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 here, provided an introduction, and dealt with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looked at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third, published below, 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.

C.  Proxy detention sites

141. Since 2005, details have emerged of how the United States was not only secretly capturing, transferring and detaining people itself, but also transferring people to other States for the purpose of interrogation or detention without charge. The practice had apparently started almost simultaneously with the high-value detainee programme. The British Government transmitted to the experts a summary of conclusions and recommendations of the Intelligence and Security Committee report on rendition (2007), in which it was noted that “the Security Service and SIS were … slow to detect the emerging pattern of “renditions to detention” that occurred during 2002” [The summary was sent in response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, dated 8 July 2009]. The CIA appears to have been generally involved in the capture and transfer of prisoners, as well as in providing questions for those held in foreign prisons. Beyond that, a clear pattern is difficult to discern: some prisoners were subsequently returned to CIA custody (and were  generally sent on to Guantanamo), while others were sent back to their home countries, or remained in the custody of the authorities in third countries.

142. The Government of the United States has acknowledged that “some enemy combatants have been transferred to their countries of nationality for continued detention” [E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69]. In its report to the Committee against Torture on 13 January 2006, the Government attempted to deflect criticism of its policy of sending detainees to countries with poor human rights records, including those where they might face the risk of torture, declaring that “the United States does not transfer persons to countries where the United States believes it is ‘more likely than not’ that they will be tortured … The United States obtains assurances, as appropriate, from the foreign government to which a detainee is transferred that it will not torture the individual being transferred” [CAT/C/48/Add.3/Rev.1, para. 30. See also the reply of the Government to a general allegation regarding the its involvement in one case of extraordinary rendition transmitted by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, in which it affirmed that “the United States does not transport individuals from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. Furthermore, the United States has not transported individuals, and will not transport individuals to a country where the Government believes they will be tortured” (A/HRC/10/9, para. 425)]. Various United Nations bodies, including the experts and the Committee against Torture, have criticized heavily this policy of “extraordinary rendition” in a detailed way in the past, defining it as a clear violation of international law. They also expressed concern about the use of assurances [See A/HRC/6/17/Add.3, para. 36; A/HRC/4/40, paras. 43 and 50; E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69; A/HRC/4/41, para. 458 and A/60/316, para. 45; CAT/C/USA/CO/2, paras. 20-21; and A/60/316, E/CN.4/2006/6 and A/HRC/4/40, paras. 52-56].

143. Given the prevailing secrecy regarding the CIA rendition programme, exact figures regarding the numbers of prisoners transferred to the custody of other Governments by the CIA without spending any time in CIA facilities are difficult to ascertain. Equally, little is known about the number of detainees who have been held at the request of other States, such as the United Kingdom and Canada. While several of these allegations cannot be backed up by other sources, the experts wish to underscore that the consistency of many of the detailed allegations provided separately by detainees adds weight to the inclusion of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Djibouti as proxy detention facilities where detainees have been held on behalf of the CIA. Serious concerns also exist about the role of Uzbekistan as a proxy detention site.

1.  Jordan

144. At least 15 prisoners, mostly seized in Karachi, Pakistan, or in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, claim to have been rendered by the CIA to the main headquarters of the General Intelligence Department of Jordan in Amman, between September 2001 and 2004. They include three men and one juvenile subsequently transferred to Guantanamo via Afghanistan:

• Jamal Mar’i, a Yemeni, and the first known victim of rendition in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Seized from his house in Karachi, on 23 September 2001, he was held for four months in Jordan before being flown to Guantanamo, where he remains [PDF, pp. 130-44] [Postscript: he was freed in December 2009].

• Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian, was rendered to Jordan after handing himself to Mauritanian authorities on 28 November 2001. Mr. Slahi was held in Jordan for eight months, and described what happened to him as “beyond description”. He was then transferred to Afghanistan, where he spent two weeks, and arrived in Guantanamo, where he remains, on 4 August 2002 [PDF, pp. 28-38; PDF, pp. 184-218][Postscript: he won his habeas petition in March 2010].

• Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, a Yemeni, was rendered to Jordan after his capture in Karachi on 7 February 2002. Flown to Afghanistan on 8 January 2004, he was held there for eight months, then flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was continuously tortured throughout his 23 months in Jordan. [Postscript: his torture was referred to by a US judge in this habeas petition].

• Hassan bin Attash, a Saudi-born Yemeni, was 17 years old when he was seized in Karachi on 11 September 2002 with Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He was held in Jordan until  8 January 2004, when he was flown to Afghanistan with Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi. He was then delivered to Guantanamo with al-Sharqawi on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was tortured throughout his time in Jordan.

145. Also held were Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi seized by United States agents in Afghanistan in December 2001 and released in Saudi Arabia in late 2002 or early 2003, and Samer Helmi al-Barq, seized in Pakistan on 15 July 2003, who was kept for three months in a secret prison outside Pakistan, before being transferred to Jordan on 26 October 2003. He was released on bail in January 2008 [Others reportedly held in Jordan are Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni student rendered from Karachi on 23 October 2001, who has not been heard of since; Ibrahim al- Jeddawi, a Saudi seized in Yemen (or Kuwait) in the first half of 2002, who was reportedly transferred to Saudi custody; at least five other men (three Algerians, a Syrian and a Chechen), seized in Georgia in 2002; an Iraqi Kurd, possibly seized in Yemen; and a Tunisian, seized in Iraq. The current whereabouts of all these men is unknown. According to former prisoners interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, seized with Hassan bin Attash and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was also held in Jordan for an unspecified amount of time, as was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, seized in Afghanistan in late 2001, who was subjected to multiple renditions. See also para. 146. For Samer Helmi al-Barq, see Amnesty International, submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review, February 2009 (PDF)].

2.  Egypt

146. At least seven men were rendered to Egypt by the CIA between September 2001 and February 2003, and another was rendered to Egypt from the Syrian Arab Republic, where he had been seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

• Abdel Hakim Khafargy, an Egyptian-born, Munich-based publisher, was allegedly seized in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 September 2001, and rendered to Egypt a few weeks later, after being held by United States forces at its base in Tuzla. He was returned to Germany two months later [PDF].

• Mamdouh Habib, an Australian seized in Pakistan in November 2001, was rendered to Egypt three weeks later and held for six months. Transferred to Guantanamo in June 2002, he was released in January 2005. He claims to have been tortured throughout his time in Egypt [For recent developments, see this article].

• Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani-Egyptian national, was seized by the Indonesian authorities in Jakarta on 9 January 2002, flown first to Egypt and then to Bagram, where he was held for 11 months. He arrived in Guantanamo on 23 March 2003 and was released in August 2008. Mr. Madni indicated that, during his detention in Cairo, he was subjected to ill-treatment, including electroshocks applied to his head and knees and, on several occasions, he was hung from metal hooks and beaten. Furthermore, he reported that was denied medical treatment for the blood in his urine [Interview with Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni (annex II, case 15)].

• As confirmed by the Government of Sweden in its response to a letter sent by the experts, following a decision made by the Government to refuse asylum in Sweden to the Egyptian citizens Mohammed Alzery and Ahmed Agiza and to expel them, they were deported to Egypt by the Swedish Security Police with the assistance of the United States authorities (CIA). Both have said that they were tortured in Egyptian custody [Agiza v Sweden, communication 233/2003 (CAT/C/34/D/233/2003); and Alzery v Sweden, communication 1416/2006 (CCPR/C/88/D/1416/2005)]. Alzery was released on 12 October 2003 without charge or trial, but was placed under police surveillance. Ahmed Agiza had already been tried and sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian military court at the time of the decision by the Government of Sweden to deport him. In April 2004, the court’s decision was confirmed and Agiza was convicted on terrorism charges following a trial monitored by Human Rights Watch, which described it as “flagrantly unfair”.

• Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan, an emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, was seized by Pakistani officials in late 2001 while fleeing Afghanistan and was rendered to Egypt where, under torture, he claimed that there were links between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, which were used by the United States administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. Also held in secret CIA detention sites in Afghanistan, and possibly in other countries, he was returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006, where he reportedly died by committing suicide in May 2009.

• Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian, was kidnapped in Milan on 17 February 2003, and rendered to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released [For more details on this case, in particular with regard to the abduction of Abu Omar in Milan and the ensuing judicial proceedings in Italy, see the section on Italian complicity in the renditions programme below]. Allegations of ill-treatment in Egyptian detention include being hung upside down and having had electric shocks applied to his testicles [PDF, p, 4].

The eighth man, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, a Canadian-Egyptian national, was seized at Damascus airport on his arrival from Toronto on 11 November 2001. He was held in the Far Falestin prison in the Syrian Arab Republic until 25 January 2002, when he was transferred to Egyptian custody, where he remained in various detention sites (including in secret detention until August 2002) until his release on 7 March 2004. During the initial period of his detention in Egypt, he was subjected to heavy beatings and threats of rape against his sister. At a later stage during the secret detention phase, he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back practically continuously for 45 days in a solitary confinement cell, which he described as being very painful and which made it hard to use the toilet and wash. He was also subjected to sleep deprivation [Internal inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, pursuant to an Order in Council dated 11 December 2006.  See also Commission of inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Maher Arar, report of the fact finder of 14 October 2005].

3.  Syrian Arab Republic

147. At least nine detainees were rendered by the CIA to the Syrian Arab Republic between December 2001 and October 2002, and held in Far Falestin, run by Syrian Military Intelligence. All those able to speak about their experiences explained that they were tortured. As in the case of Egypt (see para. 146 above), other men were seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

• Muhammad Haydar Zammar, a German national, was seized in Morocco on 8 December 2001, and rendered by the CIA to Far Falestin on 22 December 2001. In October 2004, he was moved to an “unknown location”; in February 2007, he received a 12-year sentence from the Higher State Security Court. He was convicted of being a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a crime punishable by death in the Syrian Arab Republic [See A/HRC/7/4/Add.1., this Amnesty International appeal, and CAT/C/49/Add.4]. In its reply for the present study, the Government of Morocco indicated that the police had arrested Mr. Zammar following information that he had been implicated in the events of 11 September 2001. The Government also stated that Mr. Zammar had not been subjected to secret or arbitrary detention in Morocco, and that he had been transferred to the Syrian Arab Republic on 30 December 2001, in the presence of the Syrian Ambassador accredited to Morocco.

• Three detainees were rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 14 May 2002: Abdul Halim Dahak, a student seized in Pakistan in November 2001, Omar Ghramesh and an unnamed teenager, the latter being seized with Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002 [Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Rendition Programme, Hurst & Co., 2006), pp. 4, 54 and 284]. All had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

• Noor al-Deen, a Syrian teenager, was captured with Abu Zubaydah and rendered to Morocco, then to the Syrian Arab Republic. His current whereabouts are unknown.

• According to Abdullah Almalki (see para. 148 below), two other prisoners, Barah Abdul Latif and Bahaa Mustafa Jaghel, were also transferred from Pakistan to the Syrian Arab Republic, the first in February/March 2002, the second in May 2002. Both had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

• Yasser Tinawi, a Syrian national seized in Somalia on 17 July 2002, was flown to Ethiopia by United States agents, who interrogated him for three months. On 26 October, he was flown to Egypt; on 29 October 2002, he arrived in the Syrian Arab Republic. In March 2003, he received a two-year sentence from a military court.

• Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian national, was seized at John F. Kennedy airport in New York on 26 September 2002, held for 11 days in the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Manhattan, then rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 8 October, via Jordan [A/HRC/4/33/Add.3, paras. 33, 43-45, footnote 11], where he was held in secret detention at Far Falestin until later that month. Jordan alleged that Mr. Arar had arrived in Amman as an ordinary passenger, but was asked to leave the country because his name was on a list of wanted terrorists, and given a choice of destination. It also alleged that he had asked to be voluntarily taken by car to the Syrian Arab Republic. During his period at Far Falestin, he was severely beaten with a black cable and threatened with electric shocks: “The pattern was for Mr. Arar to receive three or four lashes with the cable then to be questioned, and then for the beating to begin again.” The torture allegations were found to be completely consistent with the results of the forensic examinations conducted in Canada. On 14 August 2003, Mr. Arar was moved to Sednaya prison and released on 29 September. The official inquiry in the Arar case also stressed the catastrophic impact of the described events in terms of his and his family’s economic situation and his family life in general.

148. When Ahmad Abou El-Maati (see para. 146) was held in Far Falestin in the Syrian Arab Republic, he was held in solitary confinement in poor conditions and subjected to ill-treatment, including blindfolding, forced to remove almost all his clothes, beaten with cables, forcible shaving and had ice-cold water poured on him. Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian-Syrian national, also spent time in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Jamahiriya, in Far Falestin, from 3 May to 7 July 2002, when he received a family visit. On 25 August 2003, he was sent to Sednaya prison. He was released on 10 March 2004. He returned to Canada on 25 July 2004 after being acquitted of all charges by the Syrian State Supreme Security court [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38] .

149. Another Canadian, Muayyed Nureddin, an Iraqi-born geologist, was detained on the border of the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq on 11 December 2002, when he returned from a family visit in northern Iraq. He was secretly detained for a month in Far Falestin, then released on 13 January 2003 [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38].

150. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic stated that the country had no secret prisons or detention centres. There were no cases of secret detention, and no individuals had been arrested without the knowledge of the competent authorities. No authorization had been granted to the security service of any foreign State to establish secret detention facilities in the Syrian Arab Republic. A number of foreign individuals had been arrested in the country at the request of other States, and had been informed of the legal basis for the arrests and their places of detention. The above-mentioned States were also informed of whether the individuals concerned had been brought before the Courts or transferred outside of the country. Individuals belonging to different terrorist groups had been prosecuted and detained in public prisons, in compliance with relevant international standards. They would be judged by the competent judicial authorities. Court proceedings would be public and be held in the presence of defence lawyers, families, human rights activists and foreign diplomats. Some would be publicized through the media. The Interpol branch within the Security Service of the Ministry of the Interior was cooperating with international Interpol branches with regard to suspected terrorist and other criminal activities.

4.  Morocco

151. At least three detainees were rendered to Morocco by the CIA between May and July 2002, and held in Temara prison, including the following:

• Abou Elkassim Britel, of Moroccan origin and an Italian citizen through marriage and naturalization, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 10 March 2002. He stated that he was tortured in Pakistani custody. On 23 May 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held in secret detention until February 2003, and where he alleged he was also tortured. He was released in February 2003, but in May 2003 was seized again, held for another four months in Temara, then sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was reduced to nine years on appeal [Interview with Khadija Anna L. Pighizzini, wife of Abou Elkassim Britel (annex II, case 7)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Morocco stated that Mr. Britel had not been subjected to “arbitrary detention or torture” between May 2002 and February 2003, or between May and September 2003.

• Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was seized in Karachi, Pakistan, on 10 April 2002. He was held for approximately three months, during which time he was subjected to torture. On 21 July 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months in three different unknown facilities. During that period, he was allegedly threatened, subjected to particularly severe torture and other forms of ill-treatment; deprived from sleep for up to 48 hours at a time; and his prayers were interrupted by turning up the volume of pornographic movies. In January 2004, he was flown to the CIA “dark prison” in Kabul, and in May he was moved to Bagram. He was flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004, and was released in February 2009 [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18); see also the finding of two British High Court judges that the treatment to which he had been subjected presented an “arguable case of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (PDF)] [The third prisoner is Noor al-Deen (see para. 147), who was moved to the Syrian Arab Republic in 2003].

