Accusing the five men of being “responsible for the planning and execution” of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon added that the eight charges are “conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking aircraft, and terrorism.”

As the Pentagon proceeded to explain, subject to approval by the Commissions’ Convening Authority, Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, prosecutors recommended that the charges “be referred as capital.”

Anyone paying attention will realise that we have been here before, on February 11, 2008, when the Pentagon announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the the four others named above (plus a sixth man, Mohammed al-Qahtani, against whom the charges were later dropped) were charged with “conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, terrorism and providing material support for terrorism” — and four of them were, in addition, charged with “hijacking or hazarding a vessel.”

Astute readers will also recall that 18 months ago, on November 13, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the five men charged on Tuesday would be tried in federal court rather than in a Military Commission at Guantánamo. Holder confidently told the nation, and the wider world:

After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks from where the twin towers once stood.

I am confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial, just as they have for over 200 years. The alleged 9/11 conspirators will stand trial in our justice system before an impartial jury under long-established rules and procedures.

I also want to assure the American people that we will prosecute these cases vigorously, and we will pursue the maximum punishment available. These were extraordinary crimes and so we will seek maximum penalties.

To critics of the Military Commissions (and there were many), Holder’s decision to pursue the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators in federal court was a principled and appropriate endorsement of federal court trials as the correct venue for terrorist trials. The Commissions, revived by Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001, had been designed to lead to the swift executions of those seized — and, in many cases, tortured — in the “War on Terror,” and although the Supreme Court had ruled them illegal in June 2006, they had been revived by Congress.

There, lawmakers, adhering to the same flawed rationale of the “War on Terror” as the Bush administration — namely, that terrorists were actually “warriors” — invented war crimes for a revived version of the Commissions that first surfaced in the fall of 2006, and was then revived for the Obama administration in the summer of 2009.

Unfortunately for Holder, who believed — correctly, in my opinion — that trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a courtroom would be “the defining event of my time as Attorney General,” and that “History will show that the decisions we’ve made are the right ones,” the decision to revive the Commissions, as well as endorsing federal court trials, fatally muddied the waters.

Holder looked rather foolish when, at the same time as announcing that KSM and his alleged co-conspirators would be tried in federal court, he also stated that five other prisoners would face trials by Military Commission, but, more importantly, the administration’s ambivalence — and its refusal just to focus on federal court trials — gave critics the option of pushing to shut off federal court trials while advocating for Military Commission trials at Guantánamo instead, and this is exactly what happened.

A cynical movement to stir up hysteria regarding a federal court trial in New York was so successful that the White House backed off, allowing lawmakers the opportunity to insert a provision into a military spending bill before Christmas last year that prevented President Obama from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland to face a trial, and which, to rub salt into the wound, explicitly mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by name.

Faced with this rebellion, Obama refused to consider a veto or a signing statement, meaning that the only viable option for a trial would be at Guantánamo, as the cheerleaders for the Commissions always intended.

Eric Holder failed to disguise his disappointment when, on April 4, he announced the decision to proceed with a Military Commission trial. In a speech full of criticism, he told lawmakers:

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

Tuesday’s announcement, therefore, provides nothing to celebrate — just a confirmation of President Obama’s failures to seriously tackle his critics when it comes to “national security” issues, which has been repeated over and over again in the last two years.

For Eric Holder, the disappointment is far greater, as he is on record as noting that history will judge him on how he deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators. However, Holder is not the only loser. The administration, Congress, and the American people who, in large numbers, have allowed themselves to be seduced by the poisonous rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” have also lost, for the simple reason that Military Commissions remain a shameful, sub-standard venue for trials as important as these.

Contrary to the rhetoric of those endorsing the Commissions, the last thing the relatives of those who died on September 11, 2001 need is for the alleged perpetrators to be prosecuted in a chaotic kangaroo court. However, nearly ten years after the attacks, justice — fair, transparent justice, with a long historical pedigree — remains sidelined, bullied into submission by those who, still driven by vengeance, want the perpetrators to be “warriors” rather than what they were — mass murdering criminals, who do not deserve to be able to usurp the rhetoric of this phoney war for their own ends.

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

On CBS News, Evening News Producer Phil Hirschkorn stated that there was “little new information in the court documents themselves,” and pointed out that:

Between the extraordinarily detailed 9/11 Commission Report, commission staff reports and the extensive Guantánamo public record, including charging documents and transcripts (from the earlier “tribunals” and current “commissions”), the dismissed federal indictment reveals little that wasn’t already known or previously alleged elsewhere. That doesn’t mean the government’s case was weak, and an indictment is not evidence. There would have been plenty to convict.

Hirschkorn also pointed out that perhaps the most detailed account, generally overlooked, is a 58-page statement drawn from the interrogations of Khaid Sheih Mohammed (PDF), which was “introduced at the nation’s first and only 9/11 trial — of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006 in Virginia federal court — and which “was offered by the defense as a substitute for KSM’s supposedly exculpatory testimony regarding Moussaoui.”

Nevertheless, to freeze in time this indictment and to make it available in HTML format, I’m cross-posting the ten counts below — but not the names of all the 2,976 people who died on Septermber 11, 2001, which make up the latter half of the indictment. This is not, I hasten to add, because I lack sympathy for them — in fact, I agree with Marcy Wheeler that it’s “the most impressive part of the indictment, seeing the list of names like that” — but because formatting the names would have taken more hours than I can spare right now and may also have resulted in a document that was too big too publish. Again, for the full list, please check the original here.

Speaking of Marcy, her post analyzing the indictment — and asking some interesting questions about what it does reveal, and what new questions it raises — is recommended, as are some of the comments from Marcy’s lively and very engaged audience, and I also recommend the New York Times‘ article on the indictment, published on April 10, in which Benjamin Weiser analyzed the indictment’s place in the wider history of terrorism trials in New York, based on its docket number, 93 Cr. 180, which, as he explained, was first used in connection with the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center by Ramzi Yousef (whose uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), and was followed by 13 others, each adding more to the story, and culminating in the 9/11 indictment.

As the Times explained, “there appeared to have been legal, practical, and even symbolic reasons to charge Mr. Mohammed in the lineage that began with the 1993 trade center attack.” Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, said, “One big point of these trials is that they present to the public the narrative history that we otherwise wouldn’t have. Symbolically, it has everything to do with understanding the threat we’re under, and how it’s changed over time, and how significant KSM’s role has been.”

The Times also noted that the 9/11 case “had been assigned to Judge Duffy, who had already handled three trials in the 1993 attack and the Bojinka conspiracy [a 1995 plot, in which 'the government said Mr. Yousef had an aborted plan ... to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific Ocean']. In some ways, the indictments have evolved into a kind of terrorism genealogy that allows people, plots, and families to be traced.”

Noting also that “the 93 Cr. 180 series has yielded convictions of all eight defendants who were tried (Mr. Yousef twice), with their convictions upheld on appeal,” the Times concluded its article — whose sub-text was clearly a defense of federal court trials for KSM and his co-conspirators — with a comment made by a former prosecutor who “sounded almost wistful in speaking of the indictment’s dismissal,” and who stated, “It’s almost like an obituary. You don’t get the sense that it’s going to come back anytime soon.”

For my less challenging contribution to the discussions abut the indictment — a formatting exercise, essentially — see my cross-post of the indictment below, although I should reiterate that I did analyze the decision to drop the proposed federal court trial in an article entitled, Holder, Obama and the Cowardly Shame of Guantánamo and the 9/11 Trial.

INDICTMENT (S14) 93 Cr. 180(KTD) in the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

- v. -

KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, a/k/a “Mukhtar,” a/k/a “Mukhtar al-Baluchi,” a/k/a “Mukh,” a/k/a “Abdulrahman Abdullah al- Ghamdi,” a/k/a “Salem Ali,”

WALID BIN ATTASH, a/k/a “Khallad Bin Attash,” a/k/a “Saleh Saeed Mohammed Bin Yousaf,” a/k/a “Tawfiq Muhammad Salih Bin Rashid,” a/k/a “Silver,”

RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, a/k/a “Abu Ubaydah,” a/k/a “Ahad Abdollahi Sabet,”

ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, a/k/a “Aliosh,” a/k/a “Ali A,” a/k/a “Isam Mansur,” a/k/a “Ammar al-Baluchi,” a/k/a “Hani,”

MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, a/k/a “Hashem Abdulrahman,” a/k/a “Hashem Abdollahi,” a/k/a “Mustafa Ahmed,” a/k/a “Zaher,” a/k/a “Khal,”

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
(Counts One through Nine)

COUNT ONE

Conspiracy to Commit Acts of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries

The Grand Jury charges:

Background: al Qaeda

1. From in or about 1989 until the date of the filing of this Indictment, an international terrorist group existed that was dedicated principally to opposing non-Islamic governments with force and violence. This organization grew out of the “mekhtab al khidernat” (the “Services Office”) organization that had maintained offices in various parts of the world, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States. The group was founded by Usama Bin Laden and others. The group called itself “al Qaeda” (“the Base”). Until in or about 1991, al Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan. In or about 1991, the leadership of al Qaeda, including its “emir” (leader or prince) Usama Bin Laden, relocated to the Sudan. Al Qaeda was headquartered in the Sudan from approximately 1991 until approximately 1996 but still maintained offices in various parts of the world. In 1996, Usama Bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda relocated to Afghanistan. Many loyalists demonstrated their commitment to al Qaeda by pledging an oath of allegiance (called a “bayat”) to Usama Bin Laden.

2. Usama Bin Laden and al Qaeda violently opposed the United States for several reasons. First, the United States was regarded as an “infidel” because it was not governed in a manner consistent with the group’s extremist interpretation of Islam. Second, the United States was viewed as providing essential support for other “infidel” governments and institutions, particularly the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the nation of Israel, and the United Nations, which were regarded as enemies of al Qaeda. Third, al Qaeda opposed the involvement of the United States armed forces in the Gulf War in 1991 and in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia in 1992 and 1993. In particular, al Qaeda opposed the continued presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere on the Saudi Arabian peninsula) following the Gulf War. Fourth, al Qaeda opposed the United States Government because of the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of persons belonging to al Qaeda or its affiliated terrorist groups or those with whom it worked.

3. For these and other reasons, Usama Bin Laden declared a “jihad,” or holy war, against the United States, which he carried out through al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations. Usama Bin Laden issued public edicts calling for terrorist attacks against the United States and the murder of Americans. Members of al Qaeda issued “fatwahs” (rulings on Islamic law) indicating that such attacks were both proper and necessary.

4. Al Qaeda functioned both on its own and through some of the terrorist organizations that operated under its umbrella, including: Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri; the Islamic Group (also known as “el Gamaa Islamia” or simply “Gamaa’t”); Jema’ah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia and Australia; and jihad groups in other countries, including the Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, as well as the Kashmir region of India and the Chechen region of Russia. Al Qaeda also maintained cells and personnel in a number of countries to facilitate its activities, including in Kenya, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Canada, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United States.

Al Qaeda’s Organizational Structure

5. Al Qaeda had a command and control structure that included a majlis al shura (or consultation council), which discussed and approved major undertakings, including terrorist operations. Among those who sat on the majlis al shura of al Qaeda were Usama Bin Laden and Muhammad Atef, a/k/a “Abu Hafs el Masry,” until his death in mid-November 2001.

6. Under the majlis al shura, al Qaeda had a number of “committees,” including a “military committee” that considered and approved “military” matters. Muhammad Atef sat on the military committee and, until his death, was one of Usama Bin Laden’s principal military commanders. Atef was responsible for supervising the terrorist training of al Qaeda members and identifying targets for terrorist attacks that would be carried out, or sponsored, by al Qaeda.

7. In addition, al Qaeda had a “media committee,” which promoted al Qaeda by, among other things, preparing and distributing promotional materials to advertise al Qaeda’s terrorist agenda, intimidate its enemies, and attract recruits. KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, participated in the affairs of the media committee.

AI Qaeda’s Terrorist Training

8. Al Qaeda sponsored, managed, and financially supported training camps in Afghanistan. At the camps, personnel of al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups were instructed in the use of firearms, explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction. In addition to providing training in the use of various weapons, these camps — including camps known as al Farooq, Khalden, Derunta, Khost, Siddiq, Jihad Wal, and Mes Aynak — were used to conduct operational planning against United States targets around the world and experiments in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Al Qaeda personnel and others attending the camps flew from various locations to countries neighboring Afghanistan, usually Pakistan, and then traveled to Afghanistan and the camps using ground transportation. Al Qaeda made a promotional video concerning its training camps, featuring Usama Bin Laden, which was publicly aired, in or about June 2001, on the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, and after that time received worldwide media coverage.

9. Al Qaeda’s camps were also used to train the group’s personnel in operational security and counterintelligence methods. This training, some of which was reduced to writing in assorted training manuals, was designed to prepare al Qaeda personnel to avoid detection by authorities when traveling abroad to perform terrorist operations or otherwise conduct al Qaeda affairs. For example:

• a. Al Qaeda personnel who were traveling abroad were instructed to avoid signaling their connection to the organization or their religious beliefs. These instructions included dressing in “Western” attire, shaving their beards, carrying no Islamic literature, and bringing cologne and cigarettes (each of which is generally forbidden in Islamic culture).
• b. Al Qaeda taught its personnel to “clean” their passports before traveling abroad. This tactic typically involved eliminating from the passport any record of prior travel to destinations associated with al Qaeda (for example, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Sudan) by doctoring the passport or by obtaining a new or replacement passport shortly before traveling.
• c. Al Qaeda required its personnel to use fake names and codes in internal communications. Al Qaeda personnel were assigned “kunyas” (war names), or otherwise referred to by aliases or nicknames. Among other commonly used code words, “wedding” was used to refer to an impending terrorist operation and “honey” was used to refer to explosives and weapons.
• d. Al Qaeda instructed its personnel who were traveling abroad to prepare a false “cover story” to disguise the true purpose of the travel.
• e. Al Qaeda personnel were taught that information regarding a terrorist operation would be shared by al Qaeda leadership only on a “need to know” basis. Operatives would be managed by al Qaeda leadership in compartmented sections (sometimes called “cells”). In other words, the cells would he coordinated by al Qaeda leadership, but information would not necessarily be shared between the cells. A member of one cell might not know of the existence of another cell and its membership.
• f. Al Qaeda taught its personnel to monitor media reporting of its operations to determine the effectiveness of their terrorist activities.
• g. Al Qaeda provided counter-interrogation training to its personnel, which, among other things, required captured operatives to lie to authorities to prevent detection of an ongoing plot.

Al Qaeda’s Calls to Violence Against Americans

10. On various occasions, in the early 1990s, a co-conspirator not named as a defendant herein advised other members of al Qaeda that it was proper under Islam to engage in violent actions against infidels, even if others might be killed by such actions, because if the others were “innocent,” they would go to paradise, and if they were not “innocent,” then they deserved to die.

11. On or about August 23, 1996, a Declaration of Jihad was disseminated. It stated that it was from the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan, and was entitled, “Message from Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Laden to His Muslim Brothers in the Whole World and Especially in the Arabian Peninsula: Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques; Expel the Heretics from the Arabian Peninsula.”

12. In February 1998, Usama Bin Laden endorsed a fatwah under the banner of the “International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders.” This fatwah, published in the publication Al-Quds al-’Arabi on February 23, 1998, stated that Muslims should kill Americans — including civilians — anywhere they could be found.

13. In or about June 1999, in an interview with an Arabic-language television station, Usama Bin Laden issued a further threat indicating that all American males should be killed.

14. In or about September 2000, in an interview with an Arabic-language television station, Usama Bin Laden called for a “jihad” to release the “brothers” in jail “everywhere.”

Overview of the Plot

15. In early 1999, in Afghanistan, Usama Bin Laden, Mohammad Atef, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, the defendant, and other al Qaeda leaders planned a terrorist operation targeting U.S. interests and persons. The plan required al Qaeda operatives to hijack commercial airplanes and pilot them into prominent buildings in the United States, causing maximum casualties and destruction.

16. In late 1999 and early 2000, in Malaysia, Thailand, and elsewhere, al Qaeda personnel surveyed airports and in-flight commercial airplanes to determine means by which the group’s operatives could later evade security measures.

17. From in or about December 1999 through in or about June 2000, al Qaeda selected operatives to pilot the airplanes to be hijacked and dispatched the operatives to the United States to obtain flight training and otherwise carry out the plot. Of this group of prospective pilot hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were the first to arrive in the United States, on or about January 15, 2000. They were followed by Marwan al-Shehhi, Mohamed Atta, and Ziad Jarrah, on or about May 29, 2000, June 3, 2000, and June 27, 2000, respectively.

18. From in or about June 2000 through in or about January 2001, Marwan al- Shehhi, Mohamed Atta, and Ziad Jarrah successfully completed pilot and jet-simulator training at flight schools and training centers in Florida. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi did not acquire the necessary pilot skills. Hani Hanjour traveled to the United States on or about December 8, 2000, after which he took pilot and jet-simulator training in Arizona. In 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, a co-conspirator not named as a defendant herein, traveled to the United States and took pilot and jet-simulator training in Oklahoma and Minnesota. Al Qaeda provided financial and logistical support to these prospective pilot hijackers while they were in the United States.

