Andy Worthington » Extraordinary rendition and secret prisons

Obama Considers Repatriating Foreign Prisoners from Bagram

Andy Worthington — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:25:11 +0000

Ten years ago, foreign prisoners, seized in other countries, began to arrive in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Some were held in a secretive part of the prison, and had often passed through other secret facilities in Afghanistan or elsewhere. The majority of these prisoners ended up in Guantánamo, but some were stealthily repatriated at various times. Others, however, continued to be held, beyond the rule of law.

The prison never conformed to the Geneva Conventions, which were, essentially, discarded when the Bush administration decided to hold prisoners in its “war on terror” as “illegal enemy combatants,” and have never been reinstated. Moreover, the prisoners remained beyond the law even when the Supreme Court granted habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2004, and again in June 2008, after Congress had tried to remove these rights in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF).

In March 2009, in Washington D.C., District Judge John D. Bates briefly brought this era of secrecy and unaccountability to an end, granting the habeas corpus petitions of three foreign prisoners — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002; Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand in late 2002; and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004.

Although Judge Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantánamo prisoners extended to the foreign prisoners in Bagram, because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” the Obama administration appealed, and had its appeal granted by the D.C. Circuit Court in May 2010.

This ruling failed to take into account that Judge Bates had not ruled in favor of a fourth man, Pacha Wazir (aka Haji Wazir), an Afghan, deciding that the fate of Afghan prisoners ought to involve negotiations between the US and Afghan governments. Wazir, it turned out, had been seized in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran a chain of hawala banks, in 2003, and rendered to a CIA black site prior to his arrival at Bagram, on suspicion that he was a banker for Osama bin Laden. In June 2011, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle wrote a book, The Interrogator: An Education, in which he explained that he had established that Wazir was not bin Laden’s banker, but stated that his findings were ignored, and Wazir was not released from Bagram until February 2010.

For the other prisoners, Judge Bates also found that the review process introduced under President Bush at Bagram was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the review process introduced at Guantánamo, and, also found that it “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo.” In response, the Obama administration introduced a review process modeled on the review process at Guantánamo that the Supreme Court found inadequate, and this is the process that has been used ever since to decide what should happen to the 645 prisoners who were held in September 2009 (according to the first unclassified prisoner list, released in January 2010), and the thousands of prisoners held in the last two and a half years.

By January this year, the Washington Post reported that 2,600 prisoners were held in Bagram — or, more specifically, in the replacement facility, renamed the Parwan Detention Center, which opened in December 2009. In addition, as the Post described it on January 5, President Karzai “called for the United States to hand over its biggest military prison in Afghanistan within a month,” stating that “Afghan government investigators had found violations of the Afghan constitution and international human rights conventions at the prison.” He “did not provide details of the alleged violations, but he said in a statement that they constituted a ‘breach of Afghan sovereignty.’”

President Karzai was drawing on a US memorandum publicly issued two years ago, in which officials stated that they expected the Parwan facility to be transferred to Afghan control in early 2012, although US officials have pointed out that any proposed transfer is subject to “demonstrated capacity,” and the Afghan government does not have a good track record to date.

Nevertheless, in sounding out the possibilities of closing the Parwan facility, the Obama administration is finally addressing the problems presented by the foreign prisoners. A year ago, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First visited Parwan and discovered that 41 prisoners came from outside Afghanistan, and were still held, even though “more than a dozen” had been recommended for release. One story she heard concerned Hamidullah Khan, a Pakistani who was just 16 years old when he was seized in the summer of 2008. When he was allowed to communicate with his family, in 2010, he explained that his case had been reviewed, and he had been recommended for release, but he was still held.

Eviatar added that the foreign prisoners were “from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and even Germany,” but could not find any explanation for why, even when cleared, they were still held. She noted that “one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup,” and that US officials in Afghanistan had only been able to state that the problem was “somewhere in Washington.”

In the Washington Post last week, Peter Finn and Julie Tate reported that Washington was finally dealing with the problem. Noting that the foreign prisoners now “number close to 50″ and “were in some cases picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan and in others detained in third countries and taken to the prison by the CIA, according to US and foreign officials,” they wrote that, with a handover of the prison now on the cards, “American officials believe that Afghan authorities are unlikely to have any interest in either continuing to hold the foreigners or in putting them on trial.”

The officials added that, by starting the process of repatriating foreign prisoners now, they were hoping not only to successfully “negotiate transfers with the detainees’ home countries,” but also to “arrange for post-transfer monitoring, and secure diplomatic assurances that detainees will not be abused when they return home.”

They added that a “small number” of those currently held “may be deemed to pose a terrorist threat, requiring their continued detention or close supervision by their home country if released,” and also explained that some of the men are Yemeni, “complicating their possible repatriation,” because, in response to the failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, “because of concerns about the security situation in Yemen,” which still stands to this day.

As the Post described it, the Parwan prison holds “up to two dozen Arabs of various nationalities, according to administration and foreign officials,” although the rest are Pakistanis, and it was noted that the first to be released may well be one of these men, Yunus Rahmatullah.

Seized in Iraq by British Special Forces in 2004, he was subsequently handed over to US forces and rendered to Bagram by the CIA, where his detention went largely unnoticed until lawyers in the UK — at solicitors Leigh Day & Co. and the legal action charity Reprieve — succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to grant him a writ of habeas corpus and to order the British government to take custody of him. As the Post described it, his lawyers “argued in the British courts that the transfer violated a memorandum of understanding between the US and British militaries, and was a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions because it involved the removal of a civilian from the war theater.” The judges added that if foreign secretary William Hague and defense minister Philip Hammond failed to secure his release, the court would “be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ.” A deadline of February 14 was set for Rahmatullah’s release.

The UK government has appealed the ruling, although ministers have asked for the Obama administration to arrange for Rahmatullah to be returned to Pakistan, which, as the Post put it, “would satisfy the court and his lawyers.” The British court also made a point of noting that, back in 2010, a review board at Bagram had cleared Rahmatullah for release.

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “It would make no sense for the Obama administration to ratify this Bush-era war crime. Under the Geneva Convention, Yunus Rahmatullah is Britain’s responsibility and should never have been sent to Bagram in the first place. The man is cleared, his family are waiting, and Pakistan is apparently happy to have him — it’s high time to send him home.”

The Post noted that another Pakistani, Amanatullah Ali, who was also picked up by British forces in Iraq, is seeking his release through the US courts, and that seven Pakistanis in total, including Yunus Rahmatullah and Hamidullah Khan, are suing the Pakistani government “either for its alleged role in their capture or for failing to secure their release.”

US officials, stating that they were prepared to release Rahmatullah, nevertheless played down the role of the British court, and also “said that any transfer home has been complicated by the deterioration in relations between the United States and Pakistan.” One official said, “We will do this on our timetable.”

However, it appears that this is not entirely true, and that the days of holding prisoners at Bagram whether or not they have been cleared for release — as at Guantánamo, where 89 of the remaining 171 prisoners have been cleared, but are still held — are coming to an end. For the foreign prisoners held at Bagram without rights for up to ten years, the potential end of this long-running saga of injustice is to be welcomed.

POSTSCRIPT: At the time of publication, an Internet search revealed to me that I had missed an Associated Press story from last April in which it was reported that Amin al-Bakri, Redha al-Najar and Fadi al-Maqaleh had all been cleared for release from the Parwan prison.

The AP noted that al-Bakri, who was 42 years old, had a review board hearing in August 2010, and, in October, “was handed a paper saying he was going to be released to his home country,” but in April 2011 he was still seeking his release via the US courts. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York who filed the appeal, said, ”Amin has been there for almost a decade of his life,” adding that he “should never have been there in the first place. He has never been a threat to the United States.”

The AP also reported that Redha al-Najar, who was 45 years old, had been cleared for release to Tunisia. His lawyer, Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, “said she learned through al-Najar’s family that the military planned to release him and send him to Tunisia, his country of birth, instead of Pakistan where he was picked up,” but added that he did not want to go to Tunisia. Foster also explained that Fadi al-Maqaleh had also been cleared for release but was still being held.

In addition, the AP report noted: “Also waiting to walk free is Jan Sher Khan, who has been detained for six years. He was 15 when he disappeared from his village near Kohat, Pakistan, in the spring of 2005. He never came home from classes at his high school and ended up at Bagram. According to court papers filed seeking his release, his family believes he was seized by someone seeking thousands of dollars in reward money advertised for the capture of suspected members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. On Jan. 10 [2011], the US government confirmed that Khan had been cleared for release.”

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

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

Video: Tunisian Freed from Guantánamo Calls for the Return of His Compatriots

Andy Worthington — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:32:03 +0000

To mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, both Al-Jazeera and the Guardian turned their attention to the fate of the five Tunisians still held in Guantánamo, who I wrote about almost exactly a year ago, after the unexpected fall of the dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, and the beginning of the revolutionary movements in the Middle East.

At the time, seven Tunisians had left Guantánamo, to face a variety of fates. Two had been repatriated in 2007, although both had then been imprisoned following show trials, two others were in Italy, where they had been delivered from Guantánamo to face trials in November 2009, and three others had been resettled in early 2010 in three other countries — namely, Slovakia, Albania and Georgia.

Soon after the fall of Ben Ali, the interim Tunisian government announced an amnesty for all political prisoners, paving the way for the return of exiled members of the Islamist party Ennahdha, and also the release of 55-year old Abdallah Hajji (also identified as Abdullah bin Amor), the former Guantánamo prisoner who was still imprisoned after a show trial. It also transpired that the other returned and imprisoned ex-Guantánamo prisoner, Lotfi Lagha, had actually been freed under President Ben Ali in June 2010.

Around the same time, one of the Tunisians sent to Italy, Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, was convicted of criminal association with the aim of terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison, which seems harsh, especially as, just days later, on February 7, another judge delivered a completely different ruling in the case of Adel Ben Mabrouk (also identified as Adel Ben Mabrouk Bin Hamida Boughanmi), the other Tunisian sent to Italy from Guantánamo in November 2009. Although he too was convicted of criminal association with the aim of terrorism, the judge gave him a two-year suspended sentence and ordered his immediate release from jail, after taking into account “the eight years Mabrouk spent in Guantánamo in ‘inhumane conditions,’ plus a year and a half in Italian prison,” as his lawyer described it, even though he did not, at that point, have a passport or any kind of travel or identity papers.

On April 20, he returned to Tunisia, and after his return an Italian journalist traveled to Tunis to interview him, as I reported here.

On the third anniversary of President Obama’s failed promise to close Guantánamo, and the first anniversary of the fall of President Ben Ali, another Tunisian who returned home — Rafiq al-Hami, also identified as Rafik Hammi and Rafik al-Hammi — who had been released in Slovakia in January 2010, and had returned to his home country last March, appeared in a report on Guantánamo’s Tunisians on Al-Jazeera, and also in a longer video on the Guardian‘s website, both of which are posted below.

Al-Hami had spoken at a press conference in October last year, called by the interim government to campaign for the release of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners, when he said, “The years I spent in detention were unimaginable. I never knew if I would be able to return to my family and my homeland, and I was never informed of why I was being held, or given a chance to defend myself at trial. Since my return to Tunisia, I have finally been reunited with my family and have been able to experience normal life again. I have very high hopes for my future here.”

However, I had never seen what he looked like until these films were released. A quiet, bookish man with an almost secret smile that his long years of torture could not erase, he was clearly never a threat to anyone, and it is salutary to recall that he was actually brutalized not only in Guantánamo, but also in three “black sites” run by the CIA, where, as he explained in a lawsuit 2009, “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.”

Many years before, he had told his tribunal in Guantánamo that he was tortured for three months in the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, where, he said, “I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray … These things are documented. You have them.”

In the two and a half minute feature on Al-Jazeera, al-Hami spoke briefly about his experiences, and the report also noted the story of Adel Hakeemy, still held in Guantánamo, who was “accused of training al-Qaeda members, but all charges against him were dropped last year,” as Al-Jazeera explained. His brother Imad also spoke, as did Polly Rossdale of Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent most of the Tunisians at Guantánamo.

In the seven minute video for the Guardian, in which Rafiq al-Hami spoke about his abuse, Adel Hakeemy’s brother appeared again, as did his mother. Most poignantly, his brother showed a photo of the daughter he has never met. Also included were the sister and mother of Hisham Sliti, also still held, and Cortney Busch of Reprieve was on hand to provide a good explanation of the circumstances surrounding the men’s ongoing detention, and the need for pressure to secure their release.

Ten years after Guantánamo opened, it is sad to see these stories of men still held, even though they were cleared for release by military review boards under President Bush, and even though the reason they fled Tunisia in the first place — because of their opposition to, and persecution by President Ben Ali — has come to an end, and they could be safely repatriated without any problems.

POSTSCRIPT: Below, via Tunisia Live, which reported on a press conference in Tunis on January 11 to call for the return of the prisoners, is another interview with Rafiq al-Hami, in which he described the forms of torture used by the US authorities, and also explained that he spent five years in solitary confinement:

Libyan Rebel Leader, Rendered by UK to Torture by US in Thailand and Gaddafi in Libya, Sues British Government

Andy Worthington — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:50:14 +0000

This week, Abdel Hakim Belhadj (aka Belhaj), a Libyan military commander and rebel leader, who is the head of the Tripoli Military Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, initiated legal proceedings against the British government and the security forces for their key role in his illegal abduction, rendition and barbaric treatment — and that of his pregnant wife Fatima Bouchar — in March 2004.

Mr. Belhadj, also identified as Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, has instructed solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. to take legal action, and the legal action charity Reprieve are acting as US counsel and are also providing investigative support.

In 2004, when Mr. Belhadj’s ordeal at the hands of the British, the Americans and the Gaddafi regime began, he was living in Beijing, China, having previously led the resistance to the Gaddafi regime, and having, for a while, lived in Afghanistan. In early 2004, when Ms. Bouchar began to fear they were under surveillance, they decided to try to seek asylum in the UK. At the airport, however, they were detained and deported to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, their previous destination before China.

On arrival they were seized and held for several weeks, and then told that they would be allowed to travel to the UK, via Bangkok. They were then “forced to board an aircraft” bound for Bangkok, as Reprieve explained in a press release, and then “separated, handed over to US authorities and taken to what they believe was a US secret prison,” where “they were subjected to a barrage of barbaric treatment.” If this was in Thailand, then it may contradict claims that the secret prison used to hold “high-value detainees” in 2002 closed at the end of that year, as a new facility opened in Poland.

Mr. Belhadj has explained that, when he was not being interrogated, he “was hung by his wrists from hooks in his cell for prolonged periods, while hooded, blindfolded and viciously beaten.” Fatima Bouchar has said that she was “mistreated so severely that she finds it difficult to discuss even today.”

Still isolated from each other, they were then rendered to Libya from Bangkok by the US authorities, and, as was normal for US rendition fights, Mr. Belhadj “was hooded and shackled to the floor of the plane in a stress position, unable to sit or lie during the entire 17-hour flight.” Adding to British woes, the flight stopped to re-fuel in Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean Territory leased to the US, where, for many years, there have been rumors of the existence of another secret prison.

In Libya, Mr. Belhadj was imprisoned for six years in some of the country’s most brutal jails, including Abu Salim in Tripoli, where 1200 prisoners were killed in a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in 1996. In Libya’s prisons, he “was savagely beaten, hung from walls and cut off from human contact and daylight,” and has stated that he was interrogated by “foreign” agents, including agents from the UK. In 2008, he was sentenced to death after a 15-minute trial. For two more years, his abuse continued, and then, in 2010, he was released as part of negotiations between the Gaddafi regime and former members of the LIFG.

Alarmingly, Fatima Bouchar was also imprisoned on her return to Libya, and was subjected to aggressive interrogations,. In total, she was held for four months, and was released just three weeks before her baby was born. As Reprieve noted, by this time “her health, and that of her baby, was in a precarious state.”

Speaking of the case, Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “Mr. Belhaj was totally willing to come to an agreement with the British government. He made it absolutely plain that what he cared about was an open apology and for those who tortured him and his wife to be brought to justice. It is only after those requests were ignored for a month that he has decided to make his grievance public.”

Sapna Malik of Leigh Day & Co. added, “[T]he barbaric treatment which our clients describe, both at the hands of the Americans and the Libyans is beyond comprehension and yet it appears that the UK was responsible for setting off this torturous chain of events … [O]ur clients want those responsible for the wrongs done to them, and other Libyans, in the past be held to account and the truth to come out, so that the new Libya can finally turn the page.”

Disgracefully, evidence of the UK’s role in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Fatima Bouchar was revealed in a number of fawning, and previously classified documents that came to light in Tripoli, in September, as the Gaddafi regime fell, and which were discovered by Human Rights Watch. These documents reveal that the British government told the Libyan government that the couple were in Malaysia in early March 2004, and Sir Mark Allen, who was then the director of counter-terrorism at MI6, wrote to the notorious torturer Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, who, earlier this year, fled Libya as the regime began tumbling and was briefly welcomed in the UK.

In a letter dated March 18, 2004, just a week before British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Gaddafi in Libya to welcome him on board as an ally in the “war on terror,” Allen wrote an embarrassing and self-incriminating letter, in which he stated, “Most importantly, I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq [Abdel Hakim Belhadj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

He added, “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd Allah through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on Abu Abd Allah was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us.”

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is not the first former opponent of Gaddafi to sue the British government. In October, Sami al-Saadi (also known as Abu Munthir), another prominent figure in the LIFG, launched an action to claim damages from the British government after the documents discovered in Tripoli revealed the key role played by MI6 in his rendition as well. The Tripoli documents revealed a fax the CIA sent to Moussa Koussa, just two days before Tony Blair’s visit to Gaddafi, which, as the Guardian put it, “shows that the agency was eager to join in the Saadi rendition operation after learning that MI6 and Gaddafi’s government were about to embark upon it.”

As the Guardian was also keen to point out, after Blair’s visit, Gaddafi announced that he “had signed a £550m gas exploration deal with Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant.” Three days later, part of thew human cargo that helped to buy this deal — Sami al-Saadi — who had been seized by British agents in Hong Kong with his wife, two sons aged 12 and nine, and two daughters aged 14 and six, was forced onto a plane with his family and flown to Tripoli, where, on arrival, “he and his wife were handcuffed and hooded, and their legs were bound together with lengths of wire,” and “[t]he entire family was then thrown in jail.” Al-Saadi’s wife and children were released after two months of what he described as “psychological torture,” while he, like Belhaj, was held for six years and, as he explained, “repeatedly beaten, subjected to electric shocks and threatened with death.”

In a claim that also explains how British cynicism spread beyond Libya, he also said that “he was interrogated about Libyans living in the UK, shown photographs of a number of them, and on one occasion questioned by two British intelligence officers while one of his Libyan interrogators was present,” and what is clear from the experience of Libyan dissidents in the UK, who had claimed asylum, is that, after Gaddafi’s miraculous volte-face, his enemies were subjected to arbitrary imprisonment in the UK (in prisons, and also under house arrest) and shameful attempts to repatriate them, in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Reinforcing this assessment, the Guardian explained that al-Saadi “had lived in north London for several years in the 90s, having claimed asylum in the UK, and a number of his associates suspect he was handed over to Gaddafi as a ‘gift,’ rather than as an individual who threatened British national security,” much as those other individuals became playthings in a depressingly immoral game.

The Guardian also noted that the CIA fax made it clear that “the plan was to render not just Saadi but also his family,” even though what awaited them in Gaddafi’s Libya was obvious. Foreign Office representatives refused to comment, but solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. and lawyers at Reprieve pointed out that they had identified other documents in the Tripoli cache relating to al-Saadi, including one showing MI6 “preparing the ground for his rendition five months before it happened,” in a fax sent in November 2003, in which an MI6 officer “tells one of Koussa’s aides that the agency is talking to the Chinese intelligence services about ‘the Islamic extremist target in China.’”

Back in October, Cori Crider said of al-Saadi’s claim, “The British security services have let slip that Sami al-Saadi’s illegal kidnap was ‘ministerially authorised.’ So who signed the torture warrant? Was it [former foreign secretary] Jack Straw? The Metropolitan Police must launch an immediate criminal investigation, focusing on the highest echelons of British government. The British public, to say nothing of Sami, his wife and his family, have a right to know.”

With Abdel Hakim Belhaj joining Sami al-Saadi in suing the British government, these are difficult times for Prime Minister David Cameron, who now finds Libyans joining a queue of torture victims seeking a thorough inquiry into Britain’s use of torture, and not the whitewash envisaged by Cameron, who, in July 2009, initiated a largely secretive judge-led inquiry, which has yet to begin its deliberations, but which has been boycotted by all the major NGOs.

Sadly, the Obama administration, as is typical, is studiously avoiding having to answer any questions about the Bush administration’s involvement in the rendition and torture not only of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, but also of several other Libyans, some of whom I profiled for the United Nations, and also wrote about in an article in September 2010, entitled, “Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Freed in Libya After Three Years’ Detention – And Information About ‘Ghost Prisoners.’”

Most significant, however, is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Seized by the US crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, he was sent to Egypt to be tortured, where he came up with a false confession that al-Qaeda operatives had met with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted his claim, but it was, nevertheless, used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq, and al-Libi himself, after a tour of US torture prisons, was also returned to Libya, where he too was imprisoned and tortured, Unlike Balhaj, al-Saadi and others, however, al-Libi never survived. In May 2009, it was reported that he had committed suicide in his cell at Abu Salim prison, a story that no one with knowledge of Gaddafi — or, for that matter, the CIA — believed, especially as ming, the US embassy in Tripoli reopened just three days after his death.

With 5000 Dead in Syria, Channel 4 Exposes President Al-Assad’s Horrendous Torture Program

Andy Worthington — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:58:15 +0000

Back in March, when, in my article, “Revolution in the Middle East: Brave Protestors in Syria Call for Freedom,” I picked up on reports of protests in Damascus, firstly by those inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and then by supporters and relatives of 21 jailed human rights activists (many of whom were then seized and imprisoned themselves), I praised their bravery, because the Syrian regime has a long history of violently suppressing dissent.

This was something that was more than abstract to me, because, via a good friend, who is Syrian, i had been given an insight into the use of torture by the al-Assad regime, and had also been horrified by the use of torture on prisoners in the Bush administration’s “war on terror” — and by the fact that President Bush had sent prisoners to Syria for torture, and the Canadian government had also arranged for its own citizens to be seized and tortured.

After this initial protests in Damascus, the ripples of dissent in Syria spread rapidly, leading to major unrest in the southern city of Dara’a, where, as I noted, “protests about the arrest of a group of 15 schoolchildren who had dared to scrawl graffiti on a wall explaining that ‘the people want the overthrow of the regime’ escalated into something far more grave, when the security services opened fire, killing three protestors in cold blood. Dubbed ‘Dignity Friday’ by protestors, who had been using social networking sites to coordinate their activities, the clampdown in Dara’a immediately echoed throughout the region, where other protests had been taking place, and the next day, as the Guardian explained, “a much larger, angrier crowd — estimated to number as many as 20,000 — turned out for the burial of the previous days’ victims.”

Since then, across the country, but particularly in Homs and Hamaa and Idlib, there have been thousands of civilian deaths and reports of torture (as I also explained here, here and here), including hundreds of children (see here), so that, last Monday, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the UN Security Council, “It is my estimation that the total number of people killed since the protests began earlier this year is now likely to exceed 5,000. This situation is intolerable.” She also said that it was estimated that more than 14,000 people had been detained, confirmed that at least 300 children were among the dead, and estimated that at least 12,400 people had fled into neighbouring countries in the last nine months.

Tonight, at 11.10 pm GMT, Channel 4 is showing a powerful documentary, “Syria’s Torture Machine,” by Jonathan Miller, the foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News, featuring harrowing footage, and further evidence of the lengths to which the regime is prepared to go to cling onto power, The Channel 4 News page about the programme is here, and below is a cross-post of Miller’s informative and deeply disturbing article for the Observer last week about his recent visit to Syria, his findings, and the findings of those who analysed the videos featured in the film to verify their accuracy.

For readers who wish to know more, I can recommend the “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic” (PDF), which was presented to the UN General Assembly on November 23. An introduction is here. It seems to me, however, that the most important message to the al-Assad regime from the Syrian people is that the atrocities are not suppressing opponents, but are creating an unbreakable opposition that will never give in until the dictator and his brutal regime have fallen. As one victim of gruesome torture — a tractor driver, rounded up randomly — explained to Jonathan Miller, “Although we are suffering from torture, we are not afraid any more. There is no fear. We used to fear the regime, but there is no place for fear now.” As Miller added, appropriately, “If the intention of torture is to terrorise, it has in recent months had the opposite effect. Each act of brutality has served, it seems, to reinforce the growing sense of outrage and injustice and has triggered ever more widespread insurrection.”