5.  Pakistan

152. From December 2001 until the summer of 2002, when the majority of the detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were seized, detention facilities in Pakistan, where several hundred detainees were held before being transferred to Kandahar or Bagram, were a crucial component of what was then, exclusively, a secret detention programme. Many of these men, seized near the Pakistani border, or while crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, were held in prisons in Kohat and Peshawar, but others were held in what appear to be impromptu facilities, which were established across the country in numerous locations. The then President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, stated that:

Since shortly after 9/11, when many Al-Qaida members fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan, we have played multiple games of cat and mouse with them. The biggest of them all, Osama bin Laden, is still at large at the time of this writing, but we have caught many, many others. Some are known to the world, some are not. We have captured 672 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars [Pervez Musharraf, In The Line Of Fire: A Memoir, Free Press, 2006].

153. Two former prisoners, Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes, described their experiences of secret detention in Pakistan to the experts:

Omar Deghayes, a Libyan national and British resident, was arrested in April 2002 at his home in Lahore after a hundred people in black tracksuits surrounded the house. In the presence of an American officer, he was then taken, handcuffed and hooded, to a police station and, shortly afterwards, to an old fortress outside Lahore, where he was held with other men from Palestine, Tunisia, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Egypt, and beaten and kicked, and heard electroshocks and people screaming. According to his account, “the place was run by Pakistanis and appeared to be a maximum security prison for extremist opponents that were traded with different States such as Libya and the United States.” He also stated that he was tortured for a month without any contact with the external world, and that the ill-treatment included punching, beating, kicking, stripping, being hit in the back with wooden sticks, and stress positions for up to three days and three nights. In mid-May, two Americans in plain clothes visited, took photographs and asked questions. He was then moved to a place in Islamabad, which looked like a barracks, where he was held incommunicado for one month without access to a lawyer or ICRC, and was interrogated in a nearby house by American officers, who identified themselves as CIA, and, on one occasion, by a British agent from MI6. He said that torture took place in the barracks but not during the interrogations, and that he was subjected to drowning and stress positions, and recalled a room full of caged snakes that guards threatened to open if he did not speak about what he had done in Afghanistan. He then met with British and American officers, who finally “acquired” him with other detainees, and took him to Bagram, where he was heavily tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers. He was flown to Guantanamo in August 2002, and released in December 2007 [Interview with Omar Deghayes (annex II, case 8)].

Moazzam Begg, a British citizen, moved to Kabul, with his wife and three children, to become a teacher and a charity worker in 2001. After leaving Afghanistan in the wake of the United States-led invasion, on 31 January 2002, he was abducted from a house in Islamabad, where he was living with his family, and taken to a place in Islamabad (not an official detention facility), where those who held him were not uniformed officers and there were people held in isolation. Held for three weeks, he was moved to a different venue for interviews with American and British intelligence officers, but his wife did not know where he had been taken, and he was denied access to a lawyer or consular services. He was then taken to a military airport near Islamabad and handed over to American officers. He was held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo for three years, and was released in January 2005 [Interview with Moazzam Begg (annex II, case 6)].

6.  Ethiopia

154. The Government of Ethiopia served as the detaining authority for foreign nationals of interest to United States and possibly other foreign intelligence officers between 30 December 2006 and February 2007 [For allegations in interviews conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, see for example the case of Meshal vs Higgenbotham. See also Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?: the 2007 Horn of Africa renditions and the fate of those still missing” (PDF)]. On 2 May 2007, a number of special procedures addressed the Government of Ethiopia, adding the following details:

In December 2006, the conflict between the militias of the Council of Somali Islamic Courts and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by armed forces of Ethiopia, caused a large flow of refugees seeking to cross the border from Somalia into Kenya. On 2 January 2007, Kenyan authorities announced the closure of the border for security reasons. Since then, it is reported that the Kenyan security forces have been patrolling the border and have arrested a number of those seeking to cross it. Kenya has deported at least 84 of those arrested back to Somalia, from where they were taken to Ethiopia [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71].

155. The experts interviewed two of those captured between December 2006 and February 2007: Bashir Ahmed Makhtal (mentioned in the Special Rapporteur’s communication) and Mohamed Ezzoueck. The latter, a British national, was detained on 20 January 2007 in Kiunga village, Kenya, after crossing the Somali-Kenyan border and then transferred to Nairobi, where he was held in three different locations. Mr. Ezzoueck reported having been detained in Kenya for about three weeks and then transferred to Somalia, where he was held for a few days before being transferred, via Nairobi, back to London. According to his testimony, he was interrogated by a Kenyan army major and Kenyan intelligence service officers, FBI officers and British security services officers, and repeatedly asked about his involvement with terrorist groups, including Al Qaida [Interview with Mohamed Ezzouek (annex II, case 10)]. Mr. Makhtal, an Ethiopian-born Canadian, was arrested on the border between Kenya and Somalia on 30 December 2006 by intelligence agents and held at a police detention centre. He was subsequently transferred by car to a prison cell in Gigiri police station in Nairobi. On 21 January 2007, the Kenyan authorities sent him to Mogadishu. On the following day, he was taken to Addis Ababa by an Ethiopian military plane. He was then held for approximately 18 months incommunicado in Mekalawi federal prison, often in solitary confinement and in poor conditions, then ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment by the High Court of Ethiopia [Interview with Bashir Makhtal (annex II, case 16)].

156. In a letter dated 23 May 2007, the Government of Ethiopia informed the relevant special procedures mandate holders that the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia had handed over to Ethiopia 41 individuals captured in the course of the conflict in Somalia; most of these detainees had been released. Only eight of the detainees remained in custody by order of the court. The Government also noted that “the allegation that there are more than seventy others in addition to those named in the communication is false, as are the allegations that the detainees are held incommunicado, and that they might be at risk of torture” [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71]. However, in September 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report stating that at least 10 detainees were still in Ethiopian custody, and the whereabouts of others were unknown [PDF].

7.  Djibouti

157. The experts received information proving that a detainee in the CIA secret detention programme, Mohammed al-Asad, had been transferred by Tanzanian officials by plane to Djibouti on 27 December 2003 [High Court of Tanzania at Dar es Salaam, criminal application No. 23 of 2004, Abdullah Salehe Mohsen al-Asad vs. Director of Immigration Services ex parte Mohamed Abdullah Salehe Mohsen Al-Asaad counter affidavit, 30 June 2004]. In Djibouti, Mr. al-Asad was detained for two weeks in secret detention, where he was interrogated by a white English-speaking woman and a male interpreter, mostly on his connections to the al-Haramain foundation. The woman identified herself as American. Mr. al-Asad’s own recollection is consistent with his having been held in Djibouti. One of his guards told him that he was in Djibouti and there was a photograph of President Guelleh on the wall of the detention facility. After approximately two weeks, Mr. al-Asad was taken to an airport in Djibouti, where a team of individuals dressed entirely in black stripped him, inserted an object in his rectum, diapered and photographed him, and strapped him down in a plane. The detention site may have been in Camp Lemonier, which allegedly has been used on a short-term or transitory basis for several detainees being transferred to secret detention elsewhere.

8.  Uzbekistan

158. No confirmation has ever been provided by either the Government of the United States or that of Uzbekistan that detainees were rendered to proxy prisons in Uzbekistan. In May 2005, however, the New York Times spoke to “a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States” who stated that the United States had sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation. A United States intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens. The New York Times also obtained flight logs, showing that at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan from early 2002 to late 2003” by two planes associated with the CIA rendition programme (a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737), and noted that, on 21 September 2003, both planes had arrived at Tashkent. According to the newspaper, the flight logs showed that “the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic”. On 14 August 2009, the BBC interviewed Ikrom Yakubov, an Uzbek intelligence officer who has been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom, who stated that the United States had rendered terrorist suspects for questioning to Uzbekistan, but added, “I don’t want to talk about it as there might be serious concerns for my life in the future to discuss renditions.” On 22 August 2009, the story resurfaced once more, when Der Spiegel reported that, in an arrangement between the private security firm Blackwater and the CIA, Blackwater and its subsidiaries had been commissioned “to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan”.

