. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is – at best – unknown.”

Leon’s words, delivered in sober language, were nonetheless witheringly dismissive, but El-Gharani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, had been advancing the same argument for years in rather more colorful terms. After noting that El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time that he was supposed to have been plotting in London, Stafford Smith explained, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Judge Leon’s dismissal of Mohammed El-Gharani’s case was not the only development that fatally undermined the Vice President’s words during his last weekend in power. Largely unnoticed, as most of the mainstream media prepared the bunting for Barack Obama’s inauguration, was the release of six prisoners from Guantánamo — an Afghan, an Algerian and four Iraqis — whose stories also demonstrate that, when the facts are examined rationally, rather than being spun through a veil of paranoia, Dick Cheney’s “War on Terror” was largely a “War on Truth.”

A pro-American Afghan, betrayed by the Taliban

One of these cases — that of Haji Bismullah, an Afghan who was 23 years old when he was seized in February 2003 — was reported in the New York Times last Monday, and his story alone discredits Dick Cheney’s words. As the Times explained, and as Bismullah insisted during his imprisonment at Guantánamo, at the time of his capture he was working for the government of Hamid Karzai as the chief of transportation in a region of Helmand province. In a story that echoes dozens of others from Guantánamo, it transpired that he was removed from his job by unscrupulous rivals, connected with the Taliban, who cooked up a false story to impress the US military.

Bismullah’s long imprisonment is particularly disturbing, as his brother, a spokesman for the pro-American provisional governor, had filed a sworn statement with officials at Guantánamo in 2006, declaring that Bismullah and his entire family “fought to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan,” and Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, a member of the Afghan Senate and an ally of Hamid Karzai, had also declared in a sworn statement that “he had known Bismullah and his family for years,” and that, when they had fought the Taliban, “Haji Bismullah was with us.”

However, while the Times is to be credited for picking up on the injustice of Haji Bismullah’s story, the cases of the other five prisoners released at the same time also do nothing to bolster Cheney’s claims, and in fact reveal, in shocking detail, how Guantánamo has been sustained not by evidence that it contains “hardcore” prisoners bent on the destruction of the United States, but on false allegations, which, in the majority of cases — like the supposed evidence against Mohammed El-Gharani — wither away under scrutiny.

A lack of evidence

The first of the five, Hassan Mujamma Rabai Said, was 25 years old when he was seized in Pakistan and sold to US forces, having traveled across the mountains with an Afghan guide. According to the account compiled by the military during his seven years of imprisonment, he left his homeland in August 2000, traveled to Syria, where he lived for ten months, and then made his way, via Iran and Pakistan, to Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Said may have become involved in militancy during the few months that he was in Afghanistan prior to the 9/11 attacks, and in the three months before his capture, but the authorities failed to establish that this was what had happened.

Instead, the case against him relied on unsubstantiated allegations made by his fellow prisoners in unknown circumstances. These included claims that he “was identified as training at al-Farouq” (the main training camp for Arabs, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11), that he “was identified” as being “in charge of weapons inventory” in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, where Northern Alliance soldiers (with US back-up) fought al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in late November and early December 2001, and that he “was identified as having been chosen to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.” This latter allegation is particularly suspicious, as it is incomprehensible that someone would have been chosen to be a bodyguard for bin Laden after such a short amount of time, but it was also noticeable that Said himself persistently refuted all the allegations. Although he conceded that “political motivation and a properly declared fatwa are legitimate reasons for participating in jihad,” he maintained that he “did not participate in jihad actions.”

Even vaguer allegations were leveled against Hassan Abdul Said, an Iraqi who was also 25 years old when he “turned himself in” to US forces in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif on January 1, 2002. With the exception of two unsubstantiated allegations — that he stayed at a Taliban guesthouse in Mazar-e-Sharif for three months, and was “an Arab fighter on the Northern Front” — the authorities failed to come up with any evidence to justify holding him as an “enemy combatant.”