Syria’s torture machine
By Jonathan Miller, The Observer, December 13, 2011

Channel 4′s foreign affairs correspondent reports from Syria on the mounting body of evidence that the state is engaging in widespread acts of brutality against its own citizens.

Between bursts of machine-gun fire and the crump of explosions — unmuffled in crisp mountain air — the starry sky above the Syrian frontier offers ethereal distraction. It’s 3am and the town of Tal Kalakh, less than two miles to the north — just inside the Syrian Arab Republic — is under sustained attack, its residents reportedly refusing to hand over a small band of defectors who have holed up there, trying to bolt for Lebanon to join the insurgents.

All around are mountains among which ancient armies have battled for millennia. And below, in besieged Tal Kalakh, a western outpost in the restive governorate of Homs, the Syrian army is once again hard at work, killing its own people. Tal Kalakh has felt the full force of violent repression many times since the Syrian revolt erupted back in March. One day, Tal Kalakh will doubtless appear on the revolutionary roll of honour. For now, this town of 80,000 people doesn’t even merit a mention in my guidebook.

“We don’t kill our people,” President Bashar al-Assad said last week in an American television interview. “No government in the world kills its people unless it’s led by a crazy person.” Those who dare oppose al-Assad do not think their leader crazy. Crazed, maybe. But today they see straight through him. They’re tired of the lies. They have seen too much.

Between late November and early December, I was one of just two foreign reporters granted an official journalist visa to this repressive police state. I spent nine days in Damascus, capital of al-Assad’s Republic of Fear, as a guest of the government. There, I encountered an angrily defiant regime, robust and resolute and unapologetic. Earlier in this Arab spring, I spent six weeks in Libya. There are echoes of Gaddafi in the personality cult surrounding al-Assad, but Syria’s political and security apparatus is bigger and badder than anything Gaddafi could muster. I do not mean to belittle the suffering of Libyans, but Syria has four times the Libyan population and 10 times the menace.

Over the course of those nine days, I interviewed three government ministers, an army general and the mayor of a rebellious city. I heard nothing but denials that the security forces were shooting, shelling and torturing civilians. The government blames “armed gangs” and “terrorists” and invokes the spectre of Islamist insurgents, just as Gaddafi’s henchmen did. And like them, they see western-backed conspiracies. They talk of a media war in which Arab and western satellite TV stations broadcast “lies” and “fabricated videos.”

“Do you really think that we would accept torture?” I was asked by a seemingly incredulous Bouthaina Shaaban — presidential adviser and senior government minister — when I challenged her on the persistent allegations, most recently documented in great detail by the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry. “Syria has no policy of torture whatsoever,” she said. “We do not have Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib. That is absolutely unacceptable by us. Absolutely unacceptable.” Every government minister complained of the outside world’s anti-Syrian agenda, which overlooked the barbarous excesses of “armed gangs” that, they claimed, had tortured, killed and often dismembered 1,400 Syrian soldiers.

Syria is party to the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture. This convention defines “torture” as any act which intentionally inflicts severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, with the intention of obtaining information, a confession or punishing an individual for something he or someone else has committed or is suspected of committing.

“It’s rampant,” says Nadim Houry, the Beirut-based deputy director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, who has taken testimony on hundreds of cases of torture from Syria, “and, the odds are, if you’re detained, you will be ill treated and most likely tortured. We know of at least 105 cases of people who were returned from the custody of security services in body bags to their loved ones … and those are only the ones that we know of.” Mr Houry says he has evidence that tens of thousands of Syrians have been arbitrarily detained over the months.

“But we have also documented what I would call “meaningless torture” — if there is ever such a thing. They’ve got all the information but they want to teach you a lesson. I think that lesson is “you need to fear us”. And the striking thing that I’ve seen is that despite that torture, people are no longer afraid. The wall of fear has been broken.”

A short drive from the frontier, along hair-pinned mountain roads, past Lebanese checkpoints where friendly soldiers shiver, is a Syrian safe-house. There is no electricity. The place is crammed with refugees; there are children sleeping everywhere. In an upstairs room, next to a small wood-burner, a weathered former tractor driver from Tal Kalakh — who is in his 50s — winces as pains shoot through his battered body, lying on a mattress on the concrete floor. He manoeuvres himself on to a pile of pillows and lights a cigarette. He’s relieved to have escaped to Lebanon but he’s already yearning to go home. He can’t though. His right leg is now gangrenous below the knee; he can barely move. So far he’s had only basic medical treatment.

Before sunrise one morning, he told me, as troops laid siege to his town, he’d been shot twice by “shabiha”, pro-al-Assad militia. Unable to run, he had been rounded up, thrashed and driven down the road to nearby Homs with many other detainees, being beaten all the way. For the next few weeks, his bullet wounds were left to fester, he says, while he was subjected to torture so extreme that his accounts of what had happened to him left those of us who listened stunned and feeling sick. During his time in detention, he had been passed, he claimed, to five different branches of al-Assad’s sadistic secret police, the Mukhabarat.

In flickering candle-light, he told me in gruesome detail of beatings he’d received with batons and electric cables on the soles of his feet (a technique called “falaka”). He had been hung by his knees, immobilised inside a twisting rubber tyre, itself suspended from the ceiling. He had been shackled hand and foot and hung upside down for hours — the Mukhabarat’s notorious “flying carpet”. Then hung up by his wrists (“the ghost”), and whipped and tormented with electric cattle prods.

When he wasn’t being tortured, he had been crammed into cells with up to 80 people, without room to sit or sleep, he claimed. They stood hungry, naked and frightened in darkness, in their filth, unfed, unwashed. He recalled the stench and listening to the screams of others echoing through their sordid dungeon. He told of being thrown rotting food. And of the sobbing of the children.

“I saw at least 200 children — some as young as 10,” he said. “And there were old men in their 80s. I watched one having his teeth pulled out by pliers.” In Syria’s torture chambers, age is of no consequence, it seems. But for civilians who have risen up against al-Assad, it has been the torture — and death in custody — of children that has caused particular revulsion.

The tractor driver told of regular interrogations, of forced confessions (for crimes he never knew he had committed); he spoke of knives and other people’s severed fingers, of pliers and ropes and wires, of boiling water, cigarette burns and finger nails extracted — and worse: electric drills. There had been sexual abuse, he said, but that was all he said of that.

Having finished in one place, he’d been transferred to yet another branch of the Mukhabarat and his nightmare would start all over again. And as the beatings went on day in, day out, his legs and the soles of his feet became raw and infected. That was when they forced him to “walk on rocks of salt”. He told me, speaking clearly, slowly: “When you are bleeding and the salt comes into your flesh, it hurts a lot more than the beating. I was forced to walk round and round to feel more pain.”

He lit another cigarette, then said: “Although we are suffering from torture, we are not afraid any more. There is no fear. We used to fear the regime, but there is no place for fear now.” If the intention of torture is to terrorise, it has in recent months had the opposite effect. Each act of brutality has served, it seems, to reinforce the growing sense of outrage and injustice and has triggered ever more widespread insurrection.

I met other survivors in other safe houses and each account corroborated the other. A pharmacist, abducted by militia from a hospital to which he’d been taken after being shot. His experience of torture was every bit as bad as that of the tractor driver. The 16-year-old boy, beaten, electrocuted to the point he thought he would die, then threatened with execution. He was now having trouble sleeping.

Another man, placed in what he called “the electric coffin” — in which a detainee is forced to lie inside a wooden box, across two metal plates through which they pass a current. The 73-year-old man was mercilessly whipped, electrocuted and beaten because of his son’s known opposition activities abroad. He talked of hundreds of detainees pushed into cells, humiliated and naked. Another torture refugee told of a device they called “the German chair”, so named, apparently, because it was devised by the Stasi. In it, a detainee is bent backwards until he feels his spine will snap.

What emerged was a pattern of systematic brutality, a revolving door of terror through which thousands of people have passed in recent months. This is Syria’s torture machine. It is torture on an industrial scale.

While in Syria, we lived in a bubble, seeing nothing of the extreme brutality and killing for which the Syrian regime is so notorious. We were taken to mass rallies, where thousands of frenzied supporters kissed portraits of al-Assad for our cameras and chanted slogans in defiance of Arab League sanctions.

For two days we were not granted filming permits — and it’s probably no coincidence that one of those days was a Friday, the day on which hundreds of anti-government demonstrations are guaranteed to break out right across the country after midday prayers. One day, while we were legally filming on a street, our government minder — despite wielding official documents embossed with Ministry of Information double-headed eagles — was arrested by angry Mukhabarat agents. We never found out why this particular location was so sensitive. Our minder returned, visibly shaken, 15 minutes later. “We cannot film here,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Despite daily requests, we were refused access to cities such as Homs and Hama whose residents were posting videos on YouTube showing tanks firing at random into civilian areas. When we were finally taken to Dara’a, the southern city that had been the cradle of this insurrection, we travelled in the presence of four government minders and, when we attempted to talk to anyone, we found ourselves surrounded by Mukhabarat who instructed our interviewees to tell us everything was normal. It was very claustrophobic.

Despite this, an astonishing number of Syrian people did approach us, subtly — and often quaking — to tell us that all was not as it appeared, that they detested the regime and that there were thousands out there like them. One man touched my arm as I stood in the midst of a mass rally in downtown Damascus, completely surrounded by the ranting and raging regime-faithful. As I looked round, he caught my eye and simply uttered the word “Bashar” as he drew his index finger across his throat, before melting into the loyalist crowd. If he’d been spotted he might as well have signed his own death warrant.

A road snakes up the barren rock of Mount Qasioun which overlooks Damascus and on a clear day, from 1,000m up, there’s a magnificent panoramic view across the capital. From this vantage point, if you know what you’re looking for, it is possible to pick out at least seven locations where you can say with a good degree of certainty that people are being tortured at any single moment. The thought spoils the view.

Each of the four main pillars of the Mukhabarat — military intelligence, air force intelligence, the political security directorate and the general security directorate — has its headquarters in the city. And each has sub-branches: general security has three — including the feared Palestine branch — and military intelligence has several, among them the notorious Branch 235. No one seems to know what the number means. Each of these agencies is an empire inside an empire, with bureaux the length and breadth of Syria. Since the revolt started, detention facilities have not been confined to known intelligence buildings; the Mukhabarat have used stadiums and football fields in several cities to detain and torture suspects. In smaller towns and villages, market squares suffice. The four main intelligence agencies are thought to be directly under the control of the president.

While al-Assad increasingly faces armed insurrection from those weary of life in his Big Brother world, the most potent weapon in opposition hands is the mobile phone. Grainy footage of violent acts of repression — and of those tortured and killed by the regime — has been uploaded and rebroadcast to a global audience of millions.

These videos make distressing viewing. In one, a mother is seen weeping over the body of her 27-year-old son who has been delivered home, dead, after a week in detention. He has marks and bruises all over his body and there is a bullet wound. “May Allah take revenge against all tyrants,” the woman wails. “On each and every unjust person, Bashar and his aides, my God, may You take revenge on him.”

Such footage has caused irreparable damage to al-Assad’s regime. But the government ministers I spoke to about these videos roundly dismiss them as faked or filmed somewhere else at another time. If verified, however, such footage would present important evidence of the crimes the regime now stands accused of by the UN Human Rights Council Inquiry. The sheer volume of such material — upwards of 30,000 videos have now been posted on the internet by Syrian opposition activists — spurred Channel 4 to commission a documentary investigation.

We employed a team of experts to forensically examine video footage, subjecting it to a strict verification protocol. We have independently checked, when possible, the sources of the material, looked for time-specific clues, then examined location details with Syrians from those places. Specific incidents have been cross-checked and corroborated by independent sources. Exiled former members of the Syrian security forces have checked vehicles, uniforms and military insignia. A growing number of these videos show soldiers actually committing acts of torture, openly filming each other. It’s chilling: not one of them appears to be worried about being identified.

Accents have been carefully listened to. And the records of those uploading video have been examined for consistency and reliability. We sought the advice of a specialist doctor from the charity Freedom from Torture. We employed a forensic pathologist, Professor Derrick Pounder, to examine grim video evidence of those whose relatives allege were killed under torture.

The result is a grotesque compendium of verified video material which we believe to present irrefutable prima facie evidence of crimes against humanity.

Talking me through this material, Pounder said the videos show “compelling evidence of crude physical violence, strangulation, homicide, shootings and general assaults. There is a very distinctive pattern of … physical violence in an extreme form,” he said. “It would suggest that what was happening was happening on a wide scale and it would suggest that what was happening was carried out with impunity … There is no consequence for them even if there is clear evidence of an assault.” So much for the UN Convention Against Torture.

One evening, when I was interviewing torture victims in a Syrian safe house in Lebanon, there was a great commotion. A Syrian army defector, who had commanded resistance in the district of Baba Amr in Homs — the city Syrians have dubbed “Capital of the Revolution” — was being carried into the safe-house by four men. He had been shot nine times and had somehow survived, but he was in terrible pain. He had recently been smuggled into Lebanon from Tal Kalakh.

The next morning, he was well enough to talk briefly. It was my first encounter with a former member of the Syrian security forces. He told me that mass detention and severe torture were commonplace. “When the army carries out a detention campaign,” he said, “they start to torture the detainee until the security services arrive. They then take him to the military security branch, which is like a human slaughter house. Most of the people taken there alive are discharged dead.”

While a platoon commander in the army he had accompanied officers in house-to-house searches for wanted men in Homs, he said. “When they don’t find their target, they either rape the women, or kill the children.” He named the officers in charge and his commanding officer. They were all Allawites, he said — members of the prominent Syrian Shia sect to which the president belongs. When they had failed to find one man on their wanted list, he claimed, they had taken his son, beheaded him and hung his head above the door of the family home. He related this account in a faltering manner as though struggling to find the words, and as he did so, tears rolled down his face. But he was so badly wounded, he couldn’t wipe the tears away. This, he told me, was what had prompted his defection.

I told him that the UN had just raised its estimated death count to 4,000 civilians killed since March. (This week they raised that to 5,000.) He looked at me in disbelief. He said the number was much higher. After four decades of al-Assad rule, one man is held accountable for this bloody-thirsty repression: the army’s commander-in-chief and the head of Syrian Intelligence — the president of the republic himself. And if al-Assad was to attempt to stop all this, could he, I asked Nadim Houry. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “But I do know that he never tried to stop it.”

Trial at Guantánamo: What Shall We Do With The Torture Victim?

Andy Worthington — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:57:11 +0000

At Guantánamo on Wednesday, one of the most notorious torture victims of the Bush administration — Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — was arraigned for his trial by Military Commission, charged with masterminding the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, off the coast of Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors and wounded 39 others. Al-Nashiri is also one of three “high-value detainees” who, under the Bush administration, was subjected to waterboarding, an ancient form of torture that involves controlled drowning.

Appearing publicly for the first time in nine years, al-Nashiri, a millionaire and a merchant before his capture, who is now 46 years old, was clean-shaven, and responded politely when asked by the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, whether he understood the proceedings, and whether “he accepted the services of his Pentagon-paid defense team.” As the Miami Herald described it, he replied, “At this moment these lawyers are doing the right job.”

For those who support George W. Bush’s attempts to twist the law out of shape in an attempt to claim that torture was not torture, and then to use it on “high-value detainees” in a series of despicable torture dungeons located in other countries, the trial of al-Nashiri at Guantánamo is something of a triumph, although it is difficult to see how the torture apologists reach this conclusion.

In fact, al-Nashiri’s arraignment, nine years after he was first seized in the United Arab Emirates, is a disgrace. He was held in torture prisons in Thailand and Poland (where prosecutors are investigating his torture claims), and possibly also in Romania, Lithuania and Morocco — and what distinguishes these locations from other prisons is how the Bush administration had to undergo devious, underhand negotiations to site its prisons on foreign soil. This rather tends to prove that torture was still torture, however much John Yoo, a compliant lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said it wasn’t in a series of notorious memos that will forever be known as the “torture memos,” because if it was legal, then why was all the dirty subterfuge needed?

For the supporters of Guantánamo and torture, the sordid details of his treatment are not generally discussed, perhaps because it might be revealed how he was only held in a prison in Thailand until the Thai government got fed up with harboring American torturers, and was then sent to Poland, where, eventually, the same thing happened. His torture, according to the apologists, was supposed to show robustness and resolve on the part of the Bush administration, and not the fairly desperate maneuverings of abusers who knew that their activities were illegal.

The apologists also shrug off the alarming truth that al-Nashiri was waterboarded, and also shrug off the findings of the CIA Inspector General, who concluded, in a report in 2004, that CIA operatives had gone too far when they threatened him with a gun and a power drill while he was hooded, and also made threats against his family. Another way of expressing this would be to note that the use of the gun and the drill constituted “mock executions.”

To the best of our knowledge, the torture of al-Nashiri yielded no useful intelligence. However, because of the way he was treated, and because of the Bush administration’s foolish insistence that terror suspects were not criminals, but “warriors” in a possibly endless “war on terror,” the federal court trial that should have taken place shortly after his capture in 2002, if there was any evidence that he masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole, never took place.

Nine years on, supporters of military trials for terror suspects may be celebrating because al-Nashiri’s trial by Military Commission is finally going ahead, although, in the meantime, numerous other terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal courts. Supporters of Guantánamo and torture tend to ignore the many successful federal court trials of the last decade, choosing instead to believe that being tortured in secret CIA prisons and then held in Guantánamo somehow makes prisoners like al-Nashiri much more significant than these other terror suspects.

How else do we explain the uproar over the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the only prisoner held in secret CIA torture prisons and then Guantánamo to be transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial? Ghailani was transferred in May 2009 (before Congress imposed a ban on the transfer of any more prisoners for trials on the US mainland), and was tried last fall, convicted and given a life sentence in January this year.

Even so, the supporters of the Military Commissions tried to portray his trial as a failure, and continue to rail against federal court trials for terror suspects, even going so far, in passages included in the National Defense Authoization Act, which is currently being examined by Congress, as to demand mandatory military custody for all terror suspects in future, even though that will cripple the ability of law enforcement officials to effectively investigate their crimes, and even though the military has shown no willingness to become a misplaced policeman for deranged ideologues in Congress.

President Obama is also to blame for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri’s presence in a courtroom in Guantánamo, because his administration revived the Commissions in the summer of 2009, deciding that federal court trials were appropriate for some Guantánamo prisoners, and Military Commissions for others. That allowed the opponents of federal court trials to campaign against them, pushing the administration to drop its plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks in New York, and obliging senior officials (and specifically Attorney General Eric Holder) to undertake a humiliating climbdown, and to announce that federal court trials were off the agenda, and the Military Commissions were the only game in town.

That led directly to the notion that mandatory military custody for terror suspects is somehow acceptable, when it is clearly not, and left the administration, like an unconvincing puppeteer, holding Military Commission trials at Guantánamo which they have so far failed to endorse confidently, reaching plea deals in all three cases dealt with to date — those of Ibrahim al-Qosi, Noor Uthman Muhammed and Omar Khadr.

As a capital case and one involving such well-publicized torture, al-Nashiri’s case is much more of a test for the Obama administration, which cannot, for once, shirk its responsibilities through a plea deal. There is no way of knowing, as yet, if al-Nashiri will find a way to fundamentally challenge the administration, or if his trial will, in spite of the precedents established throughout the Commissions’ inglorious history, somehow proceed smoothly, but it seems unlikely.

At the arraignment, Richard Kammen, one of al-Nashiri’s defense attorneys, made it clear that questions about his client’s treatment would form part of the defense’s case. “Is torture a mitigating factor?” he asked Col. Pohl, to which the judge replied that the question would be appropriate when — if — al-Nashiri came to be sentenced. As the Miami Herald also explained, “Kammen also asked Pohl if he would fulfill his obligation under international treaty to report to ‘outside authorities’ evidence that Nashiri’s ‘torture’ was arranged by high public officials, doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers,” to which the judge replied, “I will comply with the law.”

That sounds promising, but as the media focus drifts away from Guantánamo once more with the realization that al-Nashiri’s trial will not begin for at least a year, it is also worth recalling that, fundamentally, this is not the right venue for the trial of anyone accused of terrorism, or, indeed, of war crimes that are not real, and were only invented by Congress in 2006 and revived, fundamentally unaltered, in 2009.

Instead, the courtroom at Guantánamo, where the world is supposed to see justice being delivered, is composed in equal parts of an ideological fixation, on the part of Republicans, and an unconvincing capitulation, on the part of the administration, and these are not the correct ingredients for a fair trial, especially as the Obama administration has refused to confirm that, should al-Nashiri somehow not be convicted, there is no guarantee that he will be released, which, of course, makes a mockery of the entire process.

Note: The courtroom sketch above is by Janet Hamlin, and is courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

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

Abu Zubaydah and the Silencing of Guantánamo’s “High-Value Detainees,” as the CIA Censors His Drawings

Andy Worthington — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:39:10 +0000

Over the last few years, my colleague Jason Leopold at Truthout has been doggedly pursuing a number of important stories about the Bush administration’s torture program, and the lack of accountability for those who authorized or implemented aspects of the program. Working sometimes with the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye, Leopold has investigated human experimentation at Guantánamo, and has also worked tirelessly to shine a light on the story of the alleged “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah.

As Jason and I have spoken about repeatedly, the story of Abu Zubaydah is one of the most crucial in the “War on Terror.” Zubaydah was seized in Pakistan in March 2002, and flown to a secret prison in Thailand, where he was the first victim of the Bush administration’s “high-value detainee” torture program. Subsequently held in other locations, including Poland, he was finally sent to Guantánamo in September 2006, along with 13 other “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

In the five years since the transfer of the “high-value detainees,” almost every attempt to officially pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding these 14 men — and two others transferred to Guantánamo in 2007 and 2008 — has been resisted, first by the Bush administration, and, since January 2009, by President Obama.

With all the Guantánamo prisoners, every discussion between the prisoners and their lawyers is presumptively classified, but many have been at least partly unclassified after undergoing a review process. With the “high-value detainees,” however, everything remains presumptively classified, and the only reason we know anything specific about what happened to them is because representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross were allowed to interview them after their arrival at Guantánamo, and a highly critical report (PDF) that they then submitted to the Bush administration, containing excerpts from the interviews and detailed analysis of the prisoners’ statements, was leaked to the New York Review of Books in 2009.

In his latest article about Abu Zubaydah for Truthout, Jason Leopold has focused on the self-serving absurdity of the government’s classification system when it comes to the “high-value detainees,” explaining how ten drawings that Abu Zubaydah made, showing his torture, are also subjected to this system of over-classification. I’m cross-posting it below, in the hope that it will attract additional readers, as it explains clearly how the purpose is to shield the Bush administration’s torturers from scrutiny, which, of course, is shameful and illegal.

For the article, Leopold spoke to Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the ACLU, who pointed out that it was “deeply troubling that the government continues to censor the best evidence of detainee abuse,” and also provided the following succinct analysis of why the censorship of the “high-value detainees” is so unjust:

[The government] has destroyed 92 videotapes of CIA interrogations, suppressed 2,000 photographs of abuse throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and even classified the detainees’ own accounts of their mistreatment at proceedings in Guantánamo. This selective suppression of evidence has allowed the government to perpetuate the myth that the abuse of detainees was aberrational, when it was, in fact, the result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of our government. And it allows advocates of torture and mistreatment to obscure the truly horrific nature of the mistreatment authorized by the Bush administration.

However, the most important part of the article, to my mind, is what Brent Mickum, Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, had to say about the gagging of his client, which is so sweeping that it includes any reference to publicly available information, such as his statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Leopold writes:

Mickum said Roberts’ order and the secrecy surrounding Zubaydah’s drawings deprives his client of a “voice” and allows former Bush officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, to control the narrative about Zubaydah’s treatment and the efficacy of his torture.

“One of the great frustrations that we as Zubaydah’s defense counsel have faced is the inability to tell his story,” Mickum said in an interview. “That inability is brought about by two things: one, the government’s misuse and improper use of the classification system to essentially muzzle our client and his attorneys to prevent telling his side of the story. And the other is the unwillingness of the district court to make decisions on motions that have been fully briefed, in some cases, for almost three years. These include motions to declassify his diaries. In the final analysis, nothing that my client says, draws, or writes is classified. The government is using this as a ruse because they are embarrassed and don’t want this information to be revealed.”

Jason’s article is below. I hope you have time to read it, and will share it if it reveals to you — or confirms to you — how muzzling torture victims is being used by the government to protect the Bush administration from accountability for its actions.

CIA: Zubaydah’s Torture Drawings, Writings, “Should They Exist,” to Remain Top Secret
By Jason Leopold, Truthout, October 5, 2011

In 2002, not long after he was subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” by Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, psychologists under contract to the CIA, high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah made about ten drawings depicting the torture he endured while in custody of the agency.

