In January this year, the Court attempted (against the government’s wishes) to argue that the international laws of war were irrelevant to the detention of men at Guantánamo and the legislation underpinning it (the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks), and in two cases in June, the Court took exception to the prevailing requirement for detention accepted in the District Court — that the men be part of the “command structure” of al-Qaeda or the Taliban — arguing that merely being “part of” either organization was enough.

As I have maintained for the last year and half, the problems with the AUMF — which the District Court judges are not empowered to discuss, even if they wanted — is that it fails to distinguish between al-Qaeda (a terrorist organization) and the Taliban (the government of Afghanistan at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001). The result of this confusion is that the majority of the men who have lost their habeas petitions (and whose detention is being robustly upheld by the Circuit Court) were, at best, minor players in a military conflict that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s international terrorist operations, and therefore the Circuit Court, with its enthusiasm for endorsing detention, is taking us further away from the kind of discussion we should be having about the purpose of Guantánamo and the ongoing detention of the men held there.

A rare victory: Circuit Court orders lower court to reconsider the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian kidnapped in Bosnia

Despite the Circuit Court’s prevailing enthusiasm for endorsing ongoing detention, there was a surprise on June 28, when a panel led by Judge Douglas Ginsburg actually ruled in favor of a prisoner, ordering the lower court to reconsider whether Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian, and one of six men kidnapped in Bosnia-Herzegovina in January 2002 and rendered to Guantánamo, was involved in any way with al-Qaeda.

In November 2008, Judge Richard Leon had granted the habeas petitions of five men seized with Bensayah, but had ruled that the government had provided “credible and reliable evidence,” from a number of sources, “linking Mr. Bensayah to al-Qaeda and, more specifically, to a senior al-Qaeda facilitator,” and had denied his petition.

In dismissing Judge Leon’s conclusion on June 28 (PDF), Judge Ginsburg said “the evidence upon which the district court relied in concluding Bensayah ‘supported’ al-Qaeda is insufficient … to show he was part of that organization.” He added, “The government presented no direct evidence of actual communication between Bensayah and any al-Qaeda member,” and also noted that, after Judge Leon had delivered his ruling, the Obama administration stepped back from a claim that a “senior al-Qaeda operative and facilitator” was a witness against Bensayah.

That man, it is clear from analyses of the case over many years, was Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee,” for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially introduced, and who, it turned out, was not a member of al-Qaeda at all, and had no knowledge of any international terrorist plots, including 9/11. In a case appealed in the Circuit Court the week before Bensayah’s — that of Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian seized with Zubaydah — the judges failed to recognize that the government had backed down from most of its claims about Zubaydah, and, shamefully, relied on long-discredited statements made by Ahmed Ressam, the failed “Millennium Bomber,” who is now serving a 22-year sentence in a US prison, as part of its justification for upholding Barhoumi’s detention.

The collapse of the case against Zubaydah — primarily because torture encourages its victims to make up a pack of lies to get it to stop — has been so significant that allegations made by him or about him have stealthily disappeared from the charge sheets in numerous cases — not only at Guantánamo, but also in other countries. In Bensayah’s case, however, the discussions regarding his significance — or lack of it — have surfaced over the years, and in an article in the New York Times in March this year, Charlie Savage explained how Bensayah’s case had also provided a test for the Obama administration regarding the perceived scope of its detention powers.

The article was fascinating for the revelations that, last spring, career lawyers at the Justice Department resisted narrowing the definition of who could legally be held at Guantánamo, after Judge John D. Bates asked for a current definition, fearing that “rolling back the Bush position might make it harder to win,” but that White House Counsel Greg Craig shepherded President Obama to a position in which “only people who were part of al-Qaeda or its affiliates, or their ‘substantial’ supporters” could be detained — the definition that Judge Bates later refined by proposing that the “key inquiry” for determining whether an individual has become “part of” one or more of these organizations is “whether the individual functions or participates within or under the command structure of the organization — i.e., whether he receives and executes orders or directions.”

Last summer, after Craig had already been sidelined for his fearless approach to dismantling the Bush administration’s policies, the case of Belkacem Bensayah arose as a test for the administration, given that he had been seized “far from the active combat zone” and had, essentially, only been accused of “facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda.”

Savage reported that Harold Koh, who became the State Department’s senior lawyer in June, “produced a lengthy, secret memo contending that there was no support in the laws of war for the United States’ position in the Bensayah case.” Koh was up against Jeh Johnson at the Pentagon, who also produced a secret memo arguing for “a more flexible interpretation of who could be detained under the laws of war.”

In September, according to Savage, Koh and Johnson debated the issues in a packed room in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (which advices the Executive branch on what is legally permissible), with David Barron, the OLC’s acting head, called upon to “decide who was right.” Instead, however, Barron refused to decide, circulating a memo in which he stated that the OLC “had found no precedents justifying the detention of mere supporters of al-Qaeda who were picked up far from enemy forces” and “was not prepared to state any definite conclusion.”

As Savage explained, the upshot was a mess, a “tactical approach” that involved lawyers trying to avoid the question “as long as possible.” He added, “They changed the subject by instead asking courts to agree that people like Mr. Bensayah, looked at from another angle, had performed functions that made them effectively part of the terrorist organization — and so were clearly detainable.”

In the end, however, the Circuit Court concluded that there was no evidence that Bensayah had “performed” any “functions” for al-Qaeda at all. The key allegation, which apparently involved phone calls that Bensayah had supposedly made to Abu Zubaydah, disappeared like a will o’ the wisp, and perhaps hinged on a solitary document marked, “INFORMATION REPORT, NOT FINALLY EVALUATED INTELLIGENCE.” In its place, as Judge Ginsburg noted, there was little more than a claim that Bensayah had “experience in obtaining and traveling in and out of numerous countries on fraudulent passports,” and, as Bensayah himself admitted, he had “used multiple travel documents, ‘some of which were in an assumed name,’ but [only] in order to avoid being sent back to Algeria, “where he reasonably feared prosecution.” As Judge Ginsburg added:

He presented “unrebutted declarations” that “mere possession and use of false travel documents is neither proof of involvement with terrorism nor evidence of facilitation of travel by others.” We agree.