D.  Complicity in the practice of secret detention

159. After September 2006, the direct role of the CIA in secret detentions seemed to have shrunk significantly, with “current and former American Government officials” explaining in May 2009 to the New York Times that, in the last two years of the Bush administration, the Government of the United States had started to rely heavily on the foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the newspaper, “in the past 10 months, … about a half-dozen mid-level financiers and logistics experts working with Al-Qaida have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services”. Instead of actively detaining persons in secret, the United States — and many other countries — became complicit in the practice of secret detention. For the purposes of the present study, the experts state that a country is complicit in the secret detention of a person in the following cases:

(a) When a State has asked another State to secretly detain a person (covering all cases mentioned in paras. 141-158 above);

(b) When a State knowingly takes advantage of the situation of secret detention by sending questions to the State detaining the person or by soliciting or receiving information from persons who are being kept in secret detention. This includes at least the following States:

• The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18)], Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed and Rashid Rauf [PDF]. In its submission for the present study, the British Government referred to ongoing and concluded judicial assessment of the cases and stressed the work of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, as well as its policy of clear opposition to secret detention [According to the Government of the United Kingdom, the judge in Mr Ahmed’s case stated, “I specifically reject the allegations that the British authorities were outsourcing torture”. The judge examined Mr. Amin’s allegations and found that there was no evidence to suggest that the British authorities had been complicit in his unlawful detention or ill-treatment in Pakistan];

• Germany, in the case of Muhammad Haydar Zammar, who was reportedly interrogated on at least one occasion, on 20 November 2002, by agents of German security agencies while he was secretly held in the Syrian Arab Republic [See “Kanzleramt dealte mit Syriens Geheimdienst”, Der Spiegel, 19 November 2005]. The Government reported having been  informed about four cases of renditions or enforced disappearances concerning the Federal Republic of Germany: the cases of Khaled El-Masri, Murat Kurnaz, Muhammad Haydar Zammar and Abdel Halim Khafagy, which occurred between September 2001 and the end of 2005. However, the German authorities did not directly or indirectly participate in arresting these persons or in rendering them for imprisonment. In the cases of El-Masri and Khafagy, the German missions responsible for consular assistance had no knowledge of their imprisonment and were therefore unable to ensure that their rights were observed or guarantee consular protection; in the cases of Zammar and Kurnaz, the German authorities worked intensively to guarantee consular protection. However, they were denied access to the detainees and were thereby prevented from effectively exercising consular protection [Response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, 30 September 2009]. In a letter dated 9 December 2009, the German Federal Ministry of Justice further reported that it had become aware of the case of Mr. Kurnaz on 26 February 2002, when the Chief Federal Prosecutor informed the Ministry that it would not take over a preliminary investigation pending before the Prosecution of the Land of Bremen. The Office of the Chief Federal Prosecutor had received a report from the Federal Criminal Police Office on 31 January 2002 that, according to information by the Federal Intelligence Service, Mr. Kurnaz had been arrested by United States officials in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the case of Mr. El-Masri, on 8 June 2004, the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Foreign Office received a letter from his lawyer that Mr. El-Masri had been abducted in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, presumably transferred to Afghanistan and kept there against his will until his return to Germany on 29 May 2004. The Federal Ministry of Justice was informed about these facts on 18 June 2004. The experts note, however, that according to the final report of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, the Government became aware of the case of Mr. El-Masri on 31 May 2004, when the Ambassador of the United States informed the Federal Minister for the Interior of Germany [PDF];

• Canada, for providing intelligence to the Syrian Arab Republic in the cases of Maher Arar, Ahmad el-Maati, Abdullah Almaki and Muayyed Nureddin. In its submission for the present study, the Government denied that any of the named individuals was detained or seized by a State at the request of Canada. The experts welcome the fact that all the above-mentioned cases have been the subject of extensive independent inquiry processes within Canada and that, in the case of Mr. Arar, substantive reparations has been provided to the victims;

• Australia, for providing intelligence to interrogators in the case of the secret detention of Mamdouh Habib. Mr Habib also alleges that an Australian official was present during at least one of his interrogation sessions in Egypt. The experts understand that Mr. Habib is currently suing the Government of Australia, arguing that it was complicit in his kidnapping and subsequent transfer to Egypt. In its submission for the present study, the Government denies that any Australian officer, servant and/or agent was involved in any dealings with or mistreatment of Mr. Habib, and refers to ongoing litigation;

(c) When a State has actively participated in the arrest and/or transfer of a person when it knew, or ought to have known, that the person would disappear in a secret detention facility or otherwise be detained outside the legally regulated detention system. This includes at least the following States:

• Italy, for its role in the abduction and rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian kidnapped by CIA agents on a street in Milan in broad daylight on 17 February 2003. He was transferred from Milan to the NATO military base at Aviano by car, and then flown, via the NATO military base of Ramstein in Germany, to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released. The European Parliament considered it “very likely, in view of the involvement of its secret services, that the Italian Government of the day was aware of the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar from within its territory” [European Parliament Committee report, paras. 50 and 54]. Prosecutors opened an investigation and charged 26 United States citizens (mostly CIA agents) with abduction, as well as members of the Italian military secret services (SISMI) with complicity in the abduction, among them the head of SISMI [Reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (see annex I)]. The Italian Ministry of Justice, however, refused to forward the judiciary’s requests for extradition of the CIA agents to the Government of the United States; as a result, the United States citizens were tried in absentia. On 4 November 2009, the court found 23 of them guilty. The court also convicted two SISMI agents and sentenced them to three years imprisonment for their involvement in the abduction. The then commander of SISMI and his deputy, however, were not convicted, the court having dismissed the cases against them on the grounds that the relevant evidence was covered by State secret [The executive branch of the Government of Italy successfully raised the issue of State secret before the Constitutional Court; see the reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (annex I)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Italy notes that the case is continuing at the appeal level, which prevents it from drawing any conclusions prior to a definitive verdict;

• Kenya, for detaining 84 persons in various secret locations in Nairobi before transferring them on three charter flights between 20 January and 10 February 2007 to Somalia. They were subsequently transferred to Ethiopia, where they were kept in secret detention. They were not provided with an opportunity to challenge their forcible physical removal at any stage (see also paras. 154-156 above) [See also Meshal vs Higgenbotham; Redress and Reprieve report, “Kenya and counter terrorism: a time for change”, February 2009 (PDF), and Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?” (PDF). The experts have received allegations of cooperation with United States intelligence that dates back to 2003; see interview with Suleiman Abdallah (annex II, case 2)].

(d) A specific form of complicity in this context are these cases where a State holds a person shortly in secret detention before handing them over to another State where that person will be put in secret detention for a longer period. This includes at least the following countries:

• The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, for its role in the case of Khaled El-Masri [Interview with Khaled el-Masri (annex II, case 9)];

• Malawi, for allegedly holding Laid Saidi in secret detention for a week;

• The Gambia: during an interview with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi reported that, on 8 November 2002, he was arrested upon arrival at Banjul airport by the Gambian Intelligence Agency, then taken to an office and later to a house located in a Banjul residential place before he was handed over to the CIA and rendered to Afghanistan.