19. From in or about April 2001 through in or about June 2001, al Qaeda sent 13 additional hijackers to the United States to carry out the operation. These hijackers were supported by al Qaeda in traveling to the United States and after their arrival in the United States. These hijackers flew to the United States from Dubai, United Arab Emirates:

• a. Satam al~Suqami and Waleed al-Shehri arrived in Orlando, Florida, on or about April 23, 2001;
• b. Majed Moqed and Ahmed al-Ghamdi arrived in the Washington, D.C. area, on or about May 2, 2001;
• c. Harnza al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al~Nami, and Mohand al-Shehri arrived in Miami, Florida, on or about May 28, 2001;
• d. Ahmad al-Haznawi and Wail al-Shehri arrived in Miami, Florida, on or about June 8, 2001;
• e. Fayez Banihammad and Saeed al-Ghamdi arrived in Orlando, Florida, on or about June 27, 2001; and
• f. Abdul Aziz al-Omari and Salem al-Hazmi arrived in New York, on or about June 29, 2001.

20. From in or about May 2001 through on or about September 10, 2001, hijackers in the United States prepared for the hijacking operation by, among other activities, taking additional flight training; taking fitness training; purchasing knives; studying cross-country commercial flights; meeting overseas with al Qaeda leadership; and coordinating activities and locations in the United States.

21. From on or about August 25, 2001, through on or about August 31, 2001, 19 hijackers purchased or reserved tickets for the flights that they would hijack. In early September 2001, hijackers sent surplus funds overseas to al Qaeda.

22. On September 11, 2001, co-conspirators Mohamed Atta, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Satam al-Suqami hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, and flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

23. On September 11, 2001, co-conspirators Marwan al-Shehhi, Fayez Banihammad, Ahmed al-Ghamdi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, and Mohand al-Shehri hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, and flew it into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

24. On September 11, 2001, co-conspirators Hani Hanjour, Khalid al- Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, and Majed Moqed hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, bound from Virginia to Los Angeles, and flew it into the Pentagon.

25. On September 11, 2001, co-conspirators Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed al-Haznawi, Saeed al-Ghamdi, and Ahmed al-Nami hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, and after resistance from the passengers, crashed it in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. (In this Indictment, each hijacker will be identified with the flight number of the plane he hijacked.)

The Defendants

26. KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, the defendant, was closely associated with Usama Bin Laden, participated in the formulation of the plot resulting in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and was the plot’s operational leader.

27. WALID BIN ATTASH, the defendant, was closely associated with Usama Bin Laden and participated in the plot resulting in the September 11, 2001 attacks by, among other things, collecting information on matters related to airport and airplane security measures.

28. RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, the defendant, tried to become one of the pilot hijackers, but failed to obtain a visa for entry into the United States; instead, BIN AL-SHIBH managed the plot resulting in the September 11, 2001 attacks by, among other things, sending money to hijackers in the United States from abroad.

29. ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, the defendant, facilitated the plot resulting in the September 11, 2001 attacks by, among other things, sending money to hijackers in the United States from abroad.

30. MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendant, facilitated the plot resulting in the September 11, 2001 attacks by, among other things, helping the hijackers travel to the United States and facilitating their efforts upon arrival.

The Charge

31. From in or about 1999 until on or about March 1, 2003, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, in circumstances involving conduct transcending national boundaries, and in which the mail and facilities of interstate and foreign commerce were used in furtherance of the offense, the offense obstructed, delayed, and affected interstate and foreign commerce, the victim was the United States Government, members of the uniformed services, and officials, officers, employees, and agents of the governmental branches, departments, and agencies of the United States, and the structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property were, in whole and in part, owned, possessed, and leased to the United States and its departments and agencies, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed to violate Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332b(a).

32. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did kill, maim and assault resulting in serious bodily injury persons within the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, 111, 114, 1111, and 1114; Title 49, United States Code, Section 46502(a); New York Penal Law Sections 120.10, 120.11, and 125.27; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Section 2502, to wit, the murder on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment, and the maiming of and serious bodily injury to hundreds more.

33. It was a further part and object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did create a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to other persons by destroying and damaging structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property within the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, and 844(f) and (i); New York Penal Law Sections 150.20 and 120.25; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Sections 3301 and 3302(a), to wit, the destruction and damage of four commercial airplanes in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania; the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and surrounding structures and property in New York City; and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

Overt Acts

34. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal objects, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the following overt acts, among others, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere:

Origin of the Plot

35. In or before 1999, in Afghanistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED proposed to Usama Bin Laden a terrorist plot that would use airplanes as missiles to crash into buildings.

36. Thereafter, in or about 1999, in Afghanistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED discussed with Usama Bin Laden and members of al Qaeda’s “military committee” a plot in which al Qaeda operatives would hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into prominent buildings in the United States and elsewhere.

MOHAMMED Trains Hijackers

37. In or about 1999 and 2000, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED trained the hijackers to use short-bladed knives by killing sheep and camels.

38. In or about 1999 and 2000, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED trained the hijackers on how to conceal short-bladed knives through airport security.

39. In or about 1999 and 2000, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed the hijackers to obtain driver’s licenses when they arrived in the United States to facilitate their travel and lodging.

Co-Conspirators Seek U.S. Visas

40. On or about April 3, 1999, in Yemen, WALID BIN ATTASH applied for a U.S.-entry visa, using the name “Salah Saeed Mohammed Bin Yousaf,” which application was denied.

41. On or about the same day, April 3, 1999, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was granted.

42. On or about April 7, 1999, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was granted.

BIN ATTASH Tests Aviation Security

43. On or about December 31, 1999, WALID BIN ATTASH flew in first class on a United Airlines flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to Hong Kong, under the name “Saeed Mohammed Yousuf.”

44. On or about January 1, 2000, WALID BIN ATTASH flew in first class on a United Airlines flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok, Thailand, under the name “Saeed Mohammed Yusuf.”

45. On one and both of the United Airlines flights referred to in the preceding two paragraphs, WALID BIN ATTASH possessed a pocket knife and approached the cockpit to test security measures on the airplane.

46. In January 2000, WALID BIN ATTASH smuggled through airport security in Malaysia a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife.

47. On or about January 2, 2000, WALID BIN ATTASH flew from Bangkok, Thailand, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, under the name “Saleh Saeed Mohammed Binyousaf.”

48. On or about January 5, 2000, Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

49. On or about January 8, 2000, WALID BIN ATTASH, using the name “Salah Saeed Mohammed”; Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77); and Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) flew from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Bangkok, Thailand, on the same flight, seated in the same row of the airplane.

50. On or about January 15, 2000, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) and Khalid al~ Mihdhar (AA 77) flew on the same United Airlines flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to Los Angeles, California, through Hong Kong.

51. On or about January 20, 2000, WALID BIN ATTASH flew from Bangkok, Thailand, to Karachi, Pakistan, under the name “Saleh Saeed Mohammed Binyousaf.”

The Hamburg Cell

52. In or about 1999, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, Mohamed Atta (AA 11), Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175), Ziad Jarrah (UA 93), and others, were associated together in Hamburg, Germany.

53. On or about November 25, 1999, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) flew from Hamburg, Germany, to Karachi, Pakistan, through Istanbul, Turkey.

54. On or about November 29, 1999, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Hamburg, Germany, to Karachi, Pakistan, through Istanbul, Turkey.

55. On or about December 6, 1999, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH flew from Hamburg, Germany, to Karachi, Pakistan, through Istanbul, Turkey.

56. In or about January 2000, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, Mohamed Atta (AA 11), Mohand al-Shehri (UA 175), Ahmed al-Ghamdi (UA 175), and Saeed al-Ghamdi (UA 93) were together at an al Qaeda facility in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

57. On or about January 3, 2000, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI helped Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) obtain a Boeing 767-300 flight deck video.

58. On or about January 4, 2000, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI helped Marwan al- Shehhi (UA 175) obtain a Boeing 747 flight simulator software program.

59. On or about January 18, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) was issued a U.S.-entry visa.

60. On or about May 18, 2000, in Berlin, Germany, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) was issued a U.S.-entry visa.

61. On or about May 25, 2000, in Berlin, Germany, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) was issued a U.S.-entry visa.

62. On or about May 29, 2000, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) flew from Brussels, Belgium, to Newark, New Jersey.

63. On or about June 3, 2000, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Prague, Czech Republic, to Newark, New Jersey.

64. On or about June 27, 2000, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) flew from Munich, Germany, to Atlanta, Georgia.

65. From late June 2000 through early December 2000, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) received flight training at the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida.

66. From early July 2000 through mid-December 2000, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) received flight training at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida.

BIN AL-SHIBH Tries to Join Hijackers

67. On or about May 17, 2000, in Berlin, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied.

68. On or about June 15, 2000, in Berlin, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied.

69. On or about August 9, 2000, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH applied to enroll in a pilot training course at the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida.

70. On or about August 14, 2000, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH arranged to wire money from his account in Germany to the account of the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida.

71. In or about August 2000, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) attempted to enroll RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH in the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice, Florida.

72. On or about September 15, 2000, in Sana’a, Yemen, RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied.

73. On or about October 25, 2000, in Berlin, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied.

MOHAMMED Deputizes BIN AL-SHIBH

74. In early- to mid-2000, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED directed RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH to serve as an intermediary between MOHAMMED and the hijackers.

Overseas Financing

75. On or about April 16, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “Ali,” wired $5,000 to a bank account in California.

76. On or about June 13, 2000, in Hamburg, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH transferred approximately $2,700 to Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) in Manhattan, New York.

77. On or about June 21, 2000, in Hamburg, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH transferred approximately $1,800 to Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) in Manhattan, New York.

78. On or about June 29, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “Isam Mansar,” transferred $5,000 to Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) in Manhattan, New York.

79. On or about July 18, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “Isam Mansur,” transferred approximately $10,000 into a Florida SunTrust bank account in the names of Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175).

80. On or about July 26, 2000, in Hamburg, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH transferred approximately $1,700 to Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 375) in Florida.

81. On or about August 5, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “Isam Mansour,” transferred approximately $9,500 into a Florida SunTrust bank account in the names of Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175).

82. On or about August 29, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “Mr. AH,” transferred approximately $20,000 into a Florida SunTrust bank account in the names of Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175).

83. On or about September 17, 2000, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, using the name “HANI (Fawaz TRDNG),” transferred approximately $70,000 into a Florida SunTrust bank account in the names of Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175).

84. On or about September 26, 2000, in Hamburg, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH transferred approximately $4,100 to Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) in Florida.

MOHAMMED Manages the Plot

85. Beginning in or about April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED directed the funding and logistical support of the hijackers by instructing RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI to coordinate the movement of hijackers to the United States through the United Arab Emirates.

86. For example, in mid-April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED coached RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH on cover stories that he could teach a hijacker to use to avoid detection by border security.

87. In or about mid-April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI to send tens of thousands of dollars to the hijackers already in the United States, but to send the money in multiple transfers of smaller amounts, so as to avoid detection and loss of the funds.

88. In or about mid-April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED expressed frustration to RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH that a hijacker was not traveling to the United States sooner.

89. In or about mid-April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED directed MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI to gather certain materials when AL-HAWSAWI traveled to Kuwait.

90. In or about mid-April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED advised RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH that hijackers traveling through the United Arab Emirates at that time should contact ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI while MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI was traveling.

91. In mid- to late-April 2001, through RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED monitored the progress of a hijacker as he traveled to a country where he would apply for a new passport and a U.S.-entry visa.

92. In or about late April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED asked RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH whether hijackers in the United States had met to coordinate with each other and with other hijackers who were arriving in the United States.

93. In or about late April 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED advised RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH that he would soon be sending more hijackers to assist Mohamed Atta (AA 11) in the United States.

AZIZ ALI Maintains Contact With Hijackers

94. From 2000 through in or about June 2001, hijackers in the United States placed approximately 35 telephone calls to numbers associated with ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI.

Arrival of Additional Hijackers

95. On or about April 23, 2001, Satam al-Suqami (AA 11) and Waleed al- Shehri (AA 11) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Orlando, Florida.

96. On or about May 2, 2001, Majed Moqed (AA 77) and Ahmed al-Ghamdi (UA 175) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Dulles Airport in Virginia.

97. On or about May 28, 2001, Hamza al-Ghamdi (UA 175), Ahmed al-Nami (UA 93), and Mohand al-Shehri (UA 175) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Miami, Florida.

98. On or about June 8, 2001, Ahmad al-Haznawi (UA 93) and Wail al-Shehri (AA 11) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Miami, Florida.

99. On or about June 27, 2001, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) and Saeed al- Ghamdi (UA 93) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Orlando, Florida.

100. In making reservations for the flight referred to in the preceding paragraph, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) and Saeed al-Ghamdi (UA 93) each provided the contact telephone number 0505209905, a cellular telephone associated with MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI (the “AL-HAWSAWI Phone”).

101. On or about June 29, 2001, Abdul Aziz al~Omari (AA 11) and Salem al~ Hazmi (AA 77) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to New York.

102. In making reservations for the flight referred to in the preceding paragraph, Abdul Aziz al-Omari (AA 11) and Salem al-Hazmi (AA 77) each provided the AL-HAWSAWI Phone as a contact telephone number.

103. On or about July 4, 2001, Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) flew from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to New York.

BIN ATTASH Videotapes Hijacker’s Martyr Will

104. Before July 4, 2001, in an overseas location, WALID BIN ATTASH videotaped Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) reading a martyr will.

AL-HAWSAWI’s Support of Banihammad

105. On or about June 25, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI opened fixed deposit, current, and credit card accounts at a Standard Chartered Bank branch in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (collectively, the “AL-HAWSAWI Accounts”).

106. On or about June 25, 2001, at the Standard Chartered Bank branch referred to in the preceding paragraph, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) opened fixed deposit, current, and credit card accounts (collectively, the “Banihammad Accounts”).

107. On or about June 25, 2001, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) gave MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI written authority to pick up items connected to the Banihammad Accounts, namely, ATM and Visa cards, and associated access codes.

108. On or about July 23, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI caused the Visa card connected to the Banihammad Accounts to be shipped from the United Arab Emirates to Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) in Florida.

109. On or about August 1, 2001, the Visa card connected to the Banihammad Accounts was used to make three ATM withdrawals in North Boca Raton, Florida.

110. On or about August 21, 2001, approximately $4,900 was deposited into the Banihammad Accounts in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

111. On or about August 22, 2001, the Visa card connected to the Banihammad Accounts was used to withdraw approximately $4,800 at a bank in Boynton Beach, Florida, in the vicinity of where Fayez Banihammad (US 175) was living.

AL-HAWSAWI Maintains Contact With Hijackers

112. From in or about July 2001 through and including September 11, 2001, hijackers in the United States placed approximately 50 telephone calls to numbers associated with MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI.

Cross-Country Surveillance Flights

113. In or about May 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed Mohamed Atta (AA 11) and Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) to take cross-country flights to study in-flight security measures.

114. On or about May 24, 2001, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) flew first class from New York to San Francisco.

115. On or about June 7, 2001, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) flew first class from Hanover, Maryland, to Los Angeles.

116. On or about June 28, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew first class from Boston to San Francisco.

117. On or about July 31, 2001, Waleed al-Shehri (AA 11) flew first class from Boston to San Francisco.

118. On or about August 13, 2001, Hani Hanjour (AA 77) flew first class from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles.

BIN AL-SHIBH Maintains Contact With Hijackers

119. In or about July 2001, hijackers in the United States placed more than 70 telephone calls to numbers associated with RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH.

The Spain Meeting

120. On or about July 7, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Miami, Florida, to Zurich, Switzerland.

121. On or about July 8, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Zurich, Switzerland, to Madrid, Spain.

122. On or about July 8, 2001, in Hamburg, Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH purchased an airline ticket to Tarragona, Spain.

123. From on or about July 9, 2001, through on or about July 16, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and Mohamed Atta (AA 11) were in Tarragona, Spain, where they met and discussed, among other aspects of the plot, potential targets for the hijacking attacks.

124. After leaving Spain, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH reported to KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED about the meeting with Mohamed Atta (AA 11).

125. Thereafter, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI to take the actions described below, in paragraphs 128 through 131.

MOHAMMED Applies for U.S. Visa

126. On or about July 23, 2001, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED applied for a U.S.-entry visa, using the name “Abdulrahman A.A. Al-Ghamdi,” which application was denied.

Jarrah Travels to Germany

127. On or about July 25, 2001, Ziad Jarrah (UA 93) traveled from the United States to Germany.

Money Transfers to Moussaoui

128. On or about July 30, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, using the name ”Hashem Abderahman,” sent $5,000 from the United Arab Emirates to RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, who received the money in Hamburg, Germany, using the name “Ahad Abdollahi Sabet.”