While Bensayah waits to see if his case will indeed by reconsidered by Judge Leon, or whether, as his Bosnian wife told a Balkan website, he “will be released soon,” he is probably fortunate that, even with no evidence against him, his appeal came up before a panel led by Judge Ginsburg, rather than, for example, Judge A. Raymond Randolph, whose record on Guantánamo is notoriously inflexible, and is discussed below.

Fawzi al-Odah, who attended a training camp for one day, has his appeal denied

Two days after the Bensayah ruling, on June 30, a different Circuit Court panel dismissed the appeal of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti who lost his habeas petition last August, when, as I explained at the time:

[T]he government secured another shallow victory when Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied the habeas petition of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti prisoner, agreeing with the government that it was “more likely than not” that he “became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan.” Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was based on a dubious assemblage of information that relied more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of his activities than it did on anything resembling concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when she wrote that there were “significant reasons why the Government’s proffered evidence may not be accurate or authentic.”

Al-Odah has always claimed that he took a break from work and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and provide humanitarian aid (which he had done previously in other countries), and has also admitted that he established contact with the Taliban, as they were the government at the time, and spent one day at a Taliban-controlled training camp. He has also stated that, after the US-led invasion, he was sent by a Taliban representative to a safer location outside Kabul, and, from there, traveled to Jalalabad, where he stayed with another family, who gave him an AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself. He then joined other people crossing the mountains to Pakistan, where he handed himself in to the border guards, and was subsequently handed over — or sold — to US forces.

While Judge Kollar-Kotelly was undoubtedly justified in finding numerous holes in al-Odah’s account of his activities, including asking why he did not flee Afghanistan before traveling to Jalalabad, and why he allowed himself to travel with other armed men through the Tora Bora mountains, the result of her ruling, as I explained at the time, was that:

[N]early eight years after the 9/11 attacks, the United States is still asserting that it has the right to hold a young man who spent just one day at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was given, and no evidence that his training involved anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.

In al-Odah’s appeal, the Circuit Court panel, led by Chief Judge David B. Sentelle, dismissed challenges regarding the “preponderance of evidence” standard for detention, and the use of hearsay evidence, dismissing the first “under binding precedent in this circuit,” and the second because the Supreme Court in Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 case that approved the detention of prisoners under the AUMF] stated that “[h]earsay … may need to be accepted as the most reliable available evidence from the Government” in the prisoners’ habeas petitions, and because of the precedent established by the Circuit Court in the cases of Adham Ali Awad and Sufyian Barhoumi, discussed in the first part of this article.

When it came to examining the basis of the evidence against al-Odah, the court began by noting that he “has a heavy burden to meet to have this court reverse the district court’s factual findings that are the underpinnings of its determination,” and then, predictably, dismissed all of his challenges, leaving unanswered the question I asked last year — about whether it ought to be justifiable to hold indefinitely a young man who attended a training camp for one day, and does not appear to have ever raised arms against US forces.

The Circuit Court’s disdainful dismissal of Mohammed al-Adahi’s successful habeas petition

A final blow for the prisoners came on July 13, when the Circuit Court, for the first time, reversed a successful habeas petition (PDF). The prisoner in question is Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni who had accompanied his sister to Afghanistan to marry a man who was undoubtedly connected to al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, last August, Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that, despite this, al-Adahi himself had no connection to al-Qaeda, and granted his habeas petition.

There was abundant evidence to suggest that she was correct — primarily that he had never previously left Yemen, where he had a respectable job, that he was obliged to accompany his sister, who was not allowed to travel alone, and that he was kicked out of a training camp during his stay because he broke the rules by smoking — but when the government’s appeal came before a panel including Judge Randolph (notorious for endorsing every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court), the Court reversed Judge Kessler’s ruling, with Judge Randolph describing it as “manifestly incorrect — indeed startling.”

In what I can only characterize as a vile assault on Judge Kessler’s integrity, Judge Randolph, as Law.com explained, wrote that Kessler’s “consideration of each piece of evidence on its own merits, instead of as part of a whole, was a ‘fundamental mistake that infected the court’s entire analysis.’” He then chastised Kessler for having “failed to consider ‘conditional probability analysis’ in weighing the government’s evidence, which he explain[ed] as a theory that the occurrence of one event makes another event either more or less likely.”

Judge Randolph also stated that the District Court “erred in its treatment of the evidence” and “reached [its] conclusion through a series of legal errors,” adding, “When the evidence is properly considered, it becomes clear that Al-Adahi was — at the very least — more likely than not a part of al-Qaeda. And that is all the government had to show in order to satisfy the preponderance standard.”

One of al-Adahi’s lawyers, John A. Chandler, said he was “utterly stunned” by the ruling, telling the New York Times, “Mr. al-Adahi is not and has never been a member of al-Qaeda or a terrorist.” Law.com reported that his team would either ask for an en banc rehearing or petition the Supreme Court to hear the case, and stated that Chandler “criticized the appeals court for reassessing the evidence being used to hold al-Adahi instead of assessing the trial court’s ruling for errors of law.” As Chandler explained, “The appellate court pretty clearly wanted to find he was al-Qaeda and substituted their judgment on the facts for the judgment of the trial court, when the trial court is supposed to make decisions of fact.”

However, what was more worrying than Judge Randolph’s dismissal of Judge Kessler’s reasoning was his additional assault on the “preponderance of the evidence” standard established by Senior District Judge Thomas F. Hogan in the Case Management Order governing the habeas petitions in November 2008, which, of course, is already considerably lower than what is required in federal court trials.