One of the drawings Zubaydah had sketched captured in incredible detail the waterboarding sessions he underwent. Another drawing showed him being chained by his wrists to the ceiling of a CIA black site prison where he was held and another showed him strapped to a chair and being doused with water as part of a sleep deprivation program, according to two counterterrorism officials who have seen Zubaydah’s drawings.

Zubaydah drew the pictures of the torture techniques he was subjected to on a sheet of paper measuring about 8 x 11 inches and on pieces of paper about the size of an index card. In some instances, Zubaydah drew several of the torture techniques on a single piece of paper.

Zubaydah’s “artwork is very detailed right down to the straps that were used when he was on the waterboard and almost looks like a photograph,” said one of the counterterrorism officials, who requested anonymity in order to discuss classified material.

Brent Mickum, Zubaydah’s attorney, previously told Truthout that in the absence of the 92 interrogation videotapes, which the agency destroyed, the drawings Zubaydah made contain the best description of the torture techniques used against him while he was being held at the agency’s black site prison facilities.

“These are a good group of drawings and he is a pretty good artist,” Mickum told Truthout last year. Mickum said he is prohibited from discussing the contents of Zubaydah’s drawings because it remains classified. However, he said, “the depictions would be of interest” and agreed that Zubaydah “can draw and with great detail.”

Additionally, Zubaydah wrote poetry, short stories, and articles while in CIA custody. The content of his writing, however, is not known.

But the CIA, which maintains the “enhanced interrogation techniques” interrogators used on Zubaydah were “safe” and “legal,” refuses to release any of his drawings or writings and won’t even acknowledge that those materials actually exist. If Zubaydah’s drawings and writings do exist, the CIA said, it would be part of the agency’s “operational files,” which means “records and files detailing the actual conduct of [CIA's] intelligence activities.”

The CIA made that disclosure in two separate responses to requests Truthout filed with the agency seeking a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) of Zubaydah’s drawings and writings. An MDR is a procedure under a section of an executive order signed by President Obama (which replaced a similar executive order signed by former President Bush) that allows the public to seek the declassification review of specific classified material.

“We have conducted a thorough review of your request and have determined that responsive records, should they exist, would be contained in operational files,” states a September 21 letter Susan Viscuso, the CIA’s information and privacy coordinator, sent to Truthout in response to an MDR request related to Zubaydah’s drawings.

In response to Truthout’s MDR request related to Zubaydah’s writings, Viscuso said in a letter dated September 28 that those materials, “should they exist,” would be “contained in properly designated CIA operational files” and are also exempt from FOIA searches, reviews, and “disclosure requirements.”

A section of “the CIA Information Act, as amended,” Viscuso said, “exempts operational files from the search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

The revised regulations still says “declassification review requests will not be accepted … for any document or material containing information contained within an operational file …”

Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, said, “it is deeply troubling that the government continues to censor the best evidence of detainee abuse.”

The government “has destroyed 92 videotapes of CIA interrogations, suppressed 2,000 photographs of abuse throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and even classified the detainees’ own accounts of their mistreatment at proceedings in Guantánamo,” Abdo said. “This selective suppression of evidence has allowed the government to perpetuate the myth that the abuse of detainees was aberrational, when it was, in fact, the result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of our government. And it allows advocates of torture and mistreatment to obscure the truly horrific nature of the mistreatment authorized by the Bush administration.”

The ACLU’s FOIA lawsuits against the Bush and Obama administrations related to the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan prisons has resulted in the release more than 100,000 pages of secret government documents.

Last month, the CIA revised its MDR regulations “to more clearly reflect the current CIA organizational structure and policies and practices, and to eliminate ambiguous, redundant and obsolete regulatory provisions.”

Judge Silences Zubaydah

However, it’s not just Zubaydah’s drawings that the government wants to keep secret. In a four-page order issued earlier this year, US District Court Judge Richard Roberts, who presides over Zubaydah’s habeas corpus case, issued an order that said that any statements Zubaydah has made to his attorneys describing the torture he endured must remain classified and cannot be revealed publicly in court filings. Zubaydah has given his attorneys a signed declaration totaling about 15 pages detailing the torture he was subjected to during his imprisonment at CIA-run prisons.

Roberts’ order was issued in March, in response to a motion Zubaydah’s legal team filed nearly two years earlier that accused the government of “improper classification” of documents that included statements Zubaydah made describing “the interrogation techniques inflicted upon him while in CIA custody … other personal knowledge of his experience within the CIA Torture and Rendition Program and … statements made by [Zubaydah's] counsel based upon information that is found within the public domain.”

Roberts said Zubaydah’s legal team, in seeking to have Zubaydah’s statements related to his treatment declassified, was essentially trying to bring “a FOIA challenge in the midst of a habeas petition.”

“The government must provide petitioner’s counsel, not the public at large, with classified information unless the government moves for an exception to disclosure,” Roberts wrote.

In 2007, during an interview with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Zubaydah described in detail how CIA interrogators tortured him, which included placing him in a “confinement box” and repeatedly slamming his head against a wall. The interview with the ICRC was part of a confidential report on the treatment of 14 high-value detainees in custody of the agency. Journalist Mark Danner obtained the ICRC report and published a lengthy story in the New York Review of Books detailing the detainees’ statements about their torture.

Still, Roberts’ order means that anything Zubaydah says or writes or has said or written that has not been officially approved for disclosure by the government is classified and that applies to his interview with the ICRC.

Mickum said Roberts’ order and the secrecy surrounding Zubaydah’s drawings deprives his client of a “voice” and allows former Bush officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, to control the narrative about Zubaydah’s treatment and the efficacy of his torture.

“One of the great frustrations that we as Zubaydah’s defense counsel have faced is the inability to tell his story,” Mickum said in an interview. “That inability is brought about by two things: one, the government’s misuse and improper use of the classification system to essentially muzzle our client and his attorneys to prevent telling his side of the story. And the other is the unwillingness of the district court to make decisions on motions that have been fully briefed, in some cases, for almost three years. These include motions to declassify his diaries. In the final analysis, nothing that my client says, draws, or writes is classified. The government is using this as a ruse because they are embarrassed and don’t want this information to be revealed.”

Meanwhile, former CIA general counsel John Rizzo confirmed long held suspicions that some of the interrogation videotapes the agency destroyed in 2005 showed Zubaydah being subjected to waterboarding, an admission that fuels speculation the tapes were destroyed to cover up illegal acts, not because the tapes were no longer of any intelligence value, as current and former agency officials have claimed.

“We had a representative in my office early on to review all of the tapes, and he came back, did a report,” Rizzo said during an interview with the PBS news program Frontline. “I also spoke to him in some depth about it, and he made it clear that there were portions of the tapes that clearly showed Zubaydah being waterboarded.”

John Durham, a federal prosecutor from Connecticut who was appointed special counsel by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the tape purge, concluded his probe last year without bringing any charges against former CIA officials involved in the destruction. Durham had obtained Zubaydah’s drawings from the government during the course of his investigation, but it’s unclear if Durham used [them] to assist his probe.

Last year, as Truthout first reported, the government, in a federal court filing in Zubaydah’s habeas case, backed off of every major claim the Bush administration had made about him after he was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, stating that their “understanding of [Zubaydah's] role in terrorist activities has … evolved with further investigation.”

Guantánamo: Military Commissions and the Illusion of Justice

Andy Worthington — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:22:43 +0000

When something is irredeemably broken, the sensible course of action is to get rid of it. However, when it comes to military trials for terror suspects in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” however broken the system is, government officials and lawmakers have repeatedly gathered round to put it back together again, and continue to do so, even though, in nearly ten years, the commissions have resulted in just two trials, and four other cases that have ended with plea deals.

The military commissions, which were last used on Nazi saboteurs in World War II, were brought back from the dead by Vice President Dick Cheney almost ten years ago — in an alarming military order dated November 13, 2001 — as a means of swiftly trying and executing terror suspects seized in the “war on terror” without the impediment of due process or a ban on evidence derived through the use of torture.

Ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, the commissions were then resuscitated by Congress, and although Barack Obama froze them temporarily when he took office, he soon thawed them out again, even though the wisest of his advisors recommended him not to, as the primary charges in the commissions — conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism, for example — were appropriate crimes to be tried in federal courts, but had only been invented as war crimes by Congress.

Reviving the commissions left President Obama with a two-tier system of justice for those held at Guantánamo, with both federal court trials and military commissions on the table, and it led him into unseen difficulties, when, after he announced in November 2009 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other “high-value detainees” in Guantánamo would face a federal court trial in New York for their involvement in the 9/11 attacks, those who opposed his plan struck back.

Because of President Obama’s refusal to consign the commissions to a legal grave, his critics could point to them as a viable alternative to a federal court trial, especially as the administration, when announcing the 9/11 trial, had also announced that five other Guantánamo prisoners would be tried by military commission.

As a result, Obama’s critics in Congress ultimately succeeded in passing legislation preventing any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland for any reason (even to to face a federal court trial), and have now embarked on their most audacious and inappropriate measure yet — threatening to pass legislation making it mandatory for any foreign terror suspect to be held in military custody rather than being tried in federal court for the crime of terrorism.

Ten years after 9 /11, it is truly depressing that the misguided “war on terror” not only lives on, but may get a new lease of life, and at Guantánamo, where part of this struggle to keep Dick Cheney’s malevolent dreams alive is particularly focused, the authorities are gearing up for new activity.

Last week, in an attempt to market what the Miami Herald described as “a new era of transparency” at Guantánamo, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the new Chief Prosecutor of the military commissions, told the Weekly Standard that the commissions will “feature new measures to ensure transparency, including a venue enabling victims and media to observe proceedings near-real-time in the continental United States.” The Herald added that the transmissions “won’t be live because the feeds will be broadcast on a ’40-second delay to ensure safeguarding of national security information.’”

In the Miami Herald article, Carol Rosenberg, who has been following the military commissions since they first began, called the proposed new system “vastly different” from what has been in place to date, whereby “reporters and other spectators were required to fly to Guantánamo on specially arranged Pentagon flights,” and then “faced strict limitations on where they could go and what they could report,” which “helped cut the number of news organizations covering events there.”

The changes, if implemented, will certainly increase transparency, and that is to be commended, but huge and, I believe, insurmountable problems remain for the commissions.

Chief amongst these is how transparency can be balanced with what remains an obsessive need for secrecy on the part of the government. Having decided not to even investigate the Bush administration’s official torture program (despite the requirement to do so under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture and America’s own domestic torture statute), the Obama administration will be obliged to continue making sure that, when those to be tried were tortured, discussion of the time they spent in secret CIA prisons, where the use of torture was widespread, is severely limited.

As Carol Rosenberg noted, “The CIA still forbids the public to hear what they did and where they did it, even when captives have described their treatment at pre-trial proceedings,” and these requirements also protect “the identities of CIA agents and contractors who carried out interrogations.”

This is of relevance not just in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused, but, more pressingly, in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, who had his case officially referred for trial by military commission by the commissions’ Convening Authority, Retired Adm. Bruce MacDonald, on Wednesday, in what were the first capital charges put forward for trial in the commissions.

The problem, for the government, is that al-Nashiri was, notoriously, one of three “high-value detainees” waterboarded by the CIA. In a report on the referral to trial in the Washington Post, it was noted, coyly, that “waterboarding was sanctioned by Justice Department lawyers,” when what should have been noted was that Justice Department lawyers — John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee — purported to approve its use, even though there are no grounds whatsoever for lawyers to attempt to justify the use of torture.

There are further complications. As the CIA Inspector General concluded in a report on detainee treatment in 2004 (PDF), al-Nashiri was also threatened with mock executions when CIA operatives held a power drill and a gun to his head while he was hooded and naked in a secret prison in Thailand — actions that exceeded the guidelines laid down by Yoo and Bybee — and al-Nashiri’s lawyers argued in submissions to the Convening Authority that no case should be brought against their client because of his torture, because of the delay in his case, and also because of the destruction of evidence. Videotapes of al-Nashiri’s waterboarding were among the tapes destroyed by the CIA, in spite of a court order demanding that they be preserved, and his lawyers argued that the destruction of the tapes deprives the defense team of important and potentially exculpatory evidence.

In addition, although the government “cannot use any statements obtained under torture,” and “prosecutors are unlikely to rely on any statements Nashiri made while in CIA custody,” in the Post‘s words, one of his lawyers, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes, stated that he intended to summon the CIA operatives involved in his client’s interrogation to the trial.

In the submission, his lawyers stated, “The United States should not be permitted to kill a man it has brutally tortured and subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

Further afield, the European Parliament submitted a declaration in June stating that al-Nashiri should not be subject to the death penalty because of his treatment by the CIA, and human rights groups have also spoken out against the plans. In addition, al-Nashiri’s treatment in a secret CIA prison in Poland, where he was sent after his ordeal in Thailand in November and early December 2002, is regarded as so severe that, although there has been no official acknowledgement that a secret prison existed in Poland (either by the US or the Polish governments), the Polish prosecutor investigating his case was so alarmed by documents, which, evidently, he had access to, that he officially designated him — and Abu Zubaydah, another tortured “high-value detainee” — as a “victim.”

One last problem with the commissions was inadvertently revealed in the Weekly Standard article, when the Pentagon’s General Counsel Jeh Johnson said that Brig. Gen. Martins was “a recognized superstar” who, as the Miami Herald put it, “would focus not on getting the most convictions but on making the war court credible and sustainable.” This is the same Jeh Johnson who, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2009, when the revival of the commissions was being discussed, urged the committee to drop the charge of material support, because the administration believed that it would be overturned on appeal, as it was “not a traditional violation of the law of war” — and, as mentioned above, was invented by Congress.

Al-Nashiri does not face a material support charge, but the charges he does face include conspiracy and murder in violation of the laws of war, and the latter charge also has a non-existent history as a war crime, having also been dreamt up by Congress when the military commissions were first revived after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal in 2006.

As al-Nashiri’s case finally proceeds to trial, all but the most blinkered enthusiasts for the commissions should be deeply troubled that, despite amendments, a system dedicated to evading all mention of torture in the case of a tortured man is going ahead with barely a murmur of dissent, even though this deeply flawed system contains invented war crimes, intended to turn a crime (terrorism) or engagement in warfare into violations of the laws of war, when they are no such thing.

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

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part Four of Five)

Andy Worthington — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:52:06 +0000

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

This is Part 19 of the 70-part series. 247 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, WikiLeaks pushed Guantánamo back onto the international media’s agenda by publishing thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, which drew on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

As an independent media partner of WikiLeaks, I liaised both before and after the publication of these documents with WikiLeaks’ mainstream media partners (including the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais), and then, after the killing of Osama bin Laden pushed Guantánamo aside once more, and allowed apologists for torture, and those who engineered its use by US forces, to resume their malignant, criminal and deeply mistaken defense of torture, and of the existence of Guantánamo, I began to analyze all of the Detainee Assessment Briefs in depth.

I began, in May and June, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. These men and boys were amongst the first 201 prisoners released, and unlike the other prisoners, for whom information was released to the public from 2006 onwards, as a result of court cases involving Freedom of Information requests, no information had been officially released about the first 201 prisoners.

“WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo” was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” published from June to August, in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources.

As a result, of the 201 prisoners released between 2002 and 2004, I have, to date, published the most comprehensive reports available in one place on 198 of the 779 prisoners held, with just three stories currently unknown (of prisoners whose Detainee Assessment Briefs were missing, and whose stories have not surfaced in any other media).

For the next phase of this 70-part project (with 18 parts now complete), I have turned my attention to the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released (see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five). This was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

The tribunals were designed to review the evidence against all the prisoners (which they did from July 2004 to March 2005), to decide whether they had been correctly designated, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held without rights. They were, however, a corrupt and inept process, designed essentially to rubber-stamp the administration’s prior decisions, and not to allow the prisoners to fundamentally challenge the largely flimsy basis of their detention. The prisoners were, for example, not allowed lawyers, and they were not allowed to either see or hear the classified evidence against them, although it was not until 2007 that the extent of the failings of the CSRTs became fully apparent, when their supposed integrity was thoroughly undermined in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham.

A veteran of US intelligence who had worked on the tribunals, Lt. Col. Abraham not only revealed how shambolic the process of compiling the supposed evidence for the tribunals was, but also how, when tribunals such as the one he took part in, disagreed with the authorities’ preconceived notions, by deciding that the man before them was not an “enemy combatant,” the officers were dismissed and “do-over” tribunals were convened until the authorities got the results they desired.

Despite the insuperable problems with the CSRTs, they — and their successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards — often provided the only opportunity for the prisoners to have their own voices heard, and they proved invaluable when I was researching and writing The Guantánamo Files.

Now supplemented with information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks, the 62 stories in this five-part series cover 29 of the 38 prisoners who were the only ones, out of 558 prisoners in total, to succeed in convincing their tribunals, and the authorities overseeing the tribunals, they they were not “enemy combatants” — or, as the administration insisted, that they were “no longer enemy combatants.” The Pentagon’s document listing the 38 (PDF) describes them as “Detainees Found to No Longer Meet the Definition of ‘Enemy Combatant’ during Combatant Status Review Tribunals Held at Guantánamo.” The other nine were not freed because, in all but one case, it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries, and, as a result, they were not released until 2006 and 2009, when third countries were found that were prepared to accept them.

This series also covers the stories of 33 others released between September 2004 and November 2005 who were not cleared for release after the CSRTs, but were released anyway, and readers will, I hope, be able to see how much of the decision-making process involved political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice.

I also hope that readers will bear in the mind the Bush administration’s refusal to concede that it made any mistakes, which is apparent in its refusal to accept that prisoners were “not enemy combatants,” and its decision to described them as being “no longer enemy combatants” instead, and will reflect on the problems of overclassification that have been thoroughly chronicled in the preceding series analyzing the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

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

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part Four of Five)

Adel Al Zamel (ISN 568, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Adel al-Zamel, who was 38 years old at the time, was one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in Al-Qaida, although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Zamel told his tribunal that, in 2001, he became the manager of the Kabul office of the Saudi humanitarian aid charity Al-Wafa, and took his wife and their eight children to Afghanistan, unaware that the humanitarian charity was under suspicion for activities related to terrorism (although noticeably, these were never proved, despite numerous Al-Wafa members, and the organization’s director, being held at Guantánamo).

Al-Zamel also said that he gave up his job in August 2001 after a disagreement with a more senior figure, who, he felt, was arrogant and was squandering money that had been given in good faith for charitable purposes. He then moved his family to Pakistan in September, but returned to help the family of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith move to Pakistan as well. He added that he had met Abu Ghaith on a few occasions in Kuwait, but insisted that he did not know, until after 9/11, “when he appeared on TV,” that he was a spokesman for Al-Qaida. Speaking of his capture, he denied all knowledge that he was staying in a safe house, as alleged, and said that he had been there for 16 weeks awaiting the opportunity to return to Kuwait.

In Chapter 14, I explained that, speaking of his time in Bagram, al-Zamel said, in an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Adil al-Zamil), “While walking to the place of interrogation, the guards would continuously hit me on my head with sticks, and every time I denied their accusations during interrogations (of being tied to Al-Qaida) the guards would hit me even more, hold me high up and then fling me to the floor.” He added that he was hooded and “stripped naked in front of women officers while they clicked photos, laughing all the time,” was intimidated by interrogators placing a gun on the table during interrogations, and was “suspend[ed] with one hand tied to the ceiling during interrogations, making it almost impossible to either sit or stand straight.”

Speaking of his transfer to Cuba, al-Zamel said, “I call the journey to Guantánamo ‘the journey of death.’ I discreetly wished that the plane would fall to end the pain I felt.” He also explained that, in Guantánamo, he was a victim of a monstrous policy whereby medical treatment was dependant on cooperation with the interrogators.

He said he was beaten on the head with handcuffs, but was refused medical treatment for several weeks until his wound became infected. He also said that the guards “used to give me pills which I didn’t know what they were, I think they were drugs because I was sleeping almost all the time.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Zamel maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan purely for humanitarian purposes. “A former employee of the Kuwaiti national housing authority,” he confirmed that he moved to Kabul in August 2000 to head a branch of what McClatchy described as the “the Wafa Humanitarian Works Organization,” left Afghanistan in January 2002, and was seized in Pakistan the next month. Refuting the US authorities’ unsubstantiated claims about Al-Wafa, he said that “his work was solely charitable, distributing food and overseeing small infrastructure projects,” and that he was “merely an employee.”

According to the US military, however, “he was a key organizer and co-founder of its offices in three Afghan cities,” and in his tribunal and review board the authorities claimed that he “had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and knew at least two members of bin Laden’s inner circle,” although this seems particularly suspect, as there are counter-arguments that Al-Wafa and bin Laden did not see eye to eye. Nevertheless, McClatchy noted that, in his interview, he failed to mention Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, although, to be fair, that could be simply because of the negative connotations attached to Abu Ghaith’s name, if al-Zamel’s version of events as explained at Guantánamo was true.

Whatever the truth, the connection haunted him in Guantánamo. He said that, on arrival, when “he was still sore from being punched in the face and kicked in the gut for two and a half months while in US military custody in Afghanistan,” and was being examined by a doctor, an interpreter “looked at him, grinned and whispered over and over: ‘Do you want to kill yourself? Do you want to kill yourself?’” He was then taken to interrogation, where a soldier “with a tattoo of a dragon stretching down his forearm shoved a piece of paper in Zamel’s face” which featured a simple diagram — the letters “UBL” (for Osama bin Laden, or Usama bin Laden as the US military called him), an arrow to Abu Ghaith, and another arrow to his own name.

A McClatchy reporter spoke to al-Zamel in Kuwait, describing him as “a small, thin man with dark rings under his eyes. When speaking with friends, he jokes often, flashing his teeth in wide grins, and he talks in energetic bursts. When he’s silent, when his face is still, he looks tired and old.” Speaking of Guantánamo, he stressed to the reporter, “You must understand, the psychological torture was much worse than physical torture,” and spoke about the solitary confinement (for a month) to which all new arrivals were subjected.

After the guards took him “to what looked like a small metal box,” he said, “The cell was hot. I couldn’t sleep at night. The pillow was soaked with my sweat. There was a small opening in the cell wall; I used to push my nose to it. I used the bathroom on the floor; there was nothing else to do.” He added, “I thought they were going to kill me, and then I thought they were going to leave me in there until I died. I was losing my mind. I started to think that one day they were going to open the door and let a lion in to eat me. The world was getting smaller and smaller.”

After his introductory month in solitary, he was taken to a regular cell, and “was interrogated every day after that for at least a month, pushed to confess his ties to Al-Qaida and to describe what he knew about bin Laden.” He told the reporter, “They asked me what I thought about the events of Sept. 11, and I did not reply. If I said I denounced those events, they would call me a liar. If I said I supported it, they would call me a terrorist.” When the interrogators “thought he wasn’t telling the truth,” he added, “he was sent back to solitary.”

He also said that, in his last year at Guantánamo, after the torture program had largely been brought to an end, following the arrival of lawyers after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, the interrogators nevertheless “began to threaten to send him to Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan or Morocco, where security agents would torture him in ways that he couldn’t imagine.” He said that he took the threats seriously, and that finally he cracked. “I told them, ‘I am Osama bin Laden. Please kill me,’” he said. “I just wanted it to end.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Zamel was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in August 1963, and the outline of his story — working for al-Wafa as an office manager, and then resigning and being caught in a house raid in Karachi — were repeated, along with a claim that he had been part of a group involved in an assault in Kuwait on a female student.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities and activities associated with upper echelons of the Al-Wafa organisation, Information about Al-Qaida and Taliban associated safe houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” plus “information about the Takfir Al-Hijra movement, [a] Kuwaiti Islamist group who seeks a return to Islam as practiced at the time of Muhammad, [and who] have conducted vigilante activity against young Kuwaitis engaged in what they perceive as immoral behaviour.”

This was a seemingly impressive list of reasons for his transfer, although, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In seeking to justify his detention, the Joint Task Force claimed that details of his timeline had been “conflicting and vague,” and also cited the concerns of the Kuwaiti Security Service (KSS), which, it was alleged, had reported that al-Zamel was a member of Takfir Al-Hijra, described as “an anti-Kuwait government group”), had claimed that Abu Ghaith had “close relationships with members of this group, specifically naming the detainee,” and had also stated that al-Zamel “was convicted and sentenced (in absentia) to one year in prison by the Kuwaiti government,” and was “considered to be a ‘Most Dangerous Extremist.’” If all this was true, it was a wonder that al-Zamel was freed on his return to Kuwait, and, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

In Guantánamo, however, until diplomatic pressure was exerted on behalf of al-Zamel and the other four men, he would not have been released. He was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” as a result of the claims against him, and it was also noted that JTF GTMO regarded him as “a member of the Al-Qaida support network, an Islamic Extremist, and to have traveled to Afghanistan with the intent to evade capture.” It was also suggested that he moved his family and Abu Ghaith’s family to Pakistan prior to 9/11, suggesting he “had knowledge of the attacks prior to their execution,” and it was also stated, with the addition of the information reportedly from the Kuwaiti Security Service, that he had been determined to pose “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” even though, in reporting his behavior, the Task Force failed to portray a man who was a threat.