Instead, the last summary of allegations against him (in November 2005) focused on complicated and often contradictory claims about his life in Iraq and allegations of his involvement in drug smuggling, and stated that he was briefly imprisoned in Uzbekistan for two and a half months for having false documents, and was then “turned over to the Taliban and imprisoned for one month.” This is hardly the type of treatment that would have encouraged Said to support the regime, and it seems probable that the authorities realized this two years ago, when he was cleared for release after the first round of the annual Administrative Review Boards, which came to an end in February 2006.

“Many people died”: testimony from the survivor of a massacre

For the other Iraqis in Guantánamo, life seems to have been even harder. Ali al-Tayeea, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, was a mechanic, who had been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, and had also been imprisoned in Turkey. He then made his way to Afghanistan, where, he said, he found paid work driving a truck for the Taliban.

In November 2001, after the fall of the city of Kunduz, al-Tayeea was one of several hundred men who, after surrendering to the forces of General Rashid Dostum, a US ally and one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, were subsequently imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in Mazar-e-Sharif. After some of the prisoners seized weapons and started a battle against their captors, he was one of around 85 prisoners who survived by hiding in the basement, which was bombed and flooded over the course of a week. One of his companions was John Walker Lindh (photo, left), the so-called “American Taliban,” who received a 20-year sentence for supporting the Taliban in October 2002.

Al-Tayeea’s description of his experience in Qala-i-Janghi is one of the most harrowing first-hand accounts available:

Now, all the people were outside and we hear the bomb and someone from Dostum’s army had a machine gun on his shoulder. He opened fire on people. People were yelling, “please don’t shoot” and he opened fire… There were RPGs and Kalashnikovs. There was nothing we could do. We were in the centre and fire came from everywhere. A lot of people died. I laid down because my hands were tied. I asked someone to just open my hands a little bit. I begged for someone to just open my hands because they had been tied for a long time with wire and they were blue and cold. They opened my hands and I went inside the shelter. There was bombing and fire for the first three days. It was dark and you couldn’t see who your neighbor was. Like, 70 people had died and it smelled bad. After three days, Dostum’s army … they thought we had guns. There were some people fighting outside … We were inside the shelter. I didn’t fire because I’m not a jackass. I stayed inside. After three days, they opened the window and put fire inside the shelter and there was nothing we could do about it. Many people died in the fire and it smelled like steak. I looked and I was beside John Walker. After this they put water in through the window. John Walker was tall and he’s beside my shoulder. Some of the detainees that were short were under water.

Like Hassan Abdul Said and the other Iraqis released the weekend before last, Ali al-Tayeea had been cleared for release from Guantánamo for two years before he was eventually dispatched to an unknown fate in his homeland, but his time in the prison was particularly uncomfortable, as, by his own account, he had provided information to the interrogators, and had been threatened as a result. Whilst it is understandable that prisoners would crack under the pressure of their harsh treatment in Guantánamo and their seemingly endless incarceration, and provide false information to the interrogators, it is, unfortunately, clear from the statements of other prisoners that al-Tayeea’s allegations were particularly troublesome. Moreover, despite appealing for “the American government to help me with asylum,” his experience shows that cooperation was no guarantee of any kind of reward.

Can a beggar befriend bin Laden?

In contrast to al-Tayeea’s case, the other two Iraqis had to contend with their own barrage of false allegations. Abbas al-Naely, who was 33 years old at the time of his capture, appears to have entered Afghanistan as a refugee from the Iraqi army in 1994. Seized in Pakistan in April 2002, he was described by a fellow Iraqi prisoner, Jawad Jabber Sadkhan (the only Iraqi still imprisoned in Guantánamo), as a beggar with a hashish problem. In a written statement, Sadkhan explained that, when al-Naely came to his house begging for help, “I did not have anything to offer [him]. But when I looked at his overall look and his dirty clothing he had on, he looked so miserable. So I went to a friend of mine and asked him for money.” He added, “He is a peaceful man and he does not pose a threat on nobody and he has parents that need him.”