After a hearing in February in al-Adahi’s case, Judge Randolph had ordered the government and al-Adahi’s lawyers to file new briefs “suggesting what factual proof — ‘if any’ — the government needed to support continued detention,” as SCOTUSblog explained, and had found that the results “were not exactly illuminating.” Fudging — as was to be expected from the analysis of backroom maneuvering described above — the government defended the “preponderance” standard as “appropriate,” but added that “a different and more deferential standard” might be appropriate in other, unexplained situations.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Judge Randolph stated in the ruling on al-Adahi that “we doubt” that the Constitution “requires the use of the preponderance standard.” He added that the District Court judges “had not said why they were using that approach, but that Judge Hogan had indicated it was based on the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision” in June 2008, which granted the prisoners habeas rights.

“But,” Judge Randolph wrote, “Boumediene held only that the ‘extent of the showing required of the Government in these cases is a matter to be determined,’” and then proposed that it “should equal the scope of habeas rights as they existed in 1789, when the Constitution was written” (as SCOTUSblog described it), and when, as Randolph obviously delighted in pointing out, there appeared to be “no precedent in which 18th Century English courts adopted a preponderance standard.”

To understand quite how depressing this proposal is, it should be noted that, the last time anyone argued in a court that “some evidence” should be sufficient to justify detentions in wartime — or, to be more accurate, in the “War on Terror” — was during the Bush administration, before the Supreme Court intervened to try to ensure that the men in Guantánamo were held for some reason other than the kind of inadequate evidence that Judge Randolph finds appropriate.

And yet, eight and a half years after Guantánamo opened, Judge Randolph has shifted the clock back to the intolerably poor detention standards of those years, which the District Court has been doing so much to challenge in the two years since Boumediene. The result, as SCOTUSblog explained, is that “even if the Justice Department did not now take the Circuit Court’s hint to propose a ‘some evidence’ standard for use in the remaining Guantánamo cases, the way the panel interpreted the preponderance standard would seem to ease the government’s burden of proof significantly.”

If al-Adahi’s case is anything to go by, that is nothing short of a disaster.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Wins and Losses, Part 2.”

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010).

With this in mind, it is distressing to note that, last month, in the case of Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian seized with Zubaydah, who lost his habeas corpus petition last September, the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. drew on discredited information about Zubaydah to overstate his importance, and to justify Barhoumi’s ongoing detention. The Circuit Court also drew on the diary of a previously unknown associate of Zubaydah’s to present another view of Zubaydah — as the leader of a militia allied with al-Qaeda — to justify Barhoumi’s detention, and, by extension, that of Zubaydah himself, even though there are doubts about the government’s interpretation of the diary, and the whereabouts of the diary’s author are unknown.

On June 22, when a panel of judges led by Judge David S. Tatel upheld Barhoumi’s detention, the ruling was superficially unsurprising. Barhoumi was not only seized in the house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, that led to the capture Abu Zubaydah, along with other alleged terror suspects, but he had also conceded, in publicly available documents from Guantánamo, that he had attended military training camps in Afghanistan.

This, on its own, may not have been sufficient for Barhoumi’s detention to be upheld, but last September, when his habeas petition was denied, Judge Rosemary Collyer provided another reason. Although she noted that Barhoumi “said that he is not now and has never been a member of al-Qaeda,” and added, “I have no reason not to believe that,” she nevertheless concluded that “he was with an associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners and therefore was properly detained.”

At the time, Judge Collyer’s unclassified opinion was not made publicly available (and has still not been made available), and the quotes above are from the court transcript that was eventually unearthed by researchers at ProPublica (PDF). It was not, therefore, until the Circuit Court upheld his detention last month (PDF) that the details of this “associated force” were revealed as a militia that was allegedly maintained by Abu Zubaydah, and it was also revealed that the Circuit Court was relying on a long-discredited opinion of Zubaydah as the leader of a training camp in Afghanistan and an associate of Osama bin Laden.

How the case against Abu Zubaydah collapsed

What is troubling about this is the fact that, since Zubaydah’s capture, when Donald Rumsfeld described it as “well established” that he was “a close associate” of Osama bin Laden, “and if not the number two, very close to the number two person in the organization”), the government has steadily backed away from these claims, as accounts have emerged that thoroughly discredit the allegations.

These include devastating statements by Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda. Coleman and his FBI colleagues had access to Zubaydah’s diaries, in which they found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said,” and Coleman’s conclusion, which he told his superiors, was, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

That was reported in 2006, and in December 2007, Coleman followed up, describing Zubaydah as a “safehouse keeper” who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and explaining how he and others at the FBI had concluded not only that he had severe mental problems — particularly because of a head injury that he had suffered in 1992 — but also that this explained why he was regarded with suspicion by the al-Qaeda leadership. “They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone,” Coleman said. “You think they’re going to tell him anything?”

This analysis was, essentially, reinforced last March by a Justice Department official who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post. As I reported at the time:

[Abu Zubaydah] “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda,” and was, instead, “a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists. A former Justice Department official, who knows his case, explained, “He was the above-ground support. He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that’s not someone who gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous.” What happened, it transpired, was that “because his name often turned up in intelligence traffic linked to al-Qaeda transactions,” some within the intelligence community presumed that he was a significant figure, whereas the truth was that, although committed to the idea of jihad, he did not share Osama bin Laden’s aims, and “regarded the United States as an enemy principally because of its support of Israel.” The officials explained that he “had strained and limited relations with bin Laden and only vague knowledge before the Sept. 11 attacks that something was brewing.”

The Circuit Court’s reliance on discredited intelligence

Alarmingly, despite these concessions on the government’s part, both the District Court and the Circuit Court drew on another source in Barhoumi’s habeas petition in an attempt to demonstrate that Zubaydah was “the person in charge” of the Khaldan training camp, and that he was “an associate of [Osama bin Laden]” who “coordinates and cooperates with [bin Laden] in the conduct of training and trainee movements between [redacted] camps and al-Qaeda camps.”