(e) When a State has failed to take measures to identify persons or airplanes passing through its airports or airspace after information of the CIA programme involving secret detention had already been revealed. The issue of rendition flights was, and still is, the subject of many separate investigations at the national or regional level. Therefore, the experts decided to refrain from going into the details of this issue [See, inter alia, the European Parliament Committee report, 18 June 2009 (PDF); the statement of the Foreign Secretary to the House of Commons on United States rendition flights, 21 February 2008, and Dick Marty,”Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report” (PDF)].

E.  Secret detention and the Obama administration

160. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the United States stated that:

The Obama Administration has adopted the following specific measures:

• Instructed the CIA to close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operated as of January 22, 2009 and ordered that the CIA shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.

• Ordered that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed as soon as practicable.

• Required the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to be given notice and timely access to any individual detained in any armed conflict in the custody or under the effective control of the United States Government, consistent with Department of Defense regulations and policies.

• Ordered a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to detention of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.

• Reaffirmed that all persons in U.S. custody must be treated humanely as a matter of law.

• Mandated that detention at Guantanamo conform to all applicable laws governing conditions of confinement, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and directed a review of detention conditions at Guantanamo to ensure such compliance.

• Ordered a review of U.S. transfer policies to ensure that they do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control. The resulting Task Force on transfer practices recommended to the President in August that (1) the State Department be involved in evaluating all diplomatic assurances; (2) the Inspectors General of the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security prepare an annual report on all transfers relying on assurances; and (3) mechanisms for monitoring treatment in the receiving country be incorporated into assurances.

• Announced the transfer of at least 7 detainees from military custody to U.S. criminal law enforcement proceedings, and transferred 25 detainees to date to third-countries for repatriation or resettlement.

• Worked with Congress to revise U.S. laws governing military commissions to enhance their procedural protections, including prohibiting introduction of evidence obtained as a result of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

• Expanded the review procedures for detainees held by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan in order to enhance the transparency and fairness of U.S. detention practices. Detainees are permitted an opportunity to challenge the evidence that is the basis for their detention, to call reasonably available witnesses, and to have the assistance of personal representatives who have access to all reasonably available relevant information (including classified information). Proceedings generally shall be open, including to representatives of the ICRC, and possibly to non-governmental organizations.

• Established more tailored standards and rigorous procedures for evaluating assertions of the State secrets privilege, including establishing an internal accountability mechanism, ensuring that the privilege is never asserted to avoid embarrassment or conceal violations of law, and creating a referral mechanism to the Office of Inspector General where the privilege is asserted but there is credible evidence of a violation of law. These standards and procedures were established in order to strike a better balance between open government and the need to protect vital national security information.

• The Department of Justice initiated a preliminary criminal investigation into the interrogation of certain detainees.

These measures cumulatively seek to reaffirm the importance of compliance with the rule of law in U.S. detention practices, to ensure U.S. adherence to its international legal obligations, and to promote accountability and transparency in this important area of national security policy.

161. The experts welcome the above commitments. They believe, however, that clarification is required as to whether detainees were held in CIA “black sites” in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time. Also, the experts are concerned that the executive order instructing the CIA “to close any detention facilities that it currently operates” does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on “a short-term transitory basis”. The order also does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by the Joint Special Operation Command.

162. The experts also welcome in particular the new policy implemented in August 2009, under which the military must notify ICRC of detainees’ names and identification number within two weeks of capture. Nevertheless, there is no legal justification for this two-week period of secret detention. According to article 70 of the Third Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are to be documented, and their whereabouts and health conditions made available to family members and to the country of origin of the prisoner within one week. Article 106 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (governing the treatment of civilians) establishes virtually identical procedures for the documentation and disclosure of information concerning civilian detainees. Furthermore, it is obvious that this unacknowledged detention for one week can only be applied to persons who have been captured on the battlefield in a situation of armed conflict. This is an important observation, as the experts noted with concern news reports quoting current Government officials saying that “the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention”.

163. The situation at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility remains of great concern. In March 2009, United States district Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted to the Guantanamo detainees by the Supreme Court in June 2008 extended to non-Afghan detainees who had been seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same”, and because the review process established at the prison “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo”. The four petitioners were among the 94 prisoners that Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury admitted were held in CIA custody between 2001 and 2005. Judge Bates found that, in holding detainees at Bagram not as prisoners of war but as “unlawful enemy combatants”, the Bush administration had put in place a review process, the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board, in which “detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an ‘enemy combatant’ designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence”.

164. The above-mentioned ruling has been appealed by the current United States administration, even though Judge Bates noted that habeas rights extend neither to Afghan detainees held at Bagram, nor to Afghans seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram. In its appeal against Judge Bates’ ruling, the United States administration notified the court that it was introducing a new review process at Bagram, “modifying the procedures for reviewing the status of aliens held by the Department of Defense at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility” [PDF]. However, the experts are concerned that the new review system fails to address the fact that detainees in an active war zone should be held according to the Geneva Conventions, screened close to the time and place of capture if there is any doubt about their status, and not be subjected to reviews at some point after their capture to determine whether they should continue to be held. The experts are also concerned that the system appears to aim specifically to prevent United States courts from having access to foreign detainees captured in other countries and rendered to Bagram. While the experts welcome the fact that the names of 645 detainees at Bagram are now known, they urge the Government of the United States to provide information on the citizenship, length of detention and place of capture of all detainees currently held at Bagram Air Base.

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.

See here for the Bagram prisoner list. For a sequence of articles discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two) (April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009), WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 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), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

Remember ten months ago, when the Democrats, following success in the mid-term elections, briefly held out the promise that they had teeth, and Donald Rumsfeld, the former strong man who had, in his latter days, become a laughing stock, resigned his post as defense secretary? There were, at that time, high hopes that his successor, former CIA director Robert Gates, would take a less bullish approach to Guantánamo than that of his political masters, the lonely Bush and the dominant Cheney cabal. Those with a particular surfeit of optimism even dared to think that, having tackled the tip of the iceberg, the country might then be ready to probe the dark and largely unexplored mass beneath: the network of secret and semi-secret prisons run or maintained by the CIA, or otherwise connected to the agency, which had begun to attract ferocious opposition, not just from human rights groups, but also from major international bodies including the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

Soon after taking office, Gates declared that he wished to close Guantánamo and conduct trials on the US mainland, explaining that, “because of things that happened earlier at Guantánamo, there is a taint about it,” and adding that he felt that “no matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials, if they took place in Guantánamo, in the international community they would lack credibility.” Despite support from Condoleezza Rice, however, who had inherited the State Department’s profound opposition to Guantánamo from the intel-cuckolded Colin Powell, the malignant swamp of Cheneydom was not to be drained. In no uncertain terms, the Vice President and his little puppet boy, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, shut down all discussion of Gates’ plan, and pretended, as ever, that it was business as usual.

As the months wore on, Gates’ pragmatic opposition to Guantánamo was slowly but surely undermined, as five new “terror suspects” arrived at Guantánamo –- mostly announced without fanfare, each separated by a sufficient space of time to avoid undue attention, and generally hidden behind the coat tails of other, more distracting events.

Mohammed Abdul Malik

The first to arrive was Mohammed Abdul Malik, an apparently “dangerous terror suspect,” who, according to the DoD, had “admitted to participation in the 2002 Paradise Hotel attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in which an explosive-filled SUV was crashed into the hotel lobby, killing 13 and injuring 80,” and had also “admitted to involvement in the attempted shootdown of an Israeli Boeing 757 civilian airliner carrying 271 passengers, near Mombasa.” Malik was flown in from Kenya two weeks after 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s spectacular “confession” was still fresh, and at almost exactly the same time that Guantanamo’s remaining Australian, David Hicks, was prevailed upon to accept a plea bargain before his trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo. This should have been a humiliation for the administration, as a man it had long touted as one of the “worst of the worst” (of the worst) –- one of just a handful of detainees considered eligible for the administration’s new wave of “war crimes” trials –- was sent home with a smacked wrist to serve just nine months in prison in Australia after confessing that he had “provided material support for terrorism.”