129. On or about July 31, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, using the name ”Hashim Abdourahman,” sent $10,000 from the United Arab Emirates to RAMZI BIN AL- SHIBH, who received the money in Hamburg, Germany, using the name “Ahad Abdollani Sabet.”

130. On or about August 1, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, using the name “Ahad Abdollahi Sabet,” sent approximately $10,000 from Dusseldorf, Germany, to Zacarias Moussaoui in Oklahoma.

131. On or about August 3, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, using the name “Ahad Abdollahi Sabet,” sent approximately $4,000 from Hamburg, Germany, to Zacarias Moussaoui in Oklahoma.

Co-Conspirator Tries to Enter the United States

132. On or about August 4, 2001, a co-conspirator not named as a defendant herein (“Co-Conspirator 1″) flew from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Orlando International Airport, in Florida.

133. In making reservations for the flight referred to in the preceding paragraph, Co-Conspirator 1 provided the AL-HAWSAWI Phone as a contact telephone number.

134. At or about the time of Co-Conspirator 1 ‘s arrival, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) was at the Orlando International Airport, where he placed calls to the AL-HAWSAWI Phone.

135. Later that day, Co-Conspirator 1 was denied entry into the United States and took a return flight to Dubai through London.

The Las Vegas Meeting

136. In summer 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed some of the hijackers to meet in Las Vegas to make final preparations.

137. On or about August 13, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Reagan National Airport in Virginia to Las Vegas, Nevada.

138. On or about August 13, 2001, Hani Hanjour (AA 77) and Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) flew together from Virginia to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Purchases of Knives

139. On or about August 3, 2001, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Zacarias Moussaoui purchased two knives.

140. On or about August 13, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) purchased two knives.

141. On or about August 13, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) purchased a knife set.

142. On or about August 16, 2001, in Eagan, Minnesota, Zacarias Moussaoui was in possession of a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.

143. On or about August 27, 2001, in Laurel, Maryland, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) purchased a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.

144. On or about August 30, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Hamza al-Ghamdi (UA 175) purchased a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.

Attack Date Is Communicated to al Qaeda Leadership

145. In late August 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED was advised of the date that the hijacking attacks would be carried out, and MOHAMMED notified Usama Bin Laden of it.

146. In early September 2001, in Afghanistan, WALID BIN ATTASH was advised of the date that the hijacking attacks would be carried out.

AZIZ ALI Tries to Join Hijackers

147. On or about August 27, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied. On the application, AZIZ ALI indicated that he expected to travel to the United States on September 4, 2001, and that he expected to stay “one week” (i.e., until September 11, 2001).

148. Shortly thereafter, when KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED learned that ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALPs application for a visa had been denied, MOHAMMED sent a message that AZIZ ALI should travel to meet MOHAMMED.

Hijackers Return Excess Funds

149. On or about September 4, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) sent a package via Federal Express to a post office box in the United Arab Emirates used by MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI.

150. On or about September 5, 2001, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) wired approximately $8,000 from his Florida SunTrust account to the Banihammad Accounts over which MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI had authority and control.

151. On or about September 8, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) wired approximately $2,860 to “Mustafa Ahmed” in the United Arab Emirates.

152. On or about September 8, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) wired $5,000 to “Mustafa Ahmed” in the United Arab Emirates.

153. On or about September 9, 2001, Waleed al-Shehri (AA 11) wired $5,000 to “Ahanad Mustafa” in the United Arab Emirates.

154. On or about September 10, 2001, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) wired $5,400 to “Mustafa Ahmad” in the United Arab Emirates.

155. On or about September 10, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) mailed the ATM card for the First Union bank account of Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) to a post office box used by MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Mihdhar’s account had a balance of approximately $10,000 at the time.

156. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, approximately $16,348 was deposited into the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts.

BIN AL-SHIBH Flees

157. On or about September 3, 2001, in Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, using the name “Ahad Abdoflahi Sabet,” received $1,500 that was sent by MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI, using the name “Hashem Abdollahi.”

158. On or about September 5, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH traveled from Dusseldorf, Germany, to Madrid, Spain, and did not return to Germany.

159. On or shortly before September 9, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH was in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he instructed ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI and MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI to depart the United Arab Emirates.

160. On or shortly before September 11, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH departed the United Arab Emirates.

161. On or about September 12, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH was in Afghanistan.

AZIZ ALI Flees

162. On or about September 9, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI made a one-way reservation to travel from Dubai to Karachi, Pakistan.

163. On or about September 10, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI withdrew nearly all the balance from two bank accounts.

164. Later on or about September 10, 2001, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI flew from Dubai to Karachi, Pakistan, on a one-way ticket.

AL-HAWSAWI Flees

165. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, at about 9:22 a.m. local time (the early morning hours of Eastern Daylight Time), MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI moved approximately $6,534 of the $8,000 in the Banihammad Accounts into the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts, using a check dated September 10, 2001; AL-HAWSAWI then withdrew approximately $1,361, nearly all the remaining balance in the Banihammad Accounts, by ATM cash withdrawal.

166. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, approximately $40,871 was prepaid to a Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts.

167. On or about September 11, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI left the United Arab Emirates for Pakistan.

The September 11. 2001 Terrorist Attacks

168. On September 11, 2001, the hijackers possessed a handwritten set of final instructions for a martyrdom operation using knives on an airplane.

169. On September 11, 2001, Mohamed Atta, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, Satam al-Suqarni, Waleed al-Shehri, and Wail al-Shehri hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, which had departed from Boston bound for Los Angeles at 7:59 a.m. They flew Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at 8:46 a.m., causing the collapse of the tower, great damage and destruction to other structures and property, and injury and death to thousands of persons.

170. On September 11, 2001, Marwan al-Shehhi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al-Shehri, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767, which had departed from Boston bound for Los Angeles at 8:14 a.m. They flew Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at 9:03 a.m., causing the collapse of the tower, great damage and destruction to other structures and property, and injury and death to thousands of persons.

171. On September 11, 2001, Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Salem al-Hazmi hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, which had departed from Virginia bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 a.m. They flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon in Virginia at 9:37 a.m., causing great damage and destruction to property and injury and death to hundreds of persons.

172. On September 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Ahmed al-Haznawi hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757, which had departed from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. After resistance by the passengers, the hijackers crashed Flight 93 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, at approximately 10:03 a.m., killing all on board.

Bin Laden and BIN ATTASH Hear News of the Attacks

173. On September 11, 2001, WALID BIN ATTASH was with Usama Bin Laden in Afghanistan when they heard for the first time that airplanes had struck the World Trade Center.

174. Shortly thereafter, Usama Bin Laden instructed WALID BIN ATTASH to travel to the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan and prepare the area by digging trenches and stockpiling food, weapons, and ammunition.

Withdrawals of Hijackers’ Excess Funds

175. On or about August 25,2001, in the United Arab Emirates, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI applied for a supplemental Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts, which application was made in the name “Abdulrahman Abdullah al-Ghamdi,” an alias used by KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED. The application was supported by documentation associated with MOHAMMED, including his photograph.

176. On or about September 13, 2001, the supplemental Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts was used to make six ATM withdrawals in Karachi, Pakistan.

Post-Attack Propaganda and Efforts to Avoid Capture

177. On or about October 7, 2001, a video was aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel in which Usama Bin Laden praised the September 11, 2001 attacks.

178. After September 11, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI met with Usama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. The meeting was videotaped.

179. On or about September 10, 2002, Usama Bin Laden videotaped a message in which he identified the 19 hijackers by name and “kunya.”

180. On or about March 1, 2003, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI were present at a safe house where they possessed false identification and materials related to al Qaeda and the planning and execution of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

(Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332b(a)(2) & (c)(1)(a).)

COUNT TWO

Acts of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries

The Grand Jury further charges:

181. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

182. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, in circumstances involving conduct transcending national boundaries, and in which the mail and facilities of interstate and foreign commerce were used in furtherance of the offense, the offense obstructed, delayed, and affected interstate and foreign commerce, the victim was the United States Government, members of the uniformed services, and officials, officers, employees, and agents of the governmental branches, departments, and agencies of the United States, and the structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property were, in whole and in part, owned, possessed, and leased to the United States and its departments and agencies, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly (1) killed, maimed, and assaulted resulting in serious bodily injury thousands of persons within the United States, including the 2,976 murdered persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, 111, 114, 1111, and 1114; Title 49, United States Code, Section 46502(a); New York Penal Law Sections 120.10, 120.11, and 125.27; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Section 2502, and (2) created a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to other persons by destroying and damaging structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property within the United States, namely, four commercial airplanes in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania; the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and surrounding structures and property in New York City; and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, and 844(f) and (i); New York Penal Law Sections 150.20 and 120.25; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Sections 3301 and 3302(a).

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 2332b(a)(l) & (c)(1)(A) and 2.)

COUNT THREE

Conspiracy to Commit Violent Acts and Destroy Aircraft

The Grand Jury further charges:

183. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

184. From in or about 1999 until on or about March 1, 2003, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed to violate Title 18, United States Code, Section 32.

185. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did destroy and wreck aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 32(a)(1), to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

186. It was a further part and object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did perform acts of violence against and incapacitate individuals on aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, so as likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 32(a)(5) (2001), to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

Overt Acts

187. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal objects, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, which are fully incorporated by reference.

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32(a)(7) (2001) and 34.)

COUNT FOUR

Violence on and Destruction of Aircraft

The Grand Jury further charges:

188. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

189. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly destroyed and wrecked aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and performed acts of violence against and incapacitated individuals on such aircraft, so as likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32(a)(1) & (5) (2001), 34, and 2.)

COUNT FIVE

Conspiracy to Commit Aircraft Piracy

The Grand Jury further charges:

190. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

191. From in or about 1999 until on or about March 1, 2003, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, knowingly, and with wrongful intent, combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed to commit aircraft piracy, by seizing and exercising control of aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States by force, violence, threat of force and violence, and intimidation, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

Overt Acts

192. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal objects, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, which are fully incorporated by reference.

(Title 49, United States Code, Section 46502(a)(1)(A) & (a)(2)(B).)

COUNT SIX

Aircraft Piracy

The Grand Jury further charges:

193. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

194. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, knowingly, and with wrongful intent, committed aircraft piracy, by seizing and exercising control of aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States by force, violence, threat of force and violence, and intimidation, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.

(Title 49, United States Code, Sections 46502(a)(1)(A) & (a)(2)(B) and 2.)

COUNTS SEVEN AND EIGHT

Murder of United States Officers and Employees

The Grand Jury further charges:

195. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

196. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, deliberately, with premeditation and malice aforethought, and perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of a human being other than him who is killed, killed an officer and employee of the United States and agencies and branches thereof, while such officer and employee was engaged in, and on account of, the performance of official duties, to wit, the deaths of the following persons at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001:

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1111, 1114 and 2.)

COUNT NINE

Destruction of the Twin Towers

The Grand Jury further charges:

197. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

198. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, maliciously, and knowingly damaged and destroyed, by means of fire and explosives, buildings, vehicles, and other real and personal property used in interstate and foreign commerce and in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce, to wit, the destruction and damage of two commercial airplanes, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and surrounding structures and property in New York City, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment, including hundreds of public safety officers performing duties as a direct and proximate result of the said damage and destruction.

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 844(i) and 2.)

COUNT TEN

Al Qaeda Conspiracy to Kill Americans

The Grand Jury further charges:

199. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.

200. From in or about 1989 until the date of the filing of this Indictment, outside the United States, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, together with members of the terrorist group known as al Qaeda, affiliated terrorist organizations, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed together and with each other to kill nationals of the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332(b).

201. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did murder United States nationals anywhere in the world, including the United States.

Overt Acts

202. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal object, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, and the following overt acts, among others:

203. In mid-1999, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and Usama Bin Laden together visited a covert training facility in the vicinity of Kabul, Afghanistan, where trainees were prohibited from using their true names and the curriculum included instruction in surveillance, counter-surveillance, and assessment of potential targets for terrorist attack.

204. In or about January 2000, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH attended a speech given by Usama Bin Laden in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

205. In early- to mid-2000, in Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED discussed United States interests in Australia as targets for a terrorist attack.

206. In or about mid-2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan, WALID BIN ATTASH served as a member of Usama Bin Laden’s security detail.

207. In summer 2000, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI was present in al Qaeda facilities in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan, including the place where the group conducted its “media” operation.

208. From at least in or about May 2001 until at least in or about October 2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan and Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED worked to influence media reports about issues of interest to al Qaeda.

209. In November and December 2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan and Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI participated in a plot to attack airplanes bound for the United States with “shoe bombs.”

210. On or about April 29, 2003, in Pakistan, WALID BIN ATTASH possessed approximately 400 to 500 kilograms of explosives to be used to attack Americans.

(Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332(b)(2).)

Notice of Special Findings

a. The allegations of Counts One through Nine of this Indictment are hereby realleged as if fully set forth herein and incorporated by reference.

b. As to Counts One through Nine of this Indictment, the defendants KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI:

• (1) were more than 18 years of age at the time of the offense, (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a));
• (2) intentionally killed the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(A));
• (3) intentionally inflicted serious bodily injury that resulted in the deaths of the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(B));
• (4) intentionally participated in an act, contemplating that the life of a person would be taken and intending that lethal force would be used in connection with a person, other than one of the participants in the offense, and the victims died as a direct result of the acts. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(C));
• (5) intentionally and specifically engaged in an act of violence, knowing that the act created a grave risk of death to a person, other than one of the participants in the offense, such that participation in the act constituted a reckless disregard for human life and the victims died as a direct result of the act. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(D));
• (6) in committing the offenses described in Counts One through Nine of the Indictment, knowingly created a grave risk of death to one or more persons in addition to the victims of the offense. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(5));
• (7) committed the offenses described in Counts One through Nine in an especially heinous, cruel, and depraved manner in that they involved serious physical abuse to the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(6));
• (8) committed the offenses described in Counts One through Nine after substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and commit an act of terrorism. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(9)); and
• (9) intentionally killed and attempted to kill more than one person in a single criminal episode. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(16).)

(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 3591 and 3592.)

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

Getting to the bottom of what actually happened to Dr. Siddiqui — and, specifically, whether she was held by the US, or by Pakistanis, and whether, as it appears, the entire Ghazni scenario and the subsequent trial and sentence was a sham and a cover-up, designed to silence her forever without actually killing her outright — has been a long, hard struggle for those seeking the truth, and it is with great pleasure, therefore, that I’m cross-posting below a compelling article by the journalist Victoria Brittain discussing the recent emergence of tape recordings of conversations in Pakistan between someone concerned by Dr. Siddiqui’s case, and a source who explained how she — and two of her children, who reappeared in 2009 and 2010 — were indeed held by the ISI, although undoubtedly with the full knowledge of the US, as is made clear from an analysis of the trial by one of Aafia’s lawyers, Linda Moreno.

The Aafia Siddiqui Case: A New Turn As Lawyers Release Explosive, Secretly Recorded Tape
By Victoria Brittain, CounterPunch, February 14, 2011

In 2003 an MIT-educated expert in children’s learning patterns, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, disappeared with her three children in Pakistan. Was she, as the Americans said, an Al-Qaeda operative who in 2008 emerged after five years undercover, carrying a handbag full of chemicals and plans for major terror attacks in the US, and then attempted to shoot US soldiers? Or was she, as her family, and most people in Pakistan have always maintained, seized by Pakistani agents for reasons unknown?

Now new evidence of the kidnapping of Dr Siddiqui prises open part of one of the most shocking of the myriad individual stories of injustice in the “War on Terror.” It also underlines the recklessness and perfidy of a key United States’ partner in the “War on Terror,” which carries its own threat of explosion.

Dr. Siddiqui was sentenced in a New York court last year to 86 years for the attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Her mysterious five-year disappearance before that, her reappearance in Afghanistan in 2008, her subsequent trial in the US, and the confusion surrounding all these events, have made Dr. Siddiqui’s a symbolic case in much of the Muslim world. Now a senior law enforcement officer has claimed to have been involved personally on the day she was seized, with her three children, by Pakistani police agents in Karachi in March 2003 and handed over to the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.

The FBI put out a “wanted for questioning” alert for Dr. Siddiqui just before she disappeared. She was later high on the US wanted list, with the US claiming that she was living undercover as an Al-Qaeda agent. She was a “clear and present danger to the US”, the then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft said in 2004. For all these years the Pakistani government repeatedly denied holding her, and after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008 spent $2 million on US lawyers for her trial. After her conviction, the Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani committed himself to work for her return from a US prison. Dr. Siddiqui had become “the daughter of the nation” and the centre of a popular cause he could not afford to ignore.

The new evidence, on a secretly recorded audio tape, is a potential earthquake in the chronically unstable political situation in Pakistan, where rage against the US runs deep and wide, especially as civilian casualties mount with the use of drone aircraft. Already the case of Aafia Siddiqui has periodically brought tens of thousands of people out on the streets in the last two and a half years in protest at what has been done to her by the United States’ military and legal systems since she reemerged, in US custody and seriously wounded, in 2008.