As the judges explained, the source of this information, which also fooled the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, who referred to “Abu Zubaydah’s Khaldan Camp” (PDF, p. 175), was Ahmed Ressam, the failed “Millennium Bomber” who is currently serving a 22-year sentence in the US. The problem with Ressam’s evidence is that, although he initially cooperated with the authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, and provided information about dozens of alleged terrorist suspects, including Zubaydah, he then stopped cooperating and withdrew his statements. As a result, numerous cases involving Ressam’s statements have collapsed — including that of Ahcene Zemiri (aka Hassan Zemiri), falsely fingered by Ressam as an associate in the bomb plot, who was freed from Guantánamo in January this year — and the portrayal of Zubaydah accepted by the judges is fundamentally at odds with the one now accepted by the Obama administration.

The government concedes that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda

As Jason Leopold explained in an article for Truthout in March this year, in a federal court filing the government officially endorsed the view put forward by the anonymous Justice Department official to the Washington Post in March 2009, “back[ing] away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, as well as even earlier claims from the Clinton administration that he was directly involved in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa,” and admitting for the first time that “Zubaydah did not have ‘any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,’ and was neither a ‘member’ of al-Qaeda nor ‘formally’ identified with the terrorist organization.”

The government also appeared to have accepted that that “the military camp he was alleged to be affiliated with, Khaldan, was closed by the Afghan Taliban after refusing to let it go under the formal control of bin Laden and al-Qaeda,” conceding, in its court filing, that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent” of al-Qaeda’s camps.

This corresponds with Zubaydah’s own revelation, during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007 (in a passage that was only unclassified in June 2009, in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU), that, after his extensive torture, his interrogators told him, “sorry we discover that you are not number three [in al-Qaeda], not a partner, even not a fighter.” It also confirms other accounts about Khaldan, which was actually run by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” who died in mysterious circumstances in a Libyan jail last year. Al-Libi, notoriously, was tortured in Egypt, on behalf of the CIA, until he produced a false confession about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and his death means that a key witness has been lost who might have been able to explain the strained relationship he had with bin Laden, and how Khaldan was closed in 2000 after he refused to allow it to come under bin Laden’s control.

Dubious allegations about Abu Zubaydah’s “militia”

While these revelations indicate that the Circuit Court is lamentably out-of-date in its consideration of Abu Zubaydah, it is also noticeable that the judges relied on another document, the diary of an alleged associate of Zubaydah, Abu Kamil al-Suri, to demonstrate that Zubaydah was in charge of a militia, which included Sufyian Barhoumi. Whether there is any truth in this is difficult to ascertain, as Abu Kamil al-Suri is not available to ask about his diary, His whereabouts are unknown, but he may have died in the raid that led to Zubaydah’s capture, or he may be one of a handful of men — and boys — seized with Zubaydah who were rendered to Syria, and have never been heard of since.

This is deeply troubling, of course, in the wider context of “disappearances” in the “War on Terror,” but its relevance to Sufyian Barhoumi’s case — and to that of Abu Zubaydah — is also significant. The diary purports to identify the movements of various men, including Barhoumi, to and from Tora Bora, where a showdown between al-Qaeda and the US took place in December 2001, and from Afghanistan to Pakistan, although it should be noted that, in Guantánamo, Barhoumi strenuously and repeatedly denied ever being in Tora Bora. Al-Suri’s diary also identifies 15 members of what is described as “Zubaydah’s militia,” although, in the translation of al-Suri’s own words, it is described, less spectacularly, as a “group,” and a fractious one, moreover, with al-Suri noting that several of the members were “trying to take over this group,” to “lead us to join Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”

The interpretation of the diary is clearly of importance not only to Sufyian Barhoumi, but also to Abu Zubaydah, as it seems to form part of the government’s revised claims about Zubaydah, mentioned in the court filing in March, in which the Justice Department maintained that Zubaydah should still be detained based on his “actions” as an “affiliate” of al-Qaeda, and alleged that he “supported enemy forces and participated in hostilities” and “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

His lawyers have countered this by stating that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has “evidence to support those assertions,” which contrasts starkly with the Circuit Court’s conclusions about both Sufyian Barhoumi and Abu Zubaydah. The scope of Zubaydah’s involvement with securing the escape of non-combatants from Afghanistan is unknown, because the government has not provided any information about this publicly, and Zubaydah’s lawyers are prevented from discussing almost anything about their client’s case because of sweeping classification rules relating to the “high-value detainees.”

However, it seems clear that one non-combatant whose escape from Afghanistan was facilitated by a network in which Zubaydah played a part is Ravil Mingazov, a Russian seized in a guest house in Faisalabad (with over a dozen other men, mostly students) on the night Zubaydah was seized. Mingazov recently won his habeas corpus petition, and he explained in Guantánamo that, after fleeing Afghanistan, where he had traveled in search of a new life free from religious persecution, he had spent three months at a religious center in Lahore run by the missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, until he and two other men accepted an offer of safe passage to a house in Faisalabad, where, they were told, it would be easier for them to leave the country.

This example of a civilian helped out of Afghanistan as part of some sort of loose transportation network, in which Zubaydah was involved, is starkly at odds with the Circuit Court’s assertion of Zubaydah’s role as the head of a militia, in which Barhoumi was implicated. In their ruling, the judges noted that Barhoumi does not “dispute that Zubaydah’s militia qualifies as an ‘associated force’ that engaged in hostilities against US or coalition forces. The only dispute, then, is whether Barhoumi was, as the district court found, ‘part of’ Zubaydah’s organization.”

Ulterior motives?