Remarkably, however, the administration rode through the criticism –- primarily, that the Military Commissions were a total farce, and that Hicks was so desperate to go home that he agreed to drop all his legitimate and well-documented claims that he was abused by the US military in Afghanistan, on US warships and in Guantánamo –- and emerged relatively unscathed, having managed, additionally, to smuggle a relative nobody into Guantánamo from Kenya without having to reveal anything of the new front in the “War on Terror” that it had embarked upon in the Horn of Africa. However malign, this was quite an achievement. Almost unnoticed, the waning world of “disappearances” and secret prisons was revived with a vengeance in Africa, conducted, this time, by FBI agents instead of the tarnished operatives of the CIA, but with the innovative addition of kidnapping dozens of women and children as well as their allegedly militant menfolk.

Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi
A month later, the administration followed this up with a more audacious delivery: that of Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a suspect who was sold more aggressively to the public, as he ticked a lot of boxes that the administration wished to have connected in voters’ minds. An Iraqi, and a member of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, al-Iraqi was described in a DoD press release as “a high-level member of al-Qaeda” and “one of al-Qaeda’s highest-ranking and experienced senior operatives.” The DoD added that, at the time of his detention, he was “associated with leaders of extremist groups allied with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taliban,” and that he had “worked directly with the Taliban to determine responsibility and lines of communication between Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, specifically with regard to the targeting of US Forces.”

In a separate “high-value” detainee profile –- similar to those issued after 14 other “high-value” detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 –- further details were provided about al-Iraqi’s activities and connections, including claims that he was “known and trusted by [Osama] bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,” and “at one point was al-Zawahiri’s caretaker,” that he worked “for a long time” as an instructor in an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and that he was a member of al-Qaeda’s ruling Shura Council and its Military Committee.

Speaking after the announcement of his transfer was made, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman added a few additional morsels of information, explaining that he had been transferred to DoD custody from the custody of the CIA, although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom.” Expanding on the CIA custody angle, USA Today reported that a US intelligence official, “speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter,” explained that al-Iraqi had actually been captured “late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country.” This admission confirmed, therefore, that al-Iraqi had been secretly held in US custody for at least four months before his transfer to Guantánamo, and also suggested that the time of his transfer was chosen for its political impact.

Abdullahi Sudi Arale

The third arrival was delivered in early June. Abdullahi Sudi Arale, a Somalian, received little fanfare, perhaps because the spotlight on terror had been dimmed following the death, the week before, of a fourth detainee at Guantánamo, a Saudi –- and long-term hunger striker –- named Abdul Rahman al-Amri. Possibly, however, his arrival was little trumpeted because it involved the deliberately under-reported “War on al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa, and because the administration had very little information to offer about him. In almost questioning terms, Arale was described as a “suspected” member of “the al-Qaeda terrorist network in East Africa,” who served as “a courier between East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.”

In a press release, the DoD added that, after returning to Somalia from Pakistan in September 2006, he “held a leadership role in the EAAQ-affiliated Somali Council of Islamic Courts (CIC),” and noted, with distressing vagueness, that there was “significant information available” to indicate that Arale had been “assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives,” that he had “facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for AQ and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia,” and that he had “played a significant role in the re-emergence of the CIC in Mogadishu.” Unmentioned, of course, was the subtext of the situation in Somalia: the role of the CIC in returning some semblance of order to one of the world’s least-governed countries, and the US government’s use of Ethiopia as a proxy army in yet another secret, dirty war.

Haroon al-Afghani

The fourth new Guantánamo detainee arrived a fortnight later. Buoyed up, perhaps, by midsummer weather, and secure that parts of the media were not paying too much attention to who was arriving in Guantánamo, and were, instead, agitating about the plight of US “enemy combatant” Ali al-Marri and the departure from Guantánamo of two cleared detainees who were sent to Tunisia where they faced the risk of torture, the DoD touted Haroon al-Afghani as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan,” and had apparently “admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL).” The Pentagon also reported that there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), an anti-US militia led by renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Despite never having disguised his loathing of the United States, Hekmatyar was, ironically, one of the major recipients of billions of dollars of American money to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which was channeled to him through his supporters in Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI. According to the DoD, al-Afghani “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangarhar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and was ”assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

Like Abdullahi Sudi Arale, Haroon al-Afghani arrived with less aplomb than al-Iraqi, presumably because, despite the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the administration had so mercilessly pumped in the latter’s case, some churlish commentators had refused to ignore the implied existence of secret prisons that were not supposed to exist anymore, and had attempted to rake up issues that the administration considered dead and buried –- or at least locked up far away in grave-like tombs in unnamed foreign countries. The misunderstanding was based on an announcement by the President, in September 2006 –- after KSM and the 13 other “high-value” suspects arrived at Guantánamo –- that the secret prison program, which had not entirely escaped the notice of the Supreme Court in June, had now been closed down. Speaking to the world from the White House, the President claimed, “The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA [secret prison] program.” This appeared to be a clear-cut confession that the program had been closed down, but it was followed by a warning that, “as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical –- and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.” Just seven months after Bush’s speech, the case of Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi revealed, uncomfortably, that, at best, the CIA’s secret prisons had only remained empty for a couple of months.

Inayatullah

And finally –- for now, at least –- last Wednesday another new boy, an Afghan identified only as Inayatullah, flew into Guantánamo from Afghanistan. Captured, according to the DoD’s press release, “as a result of ongoing DoD operations in the struggle against violent extremists in Afghanistan,” the DoD claimed that Inayatullah had “admitted that he was the al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran, and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” adding that he “collaborated with numerous al-Qaeda senior leaders, to include Abu Ubaydah al-Masri and Azzam, executing their instructions and personally supporting global terrorist efforts.” (Al-Masri and Azzam were not identified in the DoD’s press release, but the former is an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, and the latter is probably the American Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American, who has produced al-Qaeda propaganda with Ayman al-Zawahiri).

In further unwieldy prose, the DoD noted, “Inayatullah attests to facilitating the movement of foreign fighters, significantly contributing to trans-national terrorism across multiple borders,” claiming that he “met with local operatives, developed travel routes and coordinated documentation, accommodation and vehicles for smuggling unlawful combatants throughout countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.” Like the other new arrivals, he will –- at some unspecified time in the future –- be subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which will find that he has been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant,” and the administration will then, presumably, push all five men forward for trial by Military Commission.

While these new deliveries have done little for the reputation of Robert Gates, confirming that the White House has as much disdain for the new-look DoD as it does for the State Department, the arrival of these men at Guantánamo also demonstrates that, although the administration is willing to clear out some of the dead wood at Guantánamo, by sending home the husks of innocent men and Taliban foot soldiers who have been ruthlessly exploited for “intelligence” for over five years, it is still committed to pressing ahead with the Military Commissions at Guantánamo –- a bargain basement judicial system, which, by imperial command, seem to have been especially designated “For Muslims Only.” Side-stepped by David Hicks in March, the Commissions remain as toxic and unreliable to those concerned with the rule of law as the tribunals at Guantánamo, designed to conceal all evidence of torture on the part of the US authorities, to conceal secret evidence from the defense lawyers, and to secure pre-ordained verdicts of guilt.

The Military Commissions

To recap briefly, the entire Military Commission process began in November 2001, when, with the utmost stealth, and with no oversight whatsoever, Dick Cheney arranged for the President to grant himself the power to detain anyone at will, and to try them in kangaroo courts of his own devising. After starting, and stalling, several times in the intervening years, the Commissions were ignominiously extinguished by the Supreme Court in June 2006, which ruled decisively that they were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. Following this decision, the administration responded to a sliver of hope offered by one of the Supreme Court judges –- Justice Stephen Breyer, who pointed out that “Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary” –- by doing just that, drafting new legislation, which was almost exactly the same as the old legislation, on the back of a cigarette packet, and pushing the Military Commissions Act through a comatose Congress last fall.