The Pakistani media have always claimed that the ISI was responsible for her disappearance and that the Americans were involved too. The tape reopens the whole question, not just of Dr. Siddiqui, but of the corroding effect of the US alliance with Pakistan’s military and intelligence elite in a “War on Terror,” which has had so many Pakistani victims. The ISI has run its own agendas, hand-in-glove with various US officials at various periods, ever since the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then becoming godfathers of various Afghan factions tearing that country apart. There are plenty of astute Pakistani journalists with the language skills to use this tape to the utmost to embarrass their own security services and the government.

For the US too there are questions to answer about the extensive cover-up of what happened to Dr. Siddiqui and her three children — two of whom are US citizens, and appear to have spent five traumatized years separated from their mother and from each other, in various prisons. It is scarcely credible that high officials in the Bush and Obama administrations over the years were unaware of what their troublesome allies in Pakistan had done with her and her children.

On April 21 2003, a “senior U.S. law enforcement official” told Lisa Myers of NBC Nightly News that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. “At the time,” Myers told Harpers Magazine, “we thought there was a possibility perhaps he’d spoken out of turn.”

According to the Associated Press, “[t]wo federal law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, initially said 31-year-old Aafia Siddiqui recently was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.” But later, “the US officials amended their earlier statements, saying new information from the Pakistani government made it ‘doubtful’ she was in custody.”

An FBI spokesperson also formally denied that the agency had any knowledge of Dr. Siddiqui’s whereabouts, stating that the FBI was not aware that she was in any nation’s custody.

Dr. Siddiqui’s mother was visited by an unknown man a few hours after her disappearance and warned to keep her mouth shut if she ever wanted to see her daughter and grandchildren again. In 2003, in a closed hearing when the FBI had subpoenaed some documents from Dr. Siddiqui’s sister, an FBI official confirmed to her family that she was alive and well, but would answer no questions on her whereabouts.

The new audio evidence was secretly taped in a social situation last year; children can be heard in the background. It was given, unsolicited, to one of the many lawyers involved in Dr. Siddiqui’s case in the US. The source, whose identity has been protected, told lawyers at the International Justice Network that he had made the tape after a social evening when he had heard shocking things about Pakistani counter terrorism, about the fabrication of evidence, and about Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance, discussed casually by a senior official. He felt outraged and returned for a second evening with a recorder and got some of the previous discussion repeated. “If it can help anyone I had to do it,” he said to the IJN Executive Director Tina Foster who has represented Dr. Siddiqui’s family since January 2010. IJN are experienced hands in war on terror cases. They represent a number of prisoners in Bagram air base prison in Afghanistan, some of them rendered from Abu Ghraib, Dubai and Thailand by the CIA, as well as several disappeared people in Pakistan.)

The witness is a Pakistani/American and he has been extensively interviewed by IJN’s lawyers, who tell me they are entirely  confident of the tape’s authenticity, the source’s account and thus the identity of the prime subject.

IJN’s source says he was introduced by a mutual friend whose home he was visiting, to a man he identified to lawyers at the International Justice Network as Imran Shaukat, the Superintendent of Police for Sindh province.

A full report, and the four hour tape, in Urdu, Punjabi and English, was released by the International Justice Network in the United States at 6am EDT on Monday February 14, and can be accessed here with the permission of the witness. Portions of the tape concerning Dr. Siddiqui were made available to this reporter and were independently translated for this article.

Mr. Shaukat (who is voice 2 on the tape) says, “I am stationed in Karachi. I head the counter terrorism department for Sindh province.”

In the key passage in the tape for the Siddiqui case he is asked by:

Voice 1 (who is the witness): ”Did you arrest her?”

V2: “Yes, I arrested her. She wore glasses and a veil … When she was caught she was travelling to Islamabad … She was hobnobbing with clerics …

V1: “ So what happened after the arrest. Did ISI ask for her custody?”

V2: “Yes, we gave her to ISI”

V1: “ISI or something else?”

V2: “ISI, so we gave her to them.”

Mr. Shaukat also describes her as “stick thin” and “a psycho”, and, elsewhere as “not a handler, a minor facilitator” — presumably for Al-Qaeda — and he mentions a connection to Osama Bin Laden. Asked then why couldn’t she help them get Bin Laden, he replies, “Well, they are not fools. They wouldn’t inform her of their forwarding address.” And he says too about the children, “we took them with us. They were American nationals, children are American nationals, they were all born there.”

There is some discussion on the tape about the return of her daughter, Maryam. (Two unidentified voices are also heard.)

V1: Oh, another thing. They found her daughter yesterday.

V2: She’s home already.

V1: Yes, she’s home. She speaks English only. She was in the prison. She is seven or eight years old. And she only speaks English.

UM1: Eight years old?

V1: Yeah. Children were in prison and they spoke to them in American English.

UM1: Is she home?

V1: Yeah. They got her home.

V2: It’s five or six months.

UM2: Is she in Karachi?

V1: She got home today, yesterday.

V2: Well, it goes back to before I came here.

V1: I read the news just yesterday, today. Maybe, in the night.

V2: It’s two or three months old.

All that has been reported in the public domain to date is that Maryam was returned a day or two before the recording. But, according to the childrens’ lawyer, Tina Foster, Mr. Shaukat’s description is consistent with how Maryam was repatriated to Pakistan.

Elsewhere in the tape Imran Shaukat talks about how the Pakistani police and ISI work to “disappear” or to use people they have taken into custody. According to Amina Masood Janjua at Defence for Human Rights, there are currently about 500 people who have disappeared in Pakistan as part of the “War on Terror” — this does not include Sindhi and Balochi separatists. Part of the audio describes the doctoring or manufacturing of documents, creating false identities, using body doubles, with reference to various terrorist attacks, including Mumbai. “This is a game of double dealing, direct them right and exit left,” Mr. Shaukat says at one point.

Such details are an explanation of the extraordinary litany of contradictory stories about Dr. Siddiqui, including curious reported sightings by family members, that were launched into the public domain over the five years after her disappearance. In this John Le Carré world of ruthless manipulation of the vulnerable, it is impossible to know how, or whether, she could have been used in counter-terrorism’s goal at the time of finding Osama Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

From other sources it has been established that Dr. Siddiqui was separated from her children for the five years of her ordeal, and that the two older children, born in 1996 and 1998, were not together, but in separate prisons, and that the third child, Suleman, who was six months old on the day of the disappearance, probably died then.

For nearly eight years now, manufactured confusion has surrounded the disappearance and the subsequent whereabouts of Dr. Siddiqui and her three children.

The confusion only deepened with the second section of the story, which was her mysterious reappearance in 2008 in Afghanistan, and the bizarre circumstances of her being seriously wounded by two shots to the stomach by a US soldier. John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer with extensive background in Al-Qaeda-related work, told ABC News, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody as important and as well connected as she since 2003. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning of, a wide variety of different operations.” Such statements set the tone for the Western media on her return under arrest to the US.

Her subsequent trial in New York, ending with the 86-year sentence, is the third section, when, extraordinarily, Al-Qaeda and terrorism were not made part of the case against her, which was narrowly focussed on the alleged attempted murder incident.

Dr. Siddiqui’s background was an unexceptional one of a highly-educated young woman from a privileged, professional family, some of them settled in the US and most of them educated in the West. She spent a decade studying at universities in Texas, and at MIT — where she graduated in biology summa cum laude — and at Brandeis, where she took a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. She specialized in the science of how children learn, and in addition had a class teaching dyslexic children. Besides her academic work she lived a busy life in the Muslim community in Boston, attending cake sales and auctions to raise money for Muslim refugees in the Bosnian war. She was married to a doctor from Pakistan in a classic arranged ceremony conducted by phone. The couple had two children.

Life in Boston soured when her marriage began to break down. There are reports from her professors in Boston that they saw her with bruises on her face. And her husband, Dr. Amjad Khan, told Harpers Magazine reporter Petra Bartosiewicz in 2008 that his wife had once had to go to hospital after he threw a bottle at her. There are photographs of her with a deep cut across her face. She returned home to Pakistan in late 2001. In a brief reconciliation back in the US a few months later she became pregnant with her third child. On August 15, 2002, after an incident in which witnesses claim that Dr. Khan pushed him, Dr. Siddiqui’s father collapsed and died of a heart attack. A few days later, while Dr. Siddiqui was still pregnant with their youngest child, Suleman, Amjad Khan separated from her and immediately married again. Dr. Khan gave custody of the children to Dr. Siddiqui on condition they received an exclusively Islamic education.

Dr. Khan came under FBI suspicion in May 2002 for various items purchased by him on the internet when the couple were living in Boston. He said they were for big game hunting, and he was not arrested, but both he and his wife had come under suspicion.

In March, 2003, a global alert went out with both of them wanted for questioning by the FBI. A few weeks after Aafia Siddiqui disappeared, her husband had a four-hour interview with US and Pakistani agents, and US suspicions of  Dr. Khan were dropped. About two months later Dr. Khan travelled to Saudi Arabia for some time.

Dr. Khan told Harpers Magazine that his “contacts in the agencies” informed him then that Dr. Siddiqui had gone underground. He went on to say that he had no idea where his children were — a claim he would later contradict. He also told Harpers that he and his driver saw Dr. Siddiqui in a taxi in Karachi in 2005. But they did not follow her. After her arrest in 2008 Dr. Khan told a reporter from the Pakistani daily News that he thought his former wife was an “extremist” and that of course she had been on the run. After Ms. Bartosiewicz left Pakistan, she had an email from Dr. Khan saying that he had received “confidential good news” from the ISI that Mariam and Suleman were “alive and well” with their aunt Fowzia. (In fact at that point one was in prison and the other was dead.)

Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance in March 2003 came amid a feverish whirl of arrests and disappearances in Pakistan, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed to have been the mastermind of 9/11, and many other Al-Qaeda related attacks, and has been named as the killer of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was important enough to the Americans to be water-boarded 183 times. Shortly after Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi [aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali], was arrested in connection with 9/11. The two men were taken to Guantánamo Bay, then to various CIA-run secret prisons known as “black sites” for torture, before being returned to Guantánamo Bay.

US officials then had Dr. Siddiqui on an Al-Qaeda “wanted” list and linked her to Baluchi, claiming he was her second husband. Her family, and other sources in Pakistan have denied the marriage, but it remains probably the most repeated detail about her and the one that has given her an indelible image as a terrorist. This was not the only lurid story about her — she was also alleged in a UN report to have been a courier of blood diamonds from Liberia for Al-Qaeda with a sighting reported there in June 2001. Her lawyer, Elaine Sharp, stated that Dr. Siddiqui had been in Boston at that time and she could prove it. That story died away, but the further damage to her reputation was done.

For five years nothing sure was in the public domain about what happened to her and the children, though the rumours grew, turning her into a tragic martyr for many, or a poster for Al-Qaeda ruthlessness for others. Several former detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan claimed to have seen her there, while US officials quoted in WikiLeaks denied she had been.

A senior Pakistani journalist, Najeeb Ahmed, followed the story for five years and reported witness testimony of someone who claimed to have been part of the arresting team, which he said was a joint operation with the FBI. (Mr. Ahmed made a public statement about his research in 2009, but died the next day, reportedly of a heart attack.)

In mid-July 2008 Pakistanti lawyers filed a habeas corpus claim for Dr. Siddiqui in Islamabad. And within days, in Act 2 of the drama, Aafia Siddiqui reappeared, in Ghazni, in Afghanistan, allegedly carrying in her handbag chemicals, instructions for making biological weapons, and plans for terrorist strikes with mass casualties in the US. She was then involved in a shooting incident in a police station in Ghazni in which she was badly wounded by a US soldier. It is uncontested that she was seated behind a curtain in a small room, where, according to the US soldiers, one of them put down his gun and she came from behind the curtain, seized it and attempted to shoot. She says she merely looked round the curtain. None of the soldiers or FBI personnel present were hurt, but she was hospitalized with two shots in her abdomen and brought under arrest to the US.

Act 3 was her trial in New York for attempted murder of soldiers and FBI agents with an M4 rifle, picked up from the floor near a US soldier. There were no charges of terrorism or Al-Qaeda links.

Dr. Siddiqui had a tangle of high-flying legal teams, several of whom were not on good terms. Her first court-appointed lawyer, Liz Fink, a famous New York political lawyer, withdrew, and the second team, appointed by the court, was headed by Dawn Cardi, an expert in matrimonial and family law. The lawyers funded by the Pakistani government were led by Linda Moreno, an attorney with successful experiences in two high- profile war on terror-related cases, those of Professor Sami Al-Arian and Ghassan Elashi, and who is a Guantánamo Bay defence lawyer with security clearance. Ms. Moreno is also known for earlier political work as one of the lawyers for the American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Her team included Charles Swift, formerly a military defender of Guantánamo detainees who made a reputation as a critic of the Military Commission system, and Elaine Sharp.

Even the narrow grounds of the case on the shooting was full of curiosities and contradictions: there was no physical evidence on the gun of Dr. Siddiqui having held it, no bullet casings from it or holes in the walls of the small room where it took place, except from the other gun which wounded her. Defence counsel made two visits to Afghanistan to get the forensic evidence, which could, and should, have got the whole case dismissed. Linda Moreno described the defence forensic case as “very compelling, with no physical evidence whatsoever that she ever touched the gun … no DNA, no fingerprints, no bullets recovered, no bullet holes.” The military and FBI witnesses, Ms. Moreno said, contradicted each other, and under cross-examination even contradicted their own earlier stories. She went on to say that “the government wanted to scare the jury with stories of her alleged terrorist past, and steered away from the actual case.”

One key piece of evidence was not in the trial and only emerged from WikiLeaks, which revealed a Defense Department report that was not released by the military, so was unavailable as evidence in Dr Siddiqui’s defence. The incident report does not say Dr. Siddiqui fired the gun she is alleged to have snatched and fired, merely that she “pointed” it. “Six American soldiers took the stand — powerful testimony for a jury. I argued, what happened at the front, stays at the front. The WikiLeaks document would have added to my argument about the dubious credibility of the soldiers,” Ms. Moreno told me.

Dr. Siddiqui’s relations with her lawyers were impossibly difficult and she tried repeatedly to fire them. Most never saw her except in court. Linda Moreno told me,  “She was clearly damaged — extraordinarily frail, very tiny. It broke my heart when Aafia did not trust anyone, me, the other lawyers … although I could understand it. She reminded me of American Indian resisters I worked with way back … her resistance was clearly to the legal process and she saw all the attorneys as part of that process.”

Against the lawyers’ strongest advice, Dr. Siddiqui spoke in court herself. She said that she had been tortured, and rendered to the US, and that her children were also tortured in “the secret prison.” The government never rebutted these allegations. But she lost the jury, who looked openly sceptical. “Sadly, she came over as sometimes arrogant and capricious, and sometimes rambling,” according to Ms. Moreno. Another observer said, “she was very articulate, intelligent, well-spoken, and people mistook that for well-functioning.”

With so much confected fear and prejudice against her going back years, a media that did not hold back in its characterization of her as Al-Qaeda Mommy, and the impact of six soldiers testifying against her, a New York jury’s guilty verdict was probably a foregone conclusion. But Judge Berman’s sentence that would put her away for life was not. Ms. Moreno described the event: “In my 30 years of trials I have never seen anything like what happened on sentencing day — the judge walked into court and handed out pre-printed power point presentations on how he had come to decide on 86 years …”

Two veteran lawyers not connected with this case, but with extensive experience in other cases related to the “War on Terror,” described the sentence, respectively, as “extraordinary”, “ridiculous … outrageous”, and one described the case as “absolutely full of holes.” An appeal is planned.

Meanwhile part of the story of the missing five years is in the heads of two of her three children — the two older ones who are US citizens. When they emerged — separately — in Pakistan, they were reunited with Dr. Siddiqui’s mother, and her sister, Fowzia, who is a Harvard-trained child psychiatrist and neurologist, in Karachi. They have never told their stories, but even the little that is known hints at the horror this family has lived through.

The older one, Ahmed, then aged 12, told his aunt that he only met his mother the day after she was picked up in Ghazni, and that he did not recognize her after five years apart. Fuzzy film footage of them together, being questioned in a press conference the day after his mother was found, has long circulated on the internet. This was the morning before the shooting incident.

Ahmed remembers nothing about what happened to him next, only that he was visited by a US consular official in Afghanistan who told him that he was a US citizen. The official also told him that his brother, Suleman, was dead.

Ahmed remembers being taken out of the taxi where he was with his mother and siblings five years before, and remembers, before he lost consciousness, seeing the baby, six month old Suleman, lying in the road and bleeding. Ahmed told his aunt that he had been called Ali, and several other different names, while he was in custody, and that when he was told his name now was Ahmed, he knew that meant he was going to be moved again. She initially reported that he was suffering from PTSD and that he needed extensive psychological help.