In light of the failed claims about Zubaydah’s status as a senior figure in al-Qaeda, and the government’s revised analysis of him as someone who “supported enemy forces and participated in hostilities” and “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces,” it is obviously alarming that the Circuit Court clung to a discredited view of Zubaydah’s role in upholding Sufyian Barhoumi’s detention, and it is, moreover, no less alarming that the allegation about Zubaydah’s purported “militia” was allowed to pass unchallenged.

In contrast to this claim, all the evidence suggests that, in its desperation to find charges that will stick to Zubaydah, the government has every incentive to dress up a fractious group of men, nominally led by Zubaydah, as an organized “militia,” and to ignore counter-claims that he was not involved in fighting US forces, but was involved in facilitating the escape from Afghanistan of a variety of individuals, including “women, children, and/or other non-combatants.”

In establishing this picture of Zubaydah as the leader of a militia — based on a translation of a diary by a man who appears to have vanished off the face of the earth — the government, with the support of the Circuit Court, appears determined to use it in a last-ditch attempt to cover up the much more distressing fact that the US government brutally tortured someone who was never part of al-Qaeda at all.

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

As published exclusively on Truthout. Cross-posted on Information Clearing House, Eurasia Review, Free Detainees, The World Can’t Wait, War Criminals Watch, Uruknet, Blog from Middle East and The 2012 Scenario.

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

I’ll discuss the stories of Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani and Abdul Aziz Naji in a separate article, but for now the focus must be on the legal maneuvering that led to the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, because, for the first time in Guantánamo’s history, a prisoner has been sent home against his will, even though Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers, told the Washington Post two weeks ago that he was “adamantly opposed to going back.” At the weekend, another of his lawyers, Ellen Lubell, told the Miami Herald that Naji “fears extremists will try to recruit him — associating him with Guantánamo — and will torture or kill him if he resists.” She added, “He has nothing against the Algerian government, but he fears that the government will be unable to protect him from Algerian extremists.” In a press release, the Center for Constitutional Rights explained that Naji “fled various forms of persecution in Algeria many years ago, including having been attacked by an extremist.” CCR also sounded a note of caution about how the Algerian government will receive Naji, stating, “we are deeply concerned that he will disappear into secret detention.”

These are valid concerns, as Algeria has a poor human rights record. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations (PDF, pp. 108-9) regularly express concerns about the use of torture in Algeria, and in its 2009 report on human rights in Algeria, the US State Department noted, “Local human rights lawyers maintained that torture continued to occur in detention facilities, most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In contrast, an Obama administration official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post two weeks ago, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.” This was a bold statement to make, in light of the allegations made by NGOs and the UN, and concerns about torture or other ill-treatment were not diminished by a response to the news of Naji’s repatriation in Monday’s Washington Post, in which it was noted that “The government said that Algeria has provided diplomatic assurances that Naji would not be mistreated, assurances that administration officials say are credible because 10 other detainees have been returned to Algeria without incident.”

The problems with this statement concern the “diplomatic assurances,” and the claim that 10 men have been repatriated “without incident.” On the “diplomatic assurances,” Human Rights Watch explained in a press release that its own research “has shown that diplomatic assurances provided by receiving countries, which are legally unenforceable, do not provide an effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment,” and, on the status of the 10 men returned, although there have been no allegations of torture, there has been very little information at all about the conditions in which they have been held, and what has emerged publicly is not reassuring, as it reveals both prolonged pre-trial detention, and calls for punitive sentences from the prosecutors. As I explained in January this year:

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

Alarmingly, despite Abdul Aziz Naji’s fear of being repatriated — and the fears of five other Algerians, as revealed by the Washington Post two weeks ago — his release was not only supported by the Obama administration, but also by the Supreme Court.

Judge Gladys Kessler takes on the D.C. Circuit Court – and the Supreme Court

The spur for a legal battle that has largely been taking place without the mainstream media paying much attention — and with an alarming reliance on secrecy — was a principled stand taken by Judge Gladys Kessler, of the District Court in Washington D.C., who, single-handedly, has been attempting to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

In November, Judge Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, a 49-year old Algerian, after concluding that the government’s supposed evidence relied almost entirely on unreliable confessions produced by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004.

Six months after Judge Kessler delivered her ruling, with bin Mohammed still not released, his lawyers asked her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there,” as SCOTUSblog described it. As a result of two depressing rulings in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. Circuit Court (the District Court), judges are not actually able to order the release of prisoners who have won their habeas petitions, and are not even supposed to interfere with the disposition of prisoners, whose fate, according to the Circuit Court, is entirely dependent on the whims of the Executive branch. Judge Kessler, however, was undeterred.

On June 3, she issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria, and on June 10 mounted a stout defense of his right not to be forcibly repatriated, noting (PDF):

Petitioner has voiced great fear about being transferred to Algeria. He has not lived in Algeria for more than 20 years, and has no ties to that country. Because he has been designated an “enemy combatant,” he greatly fears retribution by the Algerian authorities and that he will be formally charged under the Algerian Penal Code, tortured, convicted, and very possibly executed by the Algerian Government. He has claimed that he will be caught between the Algerian Government, which will brand him as an international terrorist, and armed domestic terrorists, who oppose the existing government, often pressure individuals to join their ranks, and retaliate violently when such individuals refuse. Petitioner has made clear that he would rather suffer continued confinement in Guantánamo Bay than be placed in the control of the Algerian Government.

In response to a brief filed by the government, Judge Kessler complained that two declarations submitted, which purported to guarantee bin Mohammed’s humane treatment if returned to Algeria, “appear to be boilerplate statements which have been filed in a number of the Government’s Oppositions to Motions,” and that a third, written by Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, “was submitted ex parte so that [bin Mohammed] has not had an opportunity to read it.” After noting that bin Mohammed’s fears “are of great concern,” and that it is “essential” that assurances received from the Algerian government, purporting to guarantee that bin Mohammed will receive “humane treatment,” are “tested,” Judge Kessler ordered Fried to appear in person in her court, explaining, “Given the centrality of those representations and assurances to the future of [bin Mohammed] and possibly to his very life, this Court has an obligation to ensure that there is real substance behind the conclusory phrases contained in Special Envoy Fried’s declarations.”