After noting that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” the Task Force stated that his “only aggressive incident occurred on December 31, 2003, when he kicked dirt and gravel at a military working dog and handler,” adding, “Every other action [he] has completed is minor passive aggressive.”

Sa’ad Al Azmi (ISN 571, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sa’ad al-Azmi, who was 22 years old at the time, was, like Adel al-Zamel (see above), one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in al-Qaeda (and was tortured, as a US judge explained in 2010), although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Azmi said that he was a friend of Adel al-Zamel, and that he spent three weeks with him in Kabul, and then ended up with him in the Karachi house. “The people I was arrested with were civilians,” he said. “They were not wearing uniforms. I did not know anybody there except al-Zamel.”

In Chapter 15, drawing on an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Saad al-Anzi), he spoke about the abuse he suffered at Guantánamo. He stated that, during one interrogation, the guards beat him so hard that they broke his leg, and he also spoke about the abuse he suffered as part of the implementation of specific “enhanced interrogation techniques” between late 2002 and the summer of 2004, which included the exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, through the use of dogs in al-Azmi’s case, as he said he was bitten by dogs while being hooded.

He was also subjected to levels of treatment introduced under the watch of Maj. Gen. Miller, which were entirely dependent on the prisoners’ cooperation with the interrogators. The most compliant, in Level 1, kept all their “comfort items” and also received a bottle of water a week, and the levels were graded down to Level 4, which involved prolonged isolation, in which the supposedly uncooperative prisoners were held completely naked, or were allowed just a pair of shorts, and all other “comfort items” were removed. Sa’ad al-Azmi was one of those who experienced Level 4 deprivation when he was held naked for two months.

Al-Azmi also spoke about medical mistreatment at Guantánamo, saying that he was “sprayed by a mysterious ‘red solution’ causing a burning sensation to his skin,” and, in response to claims that female interrogators were “sexually provocative” as “a way to break down devout Muslims,” he “confirmed that those incidents occurred to him too during his interrogations at Guantánamo.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Azmi maintained that he was an innocent man, detained for no apparent reason, although the McClatchy team was clearly alarmed by the many holes in his story. For example, he told the reporter that he’d never been to Afghanistan, contradicting what he said in Guantánamo, and failed to mentioned Al-Wafa or his connection with Adel al-Zamel, claiming instead to have been seized in a hotel room in Peshawar “during a routine police check of guests’ passports” in August 2001.

While this section of his story did not make sense, given what is known of the circumstances of his capture, it is probable that what he told the reporter about his experiences in Pakistani and US custody was more accurate. In Karachi, he said, “he was put into a dimly lit cell with about two dozen other men,” and “they were taken out one by one to an interrogation room where two American men — one tall and thin, one short and stocky with glasses — sat behind a table” and “introduced themselves as CIA officers.” They asked him about Al-Qaida, refusing to believe his story about being a businessman.

Al-Azmi added that “he spent about a month in that jail and was interrogated three or four more times,” and was then flown to Kandahar, where after two weeks, in which “American troops punched, kicked and humiliated him,” he was flown to Bagram, where he was held for a month and a half, and was then flown back to Kandahar for about three months before being sent to Guantánamo.

In the Documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Azml was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in May 1979, and the Task Force established a narrative based on a variety of “claims” he had apparently made: that “he worked for Al-Wafa in Kabul,” that “one month after the ’9/11′ attacks (approximately October 2001), he moved to Peshawar,” and that, “in December 2001,he went to Karachi, PK, and stayed with Aziz from the Al-Wafa Organization,” and was captured in Karachi in February 2002.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, The Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” The Al-Wafa Organization stationed in the Wazir Akhbar Khan Area of Kabul, The Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO located in Wazir Akbar Khan Area of Kabul, [and] Aziz (LNU) who provided Arabs fleeing Pakistan with a means to leave the country.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida who has traveled extensively in the West, including travels to countries such as Switzerland, Germany and Bosnia,” although, with the exception of Bosnia, these claims seem more to mark him out as a Kuwaiti from a reasonably well-off family than as some sort of Al-Qaida scout, and Bosnia, of course, was a prime destination for the support of the Muslim population during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

It was also reported that, like Adel al-Zamel, he was involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, an extremist group that had attacked a female student in Kuwait, and that he was “wanted by the Kuwaiti government for crimes he committed while affiliated with several terrorist groups,” which was very vague. It was also stated, again in a very vague manner, that he “likely ha[d] knowledge of the Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO,” which was regarded as a front for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization opposed to the rule of Col. Gaddafi in Libya. The LIFG was also regarded by US authorities as being intimately involved with Al-Qaida, although that remains largely disputed.

As a result of the claims against him, al-Azmi was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and as “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its worldwide network,” who had “numerous close associations with known members of Al-Qaida or Al-Qaida associated organizations,” and “may have connections with European-based Al-Qaida members,” including an alleged “Spanish Cell” that later came to nothing when subjected to scrutiny. It was also assessed that his “travels to Bosnia were likely to obtain military training and participate in Jihad,” and as it was also claimed that he was “part of a large Al-Qaida contingent in Pakistan at the time of his capture, where he was living in an Al-Qaida safehouse with a key Al-Qaida facilitator,” and that he was a convicted Islamic extremist with known terrorist associations in Kuwait and he remains committed to Jihad.” As he was also allegedly “still wanted by the Kuwaiti movement for crimes he committed under Kuwaiti law,” the Task Force assessed him as “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.”

It was, however, noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, although, “in the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” CITF was obliged to “defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] poses a high risk.” Even so, on his return to Kuwait, he, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

Saeed Abdur Rahman (ISN 581, Pakistan) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Saeed Abdur Rahman is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Saeed Abdur Rahman, who was 36 years old at the time of his capture, was, as I described it, an “unfortunate victim of Pakistani zeal (or opportunism).” In Guantánamo (where, absurdly, he was identified as Shed Abdur Rahman), he said that he was at home in his village, scraping a living as a poor chicken farmer, when the police raided his house in January 2002, arresting him and telling him that he could not bribe his way to freedom.

Delivered to the Americans, he was accused of being Abdur Rahman Zahid, one of the Taliban’s deputy ministers of foreign affairs, and was later accused of having been a Taliban military judge and a prison guard in Kandahar, who “tortured, maimed and murdered” Afghan prisoners, even though Rahman said that, after he was handed over to the US forces, “An American told me I was wrongfully taken and that in a couple of days I’d be freed.”

What made these allegations all the more incomprehensible was that, in December 2001, Mullah Khaksar, a former Taliban minister who had actually been working as a spy for the Northern Alliance since 1997, said that Abdur Rahman Zahid “had deliberately created the impression that he entered Pakistan, but had in fact returned to his home village in Logar province.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mollah Shed Abdul Rehman, born in 1965, it was also noted that, as well as being diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), he had also been diagnosed with “Chronic Acute Hepatitis B,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force first acknowledged that he had been identified as an Afghan, but that a request had been sent to the relevant department to change his nationality to Pakistani, and then ran through the sad account of his capture, noting that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities while in his home in the fall of 2001,” when he “was arrested and charged with the theft of antiquities even though [he] state[d] that they had no proof.” After being imprisoned in Quetta for 36 days, he was, by his own account, then “sold” to the US authorities in Kandahar.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of his knowledge of the Sorkhab refugee camp, and information on fighting with the Mujahideen forces against the Russians.” These alleged reasons for his transfer expose clearly how desperate were the attempts to make sense of the process of sending prisoners to be the victims of an experimental offshore interrogation camp, when the very fact of detention — and some crazed ideas about creating a global “mosaic” of intelligence, no matter how small and seemingly irrelevant the components — was much more significant than whether there was any rational basis for the exploitation of the prisoners.

In his letters home, it was noted that he “wanted his family to keep up the chicken farm and to inquire about his ‘amanita’ which is translated as something precious or valuable that is given to someone else for safekeeping.” The confusion regarding his identity was also raised, with the Task Force noting that a name “very similar to the detainee’s” (Abdul Rehman, which is a very common name indeed) “was found in sensitive reporting identifying Taliban plans to send 39 individuals to Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union to carry out unspecified terrorist acts.” Refusing to acknowledge that there was no reason to link this individual to the chicken farmer in their custody, the Task Force added, “There was a passport number associated with the document, however the US does not have a copy of detainee’s passport to match the passport numbers.”

In conclusion, the Task Force stated, “Based on current information, detainee [581] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee pose a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Karama Khamisan (ISN 586, Yemen) Released August 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Karama Khamisan is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the extraordinary story of how Karama Khamisan (also identified as Karam Khamis Sayd Khamsan), a former Yemeni soldier who went to Afghanistan as part of a drug smuggling ring, and was held as a human guarantor until the deal was completed. was seized at the same time as two other men who also ended up at Guantánamo — Brahim Benchekroun, a Moroccan (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Seven of Ten)“), who said after his release that he was “rounded up by the Pakistani security forces at the end of 2001″ near Lahore, “at the time of the first round-ups of Arabs in the Koranic schools,” and Ahmed Errachidi (ISN 590, released in March 2007), a Moroccan chef, who had been living in the UK for 18 years, and who was seized in Islamabad, where he had been working in a jewelry store after visiting Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the US-led invasion. Khamisan explained that, following the US-led invasion, the drug dealers fled, leaving him near the border with Pakistan, where he was captured by Pakistani villagers.

Benchekroun described what happened to the three men once they were in Pakistani custody. “We were looking through the makeshift blindfolds that the Pakistanis had put on us,” he said, adding that Errachidi spoke English and was following the negotiations, when “people showed up with black suitcases and started bargaining with the Pakistanis over the price for handing us over.” When they agreed on a price of $5,000 a head, Benchekroun explained, they all applauded. He also said that Khamisan was singled out for unusual treatment: “The Pakistanis made him grow a beard and learn to pray. I taught him the basics about washing myself. We didn’t understand that it was so that they could sell him to the Americans, too.”

In Chapter 14, drawing on an interview conducted after his release (in “Guantánamo: Lives Torn Apart — The Impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families,” an Amnesty International report from February 2006), I explained how Khamisan had a tough time in the US prison at Bagram airbase. Kicked and beaten while hooded, stripped naked and beaten with batons, he was then transferred to Kandahar, where he was “threatened with electric shocks,” and where, in a sign that Abu Ghraib-style abuse was already being practiced, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped and piled on top of each other naked, whilst the US officials, in full military uniform, laughed at them and took photographs of the pile of naked bodies.”

In Chapter 15, I explained how Khamisan also suffered in Guantánamo, ending up in isolation after being sexually threatened. He explained that on one occasion he was “taken to the shower room where guards attempted to sexually abuse him. As he pushed them away, ten guards entered the room and beat him before transferring him to a solitary cell where he was held for 25 days, naked. He said that he was only taken to use the toilet and shower once in this entire period and that he ate no solid food in order to avoid having to defecate in his cell.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Khamisan was an “Update of Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated December 6, 2003, in which it was noted that he was born in 1970, and had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (along with many other prisoners), and had been “treated for Gum Disease,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

The information about the circumstances of his detention were not included with this document (they were “Same as previously stated” in an earlier assessment), but reasons for his continued detention were given, including a far-fetched sounding claim that he was “a criminal who was jailed in Yemen for attempting to kill the governor of his province, which he stated he did ‘just for the heck of it.’” He also claimed he “escaped prison while being transferred to a minimum-security facility, and he may still be wanted in Yemen for this crime.”

It was also claimed that he “was asked a series of questions concerning his attitude toward the US during which [he] stated that he speculated that Osama bin Laden attacked the US because the US was killing Palestinians,” which he further explained by stating that Israel and the US were “exactly the same,” and adding that “any Arab would say the same thing abut the relationship between Israel and the US.” The oppression of the Palestinian people was indeed a major motivation behind bin Laden’s jihad against the US (along with the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia), but it was inadvisable to say that in Guantánamo, or, I suspect, to criticise Israel either.

Nevertheless, although he was described, unconvincingly, as someone who “continues to express his commitment to Jihad during interrogations” (as he was not in Afghanistan for jihad), it was clear that, as he said, he was a member — whether willingly or not — of a drug-dealing group, which made the Task Force’s claim that his associate, “Mohammed,” had been “identified through reporting as being a supporter of the Taliban” rather dubious, despite the further information that “Mohammed and his criminal group ha[d] reportedly provided transportation, equipment and funding for the Taliban, who in turn protected him and supported his narcotics business.”

However, the most alarming part of the document relating to Khamisan was the reference to an allegation against him that was taken seriously by the authorities, even though, to skeptical eyes, it was nonsense, made by Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as the most notorious liar in Guantánamo, who told interrogators that Khamisan was “a trainee at the Al-Farouq training camp and part of an Arab group fighting the Northern Alliance where his alias was ‘The Murderer.’” As was conceded, however, “After further investigation it has been determined that this was a misidentification [a polite term for an outrageous lie] and in fact the detainee is known as ‘Karama the Hashish dealer,’ which substantiates other reporting concerning this detainee and some of [his] statements.”

In conclusion, he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” although he was also assessed as being “of intelligence value to the United States, and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result of Basardah’s allegations being discredited, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

On his return from Guantánamo, as the human rights NGO Al-Karama for Human Rights explained in April 2009, Khamisan (identified as Karama Khamis Said Khamisan) was held incommunicado for several months before being acquitted by the State Security court, on March 13, 2006, “on charges of trafficking narcotic.” An appeal was dismissed on April 30, 2006, and he was freed on May 10.

Al-Karama noted that he suffered from “a serious stomach ulcer that he contracted as a result of the torture he had suffered at Guantánamo,” for which he received medical treatment, but also explained that, on March 16, 2009, almost three years to the day after his acquittal, he disappeared while making his usual visit to his doctor. As Al-Karama also stated, “His family remained without news of him for over a week. Finally they learned that he was arrested while leaving a mosque by an officer of political security services and taken to its headquarters at Al-Ghaida in Al-Mahra governorate. Having found out this information, his family was able to receive confirmation of his detention and was even allowed to visit him. They later learned that no case had been filed against him. Since this single visit and despite many attempts by his family, the security policy refuse give any further concerning his future, to the point that he is now completely cut off from the outside world.”

Al-Karama appealed to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, asking it to urgently intervene with the Yemeni authorities, and Khamisan was finally freed August 16, 2009, after five months in secret detention. “Throughout this whole period,” as Al-Karama noted, “he was never brought before a judge nor were any charges brought against him.”

Khalid Al Asmar (ISN 589, Jordan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Khalid al-Asmar is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Khalid al-Asmar, who was 38 yeas old at the time of his capture, drawing on statements he made in Guantánamo (where he was described as Khalid al-Asmr), and in “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” an article by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, for Index on Censorship in 2005, based on interviews with former Jordanian prisoners after their release. The section on al-Asmar is cross-posted here.

Al-Asmar explained how he had been captured by the Pakistani police. A former mujahideen fighter against the Soviet Union, he married an Afghan woman, Fatima, whose parents and sister had been killed in a Soviet bombing raid in 1984, and moved to Pakistan, where he supported Fatima and their seven children by selling herbs and honey. In 2000, they returned to Afghanistan, settling in Kabul, which, at the time, was relatively safe, but when the war came to the city in November 2001 and US bombers planes destroyed a warehouse behind their home, they bundled the children into their white Toyota Corolla and set off for Pakistan once more.

Unfortunately, the US military associated white Toyotas with the Taliban, and, on the way to Pakistan, they were targeted twice by US bombers, narrowly avoiding death on both occasions when the Americans’ rockets failed to hit their target. When they reached Islamabad, al-Asmar found work and also contacted a Libyan charity that arranged flights to Jordan, where his parents still lived, but the day before their proposed departure he called his wife to say that he had been detained by the Pakistani police, and told her to leave without him. “I wasn’t worried,” Fatima said, “because I knew Khalid had done nothing wrong,” but seven months later she heard that he was in Guantánamo. Acknowledging that her husband may have aroused suspicion because he fought with the mujahideen, she said that he saw the Taliban’s role as different to that of the mujahideen. “This was a war for power,” she said. “Khalid wanted nothing to do with it. He said it was not for God.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, in which he was identified as Khaled al-Asmr, he explained how, in the three and a half years he was held in US custody, he persistently “told American interrogators that he hadn’t known bin Laden in the 1980s, when both of them were in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet army.” In his tribunal, he said, “The interrogators, every time they ask me, ‘Have you met Osama bin Laden?’ my response is that I’ve never met Osama bin Laden. What I told them is that I have seen Osama bin Laden from a distance for a period of maybe a few minutes.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he explained that he had, in fact, met bin Laden in the 1980s, and had “spent many hours chatting” with him, although he “didn’t remain in contact” with him afterwards. Primarily, at that time, he had worked with the “Services Office” (Maktab al-Khadamat), headed by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of bin Laden, who was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in November 1989. In some ways, Assam’s organisation was the precursor to al-Qaeda (literally, “the base”), but it was dedicated to tracking, recording and providing money for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was not, as Al-Qaida’s “base” of contacts later became, an organization dedicated to terrorist attacks on the US and its interests. Al-Asmar admitted knowing Abdullah Azzam, but “said his relationship with Azzam had been indirect, that he’d worked with Azzam’s wife in an offshoot group.”

In Guantánamo, he was also accused of working for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, tarred as a front for terrorism, despite being a vast charity involved in important humanitarian operations around the world. He “denied that he was a member of Al-Haramain, but said that he dealt with the group occasionally through his food-trading business.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he reportedly “admitted to a long-standing relationship with Al-Hamarain and Azzam,” and told the reporter that, although he knew nothing about Al-Qaida’s operations, “he could have provided a thorough sketch of bin Laden and those around him,” which, McClatchy editorialized, was “possibly crucial information that might have helped the Americans better understand the terrorist mastermind in the early days of 2002.”

As it was, the Americans’ treatment of him meant that cooperation was out of the question. Describing his trip from Pakistan to Bagram he said that he and others picked up in Islamabad “sat on the ground of an airstrip, shackled, with hoods over their heads, and listened as someone walked passed them and counted out loud the number of prisoners. When the counting stopped, a man speaking English with an American accent said to the Pakistanis, ‘You’ve got seven of them here. We’ll give you $5,000 for each one.’”

He added, “Then they (US soldiers) started hitting and kicking me. They lifted me up to take me to the plane, still hitting me in the back and hitting me on my face, saying, ‘Taliban, huh?’” As a result, he said, “he decided to tell the Americans as little as possible,” although the reporter added, “It’s hard to know whether he’d have spoken more freely had he been treated better.”

After three weeks at Bagram, he was sent to the US prison at Kandahar airport, where he stayed for about three and a half months, and “faced harassment,” including “alleged fondling of his sex organs, which he said unsettled him more than rough treatment did.” As he explained, “Once they said, ‘We will conduct a medical checkup.’ They took me to a clinic, but instead of doing a checkup, a female soldier played with my sexual organs. When she was doing this, I prayed to God to help me, and my penis did not move.” He said the soldier in question “had brown hair and looked to be in her 40s,” and “didn’t do anything else during the exam but stroke his penis, wearing latex gloves.” He added, “There were male soldiers watching it happen. They were laughing and making jokes.” After this, he said, he was taken to interrogation. The interrogator “didn’t mention the episode in the clinic, Asmr said, but grinned, asked how his day was going and wondered aloud whether he might be ready to talk.” “No,” was his reply.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Asmar was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Khalid al-Asmr or Khalid al-Asmr Wahad, born in December 1963. In running through his story, the Task Force stated that in 1985 he traveled to Pakistan to work with the vast missionary organisation Jamaat al-Tablighi, which, outrageously, the authorities at Guantánamo claimed was a front for terrorism, and confirmed that he then worked with Sheikh Abdullah Azzam coordinating aid to various groups involved with the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who was funded by the US in the 1980s, but is now an implacable enemy of the US). Despite his evasiveness, the Task Force also recognized that, “In late 1987/early 1988, [he] met UBL [bin Laden] in the company of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.”

Moving to the events preceding his capture, it was noted that, in June 2000, he traveled to Kabul, where he was “an ‘unofficial’ employee of Al-Haramayn Islamic Foundation” (aka Al-Haramain), which, despite being a huge charity with a global reach, was described as “a Tier 1 NGO; which is defined as having demonstrated sustained and active support for terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests, according to the Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism CounterTerrorism Tiers, dated 10 December 2003.”

In late September 2001, he and his family fled to Peshawar, and “applied to the Qadafi Foundation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation] for assistance in returning home,” but “was arrested by Pakistani police in Islamabad, PK, and was subsequently turned over to US Forces.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that he “may be able to provide general or specific information on: Maktib Al-Kadmat [aka Maktab al-Khadamat, Abdullah Azzam's "Services Office" for mujahideen in Afghanistan] and Al-Haramayn, [and the] Al-Khadafi Committee for Repatriation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation].”

In its assessment, the Task Force was deeply suspicious of his connections, noting that “he denie[d] having belonged to Al-Qaida or any other terrorist organization irrespective of the fact that JT [Jamaat al-Tablighi] and Al-Haramayn have been associated with Al-Qaida (which was not necessarily true, of course), and also drawing on a claim that he “spent a number of years associating with such individuals as Azzam and UBL,” which was true with reference to Azzam, but not bin Laden, and which, in addition, completely overlooks the fact that, in the 1980s in Afghanistan, he (and Azzam and bin Laden) were allies of the US (whether financially supported or not) and not enemies.

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its allies and interests,” in particular because his connections suggested to the US authorities that he had “more ties to Al-Qaida than he claim[ed],” even though he was extremely well-behaved in Guantánamo, and was described as being “on the best behaviour level and liv[ing] with detainees who [we]re equally cooperative and non-aggressive.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained in DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with the Task Force’s assessment, because, “in the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] poses a high risk.”

Padsha Wazir (ISN 631, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Padsha Wazir is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I told the story of Padsha Wazir, a shopkeeper from a village near Khost, Wazir, who was married with three children and was 29 years old at the time of his capture. In Guantánamo, he told his tribunal that the allegations against him — that he was involved with the renegade warlord Pacha Khan Zadran in a military capacity, and that he was responsible for “securing” a village for him — were a pack of lies. The baleful influence of Zadran (one of the most dubious US allies in the years following the US-led invasion) permeates many of the Afghan stories in Guantánamo, and Wazir was clearly another victim.

Wazir added that he had only ever seen Zadran “for five minutes and that was after the Taliban left and the Americans came. He was with the Americans.” He explained that he was actually working with the local commander, Mohammed Yousef, helping to secure the area for the Americans, and also stated that he was arrested at a checkpoint, with his brother and two friends, while traveling to Miram Shah in Pakistan to see members of his family. He pointed out that, although the other three were released on the spot, the commander at the checkpoint (one of Zadran’s men), told lies about him to an American soldier after he refused to hand over his gun, for which he had a permit, which led to his capture and transfer to Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Wazir was an “Updated Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated November 22, 2003, in which he was identified as Bacha Wazir, born in 1972. In this document, the circumstances of his capture were not discussed, but the Task Force was deeply suspicious abut him although not necessarily with any reason. It was claimed that he “ha[d] not been forthright in his interviews.” He “claims to be a ‘simple shopkeeper,’” the Task Force noted, but “[t]his claim remains unverified.” The Task Force also speculated that he “may have connections to various persons affiliated with the former Taliban regime,” and that he “may be a Mid to High-level Taliban supporter and may have facilitated hostile actions against US interests.” It was also stated that he “need[ed] to be fully exploited concerning his suspected involvement with the local HiG insurgent movement [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the organization headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar].”

As a result of these doubts, he was “assessed as being a probable Taliban leader however not a member of Al-Qaida,” and as being “of intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “[r]etain[ed] under DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force did not agree with this assessment. On November 6, 2003, CITF “categorized [him] as a Low Threat,” but CITF’s Behavioral Sciences Consultation Team was asked to “reevaluate their threat assessment.” The result of this is not known, but 17 months later he was finally freed.

Mushtaq Ali Patel (ISN 649, France) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Mushtaq Ali Patel is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Mushtaq Ali Patel, born in India but a French national through his marriage to a Creole woman from Réunion, who was 39 years old at the time of his capture. Patel explained at Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel), and after his release in an article in Libération (translated for Cageprisoners) that, although his wife and child were living in France, he had been working in Iran, where he taught at an Islamic school and traded in clothes and jewelry.

After setting out for Pakistan, via Afghanistan, in October 2001, he was abducted, in the countryside near Herat, by three Afghans, including a policeman, who stole his passport and his money, beat him with their fists and with electric cables, and took him to a police station in Ghazni, where he was forced to say that he was a Saudi, born in Medina, and that his name was Haji Mohammed. After several months, he was taken to Kabul to “some kind of a house that was like a prison,” where he was sold to the Americans for $5,000. He said that the Americans threatened him with death “and to cause problems to my family,” and then transferred him to Bagram, where they had “very hard attitudes,” and Kandahar, where he was “badly mistreated, interrogated in bad ways.”