In spite of this, and al-Naely’s statement that, when he was seized, the Pakistani authorities “told us that every Arab person has to go to the Americans for an investigation,” he came to be regarded by the US military as a fighter for the Taliban who had “trained at the al-Farouq camp in Kabul,” had met Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, and had sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to Omar. In response, he denied ever meeting bin Laden, and, although he acknowledged that he had met Mullah Omar, explained that he had only asked him for financial help and assistance in returning to Iraq.

When it came to the allegation about al-Farouq, an extraordinary exchange took place between al-Naely and the Presiding Officer of his review board. “I never went to Farouq,” al-Naely explained, also pointing out that the camp was in Kandahar, not Kabul, to which the Presiding Officer replied, “Well I beg to differ with you because this source we have is very reliable. I have no problem if you admit to it. I would just prefer if you tell me the truth.”

The identity of the supposedly reliable source was not revealed, of course, but it was clear from Jawad Sadkhan’s statement that he had lied about al-Naely under duress, and there is no reason to suppose that any other sources were any more reliable. “Anything that happened between him and me, like some kind of animosity, was a result of the investigators here on this facility,” he wrote. “I was exposed to a lot of abuse, psychological abuse from the investigators and God only knows what happened. This person ISN 758 [al-Naely] is innocent from any allegations and God knows everything.”

Tortured testimony and Guantánamo lies

For the last of the four Iraqis, Arkan al-Karim, who was 25 years old when he was taken by US forces from a prison in Kabul in June 2002, even Abbas al-Naely’s experiences were tame. In an extraordinary list of allegations, al-Karim was accused of being “part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle,” and an al-Qaeda member “who ate frequently with Osama bin Laden,” and who “commanded 200 Arab and Taliban fighters in Kabul, and was also responsible for sending Arab fighters to Chechnya.”

It was also alleged, inter alia, that he had “worked for Osama bin Laden for 13 years conducting weapons maintenance,” was “an expert in the areas of poisons, explosives, martial arts and weapons,” had “carried out an operation in Kuwait in which he blew up a building he believed was being used by the Israelis,” and had “taken up jihad in the Philippines, Chechnya and Bosnia.” Another claim involved an unidentified “al-Qaeda member” naming him as an understudy of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the cleric who had founded the first organization that supported the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and who was assassinated in 1989.

As al-Karim pointed out, the allegations about Abdullah Azzam, and about being a member of al-Qaeda for 13 years, were patently ludicrous, as he was just 13 years old in 1989, and had been in Iraq until 1994, when he drifted to Iran, and then Afghanistan, after deserting from the Iraqi army, but it also seems clear, from his experiences in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo, that every other allegation was equally worthless. As he explained to his review board, far from working with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, he was actually imprisoned by the Taliban for two years. During this time, a fellow prisoner, a Syrian Kurd called Abdul Rahim al-Ginco (photo, left), who was also transferred to Guantánamo and is still held, “was tortured by al-Qaeda and eventually told them he and [al-Karim] were spies for the United States.”

Al-Karim explained that al-Ginco had “confessed in front of the interrogator [in Guantánamo] and said that he made me suffer and told a lot of lies on me in front of all those Arabs,” and added, “His confession is on a piece of paper and is here in Cuba.” He also reassured his review board that there were no problems between the two men, and explained, “I told him that I forgave him and I knew what they did to him. He was suffering just as I was.” In a separate statement, al-Ginco confirmed that he had identified al-Karim as an American spy, but said that he did it “because of the torturing that I was receiving,” and added that he chose to identify al-Karim and not someone else “because they pressured me and they told me to say that he was a spy.”

However, while this accounts for some of the false information masquerading as evidence in al-Karim’s case, it’s also clear that other prisoners were responsible for some of the other allegations. As he told his review board, he was a victim of the long-standing religious divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The overwhelming majority of the prisoners in Guantánamo were (and are) Sunni Muslims, and as al-Karim — a Shiite — explained, “I have no friends in this camp at all; most of them, if they don’t give me a hard time or they don’t give me a problem, they will not talk to me. But also, they’ve threatened me more than five or six times. They will say things about me.”