Resuscitated, zombie-like, through this complete failure on the part of Congress to challenge the White House’s lust for unbridled power, the Commissions spluttered unchallenged through the Hicks farrago, but failed to blaze back to triumphant life in June, when child soldier Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, one of Osama bin Laden’s chauffeurs, were wheeled out to face the “war crimes” charges evaded by Hicks. The new style Military Commissions were regarded by those still in touch with the rule of law –- primarily the detainees’ own government-appointed military lawyers –- as being as ad hoc and monstrously illegal as the system thrown out by the Supreme Court, and the lawyers were looking forward to a fight, relishing the opportunity to challenge the spurious basis of the “war crimes” charges, and as determined as ever to do whatever they could to prevent the administration from succeeding in its malign attempts to destroy a centuries-old judicial system that was just and efficient, and to replace it with a system of show trials that would have done Stalin proud.

Astonishingly, the revived system collapsed on its first day, when, in independent decisions, both of the government-appointed military judges, Army Colonel Peter Brownback and Navy Captain Keith Allred, shut down the proceedings, pointing out, with a lawyer’s eye for detail, that the MCA mandated them to try “illegal enemy combatants,” whereas the two men before them –- and everyone else in Guantánamo, for that matter –- had only been determined to be “enemy combatants” in the tribunals that had made them eligible for trial in the first place. Blustering impotently about semantics (and ignoring its own semantic crimes over the preceding five years), the administration responded by wailing that it would appeal the decision in the appeals court for the Military Commissions, and was mocked when it transpired that that the court in question –- like so much of the architecture of the Commissions themselves –- had not yet been established.

This oversight was finally remedied two weeks ago, and the court is due to make a decision in the coming weeks, but the military lawyers representing Khadr and Hamdan have refused to be cowed, and one of them, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, explicitly told journalists after the hearing, “This is a lawless process,” and stressed that the hoped-for demolition of the rigged system was “about the credibility of the United States and the perception around the world of our commitment to the rule of law.”

While the future of the entire system of Military Commissions hangs in the balance –- and with schools of lawyers already circling the Supreme Court in the hope that the wavering justices will soon deliver a crushing verdict on the illegality of the whole Guantánamo operation –- this does not seem, under any circumstances, to be the right time to brag, as the administration did last week, that it was building a vast tent city, on an unused runway at Guantánamo, to hold “war crimes” trials beginning in March 2008, with as many as six trials taking place simultaneously, and to follow this up by flying yet another detainee into Guantánamo. But this is, perhaps, no longer the real world, and is, instead, just the latest and most outrageous manifestation of the blinkered, belligerent, bellicose Bush-and-Cheney World, an ever-shrinking war bunker in which the will alone matters, and it has been entirely forgotten that one man’s will power may be another man’s manifestation of psychotic delusions.

Note: Al-Hadi’s name is also transliterated as Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and the DoD revealed that his real name is Nashwan Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Baqi.

POSTSCRIPT: A sixth prisoner, Muhammad Rahim, was transferred into Guantánamo in March 2008. Apparently regarded as a “high-value detainee,” along with Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (and unlike the other four new arrivals, whose transfer to Guantánamo was therefore inexplicable), he was described as being “in his 40s” and “a native of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan,” according to the New York Times, which also reported that he had “fought battles for two decades,” and was described by government officials as an al-Qaeda planner and facilitator “who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.” Apparently captured in Lahore in August 2007, he, like al-Iraqi, was held in secret CIA custody before his transfer to Guantánamo, even though President Bush had declared in September 2006, when 14 “high-value detainees” arrived in Guantánamo, that the CIA’s secret prisons were now empty. In a message to CIA employees, Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director, described Rahim as a “tough, seasoned jihadist” with “high-level contacts” who, in 2001, had “helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Qaeda fighters fleeing the American-led offensive.”

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

As published on Antiwar.com.

The story, which is very much alive and reprehensible, was then broken three days later by Human Rights Watch, and was partly the subject of an impressive documentary, Kidnapped to Order (broadcast on Channel 4 in June), in which Ghost Plane author Stephen Grey reported on the “extraordinary rendition” program, traveling to Africa to interview former prisoners, who talked in detail about the rendition and imprisonment of men, women and children.

From there, Hegland takes a tour through Guantánamo’s history, via Olshansky’s part in Rasul v. Bush, the key case in June 2004 that pressured the Supreme Court to grant habeas rights to the detainees, but which has been the object of obfuscation, obstruction and vindictive contrariness by the administration ever since, ending up in the quagmire of suggestions and counter-suggestions that surround the prospective closing of Guantánamo. This takes in recent comments by Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales, discussions with lawyers, and an analysis of the ways in which indefinite detention without trial has been attempted in Canada, the UK and Israel.

The most optimistic passage –- in terms of motivating the American people to action, if not to deep political understanding –- is probably the one in which Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and long-time opponent of Guantánamo, abandoned his attempts to persuade a blank-eyed audience at a public meeting of the evils of last fall’s Military Commissions Act -– which gave the President the power to detain people as enemy combatants “without access to any of the information which the government was relying on to make that determination, [so that] somebody could be there for three years, four years, or for life, without access to a judge, based on secret evidence” –- and instead responded to an audience member who raised his hand to say, “I’m a middle-school teacher who can no longer say the Bill of Rights is sacrosanct. What would you say in my place?” by “abandon[ing] his pitch for the bill and [giving] the group the pep talk it had traveled overnight to hear. ‘The only answer is, you fight back,’ he said. ‘You can stand in front of your class and say, get involved, fight back.’”

What’s sad about even this limited success, of course, is that Levin’s attempts to interest his compatriots in rewriting the administration’s sweeping definition of “enemy combatants” fell on deaf ears, and Hegland also uses Levin’s proposals to demonstrate the bewildering diversity of views about Guantánamo, noting that the White House threatened to veto the bill, saying that Levin’s provision would “interfere with the ‘effective conduct of the war on terror’ and with the president’s constitutional authority as the commander-in-chief,” and that even human rights groups “yawned at” his proposal, because they were “focused first on the restoration of habeas corpus, something that Levin also supports, and [worried] that adding substantive protections to the tribunals would sap the strength of their arguments for habeas.” Although she concludes the article by talking to Elisa Massimino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, who insists that, as with terror prosecutions before 9/11, successful prosecutions can be arranged within the existing criminal justice system, the article suggests, overall, that dark clouds hover over any prospect of any easy escape from the bleak and conflicted story of Guantánamo.

Perhaps the most memorable passage in the whole article is the one in which, reeling from her new discovery in east Africa, Barbara Olshansky declares, “It already is the day after Guantánamo. We haven’t gotten everyone out, obviously, but they’re just putting people in other prisons.”

Read the article. There’s more that I haven’t mentioned in this brief review, and it’s here if you missed it at the top.

For more on the abuse of human rights in the “War on Terror,” see my book 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.

After Hicks’ Houdini-like escape from Guantánamo –- which not only freed him from the administration’s offshore gulag, but also conveniently prevented him from pointing out that he was tortured in Afghanistan and Guantánamo –- defense lawyers were anticipating a protracted struggle over the fate of the next two prisoners to face the Commissions: Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan, who was only 15 years old at the time of his capture in July 2002, and Salim Hamdan, a 37-year old from the Sudan, who was one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers in Afghanistan.

Countless articles have been written about Khadr, but a good place to start is The Good Son, published in Canada’s National Post in December 2002. Although his father was a militant (and a friend of bin Laden), it’s worth pointing out, I think, that only the US administration would choose, in the full glare of the world’s media, to brazenly pursue a legally dubious ‘war crimes’ charge against someone who was only a child when the alleged incident took place.