Alarmingly, Patel’s weight in Guantánamo was disturbingly low throughout his detention, as was apparent from the weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, which I analysed for a short report for Cageprisoners in June 2009, entitled, “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” (introduction here, report here). In that report, I noted how he had been chronically underweight throughout his detention, weighing just 89 pounds on arrival, and dropping to 76 pounds in November 2002, which was more or less where his weight remained for an alarmingly long period of his imprisonment. In his Libération interview, it became apparent that he had been very ill at Guantánamo, as he explained:

I became sick at Guantánamo. They took me to the health clinic. I stayed in hospital for 4 to 5 months the first time. I had chest and throat problems, and headaches. They gave me medication. I don’t know what it was. I slept sometimes, but not all the time. I was in bed. I had one foot and one hand enchained. I never got out, ever. I wanted to leave, but they did not let me. I was anguished being restrained all the time. They forced me to take medication, pills. I said “no,” but they forced me. That was the hardest time at Guantánamo. Some of the medicines had an effect on my sleep, kept me from sleeping and created respiratory problems. I could have refused to take them, but it was difficult as they forced me to swallow them in front of them. Sometimes there was the same medication for everyone, and you had to swallow it immediately.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Patel was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 27, 2004, in which he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel and Mohammed Ibn Ismael al-Akram (as well as Mohammed Haji and Haji Muhammed), born in January 1961, and his health issues were described in depth. The Task Force noted that he had “multiple psychiatric diagnoses, including depression and schizotlpal personality disorder, but [wa]s otherwise in good physical health.” It was also noted that his medications included “synthroid, celexa, zprexa, zantac, a multivitamin, and simethicone.” The Task Force added, “Schizotypal personality disorder is often characterized as having a belief in clairvoyance or telepathy, the use of metaphorical speech, paranoid ideations, and severe mood disorders. It is likely a genetic relation to schizophrenia, but the two should not be confused with each other.”

Because of his severe mental health problems, he told different stories about himself. In one version, he “claimed he was born in Medina, Saudi Arabia and claimed to be an ‘orphan,’ only to acknowledge later that his parents [we]re citizens of India and currently alive,” that they lived in India, and “were previously employed as foreign laborers in Saudi Arabia,” where, “[b]ecause they are not Saudi, the Saudi government will not grant citizenship to a non-Arab, regardless of birthplace.” In another version (the true one), he said that he was born in Shepura, India, and was a French citizen by marriage (on Réunion), which the French government confirmed.

Clearly bewildered by him, and unprepared for what to think when confronted by someone with such severe mental health issues, the Task Force noted that, during interrogation on March 23, 2004, he admitted that his stories about the orphanage, about living in Saudi Arabia, and about selling fruit were lies, and that he traveled to France when he was 22 or 23, sold radios for a living, “had $10,000 USD on his person when captured,” and had lived briefly in Germany and Turkey, but had been living in Mashad, Iran, for 15 years before his capture in Afghanistan.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide general-to-specific information on Taliban and Al-Qaida forces operating in Kunduz and Takhar provinces as well as various illegal activities taking place in Afghanistan.”

In assessing him, however, the Task Force described him, without mentioning any mitigating factors, as someone who had “never been cooperative or forthright during his detention” and had “not revealed his true name or any of his affiliations.” He was also described as “a possible Al-Qaida operative based on his circumstance of travels and his suspected affiliations.”

Assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” he was also assessed as being “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its allies, and interests until his true identity is known.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention until his true name and extremist affiliations have been determined,” although it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with JTF GTMO on the assessment of Patel as “a high risk,” which, presumably, helped lead to his release a year later.

Mamdouh Habib (ISN 661, Australia) Released January 2005

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing mainly on an article published after his release (and not on the unsubstantiated allegations for his tribunal at Guantánamo), I explained how Mamdouh Habib, who was 47 years old at the time of his capture, was one of several dozen prisoners at Guantánamo who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” and were transferred to other prisons for torture, before their transfer to Guantánamo.

Habib, seized in November 2001, was traveling on a bus from Quetta to Karachi when it was stopped by Pakistani soldiers. Plucked from his seat as a suspected militant, he was moved from jail to jail for three weeks, interrogated by US agents and “repeatedly tortured” by the Pakistani authorities.

Born in Egypt, he left at the age of 18, drifted to Europe and settled in Australia in 1980, where he became a citizen, married a Lebanese woman, had four children, and ran a cleaning business. He later opened a coffee shop in a suburb of Sydney, but became “chronically depressed” and ended up on a disability benefit. In summer 2001, seeking “a purer Islamic lifestyle,” he set off for Pakistan to look for work so that he could bring his family over to join him, but when he was captured it became apparent to the Americans that they had caught someone with a radical history.

Habib admitted that one of his reasons for leaving Australia was because he was “caught between police who suspected him of terror links and an often hostile Muslim community that was sometimes suspicious of his activities,” and these suspicions were triggered after a visit to the US, when he met followers of the Egyptian-born cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. Also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” Abdel-Rahman was a major source of inspiration for Osama bin Laden, and was serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to blow up several New York landmarks.

Habib’s troubles began when he stayed in touch with Abdul Rahman’s associates in New York on his return to Sydney, and spoke out in his defense, but although there was nothing in his activities to suggest that he was actually involved in any kind of terrorist activity, as soon as the Americans found out about his history they rendered him to Egypt. For six months, he was “suspended from hooks on the walls while his feet rested on a rotating metal drum that delivered electric shocks,” “kicked, punched, beaten with a stick and rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod,” and handcuffed and left in a room that gradually filled with water until it was just beneath his chin. “Broken” by the Egyptians, he made a number of false confessions — in particular, that he “trained several of the September 11 hijackers in martial arts and had planned to hijack a plane himself” — which were then used against him after he was transferred to Guantánamo, via Afghanistan, in June 2002.

In Guantánamo, he continued to be treated brutally, and several prisoners reported his suffering. The British prisoners Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Two of Ten)“) said that he was “in catastrophic shape, mental and physical,” and that, as a result of his torture, “he used to bleed from his nose, mouth and ears when he was asleep.” Habib also made allegations about his treatment in Guantánamo — in particular that he was “smeared with the menstrual blood of a prostitute” during an interrogation — and complained vociferously about being kept in solitary confinement in Camp Echo: “They use every possible [way] to make me crazy. They put me in isolation all the time. I never see the sun. I never have shower like a human being. I never have soap. I never have cup to drink. I never treated like a human being.”

Habib was also one of the many prisoners for whom it was made clear that medical treatment was dependent on cooperation, as he was told by medics that he would only be given treatment for the internal bleeding he suffered in Egypt if he cooperated with his interrogators.

Given this catalogue of abuse, and the allegations against him, it came as a surprise to everyone — including the Australian authorities — when he was released from Guantánamo in January 2005, and returned to Australia as a free man, but for those watching closely, it was engineered by the Bush administration in the hope that his story would then disappear, as it had been acutely embarrassing when details of Habib’s rendition and torture were included in a US court filing and exposed in the Washington Post on January 6, 2005, just three weeks before his release.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Habib was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated August 6, 2004, in which Habib, described as being born in June 1955, was diagnosed as having “a history of depression and behavioral disorders, benign prostatic hypertrophy, hungerstriking, and had a knee surgery performed.” It was also noted that he “carries the Hepatitis B virus.”

In telling Habib’s story, the Task Force described how he had served in the Egyptian army from 1975 to 1978, and then moved to Australia in 1980, where he initially lived with his sister. Other key events mentioned were his visit to New York in December 1992, to visit another two of his sisters, a brief visit to Afghanistan in 1999, and the last fateful journey in 2001, which allegedly involved him attending “a military training base,” where he stayed for “only 3 to 4 days,” before returning to Kandahar, where “he was told to leave because the US had began [sic] its bombing campaign.”

It was then noted that, when Pakistani forces seized him on a bus from Quetta to Karachi in October 2001, it was reportedly “with two Germans who were suspected Al-Qaida members from Hamburg, Germany” (about whom, to the best of my knowledge, nothing further has been heard, although they were identified as “Tier III personalities in the Hamburg 9/11 cell”). He was then “held at a Pakistan military base in Quetta, PK, and was subsequently transferred to Egyptian control” — a careful reference to his rendition to torture, which was followed up with the breezy-sounding statement that he “spent six months with Egyptian interrogators” before being transferred back to US custody.

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “may be able to provide specific information on the students, staff, and curriculum of the Al-Qaida intelligence and operations course,” because “he may also be able to provide general information on key Al-Qaida support network figures with whom he had personal contact,” and because he “may be able to provide specific information on the support network of Lashkar-e-Tayiba in Kashmir.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force drew also on the details of his US visit in 192 and the lies about him training the 9/11 hijackers that were extracted under torture, claiming that he had been “linked to the 11 Sept 2001 hijackers, Al-Qaida, Lashkar-e-Tayiba of Pakistan, Al Gamma Al Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] of Australia, German 9/11 cell and conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” and noting that he was “suspected of being a money courier and a terrorist operations facilitator, due to his extensive international travels.”

Analyzing Habib’s purported connection with terrorists in the US, the Task Force claimed that, as well as visiting in 1992, when he “allegedly befriended” Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, who was later convicted for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he had made a previous visit (or perhaps more than one). It was claimed, for example, that he attended the trial of the Egyptian-born US citizen El-Sayyid Nosair, for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, but this took place in 1991.

El-Gabrowny was Nosair’s cousin, and the Task Force claimed that, in discussions with Habib, he told him “he desired to move away from the US,” and Habib suggested that he move to Australia “because it was a quiet place to live for Muslims.” An analyst also noted that “Immigration records and external investigations show that [Habib] was also in New York during 1988/89.”

These alleged connections may not prove anything more than that Habib moved in circles where he met Egyptian-born US citizens while in America, as might be expected, but the US authorities were desperate to tie him to terrorism, claiming that, because he had a cleaning business involving the Australian military, which collapsed, leaving him in debt after a court case, that was a reason for him to have possibly been a courier or “financial operator” for Al-Qaida.

The most shocking information in Habib’s file, however, concerns the false statements that he made while being tortured in Egypt. As the Task Force explained, coyly:

While in the custody of the Egyptian Government, under extreme duress, [he] alleged that he made the following admissions of guilt, which he now denies:

He trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in the use of martial arts

He also taught them how to use a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter He was en route to hijack a Qantas flight with his friend Jamal (LNU)

His friend Rakim (LNU) was going to conduct a simultaneous operation from Thailand

He had information on his home computer to be used to poison an unidentified river in the United States

He fought in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan

Habib “retracted all the above statements during an interrogation in Jan 2003. He claimed he lied to Egyptian authorities when he admitted to the above statements.”

Despite this, the US authorities (obviously drawing heavily on the co-operation of the Australian government) followed up on the fact that a member of a mosque in the town where Habib lived in Australia was arrested in connection with a terrorist plot (and another was “implicated’ in it), to throw further innuendo his way, claiming that these two men were connected to the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and that Habib was too. This was designed to appear significant, even though it was conceded that Habib had “a hostile relationship” with the mosque.

Another dubious claim came from one of Habib’s fellow prisoners at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), who stated that he “ha[d] ‘strong knowledge’ of the Egyptian Islamic extremist group, Al-Gamma Al-Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] in Australia,” and an analyst noted, “Al-Gamma Al-Islamia has a strong following in Germany. This may explain why the detainee was captured with the two Germans, who also may be members of Al-Gamma Al-Islamia.” This was tenuous, to say the least, partly because it has not been established that Habib was with the two Germans whose whereabouts are unknown, other than being on the same bus as them, but also because Slahi is one of the most well-known torture victims at Guantánamo, whose testimony is therefore untrustworthy, and there is no evidence that he ever met Habib.

In conclusion, the Task Force described Habib as being “of high intelligence value,” and “a high risk,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, in a recap of reasons he was regarded as threat, in which it was noted that there were “serious intelligence gaps” regarding his activities, the most telling phrase concerned the results of his interrogation and torture in Egypt, which prompted the Task Force to ask, “Was any of the information that he provided to the Egyptians valid?”

Since his release, Habib has campaigned against both the US and Australian governments for their roles in his detention, rendition and torture. He has undertaken numerous interviews, and also, with Julia Collingwood, wrote a book, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, which was published in November 2008, and in February 2011, as the Mubarak regime fell in Egypt, and, briefly, it looked as if Omar Suleiman would take over, Habib told the Australian (as I reported here) that this would be unforgivable because, after he was rendered to Egypt, “Mr. Suleiman helped torture him.”

The Australian also explained that, in his book, Habib “wrote that Mr. Suleiman had often been present during his interrogations,” and also noted:

“I was sitting in a chair, hooded, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. He came up to me. His voice was deep and rough. He spoke to me in Egyptian and English,” Mr. Habib writes. “He said, ‘Listen, you don’t know who I am, but I am the one who has your life in his hands’.”

Mr. Habib writes that Mr. Suleiman had told him that he wanted him to die a slow death: “No, I don’t want you to die now. I want you to die slowly. I can’t stay with you; my time is too valuable to stay here. You only have me to save you. I’m your saviour. You have to tell me everything if you want to be saved. What do you say?”

When Mr. Habib said he had nothing to tell him, he says Mr. Suleiman had said: “You think I can’t destroy you just like that?”

They had taken Mr. Habib to another room and then Mr. Suleiman had said: “Now you are going to tell me that you planned a terrorist attack. I give you my word you will be a rich man if you tell me you have been planning attacks. Don’t you trust me?” Mr. Habib had replied that he did not trust anyone. “Immediately he slapped me hard across the face and knocked off the blindfold; I clearly saw his face,” Mr. Habib writes.

Mr. Habib alleges Mr. Suleiman said: “That’s it. That’s it. I don’t want to see this man again until he co-operates and tells me he’s been planning a terrorist attack.”

Mohammed Anwarkurd (ISN 676, Iran) Released August 2005

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I explained how Mohammed Anwarkurd, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mohamed Anwar Kurd) that he went to Afghanistan on a shopping expedition. He said that he had gone to buy electronic equipment for his brother, because it was cheaper than in Iran and could be sold for a profit, but was seized by the Taliban, who stole his money and conscripted him. He added that he “did not want to tell them that he was from Iran as he had heard that they killed Iranian diplomats.” Presumably captured by anti-Taliban forces at a later date, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan to buy a pistol to kill three people who had destroyed his mosque, or, alternately, of planning to assassinate two key Shia leaders in Zahedan, his home city.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mohammed Anwar Kurd, born in 1979, it was also stated that, as well as having latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, he had also been diagnosed with h. pylori (the bacteria responsible for most ulcers and many cases of stomach inflammation) and “adjustment disorder,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force drew on his own accounts of his activities, essentially covering the same ground that was later covered his tribunal: that he had traveled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan, to “purchase electronic devices for his brother’s electrical store in Zahedan, Iran,” ending up in Spin Boldak, where he traveled to “inspect some heavy machinery,” and that, as he tried to return, he was stopped by Taliban soldiers, who “asked for his identification card.” He said he “did not possess an identification card and claimed that he was from Nimroz, Afghanistan, because of an incident that occurred with ten Iranian diplomats who were accused of espionage and were summarily executed.”

The Taliban, he said, then conscripted him into service, “because they believed him to be an Afghan citizen.” As training, he reported that he “observed one Kalishnakov [sic] assault rifle and approximately six RPGs.” He was then taken, via a Taliban base in Kandahar, to Talogan, in Takhar province, where, he said, “the majority of the conscripts were taken to the frontlines to fight against Massoud’s forces” (the forces of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated on September 9, 2001), although Anwarkurd “convinced the Taliban leaders at the guesthouse that he was unfit for the frontlines.” He added that he “spent approximately two months at the guesthouse before the Taliban fled to Kunduz to regroup when Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance,” when he “and the other inhabitants of the guesthouse traveled to a military base in Kunduz,” and, soon after, surrendered to General Dostum, a prominent Northern Alliance commander. As a result, he was probably part of “the convoy of death,” when many prisoners (probably numbering in the thousands) died en route to Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan while being transported in containers, although this was not mentioned by the Task Force.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban safe houses in Kabul and Takhar, Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [676] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government.”

Hammad Gadallah (ISN 712, Sudan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Hammad Gadallah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files” (describing the 14 files missing from the documents released by WikiLeaks in April), Hammad Gadallah (whose full name is Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah and who was was 32 years old at the time of his capture) was one of five prisoners working for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, who were seized in 2002 after the Pakistani and Afghan branches of RHS were blacklisted by the US government.

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how he told the most complete story of the organization’s activities, and obviously managed to impress upon the Americans that not everyone who worked for the charity was siphoning off money for al-Qaeda. Arrested at his home on May 27, 2002, by two Americans and representatives of Pakistani intelligence and the police, he explained that he had been working for the Central Bank in Sudan, when his brother, who worked for a bank in Bangladesh, told him that the RIHS in Peshawar had a vacancy for an accountant. He took leave from his job to investigate the organization in January 2001, and, after seeing that they were “all good people, with high standards, [who] love their work, and … perform their work faithfully,” and that there were “no problems with the accountancy programme,” he handed in his notice at the bank and began working for the RIHS in March.

Refuting allegations about the organization’s inclusion in a US guide to terrorist organizations, he said, “I say that not every organization or person that is within that guide can be accused of being a terrorist. That requires a lot of evidence and proof … I’m sure that the year that I was working for the RIHS in 2001, it had nothing to do with any terrorist acts.” He added that the organization had an income of around two and a half million dollars in 2001, which came from mosques in Kuwait, and described it as a “huge organization” with one branch in Pakistan. He also explained the significance of his role and, crucially, how there were no underhand financial transactions during his time there:

Q: If your organization were transferring money to another organization, you would be aware of it?
A: That never happened.
Q: But if it had, you would know that?
A: Yes I would. Because I record everything that comes in and everything that goes out.

Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730, Maldives) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Ibrahim Fauzee is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In a footnote to Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ibrahim Fauzee, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, was one of a number of prisoners seized in Pakistan, mostly in April and May 2002, and largely because they were working for Gulf-based charities that had come under suspicion for alleged links with terrorist funding, like Hammad Gadallah, above. Fauzee was a student of Islam, according to an account published by Cageprisoners, which explained more than the ludicrously thin set of allegations for Fauzee’s tribunal, in which it was mainly alleged that his telephone number was discovered in another suspect’s pocket, and was associated with “a Sudanese teacher who assisted Arabs traveling to training camps in Afghanistan.” According to the Cageprisoners account, Fauzee was living in a house in which one of the other occupants was reportedly the father of an Al-Qaida suspect. A witness reported that on May 19, 2002, US agents came to the house in Karachi, and arrested Fauzee and the other man, whose whereabouts are unknown.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April, the file relating to Ibrahim Fauzee was a “Reassessment of Recommendation to Retain in DoD Control,” dated November 11, 2003, in which he was identified as Ibrahim Fouwzy, born in November 1978, and it was stated that he had been diagnosed with asthma (and had been “given an albuterol inhaler”) and had also been “treated for strep throat,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force partly reiterated the Cageprisoners account, but failed to reach the conclusion of Fauzee’s tribunal, which recognized that he was not an “enemy combatant.” The Task Force noted that Fauzee had stated that he had first traveled to Pakistan to studying 1995 (in Karachi), and that, in March 2000 he had “traveled to Maldives to wed his fiancee, and then returned with her to Karachi.” However, it is not clear from this account if it is meant to indicate that he had been living in Pakistan from 1995 to 2000.

Prior to his capture, however, the Task Force stated that he “lived in several apartments, and last resided in a home owned by Mohammed Afzal,” where, he said, he lived “for approximately 11 days before being arrested by the Pakistani police,” who “told him that he was arrested because of his knowledge and association with his landlord (Afzal).” He was then “taken to a police station and questioned,” and was “later taken to a military facility, and then returned to jail.” Soon after, he was transferred to US custody, even though he “stated he never learned why Afzal was arrested but opined that it may have had something to do with his work.”

It is not known what happened to Mohammed Afzal, as he was never transferred to Guantánamo, but Fauzee was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. No reason was given for his transfer, but it was clear that his connection with Mohammed Afzal was the only significant thing about him, and it is therefore worth asking what happened to Afzal, and whether he was ever held in US custody. In providing reasons for Fauzee’s detention, the Task Force stated that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities under suspicion of being an Al-Qaida member after a raid on his residence, that just missed a group of Al-Qaida members who had gathered at the home for a meeting.”

Without further information about Mohammed Afzai it is impossible to know whether there was any truth in this, or, indeed, if there was any truth in the additional claims that he was “a known Al-Qaida facilitator,” and was also “the person who sponsored the detainee at the madrassa [where he was studying, presumably] and whom [sic] was allowing the detainee to live in an apartment attached to his home.”

Ramping up his purported significance, the Task Force added that Fauzee had “traveled extensively in spite of his limited income and ha[d] failed to explain adequately the source(s) of the funds he used for travel.” The Task Force also claimed that the madrassa was “fundamentalist” and that it was “administered” by Mohammed Afzai, but this serves only to make me think that Afzai’s role may have been overplayed, and that Fauzee might have been nothing more than a student paying board and lodging in the apartment next to Afzai’s house, which he rented out.

Nevertheless, the Task Force noted that he was “suspected of being an Al-Qaida recruit and courier, however the complete extent of his association within the organization is not completely known because of his refusals to be forthright.” As a result, he was assessed as posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and it was noted that he “require[d] further exploitation … before being submitted for further transfer consideration.” Maj. Gen. Miller therefore recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” although the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, as it was noted that, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF deferred to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [Fauzee] pose[d] a medium threat.” However, it took another 16 months for a military tribunal to agree with CITF that he was not a threat, and for Fauzee to finally be freed.

In the classified US diplomatic cables secured by WikILeaks (and in the full version recently made available), Maldivian Permanent Secretary Ahmed Shaheed first asked the US to “share any intelligence it had gained from Fauzee” on November 5, 2002, as Minivan News reported. “Shaheed specifically asked for any information on ties Fauzee may have with other Maldivian nationals,” the cable read. “In this regard, Shaheed also requested that the Maldivian government be permitted to conduct its own intelligence interview of Fauzee.”

On November 23, 2002, Shaheed wrote to US officials requesting Fauzee’s release, but he was not, of course, freed for another 28 months. In August 2003, Maldivian government officials were allowed to visit Fauzee, although they found him to be “an unlikely threat,” and after “further investigation,” requested his release again, on November 5, 2003.

Another request was made on May 11, 2004, and in a cable dated July 20, 2004, as Haveeru Online stated, Maldivian Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Shihab assured the then US Ambassador Jeffrey Lunstead that “a travel ban would be imposed on Ibrahim Fauzy” (as he was identified), because “the Maldives understood the need to clear up the detainee’s story.”

It was also stated that “Shihab told Lunstead, who ‘had concerns about some aspects of the detainee’s history,’ that the Maldives government would place Fauzy under close surveillance and would put him on a watch list to ensure that he could not leave the country. Shihab was quoted in the diplomatic memo … as saying that the measures would be ‘effective in preventing him [Fauzy] from traveling’ unless ‘he is very good at rowing.’”

By the end of 2004, the US government finally “agreed to return Fauzee to the Maldives under certain conditions,” as Minivan News explained. A cable dated December 13, 2004 “showed the Maldivian Foreign Ministry was interested in cooperating with these conditions, which included humane treatment upon release.”

Qalandar Shah (ISN 812, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Qalandar Shah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, between April and December 2002, at least 50 Afghans were sent to Guantánamo from Bagram, and how, in his book The Interrogators, Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of a former senior interrogator in Afghanistan) reported that the screening for Afghan prisoners was made more flexible in June 2002, when, instead of sending every single prisoner in their custody to Guantánamo (as stipulated by those directing operations from Camp Doha in Kuwait), the prison’s commanders finally worked out how to release “worthless prisoners back to their farms and families.” The process involved creating a new category of prisoner — “persons under US control” — who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number that entered the system overseen by the overall commanders in Kuwait and the Pentagon, because once a prisoner was officially assigned a number, it was almost impossible for the interrogators to let them go.

One of the 50, whose story only demonstrates that, even with these changes, many Afghans were still pointlessly sent to Guantánamo, was Qalander Shah, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, when he was seized in a house raid in Bermel, in Paktika province, along with his uncle and a cousin. Accused of having a weapons cache and a false Pakistani ID card, he explained that the weapons were for protection and that he had the false ID because “the Taliban were running the government and we were in conflict with them.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Khan Shah Qalandar, born in 1973, the Task Force provided a more detailed explanation of his story, in which the key elements remained the same. Shah, described as a veterinarian for the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan from 1993 to 1996, and a self-employed teacher from 1996 to 2000, teaching Pashtu, English, math and painting, stated that he also supported his family “through construction, tailoring, and farming his land.”