As these men struggle to rebuild their lives, or to avoid being arbitrarily imprisoned once more — in Afghanistan, where even government officials had no influence on the Bush administration; in Algeria, where justice resembles a game of Russian Roulette: and in Iraq, where no one seems to know what fate awaits them — their stories demonstrate conclusively the utter contempt that Dick Cheney showed for notions of truth and justice, and they will, I hope, act as an encouragement to those in the new administration who are preparing to review the cases, to see who can be released and who should still be held, to scrutinize the evidence — such as it is — with profound skepticism.

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

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

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers are as follows:

ISN 968: Haji Bismullah (Afghan)
ISN 175: Hassan Mujamma Rabai Said (Algeria)
ISN 435: Hassan Abdul Said (Iraq)
ISN 111: Ali al-Tayeea (Iraq)
ISN 758: Abbas al-Naely (Iraq)
ISN 653: Arkan al-Karim (Iraq)

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

In a letter to other EU leaders, Luís Amado, Portugal’s Foreign Minister, declared, “The time has come for the European Union to step forward. As a matter of principle and coherence, we should send a clear signal of our willingness to help the US government in that regard, namely through the resettlement of detainees. As far as the Portuguese government is concerned, we will be available to participate.”

The Portuguese offer addresses a problem that has plagued Guantánamo for years, and that is, moreover, one of the major obstacles to Barack Obama’s promise to close the prison: what to do with the prisoners who have been cleared for release from Guantánamo after multiple military reviews, but who cannot be freed because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture?

These men, numbering at least 60 of the remaining 255 prisoners, are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan. They are no longer regarded as a threat to the United States or its allies, but they remain in Guantánamo because, until now, only one country has stepped forward to give new homes to cleared prisoners. Albania accepted eight cleared prisoners — five Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) in May 2006, and three others (an Algerian teacher, an Egyptian cleric and a refugee from the former Soviet Union) in December 2006.

A week after Barack Obama’s election victory, a number of human rights groups — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — launched a campaign in Berlin aimed at persuading European governments to accept cleared prisoners, but until the Portuguese government spoke out last week, the response had been lukewarm.

On November 13, Amnesty International announced that Switzerland had refused asylum applications by three cleared prisoners from Algeria, China and Libya, and on December 12 the Irish Times confirmed that Justice Minister Dermot Ahern had stated that the Irish government was “not contemplating the resettlement of any Guantánamo inmates,” apparently dashing the hopes of Uzbek refugee Oybek Jamoldinivich Jabbarov, who was sold to US forces in Afghanistan seven years ago, that he might finally be released from Guantánamo.

In addition, the legal action charity Reprieve, whose lawyers represent around 30 Guantánamo prisoners, has so far failed to interest the British government in accepting the return of Algerian national Ahmed Belbacha (photo, left), even though he lived in the UK for two years and only left Algeria because he was threatened by Islamist militants, and has also had no success in persuading the French government to accept Nabil Hadjarab, a former resident with family in France, and in resettling six Tunisians and an Egyptian who had all been residents in Italy. One other country, Sweden, which was widely perceived as sympathetic to refugees, dashed all hopes that it would lead the way in repatriating Guantánamo prisoners in June this year, when it refused asylum to Adel Abdul Hakim, one of the five Uighurs freed in Albania. Hakim had applied for asylum in November 2007, after securing a visa to visit his sister, who is part of a Uighur community in Stockholm.

One of the major obstacles to European support, of course, has been the Bush administration’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own mistakes by working to secure the release of cleared prisoners into the United States. For several years, State Department officials have been touring the world, attempting to persuade third countries to accept some of these men, but without success. Their failure is partly because the administration refuses to concede that any prisoners seized in the “War on Terror” are innocent men captured by mistake — choosing instead to refer to them as “No Longer Enemy Combatants” or “enemy combatants” who have been “approved for transfer” — but it is also because the administration has taken a hectoring tone with other countries, chastising them for failing to help, rather than addressing them in a conciliatory manner.