His sister Maryam reappeared nearly two years later, in April 2010. She spoke perfect English with an American accent and no Urdu. She was simply dropped off outside the family home in Karachi with a note on a string around her neck. At some stage the Afghan prime minister Hamid Karzai was contacted by the family for help in getting both children back.

There are very powerful vested interests that have worked to prevent Dr. Siddiqui from ever giving an account that would be believed of what happened to her. The same interests are still at work trying to prevent the two children from ever becoming witnesses in this back story of the “War on Terror.” Late last year a kidnap attempt was made on the children, despite the family home being guarded by armed Pakistani police 24 hours a day. Two men, carrying firearms and holding big sacks, were found behind the door of the children’s bedroom by their grandmother. The men ran off when she screamed, and were driven away by a waiting car nearby, before the police guards to the house could catch them.

The release of the tape gives a lever to Pakistani public opinion and Pakistani opposition politicians such as Imran Khan, who have long supported the family, towards forcing an end to this sinister ordeal, with the return home of Dr. Siddiqui.

And there is another lever just now. Tina Foster of IJN has written to the Interior Minister Mr. Rehman Malik, reminding him that in over a year of meetings he has been promising to help in Dr. Siddiqui’s repatriation. The letter says that now, when the US is demanding the return of the US government employee Raymond Davis, held after a shooting incident in Pakistan in which he is alleged to have killed two men, is the government’s best ever chance to negotiate an exchange. The new threat by some congressmen to withhold aid from Pakistan if he is not returned, Hilary Clinton cancelling a meeting with Pakistan’s foreign minister, and the report of possible espionage charges against Davis, ratchet up a pressure that could change the prospects for Dr. Siddiqui.

Whether Dr. Siddiqui will ever be able to tell the full story of what happened to her over five years is another question. It is hard to imagine making anything close a recovery from such multiple personal and family trauma, in which she was isolated from every solid link with her past identity. Did the ISI use her, or her identity, on errands to Al-Qaeda? “A minor facilitator”, as the tape calls her? The contradictions in her own reported words, such as allegedly telling FBI agents while she was in a military hospital shot through the stomach and in restraints, that she was indeed married to the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew Baluchi, are manifold, but not any guide to the truth.

In her initial weeks in a US prison in Brooklyn, she exhibited deeply disturbed behaviour such as saying she was saving her food for her children. Her mental state has since deteriorated and is very unpredictable, according to lawyer Elaine Sharp, who has visited her several times. She is now incarcerated in solitary confinement in the Carswell Federal Medical Centre at Fort Worth, Texas, the only US prison medical facility for women. She has no contact with the outside world. Three of the four prison psychiatrists who interviewed her for the court said they believed she was “malingering” and that her mental illness was faked. But, given the record of some doctors’ contribution to government work in the “War on Terror,” it is hard to find this persuasive in the face of the known facts of her separation from her children in traumatic circumstances, her long isolation, and the documented brutal procedures of the ISI in many other cases.

In the US, none of the lawyers, doctors, politicians and intelligence agents who devised and participated in the horrors done to so many individuals as part of the “War on Terror” have paid any price in public for it. But in this case there is the force of public opinion in Pakistan, which will demand nothing less than public trials of those responsible for ordering Dr. Siddiqui’s kidnapping, as well as those who carried it out, and were part of the vast charade that has been played with her over those years.

Victoria Brittain is a former associate foreign editor of the Guardian, and a Patron of Cageprisoners. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths and Death of Dignity. She has spent much of her working life in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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

Dr. Siddiqui’s supporters, and many commentators — myself included — who have examined her story have, for many years, had reason to doubt the official narrative about her capture in 2008, and her whereabouts for the previous five years.

While both the Pakistani and US authorities repeatedly denied that Dr. Siddiqui was in their custody between 2003 and 2008, and this is reiterated in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, in which US diplomats in Pakistan stated that “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged,” several former prisoners — and one still held — have stated that they saw her in Bagram. The following exchange is an excerpt from an interview conducted by former prisoner Moazzam Begg with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, after his release from Guantánamo in February 2009:

Moazzam Begg: When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her?

Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there.

Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background?

Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram.

Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her?

Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram.

Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui?

Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw.

Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced?

Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram.

In March 2010, at a rally organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes stated that, as well as Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash (a former child prisoner who is still held in Guantánamo) and Dr. Ghairat Baheer (a former “ghost prisoner” held in various secret prisons in Afghanistan) also described seeing Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram. Omar said, “They told me how she cried and sobbed, how she screamed and cried and banged her head, in despair and sorrow.”

The Justice for Aafia Coalition has also been gathering other testimony about Dr. Siddiqui’s presence in Bagram from other sources, locating the following statement by Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, which resonates with the recollections of Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash and Dr. Baheer:

There is a woman from Pakistan. She stayed two complete years in solitary confinement in Bagram prison among more than 500 men. She would go out to the bathroom, led by the Americans, placing his hand on one of her shoulders, and the other hand on her back, and her hands and feet chained together, and she is treated in exactly the same way as a man … even in her clothing, the orange suit that the brothers wear in Guantánamo and the mujahideen in Bagram. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming, all day and night, and those ones all they do is make it worse by calling her by her number 650, that’s the number she had in the Bagram prison… “What’s the problem?” And she didn’t find a person to talk to. She is in solitary confinement, in front of her is a solitary room belonging to a man, on her side is a solitary room belonging to a man, and next to her is a solitary room belonging to a man, She didn’t find a woman to talk to, she only sees men … so the woman lost her reasoning and her mind and she stayed in this condition for two complete years… probably no one knew anything about her.

In addition, two of Aafia Siddiqui’s three children have stated that they were also held in custody during the period that their mother’s whereabouts are unexplained, adding another chilling dimension to the story. Although it is feared that Suleman, who was just a baby in March 2003, was killed at the time of her capture, her eldest son Ahmed (who was seven at the time) and her daughter Mariam (who was five) eventually reappeared. Ahmed, who was seized with his mother in Ghazni in July 2008, and was released to his mother’s family in October 2009, issued the following statement about his capture and his lost years:

I do not remember the date but it seems a long time ago. I remember we were going to Islamabad in a car when we were stopped by different cars and high roof ones. My mother was screaming and I was screaming as they took me away. I looked around and saw my baby brother on the ground and there was blood. My mother was crying and screaming. Then they put something on my face. And I don’t remember anything.

When I woke up I was in a room. There were American soldiers in uniform and plain clothes people. They kept me in different places. If I cried or didn’t listen, they beat me and tied me and chained me. There were English speaking, Pashto and Urdu speaking. I had no courage to ask who they were. At times, for a long time, I was alone in a small room. Then I was taken to some children’s prison where there were lots of other children.

The American Consular, who came to me in Kabul jail, said, “Your name is Ahmed. You are American. Your mother’s name is Aafia Siddiqui and your younger brother is dead. After that they took me away from the kids’ prison and I met the Pakistani Consular, and I talked to my aunt (Fowzia Siddiqui).”

Mariam did not reappear until April this year, when unidentified men delivered her to her aunt’s house. Now 12 years old, she was identified as Aafia Siddiqui’s daughter (and Ahmed’s sister) through DNA tests. At a press conference, Senator Talha Mehmood, the Chairman of the Senate Committee for the Interior, reported that Mariam “was recovered from Bagram airbase in the custody of an American — in the Urdu language press, an American soldier — called ‘John.’ He also said that she had been kept for seven years in a ‘cold, dark room’ in Bagram airbase.” Although this story has not been independently verified, and it may be that Mariam was held in some other facility, no other explanation has been provided to explain her whereabouts for the previous seven years.

These are just some of the reasons to doubt the assertion made by US diplomats in Pakistan, in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, and also to doubt the conviction with which Declan Walsh followed up on the cable, writing in the Guardian, “Contrary to claims by supporters of Aafia Siddiqui, the controversial Pakistani neuroscientist was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest.”

Other reasons to doubt the assertion include previously reported shadiness on the part of diplomats, who initially told the journalist Yvonne Ridley (who has spent many years doggedly pursuing the truth about Dr. Siddiqui) that no women had been held in Bagram, although it was later revealed that they had lied. Shortly after the incident in Ghazni, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Greene, a spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, which manages the Bagram base, “said that a woman had been held at Bagram in 2003, but that woman, identified only as ‘Shafila,’ was released.” This was a fascinating insight, because the timeframe involved — during 2003 — appears to confirm that the witnesses cited above, who saw a woman at Bagram in 2004, were not mistaking Aafia Siddiqui for this other poor woman, whose whereabouts are, of course, unknown.

Even more significant is the well-chronicled failure of senior Bush administration officials to keep State Department officials in the loop about almost anything of substance to do with the “War on Terror.”

In 2009, when I interviewed Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson told me, in no uncertain terms, that the State Department had been excluded from correspondence relating to the conduct of the “War on Terror,” although the team gathered around Dick Cheney — a “War Council” consisting of just six men — had been monitoring the State Department’s responses to the results of Cheney’s activities. Wilkerson said:

I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

Another reason for doubting the diplomats’ denials concerns the timing of Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, and its place within the bigger picture of the capture of supposed “high-value detainees” who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in a variety of secret prisons, including, in many cases, a secret facility within Bagram. Whether accurately or not, it has been claimed that Dr, Siddiqui had remarried, before her capture, and that her second husband was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), a nephew of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dr. Siddiqui was seized just four weeks after KSM, and four weeks before Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and it is easy, therefore, to see that a confession extracted under torture from KSM — when he was being subjected to waterboarding on 183 separate occasions in a secret prison in Poland — could have led to Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, which, in turn, could have led to the capture — perhaps through information also extracted through the use of torture — of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

If this sequence is correct — and it certainly makes a lot of sense — then it is appropriate to conclude that Dr. Siddiqui was held as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison, and it does not take too much reflection to realize that, as a result, her mysterious reappearance in Afghanistan in July 2008, the implausible story of her attempts to murder US soldiers (even though no fingerprints were found on the gun), her rendition to the United States rather than facing justice in Afghanistan, the sham of a trial that focused only on the murder attempt, and not on the terrorist materials allegedly found on her at the time of her capture, and the disproportionately large sentence are all part of a cover-up, designed to dispose of a used-up “ghost prisoner,” who knew too much — and was, conceivably, too horribly abused — to be released.

Unlike KSM, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and 12 other “high-value detainees,” for example, Dr. Siddiqui could not be sealed up in Guantánamo (where these men were sent from secret prisons in September 2006), because the presence of a female prisoner would have caused an uproar. In addition, she could not, like prisoners from other countries, be repatriated without that also causing an uproar, unlike a number of Libyan men who were stealthily repatriated from secret prisons in 2006.

These men included Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan that was closed down by the Taliban because he refused to work with Osama bin Laden, but after his capture in late 2001 he was sent by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured until he falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met with members of al-Qaeda to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. That false confession was used a part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, but once al-Libi was used up — after several years in other secret prisons — he was returned to Libya, where, implausibly but conveniently for the US and LIbya, he died, reportedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.

For Aafia Siddiqui, the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where she is now held, may not be quite as notorious as Abu Salim prison in Tripoli — where around 1,200 prisoners were killed in a massacre in 1996 — or Bagram, because of its dark fame in the “War on Terror,” but to those in the know, it is, as Yvonne Ridley explained, known as the “Hospital of Horrors,” where more than 100 young women “have died in the last 10 years under ‘questionable circumstances’ with families unable to obtain autopsy reports,” and where there have been numerous cases of sex abuse.

Please write to Aafia at Carswell, not only to let her know that she has not been forgotten, but also because the most effective way to ensure that abusers think twice about their abuse is when they know that the outside world is watching — and is watching in large numbers. The address for the prison is here, and if you’re interested, I urge you to take advantage of the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s pre-printed cards, available here, which can easily be distributed to friends and family.

As published exclusively on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Uruknet, Dandelion Salad and Prison Watch for Imprisoned Women.

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

This event is taking place to raise awareness about the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who, in September, was given an 86-year sentence in a court in New York for allegedly trying — and failing — to shoot two US soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in the summer of 2008, after which she was rendered to New York to be put on trial. The event’s deliberately provocative title reflects how an 86-year sentence for a disputed crime in which no one was even hurt, let alone killed, is effectively a death sentence for Dr. Siddiqui, who will die in a US prison unless pressure is maintained on the US government — and on the Pakistani government — to examine her case again or arrange for her to be transferred to Pakistani custody with the opportunity for her sentence to be reviewed.

In the last few years, I have publicized and taken part in several events focusing on Aafia Siddiqui’s case — most recently in east London (where I interviewed former Guantánamo prisoners Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul) and outside the Pakistani embassy in London — and I never fail to mention how Dr. Siddiqui’s case is one of the most murky and troubling in the whole of the “War on Terror” initiated by the Bush administration, which led to countless horror stories, in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq, in the CIA’s network of secret prisons, and in the program of “extraordinary rendition” that involved — and still involves — prisoners being disposed of by being sent to torture prisons in third countries, or in their home countries.

In fact, Dr. Siddiqui’s case seems to be central to the darkest aspects of the Bush adminstration’s global torture program, as she was almost certainly identified as a supposed al-Qaeda operative by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, after his capture in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and his subsequent torture — including being waterboarded 183 times — in a secret CIA prison in Poland, presumably on the basis that her second husband, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, whom she had reportedly married shortly before her capture, was KSM’s nephew. Ali was himself seized a month after her, on April 29, 2003, and also held in secret CIA prisons before his transfer to Guantánamo with 13 other men (including his uncle) in September 2006, but there is no evidence that Dr. Siddiqui had any knowledge of the 9/11 plans or of any planned attacks in the future, and it seems more likely, therefore, that she is an example of what I once referred to as the “tangled web” of those who are falsely denounced by prisoners when they are subjected to torture instead of being questioned non-coercively by skilled interrogators.

In an article following the ruling in September, entitled, “Barbaric: 86-Year Sentence for Aafia Siddiqui,” I presented the outline of Dr. Siddiqui’s story, and suggested how the sentence hinted at a cynical cover-up by the US authorities, as follows:

Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn’t make sense. Moreover, the sentencing overlooks claims by her lawyers that her fingerprints were not even on the gun that she allegedly fired, and, even more significantly, hints at a chilling cover-up, mentioned everywhere except at Aafia’s trial earlier this year. Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret US detention — possibly in the US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan — where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.

More of Aafia Siddiqui’s story can be found in my earlier articles here and here, and also, of course, on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition. Post-sentencing, she is now held in the Federal Medical Facility in Carswell, Texas, a notorious establishment described in an article by Yvonne Ridley for Cageprisoners as the “Hospital of horror.” Please visit this JFAC page for details about how to send letters of support, and if you’re in London, please come along to the event at the London Muslim Centre on December 1.

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

I do, however, urge everyone to read the whole report, because the introduction and conclusions are important, as are the sections establishing the legal approach to secret detention and its historical context, the section detailing current practices in 25 other countries worldwide, and the annexes, which contain government responses to a questionnaire about secret detention, and a number of case studies.

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published below, provides an introduction, and deals with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looks at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Please note that I have inserted hyperlinks where possible. However, the original report contains footnotes, and not all of these provide links to websites. In most cases, I have added the information contained in the footnotes in square brackets, but for full details, please see the original.

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

Prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances.

IV. SECRET DETENTION PRACTICES IN THE GLOBAL “WAR ON TERROR” SINCE 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

98. In spite of the prominent role played by the United States of America in the development of international human rights and humanitarian law, and its position as a global leader in the protection of human rights at home and abroad following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, the United States embarked on a process of reducing and removing various human rights and other protection mechanisms through various laws and administrative acts, including the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the USA Patriot Act of 2001, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (which sought to remove habeas corpus rights), as well as various executive orders and memoranda issued by the Office of Legal Counsel that interpreted the position of the United States on a number of issues, including torture. It also sanctioned the establishment of various classified programmes much more narrowly than before [A/HRC/6/17/Add.3, para. 3].

99. The Government of the United States declared a global “war on terror”, in which individuals captured around the world were to be held neither as criminal suspects, put forward for federal court trials in the United States, nor treated as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, irrespective of whether they had been captured on the battlefield during what could be qualified as an armed conflict in terms of international humanitarian law. Rather, they were to be treated indiscriminately as “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial or the possibility to challenge the legality of their detention before a court or other judicial authority.

100. On 7 February 2002, the President of the United States issued a memorandum [PDF] declaring that “common article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either Al-Qaida or Taliban detainees”, that “Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under article 4 of Geneva”, and that “because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war”. This unprecedented departure from the Geneva Conventions was to be offset by a promise that, “as a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva”. This detention policy was defended by the Government in various submissions to the United Nations [See for example CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 3; A/HRC/4/41, paras. 453 - 455; and A/HRC/4/40, para. 12], including on 10 October 2007, when the Government stated that the law of war, and not the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, was the applicable legal framework governing the detentions of “enemy combatants” [CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 3], and therefore such detentions did not fall within the mandate of the special procedures mandate holders [CCPR/C/USA/3, para. 456, and A/HRC/4/40, para. 12].