Speaking about the circumstances of his capture, he “stated that he was asleep when Americans raided the compound where he and his family lived.” He was seized with his uncle, Pacha Gul, and his cousin, Abdul Adin. Providing further information, he “stated that he was awoken by gunfire and he later learned that as the Americans approached they were shot at by unknown persons and those people fled the compound.” He added that “he had nothing to fear from the Americans so when he was told to surrender, he did so.” It was also noted that he admitted that the area he lived in was “known to have been an egress route for Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters fleeing into Pakistan,” but obviously had nothing to do with either the Taliban or Al-Qaida, and, although weapons were found in the compound, he said he knew nothing about them. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his suspected involvement with subversive elements.”

In conclusion, the Joint Task Force assessed him “as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, however because of his subversive activities and affiliations in Afghanistan, he is assessed to pose a medium threat to the Afghan government.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” 20 months later, he was finally freed.

Richard Belmar (ISN 817, UK) Released January 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained, drawing on information from Guantánamo, and in an article published after his release (“Beatings, sex abuse and torture: how MI5 left me to rot in US jail,” by David Rose, in the Observer), how Richard Belmar, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born and brought up in Marylebone, in central London. After training as a mechanic, he worked for the Post Office, and converted to Islam in 1999. In July 2001, after spending some time in Pakistan, he traveled to Afghanistan to study at a religious school in Kandahar.

Trapped in the city after the US-led invasion began, he made several unsuccessful attempts to leave the country — on one occasion wearing a burka, but still failing to escape because the driver of his car thought that it was too dangerous — before managing to cross the border in December 2001 by walking across the mountains. “I didn’t want to be part of any war,” he said. “I wanted to get out. I was seeing people who’d been bombed, pieces of them everywhere.” In Karachi, he stayed in a hotel for a while, but was running out of money and had lost his passport, and was afraid of contacting the British consulate because he knew that “anyone who had been in Afghanistan was at risk of arrest.” He then met an Arab who “promised to sort me out,” and arranged for him to stay in “a large house,” where he was captured.

He was then taken to the ISI headquarters in Karachi (the HQ of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s largest intelligence service), along with the other prisoners, where he was interviewed by American intelligence operatives, whose superiors, finding his story credible, recommended his repatriation to the UK and asked MI5 to send some agents to see if they wanted to recruit him. Turned down by MI5, for reasons that were never explained, he was sent to Bagram instead.

In Chapter 14, I explained how Belmar said that on the plane to Bagram he received a huge blow to the back of his head from a rifle butt, which gave him headaches “for a long, long time,” and how, in Bagram, where he spent more than six months and was interrogated repeatedly, he was sexually taunted by a woman interrogator, who fondled his genitals. “I told her she was ugly, cheap and I spat in her face,” he said. “There were two guys in the room and I was shackled. They got me on the floor and started kicking me up, in the back, in the stomach, they gave me a real beating.”

In another interrogation, a pistol was forced into his mouth: “It tasted cold, bitter. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is getting serious, there’s a good chance they will pull the trigger.’” Eventually, he said, he gave the interrogators the confession they wanted, even though it was all lies. He told them he had listened to Osama bin Laden making a speech, but pointed out after his release, “How could I have done that? I didn’t know a word of Arabic,” and added that the interrogators “tried to make me confess to being at a training camp in 1998 — when I never left Britain, and wasn’t even a Muslim.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Belmar was a “Recommendation to Retain Under DoD Control,” dated November 15, 2003, in which his full name was given as Richard Dean Belmar, and it was noted that he was born in October 1979. The Joint Task Force claimed that Belmar and a friend had been arrested at Heathrow in June 2001 for “assaulting two individuals,” and then decided to go to Afghanistan rather than appear in court. A contact, Abu Mohammed, then apparently raised money for them to travel, and to attend the Al-Farouq training camp, where Belmar allegedly received basic training.

What happened to Belmar’s friend was not related, but after the 9/11 attacks, Belmar reportedly “traveled with Taliban forces throughout Afghanistan” and then, in November 2001, “fled Afghanistan after bribing a guard,” and traveling to Karachi, where he was seized three months later. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Al-Farouq training camp, Al-Qaida safehouses in Kandahar, AF, Kabul, AF and Karachi, PK, of Al-Qaida recruiter Abu Mohammed, Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and other Al-Qaida members.”

In seeking to justify Belmar’s detention, the Task Force claimed that he had sworn bayat (a pledge of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden, which seems highly unlikely, and that, for some reason, he had “unexploited information” about Ghassan al-Sharbi (ISN 682), a Saudi and a self-confessed al-Qaida member who was seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan, two months after Belmar was seized in Karachi. It was also claimed that he had “knowledge of Jaish-e-Mohammed [a Pakistani militant group] and how they aided Arabs in Afghanistan,” and, in a particularly weak claim, it was alleged that an alias attributed to him, Abdul Rahim (an exceedingly common name), had been “referenced by several detainees possibly indicating that [Belmar] played a more important role in Al-Qaida while traveling around Afghanistan.”

Belmar was “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and it was also stated that he was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a high risk to the US, its interests, or its allies.” In addition, it was noted that he had been identified as a candidate for a trial by Military Commission, and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, 14 months later, and without being put forward for trial, he was freed, flown back to the UK, and released without charge.

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five of this series.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, 700,000-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The Center for Constitutional Rights Marks “The 9/11 Decade and the Decline of US Democracy”

Andy Worthington — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:40:05 +0000

On the 10th anniversary of the horrendous terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, I’m cross-posting an article published on the website of the Center for Constitutional Rights as part of a project entitled, “The 9/11 Decade.” The article, “The 9/11 Decade and the Decline of US Democracy,” was written by Vince Warren, CCR’s Executive Director, and provides an excellent overview of the erosion of liberties and the fundamental assault on domestic laws and international laws and treaties in the United States since the 9/11 attacks — from Guantánamo to the global torture program, from the PATRIOT Act to the widespread repression of dissent in America today. In addition, the article highlights the Bush administration’s unconstitutional power grab, Obama’s refusal or inability to thoroughly repudiate Bush’s crimes and excesses, and the general failures of the courts and the judiciary to play their part in preserving the balance of power and responsibility in the US.

I should note that my interest in the article is not entirely objective, as I was involved in it as a consultant, and I have also added links that were not included in the original article.

The 9/11 Decade and the Decline of US Democracy
By Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights

In response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush shredded the US Constitution, trampled on the Bill of Rights, discarded the Geneva Conventions, and heaped scorn on the domestic torture statute and the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

As we mark the 10th anniversary of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, none of us has any desire to play down the horrors of that day, but two wrongs do not make a right, and, in response to the attacks, the Bush administration engineered and presided over the most sustained period of constitutional decay in our history.

Moreover, although George W. Bush entered the first decade of the 21st century by dismantling the rights that are fundamental to the identity of the United States and the security of its people, Barack Obama ended the decade by failing to fully reinstate those rights. Through his own indecision, or through ferocious opposition in Congress, he has been unable to close the infamous prison at Guantánamo Bay, as promised, and has also refused to even contemplate holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for their crimes.

As a result, the democratic principles which we hold dear have suffered a massive blow in the first ten years of the 21st century, although that is not the main problem. The deep erosion of our civil liberties is to be lamented, and should be resisted, however difficult the political climate, but the most painful truth about the last decade is that it marks an undoing of democracy so severe that without concerted and deliberate action by the people in this country — and, one hopes, by their elected leaders — the values which defined us, before the events of 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to reshape our perception of executive power, may never be regained.

This decade of constitutional decay didn’t happen overnight, although much of it was hidden from view. We were kept largely in the dark about how the government took steps to dismantle our rights, which were undertaken in a fog of secrecy, subterfuge and, in some cases, outright lies.

A well functioning democracy in this country relies on the three branches of government — the executive, Congress and the judiciary — checking each other to prevent overreach or constitutional misdeeds.

In this system, which has prevailed throughout most of our history, the executive is responsible for executing (and therefore abiding by) the laws of the republic. Congress creates laws, which, in some circumstances, circumscribe the power of the executive branch, and when Congress doesn’t approve of what the president is doing, it can change the laws, conduct inquires and hearings, and in certain circumstances, investigate potential wrong doing. The judiciary reviews the laws and presidential actions to ensure that they comport with the Constitution and justice.

In this system, no one is above the law. Illegal action initiated by the president can be stopped by the courts and congress; unjust laws initiated by Congress can be stopped by the president and the courts; and the Constitution prohibits the courts from making new law or policies or otherwise undertaking the powers of “the political branches” — Congress and the executive. Thus, regardless of the threat, the checks and balances we’ve built into our democracy are supposed to uphold the power of the fourth branch of government — that made up of the people who live in this country.

However, as we now know, a decade into the 21st century, the system upon which we all stake our liberty and democratic power as people has operated more like a scientific hypothesis than a bedrock of democratic principles. And just like any hypothesis, its true test is determined by the way it functions under pressure, and not how it works in theory. One need look no further than the last ten years to understand that the constitutional hypothesis has failed under the last two administrations. Our constitutional and democratic principles collapsed as breathtakingly as those same principles rose in the context of North Africa earlier this year.

The overarching development over the last ten years is that we have witnessed perhaps the single most demonstrable destruction of our democracy in US history. The rights that used to belong solely to US as people living in this country have been severely curtailed. We have fewer rights — and the president more power — in September 2011 than in September 2001. And any diminution of our rights, regardless of the justification of the day, is an elimination of our ability to define the country that we want to live in and shape it around the values that are crucial to our survival as a society run by and accountable to the people.

The undoing of Democracy — The “War” Paradigm

Ask a high school freshman in the US who the most powerful person in the world is and she will most likely say the president of the United States. That is not a change since 9/11, certainly. However, ask that same student who is more powerful in the US government, the president, Congress or the Supreme Court, and she’ll still say it’s the president. That reflects a significant change in the American psyche over the last decade with respect to the balance of powers in our government as outlined by the United States Constitution, which will turn 224 on September 17, 2011.

Most people now recognize that President Bush claimed more power than any previous president. He claimed the power to kill, capture or detain anyone, anywhere in the world. The Justice Department, under George W. Bush, said that the law simply doesn’t apply to the president when he’s acting as commander in chief. So the lawyers gathered around him, and around Vice President Dick Cheney, counseled him that he could ignore the fact that Congress had passed a law saying that torture was illegal or that the government can’t wiretap without a warrant.

Going further, the Bush administration claimed the power to send citizens to third countries to be tortured, to create secret “black sites” run by the CIA to detain and torture people, and of course, to detain men at Guantánamo Bay. Bush also claimed the authority to declare unilaterally that people it captured and placed in these prisons were neither subject to the Geneva Conventions nor the protections of the US Constitution.

The Bush Administration created the “war on terror” paradigm not to protect US from future attack, although that was what they claimed, but rather to put in place a radical expansion of power that sought to place the president outside domestic and international law. According to a leaked Justice Department memo from December 2001, Guantánamo Bay was specifically chosen for the purpose of detaining the prisoners of the US military because the Bush administration believed it would be beyond the reach of US courts. Existing outside the law and in complete secrecy, it was an ideal place to conduct interrogations of a significant number of prisoners in isolation from all outside human contact. Its selection demonstrates that, from the very beginning, the Bush administration planned to engage in activities that are illegal under domestic law and in violation of international treaties. And that is precisely what they did.

The US government and the highest levels of the Bush administration constructed a secret international network for arbitrary and extrajudicial detention for the purpose of using torture as an interrogation method, and engaged in a program of extraordinary rendition that outsourced torture when the US didn’t want to do it itself. The Bush administration set into place a framework that attempted to justify an unjustifiable act: torture. A high level Executive Branch group called the “Principals Committee,” which included Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, authorized the use of torture, including waterboarding. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also signed off on similar techniques for use in Guantánamo in December 2002, which later migrated to Iraq, and to Abu Ghraib. Moreover, administration lawyers, such as David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales and Jim Haynes, constructed fallacious legal rationales to support and justify the torture and abuse program.

Despite the rampant and brazen illegality put into place in the last 10 years, the courts have rarely called the administration to account for the crimes. The separation of powers concept used to function to circumscribe governmental power. In the last ten years, however, it has functioned to enable the amassing of presidential power. The courts have largely deferred to the president by uncritically accepting the wartime paradigm and giving him free rein to do as he sees fit — even though what he seeks to do is illegal. As a result, no torture victim has ever received a court ruling that the torture they suffered was illegal and most have been denied their day in court. Not one has received a dime in compensation for their injuries or even so much as an apology from either administration. To date, 171 men remain in Guantánamo and, after a decade of the “worst of the worst” rhetoric, more detainees have died in that prison than have been charged with a crime.

On three occasions, in 2004, 2006 and 2008, the Supreme Court issued serious, but not mortal, blows to the overreach and illegality of the Bush administration. The rulings in 2004 and 2008 granted the Guantánamo prisoners habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right not to be held in a legal black hole, and to ask an impartial judge why they were being held, if, as many of them claimed, they had been seized by mistake. The 2006 ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, involved the Court not only ruling that the trials at Guantánamo (the military commissions) were illegal, but also telling the government that all its prisoners have the protection of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits cruel treatment, torture, and humiliating and degrading treatment.

Sadly, Congress has also played a major part in allowing the president to do whatever he says is necessary, even if it is illegal. Congress passed the dangerously open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) the week after the 9/11 attacks, which has been used by both Bush and Obama to justify the detention of “war on terror” prisoners, and to hold them neither as prisoners of war nor as criminal suspects, but as what the Bush administration called “enemy combatants.” Moreover, Congress pulled the rug out from under the landmark Supreme Court decisions, seeking to repeal the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights, and reviving the military commissions.

Under Obama, all three branches of government — the executive, Congress and the courts — have largely refused to tackle Bush’s dreadful legacy. Obama has dedicated himself to looking forward and not back when it comes to the accountability of Bush administration officials and lawyers for authorizing the use of torture, and courts throughout the land have endorsed his position, and he has also revived the military commissions, in the face of opposition to federal court trials for terrorists, despite the latter being the appropriate venue for terrorist trials. He has also endorsed indefinite detention for 46 of the 171 men still held at Guantánamo, and has, in some cases, expanded Bush’s programs, declaring, for example, that he has the right to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad, without any form of legal process.

In addition, the Supreme Court has failed to act as the court of appeals in Washington D.C. has undermined the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus rights, effectively gutting habeas of all meaning, and Congress has launched an all-out assault on the president’s ability to close Guantánamo, preventing him from bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland, and interfering in his right to release prisoners as he sees fit.

Beyond pure policy and legal considerations, the results have been devastating for the victims and survivors of these practices and policies. The men in Guantánamo, and the “black sites” have endured a decade of arbitrary detention without charge or trial, and suffered torture, abuse and cruel, degrading treatment as alleged “enemy combatants.” The “black sites” may now be part of the past, along with Abu Ghraib, but the US under Obama maintains prisons in Afghanistan, including Bagram, where there have been allegations of the use of secret prisons, and where, in addition, the Geneva Conventions have not been reinstated.

Moreover, those that have been released continue to face mental anguish, suspicion and stigma, as well as the loss, in some cases, of family ties. These social costs will continue to extend far beyond the immediate victims. They affect entire families, communities, societies and even nations that have been subjected to forced engagement with the effects of the “war on terror” paradigm.

Illegal Surveillance … Again

The government used to need a warrant before spying on us, but those days are long gone. Thirty years ago, President Nixon’s warrantless wiretapping scandalized the nation. And although that administration used “national security” as a justification for the illegal acts, Congress and the Supreme Court insisted that the law had to govern all intelligence and counterintelligence gathering by the government, even when it was undertaken to protect against terrorism.

The Bush Administration discarded the US Constitution, again using the war and national security paradigms as justification. Bush and his advisors simply ignored the rules and wiretapped Americans and others without warrants or judicial oversight. Restoring the constitutional protections against government spying, uncovering the full extent of illegal surveillance programs, ending immunity for telecommunications companies and prosecuting those responsible for violating the law are essential to reclaiming our democratic power — our rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and our expectation that the constitutional system will function to protect those rights, are essential elements of restoring democracy.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had been the fundamental tool to regulate government surveillance. It properly involved Congress and the courts in issues deemed to be of concern to national security and established accountability frameworks for surveillance programs. That all changed radically after September 11, 2001. Congress joined forces to pass new laws, justified on “national security” grounds, that granted more power to surveillance and intelligence agencies. The Bush administration, however, not only pushed for these laws, but made up its own secret plan, through an executive order to the NSA, for reviving the kinds of programs explicitly deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (in a 1972 Center for Constitutional Rights case) and prohibited by FISA. These Bush programs existed outside of the law and included wiretapping US and foreign individuals without a warrant from any court and subject to no judicial oversight. The details were largely kept secret from Congress and the public until exposed, years later, by whistleblowers and the press.

In 2001, when the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and the PATRIOT Act were passed, the Bush administration never asked Congress for expanded surveillance authority including the right to spy on attorney-client communications, or to amend FISA to accommodate wiretapping unchecked by the FISA Court. As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would admit years later, the administration did not try to amend FISA to authorize the NSA spying program because “it was not something we could likely get.”

In November 2001, following the Bush administration’s call for an all-out “war on terror,” the USA PATRIOT Act was passed by wide margins in both houses of Congress. The PATRIOT Act included unprecedented expansions of government surveillance powers, including spying and government involvement in political and associational activity. It made extensive changes to FISA, eliminating many of the safeguards against surveillance abuse, and ramped up existing legislation such as the 1996 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which created new “material support” laws that defined political activity as criminal.

Although the current program of warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of Americans’ telephone calls that blatantly violated FISA began in the Bush Administration, the Obama administration has not renounced the power that Bush claimed. Moreover, the Obama administration has fought relentlessly in court to preserve these abuses of power.

Repression of Dissent

“Terrorism” is a word that has been used by the executive branch repeatedly since 9/11 to provide rationale for going to war, maintaining those wars, and cracking down on protest and dissent domestically in violation of the Constitution and international law. In doing so, Bush and Obama have ushered in a new era of repression, enabling law enforcement agencies to abuse their powers by targeting, detaining and silencing political activists. While this type of repression is far from a new exercise for the government, given the capitulation of Congress and the courts to the president, the people of this country will once again find themselves nose to nose with government crackdown on their protest of unjust government action.

A key question for us to ask is what effect will US war-making foreign policy continue to have on our protest of that policy? Unless and until the United States stops its current policy of declaring war on anyone in the world in the name of combating terrorism, people will continue to organize themselves to oppose it. And as long as people oppose “war on terrorism” policies, the government will use its power to label the dissenters themselves as terrorists.

While the stakes for defending dissent couldn’t be higher today, the obstacles are more difficult and more complicated than they were even ten years ago. Much of the organizing these days occurs online and by mobile phone and computer. This makes organizing more effective for the activists, but it also makes it easier for law enforcement to spy on and disrupt the activists’ plans. For example, law enforcement has established “Joint Terrorism Task Forces,” which bring together federal, state and local law enforcement and other agencies into “fusion centers.” State governments are even contracting out their illegal surveillance to private companies, as was done recently in Pennsylvania, when state homeland security director, James Powers, hired a private company to research and distribute information about groups engaged in lawful activity.

The nature of whistleblowing has changed in the last decade as well. In the current digital age, evidence of government wrongdoing is likely to come in the form of data dumps which can be distributed widely and quickly as in the case of WikiLeaks. And when the government pushes corporations to shut down public access to that information, the counter activism can take the form of hacking, as with Anonymous. In addition, an enormous change has occurred in how whistleblowers are treated. Despite a move prior to 2001 to protect whistleblowers, the Obama administration has taken on the mantle of prosecuting them — as terrorists.

In the last decade, the truth has become either a state secret or treason. With respect to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, Sarah Palin calls Assange an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands” and wants him hunted down like an Al-Qaeda chief, Rick Santorum and Peter King want him prosecuted as a “terrorist,” and Joe Lieberman suggests that the five news outlets that published the leaked State Department cables should be investigated for espionage. Exposing the facts — especially those concerning illegal government conduct and abuse — has become a serious crime.

Moreover, activists today run the very real risk of being arrested and prosecuted for their First Amendment activity. A ruling in a recent CCR case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), highlights why dissent must be defended at all costs, even while the Supreme Court turns the First Amendment and “material support for terrorism” on its head. CCR argued HLP in the Supreme Court and challenged the “material support” statues, including a portion of the USA PATRIOT Act, which makes it a crime to provide support, including humanitarian aid, literature distribution and peaceful political advocacy, to any entity that the government has designated as a “terrorist” group. The Court ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists. As a result, the Court has criminalized speech and polished the hammer with which the Obama government can now prosecute peace activists and human rights organizations who engage with groups on the government’s terrorist list even to support lawful goals.

Endless War

Finally, it is unacceptable that George Bush marched us into Iraq and Afghanistan illegally and under false pretenses, while Barack Obama has almost tripled the number of wars we are fighting. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan alone, and millions have been displaced. Over 6,000 US military service members have been killed, and more than 50,000 wounded in wars that have cost the American people trillions of dollars.

It’s not just where these wars are happening, but it’s also how. We are conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen, countries on which Congress has not declared war. To the extent that Bush and his advisors ignored the law to justify torture, Obama and his advisors ignore the law to justify warfare. Currently, his advisors are going so far as argue that the President can bypass the War Powers Resolution’s restrictions on unilateral, executive warmaking simply by using high-tech weaponry like drones, which don’t require the presence of troops on the ground.

Conclusion — bringing power back to the people

Ten years on from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, at the end of the distressing decade defined by those attacks, we find ourselves in a position where the president has claimed more power than ever and the people have conceded more power than ever. Ten years ago, federal trials were the norm for alleged criminal terroristic activity; now, the default method is military show trials that include the death penalty or indefinite or preventive detention. Ten years on from 9/11, more illegal wars are being fought today than under Bush, more laws are subverted in the name of national security, more people are being deported than at any point in our history, and the executive branch has seized or accrued more power than it has ever had.

In the end, the test of our democracy is to look at the actions that have been done in our name and under our watch — the wars, the repression, the extra-judicial detention and killings, the torture, the profiling — and ask ourselves: are we in a better position now to stop the acts that continue, to ensure that they don’t happen in the future, to ensure that the officials are held accountable, and to put the presidency back in the constitutional box than we were 10 years ago?

The answer to that is yes, to the extent that we are able to demand that our government end the lawlessness, stop stockpiling constitutional power and move back towards a path of lawful, democratic action, but the restoration of the values that we hold dear requires concerted action by many people.

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a painful anniversary, but let us also make it the occasion when, en masse, we say to the government, “Enough is enough,” and demand an end to the ongoing injustices, and the return of our values.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, 700,000-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)

Andy Worthington — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:00:19 +0000

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This is Part 15 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the final part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight and Part Nine of this series. Coming up next will be analyses of the prisoners released as a result of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals in 2004-05.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)

Peta Muhammed (ISN 908, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of a group of 30 prisoners rounded up after a raid by US Special Forces, in December 2002, on a compound in Musawal village, near Zormat, in Paktia province in Afghanistan, which was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan. Eight of the 30 were subsequently transferred to Guantánamo, even though they appeared to have had nothing to do with the supposed anti-coalition activities of their boss, and were (according to testimony recorded at Guantánamo) treated brutally in a US base in Gardez and at Bagram, where they were abused until they admitted attacking US forces. Only four of these stories were available at the time I wrote The Guantánamo Files, but they were deeply shocking, as they revealed that, of the four, two (Asadullah Rahman and Naqibullah, see below) were only 13 or 14 years ofd when they were seized.

Mentioned briefly in my articles, “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (12) – The Last of the Afghans (Part Two)” and ” The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” Peta Muhammed, also seized in the raid, was also possibly a juvenile (defined as those under 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place), as he was born in 1985, according to the prisoner list released by the Pentagon in May 2006 (PDF), which included, where available, the dates and places of birth of the prisoners.

However, in Muhammed’s Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 23, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” his date of birth was recorded as 1984, which, if correct, would mean that he was almost certainly 18 at the time of his capture.

Elsewhere, the file confirmed that he was essentially insignificant, and had not raised arms against US forces. It was noted that he “stated that he worked as a cook” for Samoud Khan (erroneously described as “a known Taliban supporter”), “who had recruited him to do menial work around his compound.” He also “stated that while working around the compound he heard the Americans were coming but he believed they were not coming to attack but to form an alliance.” He “did note that several key figures fled the compound but he denie[d] being told to stay behind and fight the Americans.”

He explained that he and “about a half dozen others stayed behind and when the Americans came they rounded everyone up and loaded them [onto] trucks and took them to prison.” A “Field note” added that “[o]ther detainees arrested in this same raid advised that they were ordered to ‘fight’ the Americans while the leaders fled the compound however no firefight occurred.”