Unfortunately, comments made since the Portuguese announcement by the State Department’s legal adviser, John Bellinger, have done nothing to suggest that the prevailing attitude has changed. Speaking to Reuters, Bellinger called Luis Amado’s letter “extraordinarily significant.” He revealed, “It is the first time that any country except Albania has privately or publicly stated that they are prepared to resettle Guantánamo detainees who are not their own nationals.” This was not strictly accurate, as Germany, Spain and the UK have also accepted the return of legal residents, but what made Bellinger’s comments particularly troubling was when he added, “It really is the first crack in the ice of what has been European opposition to helping with Guantánamo in any way. For five or six years there has been consistent criticism but no constructive offers to help … Europe need to stop simply calling for its closure but to step up and actually help with its closure.”

As a result of these unhelpful comments, it seems probable that the plight of Guantánamo’s refugees in limbo is unlikely to change until Barack Obama takes over from George W. Bush in January, when he will, hopefully, be able to muzzle State Department criticism of US allies, and secure cooperation as part of his honeymoon period. However, good will alone may not be enough to persuade other countries to help the new President to close Guantánamo. Speaking to the Washington Post, Jennifer Daskal, senior counter-terrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, suggested that the Portuguese announcement might be “the start of a trend,” but added that she believed European cooperation would hinge on a willingness by the United States to take cleared prisoners as well. “The new Obama administration,” she said, “is going to have to jump-start this by accepting some of the detainees.”

In particular, President Obama will need to address the plight of the 17 remaining Uighurs in Guantánamo. With the exception of five Bosnian Algerians, whose release was ordered last month by District Court judge Richard Leon, after he was allowed to review the government’s evidence against the men, and ruled that the administration had failed to establish a case for holding them, the Uighurs are the only prisoners at Guantánamo who have been cleared of being “enemy combatants.”

In June, when an appeals court was finally allowed to review the case against one of the men, Huzaifa Parhat, the judges demolished the government’s allegations, ruling that Parhat’s status as an “enemy combatant” was invalid, and comparing the government’s evidence to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the months that followed, the government abandoned trying to prove that any of the Uighurs were “enemy combatants,” and when their case reached the Washington D.C. District Court in October, Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that their continued detention was unconstitutional, and ordered their release into the United States, as no other country had been found that would accept them.

Unfortunately for the Uighurs, the government, which was still drunk on the dreams of unfettered executive power that had sustained it for over seven years, refused to accept that the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling in June, which granted the Guantánamo prisoners “the privilege of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of their detention,” also held that “a court’s power under the writ must include ‘authority to … issue … an order directing the prisoner’s release.’”

Effectively arguing that the whims of the executive trumped the ruling of a judge, the government also attempted to resuscitate claims that the Uighurs were involved in militancy, even though it had been established without a doubt that they had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and even though the administration itself had abandoned any claims of militancy when it accepted that none of the men were “enemy combatants.”

The appeals court judges have yet to deliver a final ruling on the Uighurs, but in the meantime it became apparent last week, in comments that John Bellinger made to the BBC, that he supports the government’s unprincipled and unjustifiable opinions, when he stated that the Uighurs were “properly detained,” because, although they “wanted to fight the Chinese,” they “were in training camps.”

Bellinger’s words not only suggest, incredibly, that the administration believes it is justified in holding anyone as an “enemy combatant” who has attended any kind of military training camp (even those that have no connection whatsoever with al-Qaeda or the Taliban); they also cut off any hope that another country will be prepared to accept the Uighurs. For Barack Obama to succeed in closing Guantánamo, he will not only need to repudiate opinions like these, but will also need to find the courage to follow Judge Urbina’s ruling that holding the Uighurs is unconstitutional, and to secure their release to the communities in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida, who have already made detailed plans to welcome them. Anything less, and his mission to close Guantánamo and regain America’s moral standing may well be doomed.