Fried never turned up, of course, because the Justice Department immediately filed an appeal with the Circuit Court, which then ordered Judge Kessler to “resolve all outstanding motions” in the case with reference to Munaf v. Geren and Kiyemba v. Obama (aka Kiyemba II), the cases that the Circuit Court had drawn on (Munaf) and issued (Kiyemba II) to demonstrate that only the Executive branch was entitled to make decisions about where to send Guantánamo prisoners. As SCOTUSblog noted, “While the order did not say that Kessler could not hold a hearing on Mohammed’s plea not to be sent to Algeria, it specified that the judge was to rule on that issue ‘without requiring testimony from Special Envoy Fried or any other United States government official,’” which, of course, “completely undercut the purpose that Kessler had” for calling the hearing in the first place.

The Circuit Court then issued an amended ruling, instructing Judge Kessler to decide the Mohammed plea “in an order from which a party can take an immediate appeal,” and as SCOTUSblog noted in response to this instruction:

The Circuit Court thus had taken over, in a significant way, the further proceedings in Kessler’s Court, and has sent her the strongest hint that she risked being overturned if she barred his transfer anew. Since it noted the binding nature of the precedents she was to observe, the Circuit Court clearly was signaling that, if it accepted the government’s view that Mohammed’s case was no different, Kessler would be found to be without authority to prevent his transfer to Algeria.

After this, the struggle between Judge Kessler and the Circuit Court was swamped in secrecy. At a hearing convened by Kessler on June 28, all the documentation was sealed, but SCOTUSblog was able to deduce, from a subsequent appeal filed by the government, that she had once more barred bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria. On July 8, however, in another secret hearing, the Circuit Court “summarily overturned” Judge Kessler’s ban, prompting SCOTUSblog to note that the court’s order “continues a seldom-interrupted string of rulings by the Circuit Court against detainees challenging their confinement or transfer,” which “contrasts with a majority of rulings by District Court judges upholding detainees’ challenges under federal habeas law.”

The final blow for bin Mohammed — and for those who, like Judge Kessler, had quaintly presumed that the “non-refoulement” requirement of the UN Convention Against Torture might actually mean something to the judiciary and the Executive branch — came last Friday, when, by 5 votes to 3, the Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.”

Although three of the justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — dissented, noting that they “would grant the stay to afford the Court time to consider, in the ordinary course, important questions raised in this case and not resolved in Munaf v. Geren,” just a few hours later the Supreme Court unanimously approved the forced repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji.

This was a bleak day for US justice, not only because it involved the Supreme Court blithely disregarding the UN Convention Against Torture’s “non-refoulement” obligation, joining in an unholy trinity with the D.C. Circuit Court and the Obama administration, but also because it brings to an abrupt, cruel, and — I believe — illegal conclusion a struggle to release prisoners without violating the UN Convention Against Torture, which, for the most part, was actually respected by the Bush administration.

The Bush administration’s record on not returning prisoners to torture

The long history of the authorities grappling with the “non-refoulement” obligation at Guantánamo began with the Uighurs, 22 Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who were mostly seized in Pakistan in December 2001 after crossing from Afghanistan, where they had been living in a run-down settlement in the Tora Bora mountains, thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or nursing futile hopes of rising up against their only enemy, the Chinese government.

With the Uighurs, the Bush administration recognized its “non-refoulement” obligation, refusing to return them to China, and finding new homes for five of the men in Albania in 2006. When the Obama administration inherited the problem of the remaining 17 men, who had, in the meantime, won their habeas corpus petitions, it found new homes for 12 of them in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, although five still remain at Guantánamo, and, last spring, the administration turned down a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to bring some of the men to live in the US, which would have done more in the long run to defuse scaremongering about Guantánamo than any other gesture.

Despite the Bush administration locating some principles when it came to the Uighurs, in other cases prisoners had to fight in the courts to prevent their forcible repatriation to countries where they faced the risk of torture. In 2007, a Libyan, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, sought the intervention of the courts to prevent his return to Libya, and after two Tunisians were repatriated in June 2007 — and were subsequently mistreated and given jail sentences (of three and seven years) after show trials — a judge intervened to prevent the repatriation of a third, Mohammed Abdul Rahman (also known as Lotfi bin Ali), and, by extension, other Tunisians in Guantánamo.

In other cases, like that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, lawyers successfully sought injunctions preventing their return, and by the time Obama came to power, it was generally understood that prisoners were not be involuntarily returned to China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Uzbekistan. As a result, in the last year, the Obama administration has resettled prisoners from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland. Algeria was more problematical, as was demonstrated by the cases of the men who had returned voluntarily, even though there was, to be honest, no guarantee that they would be treated humanely, and my constant analogy was that return to Algeria was like Russian Roulette.

How the Circuit Court defended expansive executive power

However, all this came to an end with the Circuit Court’s intervention in the Uighurs’ case — firstly, in February 2009 (in Kiyemba v. Obama, aka Kiyemba I), when a panel of judges ruled that the courts could not order the resettlement in the US of prisoners who had won their habeas petitions but could not be repatriated, because only the Executive branch could decide matters relating to immigration. As I explained in a review of the ruling:

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

The second blow came last September (in another Kiyemba v. Obama case, identified as Kiyemba II), after the Uighurs’ lawyers asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider its opinion en banc (in other words, with all the judges ruling, instead of just a panel of three), and also sought assurances that the courts would be able to act if the government proposed sending their clients to countries where they faced the risk of torture. However, as I explained at the time:

[N]ot only did the court refuse to reconsider its ruling, but the judges also refused the Uighurs’ request for the court’s assistance “to prevent their transfer to a country where they are likely to be subjected to further detention or to torture,”, drawing on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, although “The Court held the district court had jurisdiction over the petitions,” it also ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

It is this narrow reading of Munaf that has particularly enraged those opposed to the Circuit Court’s resolute endorsement of executive power — and which at least caused some consternation last Friday to Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Essentially, though, the Circuit Court’s ruling in Kiyemba II dictates what happens to prisoners like Abdul Aziz Naji — and, presumably, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed — when the administration tires of trying to find new homes for them, and decides to subject them involuntarily to the Russian Roulette repatriation package that Abdul Aziz Naji received this week.