It was also noted that he was sent to Guantánamo “around 5 August 2002″ (that should be 2003) “because of his knowledge of Samoud Khan’s compound,” which was only partly true, because, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that, “Based on current information, detainee [908] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention, though he has not been completely forthcoming concerning his association with individuals affiliated with the Taliban. Based on all the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Muhammed himself added that he “wishe[d] to return to Afghanistan and would like to work for Americans there.”

Abdul Samad (ISN 911, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

Another of the eight prisoners seized in December 2002 during a raid by US Special Forces on a compound in Afghanistan that was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan, Abdul Samad was probably a juvenile at the time of his capture. As I noted in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (12) – The Last of the Afghans (Part Two),” the Pentagon recorded his date of birth as 1982, but when representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross met Guantánamo’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, on October 9, 2003 (PDF), they noted that he was actually born in 1987.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 23, 2003, which was also a “Transfer Recommendation,” his date of birth was recorded as 1986, meaning that he was just 15 or 16 years old when he was seized. In an account that was largely similar to that of Peta Muhammed, it was noted that he was hired by Samoud Khan to work in his compound near Gardez (which was described as “Takar compound”), “doing menial laborer jobs including security.” He also “stated that as he worked in the compound, people started talking about the Americans and that they were coming to the compound,” but “he did not fear the Americans and did not believe they were going to attack the compound.” Like Peta Muhammed, he stated that “several people fled the compound, fearing being arrested,” adding that, “When the Americans arrived, they took all the guns and arrested [him] with about six others.” Crucially, he added, “there was no shooting by either side.” He also noted that “he had only been at the compound for about 25 days before being arrested.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of personality information on Samoud Khan, personalities associated with Samoud Khan, and the Partak and Shirwakala compounds and their activities.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that, “Based on current information, detainee [911] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of no intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, its interests and its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Asadullah Rahman (ISN 912, Afghanistan) Released January 2004

One of three well-known juvenile prisoners released in January 2004 (also see Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismael Agha, below), Rahman, like Naqibullah, was one of eight prisoners seized in December 2002 during a raid by US Special Forces on a compound in Afghanistan that was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan. The eight also included two other juveniles, or probably juveniles — Peta Muhammed and Abdul Samad (see above).

As I explained in Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on an article in the Guardian that was published in March 2004, Rahman, who was described as being 12 years old at the time of his capture, was originally from Logar province, but moved to Paktia with his family when he was eight, after a feud over land, and had been working for Samoud since he was ten, when his uncle found him paid work serving food and washing dishes. Repeatedly kicked and beaten in his first five days in custody at Gardez, he was missing for seven months before his father found out that he was still alive.

This was an adequate précis of some of the key elements in the Guardian article, but other details were also included, and other information surfaced for the first time in the first article about Rahman written after his release, which was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 13, 2004. In that article, Sonia Verma stated that Rahman told her that “[h]e was just 10 years old when American soldiers stormed the compound of the local Afghan commander who was holding him captive,” although she added that, based on medical tests, US military officials said that they believed Asadullah was “older than he claim[ed], perhaps 13 to 15.” She added that Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismael Agha, released with him, said “he was about 13 when he was freed.”

Verma added:

As proof of his youth, Asadullah points to a Polaroid hanging on his bedroom wall, too fresh to have faded, taken just before he was captured. In the photo, he looks like a child — standing, flanked by his cousin and older brother, in a field of wildflowers. Today he is 5 feet tall and mostly muscle, with a tired smile, dense lashes and old-man eyes.

Rahman told Verma, “They should have arrested al-Qaeda, not me. I was just innocent.” To the Pentagon, however, he was “a trained gunman conscripted to fight in an anti-US militia.” Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Pentagon spokesperson, told her, “The Taliban leadership directed younger members to counterattack the US forces in the area. The juveniles were removed from the battlefield to prevent further harm to US forces and to themselves.”

In contrast, however, Asadullah maintained that “he was sold into sexual slavery” to Samoud Khan, described as “a militia leader with a reputation for terrorizing surrounding villages.” As Verma described it:

“I was brought there to service the commander’s men,” Asadullah says in a quiet voice. During the day, he served food and washed dishes. At night, he was asked to do other things he is too ashamed to utter.

Verma also explained, “By his 10th birthday, he had spent about a month with the militia and knew his way around an AK-47,” but added that, according to his own account, he “never pulled a trigger.” He also said that, although Samoud had many enemies, “Americans weren’t among them. ” As he put it, “He wasn’t Taliban, but he was a criminal.” Mohammad Sabir, the military commander of the district police force, agreed with Asadullah’s assessment, explaining that Samoud and his 30 men (or boys) “were not Taliban but an armed band that often extorted money from local villagers.”

Describing his capture, Asadullah told Verma that Samoud and his entourage “were sitting down to dinner when around 50 American soldiers stormed the compound.” He added, “They said they were looking for al-Qaeda and Taliban soldiers.” Those captured — who did not include Samoud himself — were taken to the US base in Gardez, where, according to some accounts, they were treated brutally, although Asadullah stated, “At Gardez, I was beaten. But I wasn’t beaten too much. There was some kicking, nothing more.” He was then transferred to Bagram, where he believed he was held “for four or five months,” and was then transferred to Guantánamo, where, he said, his interrogators “seemed shocked” when they asked him how old he was and he told them. “I was the youngest person they had ever arrested,” he said.

In the Guardian, Asadullah Rahman explained how his interrogation became what James Astill described as “a predictable affair.” “I said, ‘Look, I don’t anything about the Taliban,’” Asadullah said. “But anyway, the Taliban were the government so lots of people worked with them. Just because you were Taliban it doesn’t mean you’re a criminal.”

Asadullah also explained that “[t]he first sign his family received that [he] was alive came in a letter delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross more than a year after he went missing,” and his mother showed it to Sonia Verma, who described it as “creased and tear-stained and bear[ing] the stamp of military clearance.” In it, Asadullah wrote, “All of the greetings from my heart I convey to the family. I keep my hope alive by the grace of Allah. Please send me a letter when you can. Please don’t cut the connection, write soon.”

In addition, Asadullah told Verma about the circumstances in which he, Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismael Agha were held after the US military recognised that they were juveniles — in Camp Iguana, separate from the main prison population. “From his bedroom,” she wrote, “he could see the ocean.” In Camp Iguana, the boys were allowed to play football, sometimes with the soldiers guarding them, and Asadullah also learned to play chess. They were also “taught to read and write English,” which “was the first time they had attended anything resembling school,” and Asadullah “was also given books in Pashto and a copy of the Koran.” As he also explained, “Sometimes we were allowed to watch television. I liked to watch movies.”

As he also told Verma, “Guantánamo was like home if you compare it to Bagram.” He added, however, “I wished I was more independent, more free. I wished I was not like a prisoner.” In the Guardian, Asadullah expanded this theme. “I was very sad because I missed my family so much,” he said. “I was always asking, ‘When can I go home? What day? What month?’ They said, ‘You’ll go home soon’, but they never said when.” Nevertheless, he noted that “the soldiers assigned to guard them became friends,” stating, “They were so kind to us.” When they were released, one of the guards “gave him a football and a chessboard to take back to Afghanistan.” “The guards gave me a big hug and said, “Be good. Go to school,’” Asadullah added.

Back in Afghanistan, the boys were met by a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who escorted them to the Interior Ministry in Kabul, where they received identity papers before being taken to be reunited with their families. Asadullah’s mother said, “We did not expect to see him alive. Everybody was crying.” She also said, as Sonia Verma put it, that she “barely recognized her son. His voice had changed. He had whiskers and a sprinkle of acne.”

The Guardian article also expanded on Asadullah’s mother’s concerns, noting how she cried “every night thinking about my son,” and said, “I prayed to God, I asked, ‘Where is my son?’ He was just a boy, much too young to disappear on his own.”

The Guardian added that Asadullah “was gone for seven months before his parents discovered his whereabouts. For the first two months, his uncles and cousins were afraid to tell his elderly father, Abdul Rahman, that he was missing, believing the shock might kill him.” James Astill added, “Almost the entire male population of Khoja Angur, a fortified mud-village, snowbound and ringed by icy peaks, downed tools and went searching for the boy. ‘They went to Bagram, but the Americans said they didn’t know anything about him,’ said Abdul Rahman, white-bearded and heavy-breathing. ‘They went to Logar and Gardez, even to Kandahar, but no one knew about him.’”

On his return to his home village of Khoja Angur, the elders “ruled that the matter was closed” after accepting his explanation that he had been treated well. For his father, however, “the matter [was] not closed,” because he had “borrowed several thousand dollars to support his relatives’ families while they looked for his son,” and, to raise the money, had been “forced to forfeit his land” and was fending off creditors whom he was unable to repay. He explained how his eldest son, a shopkeeper in Kabul, had had to cancel his engagement because of a lack of money, and also stated, “I thank God that my son has come back, but he has changed. He is impatient and refuses to listen to his elders. He has grown disobedient.” There seemed to be some truth to this, in Asadullah’s words to James Astill, while he was in Kabul, seeking help from the UN to continue the education he had received in Guantánamo. “There is no electricity and no clinic in my village,” he said. “It’s a bit boring, nothing new happens there.”

Interestingly, Sonia Verma’s account noted that US military officials refused to acknowledge that there had been anything wrong with detaining the three boys. They said they “had provided useful intelligence but had no further value and were no longer a threat to the United States.” What was not discussed were the other juveniles — at least 19 in total, as I explained most recently in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo” — who were not held separately from the main prison population, and rehabilitated rather then punished, as stipulated in the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which rather undermined comments made by Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Burfeind, who said, “We recognize the special needs of juvenile detainees and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding their young lives. Every effort was made to provide them a secure environment free from the influences of older detainees.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 23, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Asad Ullah, and his date of birth was given as 1988, the disputed American claim that some of those seized “advised that they were ordered to ‘fight’ the Americans while the leaders fled the compound” resurfaced, although crucially it was also conceded that no violence actually took place. As described in the file, he reportedly “stated that when US and allied forces raided [Samoud's] compound … he and several others were ordered to stay behind. The Taliban members at the compound were forewarned of a pending raid and departed the area but directed the younger members to wait and attack the US forces when they arrived.” The important addition was that “[he] and others surrendered without fighting and that [he] was not captured with any weapons.”

He was sent to Guantánamo in December 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban and Al-Qaida activity in the Paktia province and their probable connection to Chinese weapons suppliers.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that he was “assessed as being a child soldier who was forced by the Taliban into conscription,” and that, “[t]hough [he] may still have some remaining intelligence, it’s been assessed that that information does not outweigh the necessity to remove this juvenile from his current environment and afford him an opportunity to ‘grow out’ of the radical extremism he has been subject to.”

The Task Force also noted that, based on the information collected about Asadullah, “it must be assessed that [he] is of low intelligence value to the United States at this time. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, its interests and allies and he has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to an approved organization with a program that can provide assistance to help [him] become a productive member of his society.”

Naqibullah (ISN 913, Afghanistan) Released January 2004

Another of three well-known juvenile prisoners released in January 2004 (also see Asadullah Rahman, above, and Mohammed Ismael Agha, below), Naqibullah (also identified by the US authorise as Naqib Ullah), like Rahman, was one of eight prisoners seized in December 2002 during a raid by US Special Forces on a compound in Afghanistan that was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan.The eight also included two other juveniles, or probable juveniles — Peta Muhammed and Abdul Samad (see above).

As I explained in Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on an article that was cross-posted on the Cageprisoners website, Naqibullah, described as being 13 years old at the time of his capture, was not even part of Samoud’s group. The local imam’s son, he was arrested after stumbling on the US raid while cycling home from a friend’s house. Subjected to brutal interrogation in Bagram, he also said that his first ten days in Guantánamo were the worst ten days of his life.

In a Guardian article published in March 2004, James Astill explained how Naqibullah, located in “his remote village in south-eastern Afghanistan,” described life in Guantánamo as “good,” explaining that “[t]he food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and his warders were kind.” In his own words, “Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don’t have anything against them. If my father didn’t need me, I would want to live in America.”

Nevertheless, describing his time at Bagram, he confirmed that it had been arduous. “It was terrifying, I didn’t know what was happening to me,” he said. “There were many of us in a small cell. Some men were screaming to be let free.” He said that he was interrogated every day. “They kept asking me, ‘Do you know the Taliban? Do you know al-Qaida? Have you given them shelter? Have you given them food?’ I told them, ‘I don’t know these people, and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father’s authority.’”

In Guantánamo, where he was sent after two weeks in Bagram, and where, as I mentioned previously, he regarded his first 10 days as “the worst of his life,” he was held “in a tiny cell with a single slit-window as his interrogation continued.” He also discussed how “everything changed” after he “was taken to an American general who said, ‘We will educate you and soon you will go home.’”

Providing further information about how he, Asadullah Rahman and Mohammed Ismael Agha were treated prior to their release, James Astill explained how they were “moved into one large room, which was never locked, ” and “were taught Pashto (their own language), English, Arabic, maths, science, art and, for two months, Islam.” Naqibullah said, “The American soldiers ate pork but they said we must never do that because we were Muslim. They were very strict about Islam.”

As well as playing football, as noted by Asadullah Rahman, Naqibullah said that they also sometimes played basketball and volleyball with their guards. He also revealed to James Astill the first letter he had sent home from Guantánamo, as facilitated by the International Committee of the Red Cross:

“My greetings to beloved family, to my beloved father, to my beloved uncles, to my beloved cousins, to my beloved brothers. I am in good health and happy. I am in Cuba, in a special room, but it is not like a jail. Don’t worry about me. I am learning English, Pashto and Arabic.” The next two lines of the letter were scrubbed out by the Guantánamo censor. Asadullah said he couldn’t for the life of him remember what they said.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 23, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was stated that he was a Pakistani national, “born in approximately 1988″ in Zargary Camp, a refugee camp (meaning, to my mind, that he was not a Pakistani national, but an Afghan refugee born to Afghan parents), it was also noted that he “stated that he was kidnapped while doing an errand for his father by 11 men who belonged to a group called ‘Samoud’s people,’” who “abducted him, forcibly raped him at gunpoint and he was taken back to their village encampment as a prisoner and forced to do manual work.”

He added that “he had been at the camp around 3 days when US forces conducted a raid.” As with Peta Muhammed and Asadullah Rahman, the disputed American claim, alleging that some of those seized “advised that they were ordered to ‘fight’ the Americans while the leaders fled the compound” resurfaced, although crucially it was again conceded that no violence actually took place. In Naqibullah’s DAB, it was stated, “The group had been forewarned of the pending raid and they ordered [him] and some others to stay behind and fight the Americans.” It was also noted that Naqibullah “was captured in possession of a weapon but it had not been fired.”

He was sent to Guantánamo in January 2003 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his possible knowledge of Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that he was assessed as “a kidnap victim and a forced conscript of a local warring tribe, affiliated with the Taliban,” and that, “[t]hough [he] may still have some remaining intelligence, it’s been assessed that that information does not outweigh the necessity to remove this juvenile from his current environment and afford him an opportunity to ‘grow out’ of the radical extremism he has been subject to.”

The Task Force also noted that, based on the information collected about Naqibullah, “he has no further intelligence value to the United States.’ It was also noted that he has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention” and was “considered [a] low threat to the US, its interests and its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to an approved organization with a program that can provide assistance to help [him] become a productive member of his society.”

Mohammed Ismael Agha (ISN 930, Afghanistan) Released January 2004

The last of three well-known juvenile prisoners released in January 2004 (also see Asadullah Rahman and Naqib Ullah, above), Mohammed Ismael Agha, as I explained in Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, was 14 years old when he was seized with another 14-year old, Abdul Qudus, who was not released until April 2005. The two, according to their own accounts, were sold to the Americans by Afghan soldiers. Agha said they had been looking for work, and ended up spending the night at an Afghan militia post in Gereshk. The following morning, Qudus said that the soldiers wanted to give them weapons and make them fight, and when they refused they were put in a car, delivered to the Americans, and accused of being with the Taliban.

Speaking to the Associated Press after his release, in “a relative’s general store at the bazaar in Naw Zad, a market town about 300 miles southwest of Kabul,” which was near to his home village, Agha, described as being 15 years old, and identified as Mohammed Ismail Agha, said, “At first I was unhappy with the US forces. They stole 14 months of my life.” He explained that US forces had interrogated him at Bagram asking him “whether he was a Taliban supporter,” but that, in Guantánamo, “there were few questions, only schooling, prayer, and good food.” “[T]hey gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons,” he said.

Explaining, “I’m not Taliban, it’s not true. I’m innocent,” Agha reiterated his story about traveling with a friend to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, in late 2002 in search of work, stating, as the AP described it, that he and his friend — identified as Mohammed Wali rather than as Abdul Qudus — “were standing outside a shop in a town along the way when they were detained by Afghan militiamen.”

“They said, ‘Come and join us,’ but we told them we are poor people, jobless, and we don’t want to join the militia, we want to earn money,” Agha said. “Then they said, ‘You are Taliban.’”

Handed over to US soldiers, he said that he was taken first to Kandahar, where he “lost track of his friend” and had “not seen him since,” and then to Bagram, “where he was held in solitary confinement.” “They were interrogating me every day, and in the first three or four days giving just a little food and giving punishment,” he said, explaining that, as the AP put it, “[h]e was not beaten but was made to sit on his haunches for three or four hours at a time, even when he wanted to sleep.”

He also said that his family “feared he was dead,” because they did not receive a letter from him until ten months after he was first held.

Asked to comment on Agha’s case, US officials refused to speak directly about him, “saying that identifying the youths could put them in danger,” but they did state that one of the three juveniles freed “told of being conscripted into an anti-American militia group. A second said he was abducted by the Taliban and forced to train and fight, while the third was studying in an extremist mosque and captured while preparing to obtain weapons.” As with Asadullah Rahman’s case, it was also noted that military officials said that they “had provided viable intelligence but had no further value and were no longer a threat to the United States.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 23, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that his name was Mohammed Ismail, and that he was born in 1988. Despite the date the file was compiled, it was stated that, as a result, he was 16, even though that was impossible, and he was either 14 (if born after August 23) or 15 (if born before August 23).

In relating his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had “worked since childhood with his father constructing buildings and houses, when [until] a lack of employment forced him to search for work elsewhere.” He then traveled to neighbouring towns and villages in Helmand province, including Lashkar Gah, looking in vain for work, and then, with his friend Mohammed Wali, who he talked about after his release (but who was here described as Mohammed Whali), he “traveled to Gereshk and stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of town.” There, he essentially told the same story he told after his release, although with some new details.

“Soldiers in the vicinity were working on an irrigation ditch known as a ‘Khali,’” he said, “so [he] thought he might find work on the project. [He] and Whali woke a soldier sleeping in a nearby tent and requested work, but were denied. Instead the soldier offered the pair a chance to join the Taliban and fight against Americans. Whali accepted the offer for both of them, but detainee was apprehensive, stating that he wanted to find construction work instead.” Both boys were then betrayed, as the soldiers “planned to go into Gereshk city the next day and offered to take the detainee and Whali with them. However, instead of taking them to Gereshk, the soldiers turned them over to a commander” who “put them into another vehicle and took them to jail.” There, according to Agha’s account, “interrogators allegedly told [him] that Whali would be released because he admitted that he was Taliban, so he admitted it also.”

Instead, he was transferred to Bagram, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002 (actually, 2003) on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of possible plans to attack American forces in Afghanistan, as well as ingress and egress routes in Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force failed to mention his age, noting only that he was “assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government,” although it was also noted that, although “JTF Guantanamo notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of this recommendation on 17 June 2003, [o]n 16 July 2003 the CITF Assessment Board met and determined that [he] be recommended to be retained in DoD control because CITF ha[d] not fully assessed his case.”

Four years after his release, In a fact sheet entitled, “Former GTMO Detainee Terrorism Trends” (PDF), issued by the Pentagon on June 13, 2008, it was claimed that he “was recaptured four months [after his release] in May 2004, participating in an attack on US forces near Kandahar. At the time of his recapture, Ismail carried a letter confirming his status as a Taliban member in good standing.”

It is not known whether there is any truth to this claim, or, perhaps more importantly, whether, if recruited, Agha did so willingly. When he was first interviewed after his release, the Associated Press noted that officials in Naw Zad, where he was interviewed, “sent a messenger to summon Agha from Durabien village, where he lives, to talk to reporters, warning that there were Taliban in the hills where he lived,” and it is easy to imagine that these men would have targeted Agha for recruitment, whether willingly or not, because of his status as a former prisoner of America.

Haji Naim Kuchi (ISN 931, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

As I explained in Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, “Having failed to round up a single Taliban leader throughout 2003, only one of the 90 men captured in this period was flagged as a significant catch — and even he turned out to be nothing of the sort. 62-year old Haji Naeem Kochi, a tribal elder of the nomadic Kochi tribe, was the object of a manhunt from the earliest days of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom,’ when the Americans bombed numerous locations in an attempt to kill him. Human Rights Watch reported that defense department officials told them that he ‘was a former Taliban official and a “scumbag” involved in smuggling arms over the Pakistani border,’ but when he was finally captured by US forces, on his way to meet President Karzai to discuss a tribal dispute on January 1, 2003, his reputation seemed to vanish like a mirage. Instead of validating the Americans’ concerns, this frail, unthreatening man, who suffered from diabetes and wore a surgical belt after one of his kidneys was removed, was so insignificant that he was released from Guantánamo in September 2004.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 3, 2004, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” in which he was identified as Haji Niam Kuchi, born in 1940, the only medical problem noted was his diabetes. In relating his story, the Joint Task Force confirmed that he was seized on January 1, 2003, “while traveling with his nephew in Kabul,” and “due to suspected affiliations with the Al-Qaida and Taliban [sic].”

He was sent to on Guantánamo on March 22, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was “due to the probability that [he] would be able to provide information on the escape of Arab Al-Qaida members into Pakistan as well as Afghan politics, ground forces, and personalities that have and will provide leadership in Afghanistan.”

However, the Task Force also claimed that he “was a key logistical facilitator for subversive activities throughout Afghanistan with direct and strong ties to Al-Qaida, Taliban, Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate [ISI] and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) operatives,” and that he “possesses knowledge of Taliban and Al-Qaida operations and was involved in the smuggling of weapons.” In addition, the Task Force stated that he was “purported to have information concerning Taliban, Al-Qaida, and Chechen operatives and their actions during Operation Enduring Freedom,” and “has strong ties with senior level operatives in several terrorist organizations and support networks to include Al-Qaida and the HIG.”

This was quite a list, and reasons for doubting it are described below, but it is of interest not just because of its purported scope (which, if true, would surely have led to Kuchi’s ongoing detention), but also because US forces were interested in monitoring the activities of the ISI, Pakistan’s largest intelligence service, and, theoretically, one of the Americans’ closest allies during the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, although, in reality, of course, the US has never quite comprehended the extent to which parts of Pakistan’s establishment have their own distinct agenda, involving, in some cases, explicitly backing the Taliban.

In its assessment, the Task Force insisted on maintaining Kuchi as a high-level threat, noting that he was assessed as “a key logistics facilitator and supporter of terrorism in Afghanistan,” who “has the capability to continue to do so.” He was also described as being “of high intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a high threat to the US, its allies and interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “[r]etain[ed] under DoD control,” although it was also noted that the Criminal lnvestigative Task Force had evidently disagreed with this assessment. It was stated that, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that the detainee poses a high threat.” As a result, CITF may well have played a part in reevaluating Kuchi’s significance, leading to his release eight months later.

After his release, Kuchi was mentioned in a front-page story in the Guardian in February 2008, which I analyzed in an article entitled, “Expelled UN official criticizes Afghan policy re: Taliban – and defends ex-Guantánamo detainee.” In that article, Michael Semple, an Irish UN official expelled from Afghanistan, along with British EU official Mervyn Patterson, for posing a threat to national security by making contact with the Taliban (despite being described by the British Ambassador to Afghanistan as a man who “speaks fluent Pashtu, and understands the grain and granularity of Afghan society better than almost any other foreigner”) spoke about the case of Haji Naim Kuchi (described as Haji Naeem Kochi), as a successful example of “official policy to bring people in from the cold.”

“Take Haji Naeem Kochi, someone I have known for a very long time in Afghanistan,” Semple said. “After 9/11 and the invasion he ended up doing time in Guantánamo Bay. When he came back … I met up with him. The first thing I asked him was did he learn any English and he replied: ‘Yes, but all I learned was sit up and sit down from the American guards.’ Yet despite doing time in Guantánamo he is now a member of the peace commission aimed at reconciling all Afghans.”