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

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Apprehended as he attempted to flee the house, Zubaydah reportedly received gunshot wounds in his stomach, one of his legs, and his groin, and after his capture was immediately rendered to a secret CIA prison in Thailand, where, as General Michael Hayden, the CIA’s Director, acknowledged in February this year, he was subjected to the ancient torture technique known as waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning. He was later transferred to other secret prisons — in Poland, and possibly on the island of Diego Garcia — until his eventual transfer to Guantánamo, along with 13 other “high-value detainees,” in September 2006.

Disputes within the US administration over Zubaydah’s alleged significance have never been resolved. Dan Coleman, a senior FBI operative, maintains that he was “insane, certifiable, split personality,” based on an analysis of his dairies, which revealed mundane accounts of life as recorded by three different personalities, and according to Ron Suskind, in his book The One Percent Doctrine, other officials confirmed that Zubaydah appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations, and was, instead, a minor logistician. Nevertheless, the CIA took over his interrogations from the FBI and subjected him to torture, and after he arrived at Guantánamo, President Bush took the opportunity to declare, “We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.”

While the story of Abu Zubaydah has been reported extensively in the media, there has been far less coverage of the seven men seized with him during the Faisalabad raid, and almost no mention whatsoever of 16 other men seized in a raid on another house in Faisalabad that same evening, even though the stories of two of these prisoners shed light on the CIA’s policy of rendering terror suspects to third countries for torture, and others cast doubt on the Pentagon’s justifications for holding prisoners in Guantánamo.

Information about the two suspects who were rendered to torture was provided by the journalist Stephen Grey in his book Ghost Plane, following an interview with Abdullah Almalki. A joint Syrian-Canadian national, Almalki was seized by Syrian intelligence agents in May 2002, at the request of the Canadian authorities, and imprisoned and tortured for 22 months in the notorious military prison known as the “Palestine Branch,” before being released without charge. He explained to Grey that two suspects seized with Zubaydah — Omar Ghramesh and an unnamed teenager — were rendered to the “Palestine Branch” on May 14, 2002, along with Abdul Halim Dalak, a student seized in Pakistan in November 2001. Ghramesh, he said, had explained to him that in Pakistan US agents had shown him photos of Abu Zubaydah looking battered and bruised, and had told him, “If you don’t talk, this is what will happen to you.”

As in the cases of dozens of other “ghost prisoners,” the US government has never acknowledged its role in the rendition and torture of Ghramesh, Dalak and the unnamed teenager, and their current whereabouts are unknown.

However, more is known about the prisoners who were transferred to Guantánamo. Four of the men seized with Zubaydah — Ghassan al-Sharbi and Jabran al-Qahtani (both Saudis), Sufyian Barhoumi (an Algerian) and Noor Uthman Muhammed (a Sudanese) — were put forward for trial by Military Commission in June this year, accused of various plots involving explosives, and, in Muhammed’s case, of being the deputy emir of the Khaldan training camp.

Their cases are notable because the charges against them were dropped by the Pentagon in October, 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, and citing examples in one of the cases he was prosecuting, that of an Afghan prisoner named Mohamed Jawad. The Pentagon gave no explanation for dropping the charges, but commentators suggested that officials were concerned that, if the cases proceeded to trial, Vandeveld would cause them further embarrassment by testifying for the defense.

It is not known whether Vandeveld possesses information that undermines the Pentagon’s claims against these men, but the recent release from Guantánamo of another prisoner captured with Abu Zubaydah indicates that not everyone seized in the Faisalabad raids was connected with al-Qaeda.

Labed Ahmed, a 50-year old Algerian (also identified as Abdallah Husseini), was repatriated on November 10, after being “approved for transfer” by a military review board. During a review in 2006, he explained that he had ended up at Zubaydah’s house by accident.

A former drug dealer in Europe, Ahmed told the military panel that he had been imprisoned many times in Germany and Italy, and explained that he decided to go to Afghanistan in March 2001, after someone he met at a mosque in Hamburg recruited him by showing him videos of mujahideen in Afghanistan and Chechnya, although he added that he actually hoped to buy heroin to sell in Europe so that he could buy his own nightclub.