101. By using this war paradigm, the United States purported to limit the applicable legal framework of the law of war (international humanitarian law) and exclude any application of human rights law. Even if and when human rights law were to apply, the Government was of the view that it was not bound by human rights law outside the territory of the United States. Therefore, by establishing detention centres in Guantanamo Bay and other places around the world, the United States was of the view that human rights law would not be applicable there. Guantanamo and other places of detention outside United States territory were intended to be outside the reach of domestic courts for habeas corpus applications by those held in custody in those places. One of the consequences of this policy was that many detainees were kept secretly and without access to the protection accorded to those in custody, namely the protection of the Geneva Conventions, international human rights law, the United States Constitution and various other domestic laws. [In its October 2007 submission to the Human Rights Committee, the Government reaffirmed its long-standing position that “the Covenant does not apply extraterritorially” (CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 2)].

102. The secret detention policy took many forms. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established its own secret detention facilities to interrogate so-called “high value detainees”. It asked partners with poor human rights records to secretly detain and interrogate persons on its behalf. When the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq started, the United States secretly held persons in battlefield detention sites for prolonged periods of time. The present chapter therefore focuses on various secret detention sites and those held there, and also highlights examples of the complicity of other States.

A.  The “high-value detainee” programme and CIA secret detention facilities

103. On 17 September 2001, President Bush sent a 12-page memorandum to the Director of the CIA through the National Security Council, which authorized the CIA to detain terrorists and set up detention facilities outside the United States [PDF]. Until 2005, when the United Nations sent its first of many communications regarding this programme to the Government of the United States, little was known about the extent and the details of the secret detention programme. Only in May 2009 could a definitive number of detainees in the programme be established. In a released, yet still redacted, memo, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury stated that, to date, the CIA had “taken custody of 94 detainees [redacted], and had employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of those detainees.” [PDF, footnote, p. 5]

104. In the report of 2007 on his country visit to the United States (A/HRC/6/17/Add.3), the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism described what was known at that time of these “enhanced techniques” and how they were regarded:

As a result of an apparent internal leak from the CIA, the media in the United States learned and published information about “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA in its interrogation of terrorist suspects and possibly other persons held because of their links with such suspects. Various sources have spoken of techniques involving physical and psychological means of coercion, including stress positions, extreme temperature changes, sleep deprivation, and “waterboarding” (means by which an interrogated person is made to feel as if drowning). With reference to the well-established practice of bodies such as the Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture, the Special Rapporteur concludes that these techniques involve conduct that amounts to a breach of the prohibition against torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

105. Several of the 28 detainees who, according to Mr. Bradbury, were subjected to “enhanced techniques to varying degrees” were also “high value detainees”. Fourteen people were transferred from secret CIA custody in an undisclosed location to confinement at the Defense Department’s detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, as announced by President Bush on 6 September 2006. They were:

• Abu Zubaydah (Palestinian), captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002

• Ramzi bin al-Shibh (Yemeni), captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 11 September 2002

• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (Saudi), captured in the United Arab Emirates in October or November 2002

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Pakistani), captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on 1 March 2003

• Mustafa al-Hawsawi (Saudi), captured with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on 1 March 2003

• Majid Khan (Pakistani), captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 5 March 2003

• Waleed Mohammed bin Attash (Yemeni), also known as Khallad, captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 29 April 2003

• Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali (Pakistani) also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, captured with Waleed bin Attash in Karachi, Pakistan, on 29 April 2003

• Mohammed Farik bin Amin (Malaysian), also known as Zubair, captured in Bangkok on 8 June 2003

• Riduan Isamuddin (Indonesian), also known as Hambali, also known as Encep Nuraman, captured in Ayutthaya, Thailand, on 11 August 2003

• Mohammed Nazir bin Lep (Malaysian), also known as Lillie, captured in Bangkok on 11 August 2003

• Gouled Hassan Dourad (Somali), also known as Haned Hassan Ahmad Guleed, captured in Djibouti on 4 March 2004

• Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (Tanzanian), captured in Gujrat, Pakistan, on 25 July 2004

• Abu Faraj al-Libi (Libyan), also known as Mustafa Faraj al-Azibi, captured in Mardan, Pakistan, on 2 May 2005 [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1. Pentagon biographies are available here (PDF)]

106. Beyond the transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2007 [PDF], and the facts reported in opinion No. 29/2006 (United States of America), adopted by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on 1 September 2006 [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1], the only available source on the conditions in the above-mentioned facilities is a report by ICRC leaked to the media by United States Government officials [PDF]. In spite of the fact that the ICRC report was never officially published, the experts decided to refer to it since information on the 14 was scarce and the United States of America, in spite of requests to be allowed to speak to Guantanamo detainees, did not authorize them to do so. That report details the treatment that most of the 14 had described during individual interviews, and concluded that there had been cases of beatings, kicking, confinement in a box, forcible shaving, threats, sleep deprivation, deprivation/restriction on food provisions, stress positions, exposure to cold temperatures/cold water, suffocation by water and so on. It stressed that, for the entire detention periods, which ranged from 16 months to more than 3 and a half years, all 14 persons had been held in solitary confinement and incommunicado detention. According to the report, they had no knowledge of where they were being held, and no contact with persons other than their interrogators or guards.” ICRC concluded that:

Twelve of the fourteen alleged that they were subjected to systematic physical and/or psychological ill-treatment. This was a consequence of both the treatment and the material conditions which formed part of the interrogation regime, as well as the overall detention regime. This regime was clearly designed to undermine human dignity and to create a sense of futility by inducing, in many cases, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, with the aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information, resulting in exhaustion, depersonalization and dehumanization. The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly, or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.”

107. Despite the acknowledgement in September 2006 by President Bush of the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, the United States Government and the Governments of the States that hosted these facilities have generally refused to disclose their location or even existence. The specifics of the secret sites have, for the most part, been revealed through off-the-record disclosures.

108. In November 2005, for example, the Washington Post referred to “current and former intelligence officers and two other US Government officials” as sources for the contention that there had been a secret CIA black site or safe house in Thailand, “which included underground interrogation cells”. One month later, ABC News reported on the basis of testimonies from “current and former CIA officers” that Abu Zubaydah had been:

… whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small, disused warehouse on an active airbase. There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor specially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

The details of Abu Zubaydah’s treatment have been confirmed by his initial FBI interrogator, who has not confirmed or denied that the location where Abu Zubaydah was held was in Thailand. The Washington Post also reported that the officials had stated that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had been flown to Thailand after his capture. The New York Times again stated in 2006 that Abu Zubaydah was held in Thailand “according to accounts from five former and current government officials who were briefed on the case.” In January 2008, the Asia Times reported that political analysts and diplomats in Thailand suspected that the detention facility was “situated at a military base in the northeastern province of Udon Thani”.

109. The sources of the Washington Post stated that, after “published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down”. The New York Times alleged later that local officials were said to be growing uneasy about “a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye” and that this was a reason for the CIA to want “its own, more permanent detention centers”.

110. In 2008, the Washington Post described on the basis of interviews with “more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials” how a “classified cable” had been sent between the CIA station chief in Bangkok and his superiors “asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand … from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee’s death.” The newspaper also reported “several of the inspector general’s deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes.” The Office of the Inspector General reviewed 92 videotapes in May 2003, 12 of which included “enhanced interrogation techniques” and identified 83 waterboarding sessions on Abu Zubaydah at a “foreign site”. From the OIG report it seems that Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were detained and interrogated at the same place [PDF, paras. 74 and 91]. This information could not be verified, as the location of the interrogation is redacted in the report of the CIA Officer General, although independent sources informed the experts that the facility was indeed in Thailand and that it was known as the “Cat’s Eye”. The videotapes were however allegedly destroyed in November 2005 by the CIA and, according to the New York Times, the tapes had been held “in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand, the country where two detainees — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were interrogated.”

111. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Thailand denied the existence of a secret detention facility in Thailand in 2002/03, stating that international and local media had visited the suspected places and found no evidence of such a facility. In the light of the detailed nature of the allegations, however, the experts believe it credible that a CIA black site existed in Thailand, and calls on the domestic authorities to launch an independent investigation into the matter.

112. In June 2007, in a report submitted to the Council of Europe, rapporteur Dick Marty stated that he had enough “evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” [PDF. In its response to the report, Romania contested the evidentiary basis of the findings concerning Romania]. The report drew on testimony from over 30 current and former members of intelligence services in the United States and from Europe. According to the Rapporteur, the Romanian “black site” was allegedly in force from 2003 to the second half of 2005. He also noted that “the majority of the detainees brought to Romania were, according to our sources, extracted ‘out of [the] theater of conflict’. This phrase is understood as a reference to detainee transfers originating from Afghanistan and, later, Iraq”. In August 2009, former United States intelligence officials disclosed to the New York Times that Kyle D. Foggo, at that time head of the CIA’s main European supply base in Frankfurt, oversaw the construction of three CIA detention centres, “each built to house about a half-dozen detainees”. They added that “one jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest”.

113. While the identities of many detainees who were held in these facilities have not been revealed yet, it is known that on or around 24 April 2004, Mohammed al-Asad (see para. 133 below) was transferred with at least two other people from Afghanistan to an unknown, modern facility apparently run by United States officials, which was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees. Descriptions of the facility and its detention regime were given by Mr. al-Asad to Amnesty International, which established that he had been held in the same place as two other Yemeni men, Salah Ali and Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. Research into flight durations and the observations of Mr. al-Asad, Mr. Ali, and Mr. Bashmilah suggest that the facility was likely located in Eastern Europe. Mr. al-Asad was held in a rectangular cell approximately 3.5 x 2.5 m, in which he was chained to the floor in the corner. The first night, Mr. al-Asad was kept naked in his cell. The cell included a speaker, which played noise similar to an engine or machine, and two cameras. For most of his time in the facility, the light in his cell was kept on all night. At one point, Mr. al-Asad met with a man who identified himself as the prison director and claimed that he had just flown in from Washington, D.C. Similarly, Mr. Bashmilah described how the facility where he was held was much more modern than the one in Afghanistan. White noise was blasted into his cell, the light was kept on constantly, and he was kept shackled. The guards in the facility were completely dressed in black, including black face masks, and communicated to one another by hand gestures only. The interrogators spoke to each other in English and referred to information arriving from Washington, D.C. [Declaration of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in support of plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion of the United States to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgement, Civil Action No. 5:07-cv-02798 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. See also “Surviving the Darkness”, a report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law (PDF), pp. 34-35]. On 5 March 2005, the United States informed Yemen that Mr. Bashmilah was in American custody. On 5 May 2005, Mr. Bashmilah was transferred to Yemen, along with two other Yemeni nationals, Mr. al-Asad and Salah Nasser Salim Ali Darwish.

114. In Poland, eight high-value detainees, including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Tawfiq [Waleed] bin Attash and Ahmed Khalfan [al-]Ghailani, were allegedly held between 2003 and 2005 in the village of Stare Kiejkuty [PDF, p. 25. In his report, Dick Marty also noted that “a single CIA source told us that there were ‘up to a dozen’ high-value detainees in Poland in 2005, but we were unable to confirm this number”]. According to the leaked ICRC report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew that he was in Poland when he received a bottle of water with a Polish label. According to ABC News, in 2005, Hassan Ghul and Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman were also detained in the facility in Poland [also see Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 29/2006 (United States of America) (A/HRC/4/40/Add.1, para. 15., and this March 2003 Fox News report]. The Polish press subsequently claimed that the authorities of Poland — during the term of office of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller — had assigned a team of “around a dozen” intelligence officers to cooperate with the United States on Polish soil, thereby putting them under exclusive American control and had permitted American “special purpose planes” to land on the territory of Poland [Edyta Żemła, Mariusz Kowalewski, “Polski wywiad w służbie CIA”, Rzeczpospolita, 15 April 2009]. The existence of the facility has always been denied by the Government of Poland and press reports have indicated that it is unclear what Polish authorities knew about the facility.

115. While denying that any terrorists had been detained in Poland, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, the head of the Polish Intelligence Agency in the period 2002-2004, confirmed the landing of CIA flights [Adam Krzykowski , Mariusz Kowalewski, ‘Politycy przeczą’ Rzeczpospolita, 15 April 2009]. Earlier, the Marty report had included information from civil aviation records revealing how CIA-operated planes used for detainee transfers landed at Szymany airport, near the town of Szczytno, in Warmia-Mazuria province in north-eastern Poland, and at the Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania between 2003 and 2005. Marty also explained how flights to Poland were disguised by using fake flight plans.

116. In research conducted for the present study, complex aeronautical data, including “data strings” retrieved and analysed, have added further to this picture of flights disguised using fake flight plans and also front companies [Data strings are exchanges of messages or digital data, mostly in the form of coded text and numbers between different entities around the world on aeronautical telecommunications networks]. For example, a flight from Bangkok to Szymany, Poland, on 5 December 2002 (stopping at Dubai) was identified, though it was disguised under multiple layers of secrecy, including charter and sub-contracting arrangements that would avoid there being any discernible “fingerprints” of a United States Government operation, as well as the filing of “dummy” flight plans. The experts were made aware of the role of the CIA chief aviation contractor through sources in the United States. The modus operandi was to charter private aircraft from among a wide variety of companies across the United States, on short-term leases to match the specific needs of the CIA Air Branch. Through retrieval and analysis of aeronautical data, including data strings, it is possible to connect the aircraft N63MU with three named American corporations, each of which provided cover in a different set of aviation records for the operation of December 2002. The aircraft’s owner was and remains “International Group LLC”; its registered operator for the period in question was “First Flight Management”; and its registered user in the records of the Eurocontrol Central Route Charges Office, which handles the payment of bills, was “Universal Weather”. Nowhere in the aviation records generated by this aircraft is there any explicit recognition that it carried out a mission associated with the CIA. Research for the present study also made clear that the aviation services provider Universal Trip Support Services filed multiple dummy flight plans for the N63MU in the period from 3 to 6 December 2002. In a report, the CIA Inspector General discussed the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Two United States sources with knowledge of the high-value detainees programme informed the experts that a passage revealing that “enhanced interrogation of al-Nashiri continued through 4 December 2002” and another, partially redacted, which stated that:

However, after being moved, al-Nashiri was thought to have been withholding information”, indicate that it was at this time that he was rendered to Poland. The passages are partially redacted because they explicitly state the facts of al-Nashiri’s rendition — details which remain classified as “Top Secret” [PDF, paras. 76 and 224].

117. Using a similar analysis of complex aeronautical data, including data strings, research was also able to demonstrate that a Boeing 737 aircraft, registered with the Federal Aviation Administration as N313P, flew to Romania in September 2003. The aircraft took off from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. on Saturday 20 September 2003, and undertook a four-day flight “circuit”, during which it landed in and departed from six different foreign territories — the Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Morocco — as well as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Focus was also placed on a flight between the two listed European “black site” locations — namely from Szymany (Poland) to Bucharest — on the night of 22 September 2003, although it was conceivable that as many as five consecutive individual routes on this circuit — beginning in Tashkent, concluding in Guantanamo — may have involved transfers of detainees in the custody of the CIA. The experts were not able to identify any definitive evidence of a detainee transfer into Romania taking place prior to the flight circuit.

118. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, Poland stated that:

On 11 March 2008, the district Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw instituted proceedings on the alleged existence of so-called secret CIA detention facilities in Poland as well as the illegal transport and detention of persons suspected of terrorism. On 1 April 2009, as result of the reorganization of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the investigation was referred to the Appellate Prosecutor Office in Warsaw. In the course of investigation, the prosecutors gathered evidence, which is considered classified or secret. In order to secure the proper course of proceedings, the prosecutors who conduct the investigation are bound by the confidentiality of the case. In this connection, it is impossible to present any information regarding the findings of the investigation. Once the proceedings are completed and its results and findings are made public the Government of Poland will present and submit all necessary or requested information to any international body.

While the experts appreciate the fact that an investigation has been opened into the existence of places of secret detention in Poland, they are concerned about the lack of transparency into the investigation. After 18 months, still nothing is known about the exact scope of the investigation. The experts expect that any such investigation would not be limited to the question of whether Polish officials had created an “extraterritorial zone” in Poland, but also whether officials were aware that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were applied there.

119.  In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, Romania provided a copy of the report of the Committee of Enquiry of Parliament concerning the investigation of the statements on the existence of CIA imprisonment centres or of flights of aircraft hired by the CIA on the territory of Romania.

120. With regard to Europe, ABC News recently reported that Lithuanian officials had provided the CIA with a building where as many as eight terrorist suspects were held for more than a year, until late 2005, when they were moved because of public disclosure of the programme [also see this statement by Dick Marty]. More details emerged in November 2009 when ABC News reported that the facility was built inside an exclusive riding academy in Antaviliai. Research for the present study, including data strings relating to Lithuania, appears to confirm that Lithuania was integrated into the secret detention programme in 2004. Two flights from Afghanistan to Vilnius could be identified: the first, from Bagram, on 20 September 2004, the same day that 10 detainees previously held in secret detention, in a variety of countries, were flown to Guantanamo; the second, from Kabul, on 28 July 2005. The dummy flight plans filed for the flights into Vilnius customarily used airports of destination in different countries altogether, excluding any mention of a Lithuanian airport as an alternate or back-up landing point.