Although government officials told the Washington Post on Monday that they “will nonetheless continue to examine each case individually before any repatriation,” noting that some officials “have expressed some concern about returning one of the Algerians [Ahmed Belbacha] who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia” last year, for what his lawyers think was the crime of speaking out about his fears of repatriation, there now appears to be no obstacle to prevent the Obama administration from sending the other four Algerians home whenever it feels like it.

To discover that such shameless disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture has come not only from the Supreme Court, but also from the man who promised to close Guantánamo (but then failed to do so), and who also promised to uphold the absolute ban on torture (while refusing to prosecute anyone who authorized its use in the previous eight years), is depressing news indeed.

Note: With these releases, 178 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was recently approved. 594 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

These results constitute a comprehensive dismissal of the Bush administration’s claims — still touted today by supporters of Guantánamo — that the prison held “the worst of the worst,” and are all the more remarkable because the threshold for success on the government’s part is so low, requiring Justice Department lawyers merely to establish, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the men in question were involved with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

Even with this success rate, problems remain, because the basis for detention for those prisoners who have lost their habeas petitions — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — fails to distinguish between a terrorist group (al-Qaeda) and the government of Afghanistan at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 (the Taliban).

This has led, in the cases of the majority of the 14 prisoners who have lost their petitions, to an unjust situation in which soldiers — who should have been held as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions — are, instead, being consigned, on an apparently legal basis, to ongoing detention at Guantánamo, a prison designed not for soldiers, but, as mentioned above, for “the worst of the worst” terrorists, involved in the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism.

In challenging their habeas rulings, the prisoners who have lost their petitions have, in general, found the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. to be so supportive of executive power that the judges have not only endorsed the denial of habeas, but have also gone further than the government in their interpretation of the scope of the detention powers in the AUMF.

A worrying start: No limit on the President’s war powers

The appeals process took a while to get underway, but, in the cases of the men who lost their petitions, the Circuit Court established a worrying position in January this year, ruling, in the case of Ghaleb al-Bihani, a Yemeni who lost his petition in January 2009, on the basis that he was a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, that it was “mistaken” for al-Bihani’s lawyers to argue that “the war powers granted by the AUMF and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war.”

In the majority opinion, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, supported by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh Brown, also described the international laws of war as not “a fixed code,” refused to “quibble over the intricate application of vague treaty provisions and amorphous customary principles,” and concluded that “their lack of controlling legal force and firm definition render their use both inapposite and inadvisable when courts seek to determine the limits of the President’s war powers.”

Lawyers for Ghaleb al-Bihani responded to the ruling by calling for en banc review of the appeal (meaning that a full panel of judges must consider it), and took some comfort from the statements of Senior Circuit Judge Stephen F. Williams, the third judge, who concurred with the overall judgment and with part of the majority opinion, but took exception to his colleagues’ conclusion about the scope of the President’s war powers, noting that it was “hard to square with the approach that the Supreme Court took in Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld, a 2004 Supreme Court case regarding Guantánamo that established the government’s right to hold men detained under the AUMF].” Judge Williams quoted Justice Souter, who stated explicitly, “[W]e understand Congress’ grant of authority for the use of ‘necessary and appropriate force’ to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles.”

Everyone in a position of authority appears to have ignored the significance of Justice Souter’s opinion about “the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict.” To my mind, this echoes the overlooked fact that soldiers should be held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, which authorize detention “for the duration of the relevant conflict,” and do not, therefore need replacing with the AUMF.

The government argues against the Circuit Court on Presidential power and the international laws of war

Reassuringly, however, the Circuit Court’s contentious argument about Presidential power and the international laws of war has not been ignored. No decision has yet been made about al-Bihani’s appeal for en banc review of the Circuit Court’s January ruling, but on May 13 the government submitted a brief (PDF), in which, although lawyers opposed en banc review and agreed with the Circuit Court on almost every point in its January opinion, they disagreed with the court’s opinion about Presidential power and the international laws of war.

As the lawyers explained in their brief:

Petitioner cites the panel majority’s statement that the “premise that the war powers granted by the [Authorization for Use of Military Force] and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war is mistaken.” The Government agrees that this broad statement does not properly reflect the state of the law. The Government interprets the detention authority permitted under the AUMF as informed by the laws of war.

The lawyers proceeded to explain that their interpretation was “consistent” with Hamdi, as cited above, “and with longstanding Supreme Court precedent that statutes should be construed as consistent with applicable international law.” The lawyers also pointed out that the government had accepted “its detention authority under the AUMF to be informed by the laws of war” in a court filing on March 13, 2009, in response to a request for clarification from Judge John D. Bates, which I discussed in an article entitled, “Guantánamo: The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants.”

In that filing, the government stated:

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaeda forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.

The key change implemented by the Obama administration was the requirement that “substantial support” rather than just “support” was necessary for detention, but as this also required judges to ascertain what constituted “substantial support,” there were further developments, in particular a ruling by Judge John D. Bates, in Hamlily v. Obama (PDF), in which he proposed that the “key inquiry” for determining whether an individual has become “part of” one or more of these organizations is “whether the individual functions or participates within or under the command structure of the organization — i.e., whether he receives and executes orders or directions.”