Ahmed said that he arrived in Afghanistan at the start of September 2001, trained at al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs) for 12 days until the camp closed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and then fought with the Taliban until December, when he left for Pakistan with a group of 20 other people, staying for three months in safe houses in Bannu and Lahore. He said that he was then told 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, they were told that they had been brought there by mistake and would be moved to another house after the evening prayer.

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.”

The house to which Ahmed and his companions were supposed to have been delivered was the Crescent Mill guest house (also referred to as the “Issa” guest house, after its owner, and “the Yemeni house,” after most of its guests), and it was here that the Russian and the Yemeni who arrived at Shabaz Cottage with Ahmed were seized, along with another 14 prisoners. Mostly aged between 18 and 24, there were 11 Yemenis, an Algerian, a Palestinian and a Saudi, and all are still in Guantánamo, with the exception of Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami, one of three prisoners who died in Guantánamo in June 2006, apparently after committing suicide.

Of the remaining 15 prisoners, only one has been approved for release from Guantánamo, even though there is little in any of the men’s stories to suggest that they were involved in any kind of militant activity. Nine of the 15 have maintained that they were students at Salafia University, run by the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and that the guest house was a university dorm, two have stated that they traveled to receive medical treatment, and another, Fahmi Ahmed, said that he went to Pakistan to buy fabrics, taking money that he had borrowed from his mother, but explained that he actually spent most of his time “like a wild man,” drinking and smoking hashish. The prisoner cleared for release, Mohammed Hassen, was not even living at the house, and was caught up in the raid after visiting for dinner and staying the night.

Only three of the men have admitted that they ever set foot in Afghanistan: Ahmed Abdul Qader, a Yemeni, who said that he went to Afghanistan for charitable work, and Ravil Mingazov and Jamil Nassir, the Russian and Yemeni who were taken to Abu Zubaydah’s house by mistake just two weeks before the raid. Nassir’s story involves conflicting claims that he either undertook military training in Afghanistan, was a humanitarian aid worker, or had traveled to Pakistan for medical treatment, and Mingazov, a former ballet dancer, fled religious persecution in his homeland, and has stated that he was with Jamaat-al-Tablighi in Lahore when he joined Labed Ahmed on the ill-fated trip to Faisalabad.

The allegations made against these prisoners give little reason to doubt their stories. They contain claims by the US authorities, as with many other prisoners involved with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, that the organization was “used to mask travel and activities of terrorists,” but this allegation has never been regarded as legitimate outside Guantánamo. For the most part the prisoners’ insistence that they traveled from their home countries to study in Faisalabad via Karachi (and often via Jamaat-al-Tablighi mosques in Lahore and Raiwand, where the organization has its headquarters) is at odds with a catalog of other allegations made under unknown circumstances by unidentified “al-Qaeda operatives” and other unidentified “sources,” who claimed to have seen the men at various times in Afghanistan.

With Labed Ahmed now released, it is unclear how the Pentagon can maintain that it has any reason to hold the 16 other prisoners seized in the Crescent Mill guest house. One particular comment that Ahmed made during his military review, when he 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,” indicates that, although Abu Zubaydah had some sort of contact with the 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.

Mohammed Hassen’s lawyer, David Remes, says his client has paid dearly for being at the wrong place at the wrong time: “Mohammed has spent a quarter of his life behind bars because he made the mistake of visiting a friend at a guest house the night it was raided.” Noting that Hassen was cleared for release nearly three years ago but remains imprisoned at Guantánamo, Remes added, “This is more than injustice. It’s a nightmare. My client is particularly unfortunate, because he was not even living at the house, but nothing I have either seen or heard, in my discussions with other lawyers and my analysis of Mr. Hassen’s case, indicates that any of these men constitutes a threat to the United States.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). A more detailed analysis of the Faisalabad story is available in Chapter 13 of the book. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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

Note: Another Algerian, Soufian al-Hawari, was repatriated from Guantánamo with Labed Ahmed. His story is discussed in Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, and will also feature in a forthcoming article.

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers are as follows:

ISN 703: Labed Ahmed
ISN 1016: Soufian al-Hawari

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