Abdurahman Khadr (ISN 990, Canada) Released November 2003

In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Abdurahman Khadr’s was one of 14 missing files, as I noted in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files.” In that article, I stated that, “Of the 14 missing stories, just two are overtly suspicious,” and one of those was that of Abdurahman Khadr. The brother of the former child prisoner Omar Khadr (ISN 766), he was persuaded to work as a spy, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files:

Abdurahman was captured by Afghans in Kabul in November 2001, when he was 20 years old, and was then handed over to the Americans. Describing himself as the “black sheep” of the family, who saw no value in the radical beliefs of the rest of his family, Abdurahman agreed to work as a spy for the CIA in Kabul, and then in Guantánamo, but was told that, to protect his cover, he would have to be treated like all the other prisoners. He said that his imprisonment at Bagram — where he was stripped, photographed naked and subjected to an anal probe — was the start of “the longest and most painful ordeal of his life,” and that he “had no idea what he was getting into.”

After ten days at Bagram, he was flown to Guantánamo, where, he said, he arrived “a broken man,” and was then kept in isolation for a month before being moved to a cell near other prisoners. The plan, as he described it, was that “they could put me next to anyone that was stubborn and that wouldn’t talk and I would talk him into it. Well, it’s not that easy — lots of people won’t talk to anyone because everybody in Cuba is scared of the person next to him. I couldn’t do a lot for them.” Unable to cope with his situation, he spent the rest of his time in Guantánamo in a “luxurious” private cell, and was then sent to Bosnia, where his mission was to infiltrate radical mosques and gather information on al-Qaeda’s activities.

When the CIA wanted to send him to Iraq, however, he decided that he couldn’t take the pressure any more, and after resigning from the agency he returned to Canada, where his most salient comments concerned the prisoners in Guantánamo. He said that he told the CIA that the vast majority of the prisoners were innocent, and that it was “a huge mistake for the US military to offer large cash rewards for the capture of al-Qaeda suspects when they first arrived in Afghanistan.”

Haji Mohammed Wazir (ISN 996, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Haji Mohammed Wazir’s was one of 14 missing files, as I noted in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files.” In that article, as I explained, all that was known of him was that he was a 60 year old farmer from Helmand province, who was released in March 2004 with 22 other Afghans after spending a year in Guantánamo and being held for two and half years in total. Speaking briefly to reporters on his release, he said, “I’m a poor and innocent man. I was in my home, unaware of Taliban and al-Qaeda, when I was caught. If I’m a Taliban or al-Qaeda I want to be punished. If I’m not, then they should compensate me. The two-and-a-half years that I have spent in pain and soreness — who is going to pay?”

Bashir Ahmad (ISN 1005, Pakistan) Released September 2004

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” Ahmad’s story was only known before WikiLeaks released the Detainee Assessment Briefs because he had been interviewed in 2008 by Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers for a major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners.

25 years old when he was seized, he admitted that he “was fighting for the Taliban,” but as Tom Lasseter noted, although he had “little training and no concept of the structure or detail of al-Qaeda or the Taliban,” and seemed, therefore, “to have known nothing of much value to US interrogators,” his story indicates that “American military officials had a hard time distinguishing between foot soldiers and jihadist leaders.”

Ahmad was one of dozens of Guantánamo prisoners seized in November 2001 after the fall of the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, the last stronghold of the Taliban, who first had to survive the journey from Kunduz to a Northern Alliance prison in Sheberghan run by the Afghan Uzbek warlord General Rashid Dostum. The prisoners, who surrendered in their thousands, were transported to Sheberghan in container trucks, when hundreds — or even thousands — of prisoners died of suffocation, or by being shot through the sides of the containers by Northern Alliance soldiers, in what has become known as “the convoy of death.”

Ahmad said that ten to 15 men survived in his container. “There was a mini-revolt in the container” he explained, “which caused Dostum’s men to fire. Many died of bullet wounds; many suffocated. When the door opened, suddenly there was light. All the bodies fell out. They sprinkled water on the bodies and felt their pulse to see if they were alive.” Held for 16 to 17 months at Sheberghan, he recalled some examples of extraordinary brutality. “The Northern Alliance soldiers were very cruel,” he said. “They asked a Taliban commander to shave his beard. He refused. They took him off and chopped off one arm, and then another, and then they killed him.”

When he was finally picked out from the dwindling population of Sheberghan, he was taken to the US prison at Bagram airbase, where he was held for 40 days. “When I was taken to interrogation and then taken back to our area, they (guards) would kick me and slap me,” he said. “Sometimes three guards would come take me to a separate room and tie my hands to a chain that was hanging from the ceiling. They would pull the chain tightly so that I rose up in the air. Sometimes they did it the other way, pulling me up by my feet. And then they would punch me or hit me with a wood rod they used to carry.”

His life did not improve in Guantánamo, where he was subjected to regular assaults by the team of five armored guards responsible for quelling the most minor infringements of the rules. “Five soldiers would come with bulletproof jackets and weapons to my cell, to my cage,” he said. “One of them would spray me in the face. My eyes would burn and water. They would come in and punch and kick me until they were satisfied.”

Unable to endure “the beatings, the fear, the loneliness, the hunger strikes, the anger,” he said that he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself. When he awoke in the prison hospital, a psychologist asked him why he had tried to kill himself. “I had lost all hope in life,” he said. “I decided to die instead of living in that hell.” He added, “What can I say about my mental health? My friends say I am half-mad.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 10, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Ahmad Bushir, born in 1976, it was clear how, as Tom Lasseter noted, “American military officials had a hard time distinguishing between foot soldiers and jihadist leaders.” It was also apparent, reading between the lines, how Ahmad had refused to cooperage with his captors, and why, as a result, he had been subjected to regular violence, although to my mind this demonstrates, above all, how, when confronted by a superpower in brutal overdrive, those subjected to it had only a few options which tended to define their experiences — to fight back, as Ahmad did, to shut down, or to cooperate, either to a major or a minor degree.

Whereas he spoke honestly to Tom Lasseter, he maintained, with the Joint Task Force, that he was “working as a cook at the Taliban school” in Kunduz, when “he received orders to surrender to Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces in early November 2001.” It was noted that he was thern taken to Sheberghan, and that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 8, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was “because he was suspected of being a mid-level Taliban commander who was closely associated with Mullah Omar.”

To the Task Force, Ahmad had “refused to be forthright concerning his activities.” He told his interrogators that he worked as a cook for one month prior to surrendering, but the Task Force regarded it as “probable” that he was “training at the Dasht-e-Archi training camp near Kunduz,” which, it seems, he mentioned vaguely at some point while being interrogated. The Task Force “also believed that [he] may be a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) member because of his affiliations with several known members at the training camp but that information cannot be confirmed.” Nevertheless, his “suspected affiliations and his unexplained attendance at the training camp contribute to [his] assessment as a possible Islamic extremist.”

Although he was also “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” and was regarded as being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” he was designated as “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended him for “[t]ransfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” Noticeably, however, the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with this assessment, having assessed him as “a low threat.” However, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that the detainee poses a medium threat.”

Mohammed Irfan (ISN 1006, Pakistan) Released September 2004

When Lasseter met him, he was working, fixing equipment at a sugar mill. Interviewed in Islamabad, he explained that he had traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 as a volunteer medic, but was then seized by General Dostum’s troops with “hundreds of other men” outside Kunduz. He claimed not to be a combatant, but the reporter noted that, while describing what happened at Kunduz — “a broken treaty, then a standoff between Dostum and the Taliban” — he “said things like ‘when a skirmish broke out between us and Dostum’s men’ and ‘we should fight for our lives,’ which suggest that he was armed at the time, as was almost everyone around him.”

He was then taken to Sheberghan, where he was held for a year and half, in abysmal conditions. Once a week, he said, the prisoners were taken from their cells to be counted, and every time “he stood in a courtyard and shook because he knew what was about to happen: A guard would walk up and begin beating him with a plastic garden hose filled with dirt or with a stick, until he fell to the ground in pain. Then they’d beat him some more.” He added that “he knew of at least 30 other Pakistanis who died of starvation” during his time at the prison.

Astonishingly, however, he said that the 40 days that he subsequently spent at the US prison in Bagram airbase, before his transfer to Guantánamo, were even worse. “Bagram was the worst,” he said. “I was never treated so badly anywhere else as I was at Bagram.” The reporter explained that “while the violence at Sherberghan was more intense, it came only once a week,” whereas at Bagram, “he was beaten almost every day.” What’s particularly disturbing about this account is that the period Irfan was at Bagram, in early summer 2003, was around six months after two prisoners had been killed by guards, and indicates that there was no improvement in the conditions at the prison. “We were told we were being taken for a shower,” Irfan said. “But they would take pictures of us, laugh at us; they would beat us to the ground and then drag us around naked. When they took us to the interrogation room, they would punch us, kick us and knee us and push our head into the wall. They did this on the way to interrogation and in the interrogation room.”

After Bagram, Irfan said, his transfer to Guantánamo was “almost a relief,” although he stressed that he was still subjected to violence. “The guards still punched him occasionally,” the reporter noted, “and when he asked, in broken English, why they did, they laughed and punched him some more.” For the most part, however, he was left alone. Because he “didn’t participate in hunger strikes and usually kept to himself, he spent most of his time sitting in his cell, waiting for the next meal.” He added that he was only interrogated “a handful of times,” and spent his last six months in Camp Four, the communal camp at .Guantánamo, reserved for cooperative prisoners. “It wasn’t great,” he added, “but at least it wasn’t Bagram.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was noted that he was born in 1979, his story about being a medic was not mentioned, Instead, the recruitment story perceived by Tom Lasseter was discussed explicitly, with the Joint Task Force noting that Irfan had stated that, in November 2001, he heard a speech at his town hall in which a preacher “encouraged all men to travel to Afghanistan (AF) to help with Jihad.” While there, he met a man named Mohammed Ahmed and the two “befriended each other,” subsequently traveling to Kunduz, where he stayed in a house for ten days and trained on a Kalashnikov rifle, and then stayed in another house for eight days until his group was ordered to surrender to Northern Alliance forces.” A survivor of the notorious “convoy of death,” when thousands of soldiers and civilians who surrendered were suffocated or shot en route to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, he said, as the Task Force put it, that they “were put in containers for a day and then transported to Sheberghan,” indicating that, if he had discussed the horrors of the journey, they were not mentioned in the report. According to the Task Force, he was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, “because of his affiliation with the Taliban as a foreign fighter.”

“[A]ssessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” Irfan was also regarded as being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and of being “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Walid Al Qadasi (ISN 1014, Yemen) Released March 2004

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Walid al-Qadasi was one of ten men seized in Iran and handed over to Afghan forces as part of a prisoner exchange in early 2002. The men were then handed over to US forces, and sent to Guantánamo after being held in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, although as one of them, Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan, explained, although ten prisoners in total were transferred from iran — six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik — only six ended up in Guantánamo, and it is not known what happened to the other four.

As I wrote in The Guantánamo Files (and in an article in April 2009 entitled, “CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval“), drawing on a case sheet produced by Amnesty International in August 2005, al-Qadasi was rendered to Afghanistan in January 2002. Describing his time in a prison that he identified as the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, but which was probably another secret prison instead, he said, “The Americans interrogated us on our first night which we coined as ‘the black night.’ They cut our clothes with scissors, left us naked and took photos of us before they gave us Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed our hands behind our backs, blindfolded us and started interrogating us … They threatened me with death, accusing me of belonging to al-Qaeda.”

After this initial interrogation, he said, “They put us in an underground cell measuring approximately two meters by three meters. There were 10 of us in the cell. We spent three months in the cell. There was no room for us to sleep so we had to alternate … It was too hot in the cell, despite the fact that outside the temperature was freezing (there was snow), because the cell was overcrowded.” He added that they were only fed once a day, that loud music was used as “torture,” and that one of his fellow detainees “went insane,” and pointed out that, when Red Cross representatives were allowed to visit, the most severely disturbed prisoners were secretly moved to another cell that was off-limits.

In documents released by WikiLeaks, al-Qadasi’s was a “Recommendation [for] Release or transfer to Another Country.” In this document, dated February 27, 2004, in which he was identified as Walid Mohammed Shahir, born in 1979, it was noted that he claimed that “he illegally entered Saudi Arabia in 1999 to look for work,” but that, in 2001, “when Saudi Arabia began to crack down on illegal workers, [he] contacted a smuggler to take him to Italy.” However, in May or June 2001, he succeeded only in being smuggled to Iran, via Iraq, where he and the smuggler “remained for five months.”

In December 2001, he was arrested by Iranian police, and, after spending three months in prison, was “transported to Afghanistan as part of a prisoner exchange between the two countries.” In this analysis, it was stated that the Iranian authorities, rather than the US, “considered [him] an Al-Qaida operative,” and that the secret prison in which he was held was not run by the CIA. The Task Force claimed that he “was held in an Afghanistani prison for about a year before being turned over to US Forces.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was because of his “possible connections to Al-Qaida,” and because his “travel route [was] suspicious.”

In assessing the reasons for his release of transfer, the Task Force noted that, “As a suspected Al-Qaida member, [he] had more value in the prisoner exchange,” but the Iranian police had provided “[n]o documentation or corroborating information” regarding his status as an Al-Qaida member.” It was also noted that JTF GTMO “found no information that directly link[ed him] to Al-Qaida,” and that, although his “circuitous travel route to Italy seems suspicious, no other information is available to contradict [his] story.”

JTF GTMO determined that he was “of low intelligence value due to his knowledge of Local smuggling routes between Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran,” and he was assessed as posing “a low risk as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “released or transferred to the control of another country as appropriate,” although it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force “ha[d] not completed an assessment and [we]re unable to supply a threat at this time.”

Following his return from Guantánamo, al-Qadasi was imprisoned by the Yemeni authorities for two years, first in a prison in his hometown of Tai’z and then in Sana’a, attracting attention from Amnesty International and lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who visited him in prison in 2005 and highlighted the fact that he was still being held without trial.

He also attracted the attention of the United Nations. In November 2005, the Special Rapporteur on torture drew on these allegations in a letter to the US government. The Rapporteur noted, “In its response, the Government of the United States reiterated its earlier announcements that no Government agency was allowed to engage in torture and that its actions complied with the non-refoulement principle.” This note was included in a mention of al-Qadasi’s story in a UN report on secret detention, for which I was a major contributor, which was published in 2010. The report is available here, and the section dealing with the US was also cross-posted on my website in three parts, the relevant section being, “UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

In 2009, he was interviewed by Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star for a feature on Guantánamo’s Yemeni prisoners. Shephard wrote:

He says his wife has just left him and he can’t find a job. Any job. He says he doesn’t care what he does … Now 29 and married, he has two children, the youngest just 10 days old at the time of the Star‘s interview [in August 2009]. He depends on his father-in-law for support. Slumping listlessly, he answers most questions in short sentences. “My wife says she will not return until I get a job,” Al-Qadasi says. He shrugs. “There are no jobs.”

Wassam Al Ourdoni (ISN 1018, Jordan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Wassam Al Ourdoni (identified as Wisam Ahmed) was one of ten men seized in Iran and handed over to Afghan forces as part of a prisoner exchange in early 2002. The men were then handed over to US forces, and sent to Guantánamo after being held in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, although as one of them, Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan, explained, although ten prisoners in total were transferred from iran — six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik — only six ended up in Guantánamo, and it is not known what happened to the other four.

As I wrote in The Guantánamo Files (and in an article in April 2009 entitled, “CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval“), drawing on an article entitled, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” which was written by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, and published by Index on Censorship in 2005, Wisam Ahmed ran a clothes shop in Jordan and traveled to Pakistan every year with a religious group. After getting married in 2000, he decided to take his wife and their newborn child to Pakistan for his visit in August 2001. In December, they were on a bus, traveling home, when they were stopped at a checkpoint in Iran, and Ahmed — under suspicion “because they associated [my] headdress with al-Qaeda and must have overlooked the fact that it was also my national dress” — was taken into custody.

Rendered to Afghanistan on March 1, 2002, he was held in the “Dark Prison,” in what he described as “unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society,” and spent 77 days in a room that “was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days. There was no window, and we didn’t see the sun once during the whole time.” He was then moved to another secret prison — “Prison Number Three” — where the food was so bad that he lost a significant amount of weight, and was then moved to Bagram, where, in the 40 days before his transfer to Guantánamo, he was threatened by dogs, made to watch torture videos, and intimidated in other ways: “they used to start up an electric saw and while they were sawing we would hear cries of agony. I thought they would cut me into pieces sooner or later.”

In 2008, he was interviewed by Tom Lasseter for a major report by McClatchy Newspapers on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, in which he was described as Wissam Ahmad. Lasseter’s article began with a harrowing account of “Ahmad’s first night in the small jail in Kabul,” where was held after being transferred from Iran. Lasseter noted:

[H]e trembled with fear. Nine other men were crammed around him in the cell, he said, and he heard one of them, an elderly Afghan, wailing in the darkness. The old man screamed a lot. He had hallucinations of men whispering threats in his ear, and he often urinated on himself. He was going mad, Ahmad said.

The guards who beat the prisoners with small rubber hoses were Afghans, but the interpreters and soldiers in the building next door were Americans, he said.

Ahmad said he’d been taken next door with a sack over his head and thrown to the floor of the interrogation room. When his body hit the floor, he said, the sack over his head rose just enough for him to see the first American combat boot flying at his body.

The sack was removed, he said, and he was hoisted onto a chair. There were U.S. soldiers behind him, he said, and an American man and woman were sitting in front of him, wearing civilian clothes and calm expressions. Ahmad said he assumed that they were with the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Then the interrogator shouted at me. He told me, ‘Either admit that you are a part of al Qaida, or we will send you to a room full of dogs,’ ” Ahmad said.

Ahmad said that he wasn’t a part of al Qaida. In fact, he told the two interrogators, he’d never been to Afghanistan before in his life. About 10 minutes later, he was taken back to his cell.

Wissam Ahmad told his story at a mosque in Amman, where he was the imam. As the report explained, “When he began to talk about being punched or kicked, he shooed his 5-year-old daughter, Yaqeen, and 3-year-old son, Obaidah, out of the room.”

Repeating what he had said to Clive Stafford Smith, he confirmed that “he was detained on a bus at a routine checkpoint outside Zahedan, Iran, in January 2002,” and elaborated on how he had become a preacher, explaining that he had joined the vast missionary organisation Jamaat al-Tablighi, “after meeting members in a mosque in his hometown of Zarqa, about an hour north of Amman.” As the McClatchy report noted, “He was 22 and working at a clothing store in the town, which is known as a bastion of conservative Sunni Islam. His life had had little direction — he wasn’t interested in a career in the army, like his father — and the group’s call to return to the basic tenets of Islam, as it saw them, appealed to him. Ahmad said he was 26 when he went on his first mission for Tablighi Jamaat, to Pakistan in January 2002.”

In Zaheran, however, where his life changed so horribly, although the police asked him “to come with them for routine questioning,” he was not questioned. He said that the Iranians “held him for about a month without ever interrogating him or telling him why they were holding him.”

After his transfer to Afghanistan, and that first grim night, Ahmad said, Americans, who were “in the building next door,” questioned him two months later. They “asked his name, his affiliation with al-Qaida, his reasons for being in Iran — and he gave the same answers.” He also reiterated that he was held for 77 days and then moved to “another jail in Kabul,” where “he had his own cell.” He also said that “he was interrogated once during his first month by Americans in plainclothes who again demanded to know about his relationship with al-Qaida,” and “was interrogated a few more times during the next year, but mostly he just sat in silence.”

He also spoke about being taken to Bagram, in spring 2003, where, he said, he was asked the same questions about al-Qaida, and was subjected to three days of sleep deprivation, when “he wasn’t allowed to sleep for more than two hours or so,” and “was put in a small space on the floor, fenced off by concertina wire, and kept in the shackles, mask, goggles and earmuffs. He was moved then to a small plywood cell, he said. The goggles were taken off, along with the mask and earmuffs. A guard outside hit the walls of his cell periodically to keep him awake.”

After about three weeks of interrogations, he said, “guards took him to a room, lifted his arms above his head and tied his handcuffs to the ceiling, leaving him standing on his tiptoes. He was kept that way for a week, he said, let down only for a couple of hours a day to eat and rest.”

Afterwards, he said, he was taken back to interrogation, and “[a]n American man was there, smiling. Now, he said, what do you have to tell us about your connection to al-Qaida?” Ahmad explained that “he shook his head warily and said that, God help him, he didn’t know anything about al-Qaida,” but what was most revealing about this was how torture was directly linked to the manufacture of false confessions, if prisoners did not have the resistance of Ahmad or others like him. A week later, he added, he was sent to Guantánamo.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 20, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Osam Abdul Rahman Ahmed, born in 1975, his own story was confirmed. It was stated that “he arrived in Pakistan in August 2001 from Jordan,” although the Task Force could not resist throwing doubt into the narrative, noting that he was “claiming he was there to do Muslim missionary work for the poor.” The Task Force added that he “was in Pakistan for approximately four months before deciding to return to Jordan with his family,” but that, shortly after arriving in Iran, his bus “was stopped, searched, and he was arrested under suspicion of being an Al-Qaida member.” It was also noted that his family “was not detained and they returned to Jordan,” and that he “was held by the Iranians and the[y] turned him over to the Afghan government, who transferred [him] into US custody.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 8, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his suspected affiliation with Al-Qaida,” even though it must have been known at the time that he was not. In an interesting note, the Task Force stated that His “enemy combatant (EC) status was reassessed on 29 Aug 03,” and that “[h]e remains an EC as we have no factual basis to change the original determination made prior to his arrival at Guantánamo Bay.”

This is an extremely useful note for confirming how the prisoners were all judged as “enemy combatants” before their arrival at Guantánamo, even though there was no official process involved in this assessment — nothing more, in fact, than being regarded as an “enemy combatant” without any rights whatsoever based solely on ending up in US custody — and it rather overshadows the rest of the file, in which it was noted that he was “assessed as being neither a member of Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” and was also regarded as being “not of intelligence value to the United States,” and as posing “a low risk as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies.”

As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended him for “[r]elease or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention,” and the Criminal Investigative Task Force, which had evidently not assessed his case, stated that they would assess him on December 23, 2003. This could have been the end of the story, leading to his release just three months later, but in the documents released by WikiLeaks there was a second document relating to Ahmed, which follows up on the discussion about his status as an “enemy combatant” in his DAB.

This second document was an Annual Enemy Combatant Review, dated January 31, 2004, which, as I have mentioned previously, was a type of document that was evidently used to specifically assess the status of all the prisoners as “enemy combatants,” although the only ones I have seen previously were in the cases of the Iranian Bakhtiar Bameri (ISN 623, see Part Seven) and the Tajik Muhibullo Umarov (ISN 729, see Part Nine).

In Ahmed’s Annual Enemy Combatant Review, as with the other two examples cited, it was noted, crucially, that, “Although he was assessed as an enemy combatant at the time of his transfer to GTMO, on-going assessment and determination of his status as an EC is required by the Implementing Guidance for Release or Transfer of Detainees under US Department of Defense Control to Foreign government Control, dated 11 December 2002 and approved by the Secretary of Defense on 26 December 2002.” As I have mentioned previously, a version of this document, relating to Bagram and issued on December 10, 2002, is available here. In it, as I previously noted in connection with Bameri and Umarov:

Enemy combatant is defined by the above guidance as “any person that US or allied forces could properly detain under laws and customs of war.” For purposes of this conflict, an enemy combatant includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a member or agent of al-Qaida, the Taliban, or another international terrorist organisation against which the United States is engaged in armed conflict.

In describing how he ended up in US custody, the Task Force reiterated that he “was turned over to US control by Afghanistan forces in February 2003,” adding, in an analysis that repeated the dubious claim that US forces had nothing to do with his detention prior to this time, “He had been detained in Afghanistan since April 2002, having been held in Iran for approximately 4 months.”

It was also stated that he “was originally detained and assessed as being a possible Al-Qaida member based on the information available at the time.” Crucially, however, the Task Force added, “Since his arrival at GTMO, no further information has developed to support the possibility that he is a member of Al-Qaida. Furthermore, no information has developed to support his determination as an EC under any other aspect of the EC definition above. Therefore, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO’s assessment that [he] is not an enemy combatant.” The memo concluded by noting that his case was being “processed by the Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team for release.”

This is notable for two reasons: firstly, because it is only the third mention I have seen of the existence of a Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team responsible for processing the prisoners for release; and secondly, because it is almost unprecedented for a prisoner to be designated as “not an enemy combatant.” The terminology, when the Combatant Status Review Tribunals began in the summer of 2004, was that those whose release was recommended (38 out of 558 prisoners whose cases were reviewed) were not judged as “not an enemy combatant,” but as being “no longer an enemy combatant.”

In 2010, Ahmed’s story was included in a United Nations report on secret detention, for which I was a major contributor. The report is available here, and the section dealing with the US was also cross-posted on my website in three parts, the relevant section being, “UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

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

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

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