121. On 25 August 2009, the President of Lithuania announced that her Government would investigate allegations that Lithuania had hosted a secret detention facility. On 5 November 2009, the Lithuanian Parliament opened an investigation into the allegation of the existence of a CIA secret detention on Lithuanian territory. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Lithuania provided the then draft findings of this investigation, which in the meantime had been adopted by the full Parliament. In its findings, the Seimas Committee stated that the State Security Department (SSD) had received requests to “equip facilities in Lithuania suitable for holding detainees”. In relation to the first facility, the Committee found that “conditions were created for holding detainees in Lithuania”. The Committee could not conclude, however, that the premises were also used for that purpose. In relation to the second facility, the Committee found that:

The persons who gave testimony to the Committee deny any preconditions for and possibilities of holding and interrogating detainees … However, the layout of the building, its enclosed nature and protection of the perimeter as well as fragmented presence of the SSD staff in the premises allowed for the performance of actions by officers of the partners without the control of the SSD and use of the infrastructure at their discretion.

The report also found that there was no evidence that the SSD had informed the President, the Prime Minister or other political leaders of the purposes and contents of its cooperation with the CIA regarding these two premises.

122. While the experts welcome the work of the Seimas Committee as an important starting point in the quest for truth about the role played by Lithuania in the secret detention and rendition programme, they stress that its findings can in no way constitute the final word on the country’s role. On 14 January 2010, President Dalia Grybauskaite rightly urged Lithuanian prosecutors to launch a deeper investigation into secret CIA black sites held on the country’s territory without parliamentary approval.

123. The experts stress that all European Governments are obliged under the European Convention of Human Rights to investigate effectively allegations of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment [See for example Assenov et al v. Bulgaria, judgement of 28 October 1998]. Failure to investigate effectively might lead to a situation of grave impunity, besides being injurious to victims, their next of kin and society as a whole, and fosters chronic recidivism of the human rights violations involved. The experts also note that the European Court of Human Rights has applied the test of whether “the authorities reacted effectively to the complaints at the relevant time” [Labita v Italy, application no. 26772/95, judgement of 6 April 2000, para. 131]. A thorough investigation should be capable of leading to the identification and punishment of those responsible for any ill treatment; it “must be ‘effective’ in practice as well as in law, in particular in the sense that its exercise must not be unjustifiably hindered by the acts or the omissions of the authorities” [See Aksoy v. Turkey, judgement of December 1996, para 95; and Kaya v. Turkey, judgement of 19 February 1998, para 106]. Furthermore, according to the European Court, authorities must always make a serious attempt to find out what happened [See Timurtas v. Turkey, judgement of 13 June 2000, para. 88] and “should not rely on hasty or ill-founded conclusions to close their investigation or as the basis of their decisions” [Assenov v. Bulgaria, op. cit., para. 104].

124. According to two high-ranking Government officials at the time, revelations about the existence of detention facilities in Eastern Europe in late 2005 by the Washington Post and ABC News led the CIA to close its facilities in Lithuania and Romania and move the Al-Qaida detainees out of Europe. It is not known where these persons were transferred; they could have been moved into “war zone facilities” in Iraq and Afghanistan or to another black site, potentially in Africa. The experts were not able to find the exact destination of the 16 high-value detainees between December 2005 and their move to Guantanamo in September 2006. No other explanation has been provided for the whereabouts of the detainees before they were moved to Guantanamo in September 2006.

125. Other locations have been mentioned as the venues for secret detention facilities outside territories under United States control (or operated jointly with the United States military). The first is Guantanamo, which was mentioned by the United States officials who spoke to the Washington Post in 2005, when it was reported that the detention facility had existed “on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay”, but that “some time in 2004, the CIA decided it had to give [it] up … The CIA had planned to convert it into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military [but] pulled out when US courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees”. More recently, former Guantanamo Bay guards have described “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged” compound located out of sight from the main road between two plateaus, about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter with the access road chained off. The unacknowledged “camp no” is described as having had no guard towers and being surrounded with concertina wire, with one part of the compound having “the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps”. At this point, it is unclear whether this facility was run by the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command. The experts are concerned about the possibility that three Guantanamo detainees (Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani) might have died during interrogations at this facility, instead of in their own cells, on 9 June 2006.

126. There have also been claims that the United States used two military bases in the Balkans for secret detention: Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo, and Eagle Base, in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In November 2005, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles told Le Monde that the United States military ran a Guantanamo-type detention centre in Camp Bondsteel. He said he had been “shocked” by conditions at the centre, which he witnessed in 2002, and which resembled “a smaller version of Guantanamo”. In December 2005, the United Nations Ombudsman in Kosovo, Marek Antoni Nowicki, also spoke about Camp Bondsteel, saying “there can be no doubt that for years there has been a prison in the Bondsteel base with no external civilian or judicial oversight. The prison looks like the pictures we have seen of Guantanamo Bay”. Mr. Nowicki said that he had visited Camp Bondsteel in late 2000 and early 2001, when it was the main detention centre for Kosovo Force (KFOR), the NATO-led peace-keeping force, but explained that he had had no access to the base since 2001. The United States base in Tuzla was allegedly used to “process” eight detainees, including Nihad Karsic and Almin Hardaus. Around 25 September 2001, Karsic and Hardaus were arrested at work and taken to Butmir Base, then to Eagle Base, Tuzla, where they allegedly were held in secret detention [PDF]. The men say that they were held in solitary confinement, stripped naked, forcibly kept awake, repeatedly beaten, verbally harassed, deprived of food and photographed.

127. Further developments were witnessed in 2009. In October, three of the experts sent a letter to the Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom [United Kingdom response included in A/HRC/13/39/Add.1], Pakistan and the Syrian Arab Republic regarding Mustafa Setmariam Nassar, aged 42, a Spanish citizen of Syrian origin and author of a number of books and other publications on Islam and jihad. They pointed to allegations received that, on an unknown date in October 2005, he had been apprehended in Pakistan by forces of the Pakistani intelligence on suspicion of having been involved in a number of terrorist attacks, including the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States and the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid. He was detained in Pakistan for a certain period of time accused of involvement in both incidents. He was then handed over to authorities of the United States. While no official news of Mr. Nassar’s whereabouts has been received since his apprehension in October 2005, it is alleged that, in November 2005, he was held for some time at a military base facility under United States authority in Diego Garcia. It is now assumed that he is currently being held in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Republic. Official United States documents and web postings, as well as media reports, indicate that the United States authorities had been interested in Mr. Nassar before his disappearance in 2005. In June 2009, in response to a request made through Interpol by a Spanish judge for information relating to Mr. Nassar’s whereabouts, the FBI stated that Mr. Nassar was not in the United States at that time. The FBI did not, however, address whether Mr. Nassar was in United States custody elsewhere or whether it knew where he was then held. Following queries by non-governmental organizations regarding the whereabouts of Mr. Nassar, the CIA responded on 10 June 2009, stating that “the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request” and that, even if the CIA was in a position to answer the request, the records would be classified and protected from disclosure by United States laws. According to Reprieve, Mr. Nassar may have been transferred to Syrian custody. According to the Government of the United Kingdom, it has received assurances from the United States that it has not interrogated any terrorist suspect or terrorism-related detainee in Diego Garcia in any case since 11 September 2001, and that the allegations of a CIA holding facility on the island are false. The Government was therefore confident that the allegations that Mr. Nassar had been held on Diego Garcia were inaccurate.

128. Following the transfer of the 14 high-value detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo, President Bush, in a delivered speech on 6 September 2006, announced the closure of the CIA’s “high-value detainee programme”. He stressed that, “as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical — and having a CIA programme for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information”. Later in 2006 and in 2007 [PDF], he indicated that “the CIA interrogation and detention program” would continue. Subsequent events support this claim as the Department of Defense announced in 2007 and 2008 the transfer of high-value detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo.

129. On 27 April 2007, the Department of Defense announced that another high-value detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, described as “a high-level member of Al-Qaida”, had been transferred to Guantanamo. On the same day, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, stated that the detainee had been transferred to Defense Department custody that week from the CIA although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom”. However, a United States intelligence official stated that al-Iraqi “had been captured late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country”. Another high-value detainee, Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was transferred to Guantanamo on 14 March 2008. In a press release, the Department of Defense stated that, “prior to his arrival at Guantanamo Bay, he was held in CIA custody”. According to reports in Pakistani newspapers, he was captured in Lahore in August 2007.

130. The Government of the United States provided no further details about where the above-mentioned men had been held before their transfer to Guantanamo; however, although it is probable that al-Iraqi was held in another country, in a prison to which the CIA had access (it was reported in March 2009 that he “was captured by a foreign security service in 2006” and then handed over to the CIA), the Department of Defense itself made it clear that the CIA had been holding Muhammad Rahim, indicating that some sort of CIA “black site” was still operating.

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK (February 2010), Torture Whitewash: How “Professional Misconduct” Became “Poor Judgment” in the OPR Report (February 2010), Judges Restore Damning Passage on MI5 to the Binyam Mohamed Torture Ruling (February 2010), What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not “Poor Judgment” (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary (March 2010), Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney’s Torture and Lies (March 2010), Protests worldwide on Aafia Siddiqui Day, Sunday March 28, 2010 (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), How Binyam Mohammed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison” (June 2010), New Report Reveals How Bush Torture Program Involved Human Experimentation (June 2010). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For this alleged crime, she was flown to the United States, put on trial, and found guilty, in a federal court in New York, on February 3, 2010, on “charges related to the attempted murder and assault of US nationals and US officers and employees in Afghanistan.”

Numerous commentators have denounced the trial as a sham, and today, protestors around the world will be calling for justice for Aafia Siddiqui. Further details can be found on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, including a campaign pack (PDF), which contains a detailed report on the background to the story, and contact details for letters/emails to Aafia, the US and Pakistani governments and the UN.

Amongst the many outstanding questions regarding the case of Aafia Siddiqui are the following:

• Was she indeed kidnapped with her three children in Karachi on March 28, 2003, and subsequently rendered to a secret prison, where she was raped and tortured for five years? Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was released from Guantánamo in February 2009, has stated that he saw Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram, and other former prisoners have spoken about “The Grey Lady of Bagram,” Prisoner 650, who they believed was Aafia.

• Where are her children?

• If Aafia Siddiqui was indeed held in secret US custody for over five years, was the story of the attempted shooting of the US soldiers in July 2008 a cynical set-up, designed to ensure that she could be transferred to the US and tried, convicted and imprisoned without the true story coming to light?

I urge anyone concerned with the stories of “ghost prisoners” detained in secret prisons in the “War on Terror” to study Aafia Siddiqui’s story closely. Yvonne Ridley has focused on her case for many years, and other sources include a detailed report in Harper’s Magazine by Petra Bartosiewicz last November, another in the Guardian by Declan Walsh, and a recent report by Robert Fisk in the Independent, which I reproduce below.

I confess that, although I have been aware of her case for many years, I have never found the time to investigate it fully, as it seemed to me that it was a research project that could take months, if not years. However, it has always troubled me that her case could be the most distressing of all the many disturbing stories of brutality, injustice and false confessions in the “War on Terror,” and the failure of anyone to account for the whereabouts of two of her children has always struck me as particularly despicable.

The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, March 19, 2010

Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. “I strongly doubt if the children are alive,” he says. “Probably, they have expired.” He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui — the “most wanted woman in the world,” according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft — I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?

Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui’s uncle and he produces a photograph of his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which al-Qa’ida operatives are made. Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten.

Aafia Siddiqui’s story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 — she was convicted this month and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just one of the charges against her — is regarded as a symbol of American injustice. “Shame on America,” posters scream in all of Pakistan’s major cities. She is known as the “grey lady of Bagram,” supposedly tortured for five years in America’s cruel Afghan prison. Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme, while the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dubbed her a “daughter of the nation.” Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam are their names.

Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi tells me he doesn’t believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui’s son. “He came here to stay with me, but he said he didn’t know Aafia until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: ‘I was in the big earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in their home while I was out fetching water — that’s what saved my life.’ He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before. Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman — my niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest.”

All such mysteries require a “story-so-far.” It goes like this. Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister’s home for Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her. The Americans say she was a leading al-Qa’ida operative. So does her ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in Guantánamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy curriculum vitae in the West’s obsessive “war on terror.” In 2004, the UN identified her as an al-Qa’ida operative.

But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near Kabul — where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have been murdered — have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was dubbed the “grey lady of Bagram.” At her New York trial, Siddiqui demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture; Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest. “If you were in a secret prison … where children were murdered…” she said.

And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting behind a curtain.

According to their evidence, she managed to take one of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire with the words, “Get the fuck of here. May the blood of [unintelligible] be on your [head or hands].” She missed but was cut down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers. Hence the charges. Hence the conviction.

She wasn’t helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the man who supposedly planned 9/11 and who is the uncle of her second husband, Ammar al-Baluchi — who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a senior al-Qa’ida agent. But then, he’d just been waterboarded 183 times in a month — which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase, water-tight.

The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn’t they report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the children? Ahmed — son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your point of view — is now staying with Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia, in Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans have shown no interest in him — even less in the other two, younger children. Why not?

It’s odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008 — before the Ghazni incident — Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in the suburbs of Islamabad. “She was wearing a burqa and got out of the car, just outside here,” he says, pointing to the tree-lined street outside his office window. “I only caught sight of her once, and I said ‘You have changed your nose.’ But it was her. We talked about the past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia.”

More questions. If Siddiqui was a “ghost prisoner” in Afghanistan, how come she turned up at Dr Faruqi’s home in Islamabad? Why would she wear an Afghan “burqa” in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country? Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad?

Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister’s “unfair” trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But America’s constant protestations of ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about them.

And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a sense, were “disappeared” from the story — until the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and, according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that “the children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon.” Was Karzai referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the “real” Ahmed? And if Aafia’s two/three children are in Afghanistan, where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept them? The Afghans? The Americans?

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.

Despite the fact that the “War on Terror” was launched over eight years ago to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder noted, in a statement announcing the trial, that the opportunity for the relatives of the 9/11 victims “to see the alleged plotters of those attacks held accountable in court” had been “too long delayed,” Republican critics immediately leapt on the announcement, with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell describing it as “a step backwards for the security of our country” that “puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

McConnell, former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who have spent most of the year shamelessly playing the fear card about bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland to face trials ought to be ashamed of themselves, as there is no reason to delay justice any longer in the case of these men, and every reason to decry the fact that, instead of being prosecuted shortly after their capture, they were diverted into a lawless program of incommunicado detention and torture that threatened to derail the possibility that they could be brought to justice at all.

In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, the decision to prosecute him in a federal court comes over six years late. Despite having confessed to his involvement in the 9/11 attacks to an al-Jazeera reporter before his capture by US forces in March 2003, he was held for three and a half years in secret prisons run by the CIA, where he was subjected to torture (including waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning), in a violent and misguided attempt to secure “actionable intelligence.” Instead of achieving its desired result, this vile program appears to have prevented no actual planned terrorist attack, and led only to the generation of countless false leads, which wasted the resources of the intelligence services, and also, of course, led to the creation of a global network of secret prisons in which, distressingly, torture only begat more torture.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the most notorious of the five men, but the others — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash — were also tortured in secret CIA prisons for up to four years, and, as with KSM, the decision to try them in federal courts is most noteworthy for finally bringing to an end the scandalous flight from justice and the law that led to their secret detention and torture.

The problems with the Military Commissions

However dismal and compromised this story is, it at least has more to recommend it than the simultaneous announcement that five other prisoners will not face federal court trials, but will, instead, face trials by Military Commission. This alternative judicial system — for “terror suspects” only — was set up by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001, and struggled to establish anything resembling legitimacy throughout its seven-year existence, securing only three dubious verdicts, and attracting ferocious opposition from its own government-appointed military defense attorneys, and also from a number of prosecutors who resigned, including Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and the former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who all recognized that it was rigged to disguise the use of torture and to secure convictions.

Amended by the Obama administration and by Congress, the Commissions still lack legitimacy, with gray areas involving the admissibility of coerced confessions and hearsay evidence, and a widespread conviction amongst legal experts that federal courts have a proven track record in dealing with terrorism cases that the Commissions can never hope to emulate.

Moreover, although Eric Holder claimed on Friday that the revised Commission process “will be fair and that convictions obtained will be secure,” he neglected to mention that, this summer, senior administration officials conceded that the proposed charge of material support for terrorism — a longtime mainstay of the Commissions from 2006 onwards, when they were revived by Congress after being ruled illegal by the Supreme Court — may well be subject to successful court appeals. What makes the decision to proceed with the Commissions even more ludicrous is that the government also admits that no such problems exist with prosecuting material support for terrorism in federal courts.