In Hamdan’s case, the main source of information is his military lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, of the US navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corp (JAG), who has been opposed to the Military Commissions almost from the moment that he was assigned the case in 2003. In a letter to Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair in January 2007 (for an excellent article, Taking on Guantanamo, that was published in March), he wrote, ‘The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively — what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is “exporting Guantánamo”? That it is the “Guantánamo method”?’

Working with Neil Katyal, a civilian lawyer, Swift’s arguments helped to persuade the Supreme Court, in June 2006, that the Military Commissions were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. His victory was short-lived, however. Within four months, President Bush convinced a supine Congress to reinstate them in the vile Military Commissions Act, but Swift, who, as a result of his actions, had already been passed over for promotion, remained implacably opposed to them, telling a meeting of law students in April 2007 that the government’s insistence that Military Commissions which accepted coerced testimony ‘were “full and fair trials” reminded him of an old Western in which a character is told, “You’re going to have a fair trial, and then we’re going to hang you.” “They weren’t doing what military commissions historically were set up to do,” he said. “Rather than bring law to a lawless place, it was to create a lawless place”.’

With this build-up to the Military Commissions of Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, no one foresaw that, of all people, the military judges appointed by President Bush to preside over the Commissions would, in separate decisions, throw out both cases on a technicality. Yet this is what happened. Both Navy Captain Keith Allred, presiding over Hamdan’s case, and Army Colonel Peter Brownback, in Khadr’s case, dismantled, in the space of a few short hours, what the administration had spent five and half years trying to construct.

The technicality that derailed the Commissions centered on a legal distinction overlooked by the lawyers who cobbled together the Military Commissions Act during the summer of 2006. For the Commissions to proceed, those brought before them had to have been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ (a post-9/11 term that seems to be recognized only by the White House and the Pentagon) in a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). These tribunals, set up to review the prisoners’ status as ‘enemy combatants’ in response to the Supreme Court decision in June 2004 that they had a right to challenge their detention, were memorably described on 5 June, in a New York Times editorial, Gitmo: A National Disgrace, as ‘kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants’.

What both Brownback and Ellred pointed out, however, was that Khadr and Hamdan had not been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ in their CSRT, and had, instead, been judged as ‘enemy combatants’ only, without the crucial designation ‘unlawful’. Far from being a minor quibble, the distinction is of enormous importance, as Allred pointed out, ruling that Hamdan had never received ‘an individuated determination’ that he was an unlawful combatant, as required by the Geneva Conventions, and that without this determination he and other detainees were entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (in other words, as ‘lawful enemy combatants’). Moreover, as both judges clearly realized, none of the 383 other prisoners at Guantánamo had been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ either.

One can only imagine the responses of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney when they heard the news about the Military Commissions. As approved in October 2006, the Commissions were intended, once and for all, to provide the means whereby high-profile prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah could be tried and convicted without the interference of uncooperative lawyers and without the possibility that torture could ever be mentioned (just as Charles Swift and others had realized in 2003). Attempting to gloss over the collapse of the Commissions, a Pentagon spokesman declared it a mere question of semantics (which, as explained above, it was not) and threatened to appeal, but it took virtually no time, as a Washington Post editorial, Stuck in Guantánamo, explained on 7 June, for commentators to realize that ‘the appeals court that is to hear military commission cases hasn’t yet been established’.

With the administration apparently on the ropes, the media revolt against its policies grew noticeably larger. In addition to the coruscating New York Times editorial and criticism in the Washington Post, dozens of smaller papers in the US ran ‘Close Guantánamo’ editorials, and even the Financial Times weighed in with a pointedly unambiguous editorial, Time to abandon the absurd charade at Guantánamo Bay. On 10 June, former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined in, telling NBC’s Meet the Press, ‘Guantánamo has become a major, major problem [in] the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantánamo, not tomorrow but this afternoon. I’d close it. And I would not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system … essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantánamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far damage than any good we get for it’.

In Slate, meanwhile, in an article entitled Line in the Sand, Dahlia Lithwick speculated about the judges’ reasons for dismissing the cases. Noting that they could have ‘simply deferred to President Bush’s 2002 determination that all associates and agents of al-Qaeda are automatically “unlawful” enemy combatants’, she wondered whether, like ‘many highly conservative legal and career military professionals once willing to follow this president wherever he led them’, they had ‘simply become disillusioned with a process that is so clearly ends-driven as to have been described as “rigged” by one of the three prosecutors who eventually quit, rather than proceed with the trials’.

Lithwick also pointed out that the judges may have wished to make a point about being presented with ‘small fry’ rather than the high-profile prisoners held at Guantánamo –- including KSM, bin al-Shibh and Zubaydah. If the judges were more in sympathy with the State Department than with Bush and Cheney, they would no doubt have read Legal Policy in a Twilight War, a lecture delivered in April 2007 by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a former advisor to the State Department, who described a ‘new paradigm’ in the State Department’s approach to the ‘War on Terror’, which called for the closing of Guantánamo, and, crucially, as Marty Lederman described it in an article for Balkinization, ‘to reserve military commission trials for the big fish directly involved in terrorist activities, against whom such trials have historically been used –- “for major war criminals and al-Qaeda’s leaders, not Osama’s driver.”’

Lithwick added, ‘And who did Brownbeck and Allred see in their courtrooms [on 4 June]? Osama’s driver. And a Canadian kid who allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. What must it feel like to be handpicked to pass judgment over the “worst of the worst” and instead find yourself confronted with the worst of the tweens? If these military commissions are intended to be taken seriously, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be facing one’.

Whether the State Department’s ‘new paradigm’ can actually influence the policies of Bush and Cheney remains to be seen. Noticeably, Robert Gates, the new defense secretary, was overruled by Cheney when he called for the closure of Guantánamo shortly after taking office. As is always the case with this administration, it’s far too early to applaud a return to decent human values and the triumph of due process. Deprived of a trial –- however ‘rigged’ –- Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan will, like the other 383 prisoners in Guantánamo, simply be returned to their cells to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. This, remember, is an administration that has bragged of its willingness to hold prisoners indefinitely, ‘even if they are found not guilty by a military tribunal’.

And in the meantime, as if to demonstrate that the President and the Vice President will not be swayed from the remorseless pursuit of their lawless global vendetta, on 7 June, just three days after the debacle of the Commissions, another prospective victim of the show trials –- a Somalian identified by defense officials as Abdullahi Sudi Arale –- arrived at Guantánamo from the Horn of Africa. Accused of being a courier between al-Qaeda operatives in East Africa and Pakistan, who ‘assisted extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives’, as well as facilitating travel by providing false documents for al-Qaeda operatives and foreign fighters, Arale is the third prisoner to arrive at Guantánamo in the last ten weeks, following Mohammed Abdul Malik, a Kenyan, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a long sought-after al-Qaeda operative, who had apparently been held for several months in one of the secret prisons run by the CIA that no longer exist, according to a speech made by President Bush on 6 September 2006, shortly after the 14 ‘high-value’ prisoners –- including KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah –- were transferred to Guantánamo from CIA custody.

With the administration once more demonstrating its undiluted commitment to unfettered executive power, the brightest light in the last week’s events may not be the collapse of the Military Commissions per se, but what comes out of it: a renewed vigor to topple the architects of this ‘rogue system’ (as the New York Times described it), and unflinching support for the legislation, proposed by the Republican Arlen Specter and the Democrat Patrick Leahy and passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 8 June, to restore the right of habeas corpus to the Guantánamo prisoners (which was stripped by the Military Commissions Act), allowing them once more to appeal their detention in the US federal courts.

For more on Guantánamo and the Military Commissions, see my book 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.

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

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