In addition, the very existence of a two-tier judicial system should be enough to set alarm bells ringing, as it suggests — quite correctly, I believe — that the government is hedging its bets when it comes to justice, proceeding with federal court trials when it believes that it will secure successful prosecutions, and reserving the Commissions for other cases in which it fears that it may fail, because the evidence is not only contaminated by the use of torture, but is also weak.

In his announcement about the trials, Eric Holder stated that the “decision as to whether to proceed in federal courts or military commissions was based on a protocol that the Departments of Justice and Defense developed and that was announced in July,” adding that the protocol “sets forth a number of factors — including the nature of the offense, the location in which the offense occurred, the identity of the victims, and the manner in which the case was investigated — that must be considered.” The process has therefore been presented as being based on clear-cut decisions — whether the alleged offenses took place on the US mainland (federal court trials) or elsewhere (Military Commissions) — but in reality Holder let slip that the decisions would be based on whether or not the government thinks it will secure victory. The key is that phrase, “the manner in which the case was investigated”; in other words, how the supposed evidence was gathered.

I’ve been railing against the proposed revival of the Commissions since May, when President Obama first announced it in a major speech on national security, and I remain as confused and depressed about the proposals as I did back then. Glenn Greenwald has also been implacably opposed to the proposals, and on Friday he succinctly summed up the significance of the government’s failure to hold only federal court trials as follows: “A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you’ll get just enough to be convicted isn’t a justice system at all. It’s a rigged game of show trials.”

The government has not yet announced how many of the remaining 215 Guantánamo prisoners will be put forward for trials — either in federal court or by Military Commission — but ProPublica reported on Friday that, although “Justice Department officials said the cases of 40 detainees have been referred to government prosecutors for possible prosecution,” another administration official conceded that “it was unlikely that charges would be brought against more than 30.” This figure of a maximum of 40 prisoners is somewhat encouraging, as it corresponds with the numbers quoted in intelligence reports over the years, but the government is not off to an encouraging start, because, beyond the five men put forward for the 9/11 trial, the choice of the five other men put forward for trials by Military Commission — all of whom were previously charged under the Bush administration — is disheartening, to say the least.

The five prisoners put forward for trial by Military Commission

One is Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. Khadr should have been treated as a juvenile prisoner, and rehabilitated rather than punished, but he was subjected to appalling brutality, even though, to this day, the evidence suggests that he was not responsible for the crime for which he will be charged — the killing of a US soldier with a grenade — as, at the time, he was face down and unconscious under a pile of rubble. In addition, it remains as doubtful as it always has that there was anything extraordinary about the context of his capture (as part of a group of men engaged in combat in a war zone), and that attempts to imbue it with anything related to terrorism are simply misguided.

Khadr’s case is undoubtedly the most disappointing of the five, but the other four cases are also troubling, firstly because there appears to be no justifiable basis for not pursuing them in federal courts, and, in some cases, because the very basis for prosecution seems to be in doubt.

In the case of Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, a “high-value detainee” seized in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, and held in secret CIA prisons for nearly four years, the main problem is that he, along with KSM and Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded in US custody, and claimed, in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, that he had made false allegations because he was tortured. He said that he made up stories tying him to the bombing of the USS Cole and confessed to involvement in several other plots — the attack on the USS Limburg, other plans to bomb American ships in the Gulf, a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship, and claims that Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb — in order to get his captors to stop torturing him. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

Moreover, as his attorney, Nancy Hollander, explained on Friday (as reported on Daily Kos), “his case was first investigated as a criminal case, and the only reason to try him in a military commission is that they do not have the evidence to go to a legitimate court.”

The other three are not even accused of involvement in specific attacks. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who was charged in the Commissions’ first incarnation in 2004, and again in 2007, was only finally arraigned on November 19, 2008, when the major claim against him — that he was responsible for al-Qaeda’s payroll in Khartoum, before Osama bin Laden and his entourage moved back to Afghanistan in 1996 — was dropped by the government, and all that remained were claims that he worked at an al-Qaeda compound from 1996 to 1998, that he fought “as an al-Qaeda mortar man near Kabul from 1998 to 2001,” and that he sometimes worked as a driver and bodyguard for bin Laden.

At the arraignment, al-Qosi’s civilian lawyer, Lawrence Martin, declared that his client, “far from being a war criminal, was a cook,” adding, “He was not even a cook for bin Laden, but a cook for a compound where bin Laden was sometimes a visitor.” This position is also maintained by his military defense lawyers, including Maj. Todd Pierce, who visited Sudan over the summer to meet al-Qosi’s family, and it seems, therefore, to cast al-Qosi in a similar role to that of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one of bin Laden’s drivers in Afghanistan. Hamdan received a meager sentence after his trial by Military Commission in August 2008, when the military jury threw out the conspiracy charge against him, accepting that he knew nothing about the workings of al-Qaeda.

Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi who was seized on arrival in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and “rendered” to US custody in Afghanistan two months later, is accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait Of Hormuz, meeting Osama bin Laden and attending a training camp in Afghanistan, but in September, at one of the last pre-trial Military Commission hearings before Friday’s announcement, his civilian lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, urged that all of the 119 statements that al-Darbi made to interrogators should be ruled out, because they were obtained through the use of torture and abuse, including beatings, threats of rape, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation, both at Bagram, where al-Darbi was held for eight months, and at Guantánamo (a full statement by al-Darbi is available here). At the time, the judge in his case, Army Col. James Pohl, reserved judgement on Kassem’s request, but it is clear that these unresolved issues will surface at al-Darbi’s trial, and it is difficult to see how they can easily be brushed aside.

The last man to be put forward to face a trial by Military Commission is Noor Uthman Muhammed, also from Sudan. On May 23, 2008, Muhammed was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, based on allegations that he served as the deputy emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed, that he served as an instructor at the camp, and that he delivered a fax machine to Osama bin Laden at a training camp in 1999.

Noticeably, in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed did not deny that he was sometimes involved in the administration of the camp, but he insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business.

Behind the façade

This may appear to have been an evasive explanation on Muhammed’s part, but in fact the whole story of Khaldan is dangerously complicated for the government, not merely because these claims have been aired before, and because it appears that the camp was closed in 2000 because its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to cooperate with bin Laden, but also because both al-Libi and Khaldan’s gatekeeper, Abu Zubaydah, are people that the government want to keep quiet about.

Al-Libi, perhaps the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” was rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he produced a false confession about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Returned to Libya in 2006, after spending over four years in a series of proxy prisons or prisons run by the CIA, he died in mysterious circumstances in May this year. Zubaydah, who is still in Guantánamo, but has not been put forward for a trial, was the first prisoner to be subjected to the torture techniques — including waterboarding — that were developed for use on the “high-value detainees,” and the problem for the government is not that officials have to build a case against him while avoiding all mention of the use of torture, but that his role was massively overstated, and he appears to be too psychologically damaged to be put on trial.

It is, therefore, difficult to see how Noor Uthman Muhammed’s trial by Military Commission can proceed without focusing on the stories of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah, but even if it does prove possible, the very mention of these men points to some dark truths that lie behind Friday’s announcement: that other supposedly “high-value detainees,” in addition to Abu Zubaydah, have not been put forward for trial, that the question of what to do with Zubaydah, a Palestinian, appears to present an insoluble problem, and that the murky world of proxy prisons and CIA prisons, and the torture regime that involved at least 150 prisoners (and maybe many more) is barely hidden behind Eric Holder’s decision to announce the trials of the ten men mentioned above. Even on this limited basis, the pursuit of justice is contaminated, and the question of accountability — deliberately ducked by the Obama administration — seems unlikely to go away.

Perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, the Bush administration will be under the spotlight as much as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the forthcoming trials, and it seems probable, therefore, that questions about the Bush administration’s responsibility for torture and abuse will also leak out in the trials by Military Commission, and will remain, like a guilty secret waiting to be revealed, in the cases of many of the other men at Guantánamo whose fates have yet to be decided.

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 my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

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

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009),
9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009).

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

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

A statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants

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

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

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

Ahmed al-Darbi’s torture allegations

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

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

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

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

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

The futility of prosecuting Mohammed Kamin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-posted on The Public Record.

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

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

The Military Commissions, established by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001 and revived by Congress in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, were frozen for four months by President Obama on his first day in office, and then frozen again four months later, and the request for this third delay — apparently just for two months this time, until November 16 — cannot disguise the fact that Congress is struggling to establish new rules for the Commissions in an attempt to iron out problems with the much-criticized trial system, and that the administration is struggling with a decision about whether to proceed with the Commissions, or to put prisoners forward for trials in federal courts instead (as happened in June with a solitary “high-value detainee,” Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, whose trial in New York is scheduled to begin in September 2010).

Last week, the government was spurred to action by lawyers for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose mental competence to stand trial has been disputed by his lawyers since pre-trial hearings began last year. In what Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald described as “a 71-page broadside against the war court created by the Bush administration,” bin al-Shibh’s lawyers described the court as “not a legitimate judicial proceeding but a political show trial” (PDF), prompting a 30-page response from the Justice Department, in which Assistant Attorney General David Kris argued that the lawyers’ claim of “constitutional defects in the Military Commissions Act are without merit” (PDF).

Despite the fact that Kris had been put forward to prevent the planned resumption of pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo this week, while government lawyers continue their deliberations regarding the Commissions’ future (and partly, I suspect, because the last two outings were so disastrous), he appeared, in summer, to deal a major blow to the continuing rationale for the Commissions. In Congressional testimony (PDF), he conceded that one of the mainstays of the charges in the Commissions — providing material support for terrorism — should be dropped because there was a “significant risk” that, on appeal, judges would not regard it as a legitimate war crime.

Critics were quick to remark that this appeared to rule out two of the Commissions’ only three verdicts — in the cases of David Hicks and Salim Hamdan, who were both convicted solely on the basis that they provided material support for terrorism — but while these arguments continue behind the scenes (and lawyers for the third man, Ali Hamzi al-Bahlul, appeal his conviction and life sentence last November, in a trial in which he refused to mount a defense), Kris told the court only that the government was seeking a 60-day delay in the 9/11 cases because “a decision might be made to prosecute [bin al-Shibh] in federal court.”

For the purposes of justice, it must be said, these developments are good news. Scarcely in its history has the United States entertained such a shabby and shamelessly politicized travesty of justice as the Military Commissions, which stumbled from one embarrassment to another in their long and almost entirely unproductive history during the Bush years.

Moreover, although President Obama has managed to secure some support from within his administration — and within the Senate — for his ghoulish proposal to bring the Commissions back from the dead for a second time, the House of Representatives has, to date, refused to endorse the changes to the Military Commissions Act that have already been approved by the Senate, and, as Carol Rosenberg explained, “has given no indication when or if it will take up the matter.”

This is another good sign, because, although the proposed changes, which include a ban on the use of evidence obtained through coercion and restrictions on the use of hearsay as evidence, convinced the politicians in Congress (largely the same people who passed the hideously flawed Military Commissions Act back in 2006, which introduced “material support for terrorism” as a war crime in the first place), experts with a far greater understanding of the inherent problems of the system queued up over the summer to tell various Senate and House Committees why the proposals were a bad idea, and also why they were doomed to fail.

I wrote at the time about the testimony of Adm. John Hutson, about the testimony of Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld (the prosecutor who resigned after seeing first-hand how the Commissions were incapable of delivering justice), and about the testimony of Maj. David Frakt, a military defense attorney in the Commissions, who reminded a House Committee of the trial system’s fatally flawed origins, and who spelled out, with unassailable clarity, why federal courts are more adequately equipped than the military to handle the limited number of genuine terrorism cases at Guantánamo.

These were not the only critics. Others included Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, who provided a detailed analysis of the Commissions’ failings based on her observations of the pre-trial hearings in the 9/11 trial, and on a forensic dissection of the weaknesses in the Senate Committee’s legislation (PDF), and in a recent article on the release from Guantánamo of Mohammed Jawad, I included excerpts from the testimony of Col. Peter Masciola, the Commissions’ Chief Defense Counsel. Col. Masciola explained how the Commissions’ Convening Authority — a post still held by Susan Crawford, a close friend of both Dick Cheney and his right-hand man, David Addington — is an “untenable and inherently conflicted role.” As he described it, drawing from bitter experience, without a radical review of the Convening Authority’s role, which is not addressed in the Senate bill aimed at reviving the Commissions, it will remain a job for a political appointee with prosecutorial functions, who is also responsible for providing — or, as Col. Masciola demonstrated, mostly refusing to provide — the defense teams with any of the resources needed to do their job.

Recently, I also came across another damning document confirming the unsuitability of Military Commissions for cases related to terrorism. Just three weeks ago, the National Institute of Military Justice (a non-profit organization established in 1991 to advance the fair administration of military justice and foster improved public understanding of the military justice system) produced a report, “NIMJ Reports From Guantánamo” (PDF), in which a number of observers reported on their visits to Commission hearings between October 2008 and January 2009.

Two accounts were particularly noteworthy. In the first, Jonathan E. Tracy, NIMJ’s Assistant Director (and a former member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps) noted that, “while the lawyers and judges all operated professionally and seemed eminently qualified, there is no escaping the fact that the commissions are ad hoc proceedings with little or no legal precedent on either substantive or procedural issues,” and that “the system contains several inherent flaws that make for lopsided justice, no matter how qualified the defense counsel.”

Tracy observed proceedings in the cases of Omar Khadr (the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized) and Mohammed Kamin (at best, a minor Afghan insurgent) and he was appalled, in particular, by what he perceived as the persistent refusal of prosecutors to provide discovery to the defense “in a timely manner “ — if at all. After also revealing his dismay that questions about Kamin’s mental competency were subjected to an “inadequate investigation,” he concluded, “It was very apparent that the defense counsel in both cases face a daunting challenge getting access to evidence to which they are entitled. The tactics used by the government and their cavalier dismissal of charges of unfairness damage the credibility of the commissions.”

In the second account, Diane Marie Amann, a law professor and former Assistant Federal Public Defender, reported on her observation of pre-trial hearings in the cases of the 9/11 co-defendants in December 2008, and was shocked to note that, when it came to questions of self-representation, “not even the participants who are members of the bar were fully cognizant of the rules that governed the proceedings.” She also noted that, because the case involved difficulties raised by the use of “waterboarding or other harsh methods of interrogation,” the trial would “benefit from the certainty of precedent. Yet precedent is something utterly lacking in the military commissions.”

After also noting complaints from the prisoners regarding the poor quality of the interpreters (which she compared unfavorably to her recollections of interpreters in federal court), Amann concluded that nothing she had seen eased “the core concern” that had troubled her for several years: “specifically, that the post-9/11 military commissions are unlikely to afford fair trials to the defendants who appear before them.”

So bring on federal court trials, please — in which “material support for terrorism” is a genuine crime, as opposed to an invented war crime — and let’s give the Commissions the burial they deserve, in a grave marked, “Cheney’s Wretched Dreams.” As Reuters explained on Monday, Navy Capt. John Murphy, the Commissions’ chief prosecutor, told journalists at Guantánamo on Sunday that “Federal prosecutors in New York, Washington and Virginia are vying to try the accused plotters of the September 11 attacks if their cases are moved into US civilian courts.”

Adding that the courts in question are Washington, the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, and the Eastern District of Virginia, Capt. Murphy also explained, “They are working with us in a joint review of these cases and it is our collaboration that will ultimately make its way in written reports that go up to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense to make a decision.” He also said that he “still hopes” to try 65 of the remaining prisoners in trials by Military Commission, but conceded that some of the 65 had “already been indicted in US federal courts,” although he “would not say how many.”

After four years of research into the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, I have profound doubts that viable cases can be established against as many as 65 prisoners — unless the administration is really determined to pursue Taliban foot soldiers in the courts, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists — but it was refreshing to hear that Capt. Murphy was talking so openly about the possibility of federal court trials.

As Maj. David Frakt explained in the one-man demolition job that he conducted on the Commissions during his testimony to a House Committee in July, “Among the over two hundred detainees still at Guantánamo, there are perhaps a few dozen who have committed serious offenses. I have yet to hear any compelling reason why any of these men could not be prosecuted under existing law in Federal Court. As the recent report by Human Rights First conclusively demonstrates [PDF], the federal courts are open, and have a long track record of successful prosecutions of terrorism cases.”

More crucially, as Maj. Frakt also explained:

The reason that the military commissions failed — indeed, the primary mistake of the entire “War on Terror” — was the pervasive abandonment of the law by the prior administration. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past and continue to cut corners. We must remember that this war is ultimately a war about ideas and values. True American values guarantee justice and fairness for all, even for the vilified and unpopular. If there are terrorists and war criminals to be tried, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, in a fair fight in a real court with untainted evidence. America is better than the last eight years. It is time to prove it to the world, and to ourselves.

Note: For more NIMJ documents relating to the Commissions, visit the website 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). 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 on the Huffington Post and Antiwar.com. Cross-posted on The Public Record.

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

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