This was not the only definition proposed by individual judges, but it was used in a number of cases, and was unchallenged until, last month, largely unnoticed in the mainstream media, the Court of Appeals delivered four more rulings, and delivered a fifth on July 13. For the most part, the Circuit Court reinforced the District Court’s findings (largely because, in five of the six cases, they were challenges mounted by prisoners who had already lost their habeas petitions), although in one case the court overturned the lower court’s denial of habeas corpus, and in another reversed a prisoner’s successful petition. Behind these blunt figures, however, the court tore into Judge Bates’ definition of the requirements for detention, and, emboldened by this, delivered an even more critical opinion, further undermining the District Court’s authority, in the most recent case decided. Given the number of cases involved in this analysis, I will examine the first two of these rulings in this article, and I will examine the other three in an article next week.

The “gossamer thin” evidence against Adham Ali Awad is upheld

In the first of these appeals, decided on June 2, the Circuit Court upheld the ongoing detention of Adham Ali Awad (PDF), a Yemeni amputee who had been handed over to Afghan forces by al-Qaeda fighters besieged in a hospital in Afghanistan in December 2001. Last August, Judge James Robertson denied Ali Awad’s habeas petition, even though he conceded that the case against him was “gossamer thin,” and added, “The evidence is of a kind fit only for these unique proceedings and has very little weight.” He also described Ali Awad as a “marginally literate” young man, who “has spent more than seven of his twenty-six years — since he was a teenager — in American custody,” and stated, “It seems ludicrous to believe that he poses a security threat now,” adding, limply, “but that is not for me to decide.”

As I explained at the time, in the hands of another judge, the ruling may well have tipped the other way, as the case was not only “gossamer thin,” but also full of holes. As a result, the Court of Appeals could have given Ali Awad the benefit of the doubt, but this was always unlikely, as the Circuit Court is dominated by deeply Conservative judges. In Ali Awad’s appeal, two of the judges — Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Merrick B. Garland — had delivered a crucial ruling against the Bush administration in June 2008, in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, one of 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) who subsequently won their habeas petitions after the Circuit Court’s withering intervention, but this was something of an exception. Just two months ago, Judge Sentelle led the panel that denied habeas corpus rights to foreign prisoners seized in other countries and rendered to the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, reversing a ruling in favor of the prisoners, delivered by Judge Bates last March, and consigning the foreigners in Bagram to a legal black hole that resembles Guantánamo in its early days.

In Ali Awad’s appeal, the judges thoroughly endorsed the “gossamer thin” evidence against the Yemeni, and although they did not indulge in the kind of assault on the international laws of war favored by the judges in Ghaleb al-Bihani’s appeal, they did make a point of wading into the debate regarding the extent to which prisoners must be involved in al-Qaeda or the Taliban for their detention to be justified, by refuting Judge Bates’ assertion that evidence of involvement in the organizations’ “command structure” is required, and asserting that it need only be demonstrated that they were “part of” al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. As JURIST noted, in one of the few commentaries on the ruling, “This statement lowers the threshold for the amount of evidence needed for incarceration.”

The Circuit Court upholds the detention of Sufyian Barhoumi

On June 22, the Circuit Court upheld the detention of Sufyian Barhoumi (PDF), an Algerian who lost his habeas petition last September. Although the recently established precedent of being “part of” al-Qaeda surfaced in the Circuit Court’s ruling, it was debatable whether it was strictly necessary in Barhoumi’s case, because he had conceded, in publicly available documents from Guantánamo, that he had attended military training camps in Afghanistan. This, on its own, may not have been sufficient for his detention to be upheld, but the panel, led by Judge David S. Tatel (who had been on the panel that denied habeas rights to foreigners in Bagram) was also swayed by the fact that he was seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, that led to the capture of the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah, along with other alleged terror suspects.

Alarmingly, the judges were unconcerned by the copious amount of evidence that has emerged in recent years to demonstrate that Zubaydah — for whom the CIA’s torture program was first conceived — was not, as alleged, a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda involved in numerous international terrorist plots, but was, instead, the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp that had little connection to al-Qaeda at all. As a result, the Circuit Court’s ruling not only shows a fundamental disdain for any kind of historical accuracy, but also demonstrates a general unwillingness on the part of the Circuit Court to challenge or probe prosecutorial positions regarding the Guantánamo prisoners.

In next week’s article, I will begin by examining an exception to this rule, but that was very much a one-off, because the Circuit Court’s most recent rulings have demonstrated a further commitment to eroding the District Court’s independence — and, for the most part, its fairness and impartiality — with increasingly aggressive assertions that have less to do with due process than with a kind of overreaching, authoritarian, right-wing ideology.

With the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens from the Supreme Court, this is deeply troubling, as it means that, in all probability, the Supreme Court has lost its ability to challenge dubious decisions on Guantánamo, and the Circuit Court is left running the show. As a result, anyone concerned about justice for the Guantánamo prisoners, as the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, should be very worried indeed.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as, “Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Wins and Losses, Part 1.”

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010).

This is probably a wise move on Khadr’s part, although it does shut the door on the perhaps remote possibility that his defiance could have prompted the Obama administration to put pressure on the Canadian government to demand his repatriation before the trial begins. As I explained in an article on Friday, “Defiance in Isolation: The Last Stand of Omar Khadr,” the Canadian government has a wretched record regarding Omar Khadr, having ignored demands for his return that have been issued by the Federal Court, and having also ignored a strongly-worded condemnation of its actions that was issued by the Supreme Court.

However, the prospect of a one-sided trial, boycotted by Khadr, might have made the Obama administration — already unnerved by the implications of its own willingness to prosecute a former child soldier for war crimes — so uncomfortable that senior officials could have attempted to exert extra pressure on Stephen Harper’s government to request Khadr’s repatriation.

On the ground at Guantánamo, these deliberations have, in any case, been studiously avoided by Khadr’s military judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, who was extremely unwilling to allow Khadr to represent himself. In a pre-trial hearing last Monday, Khadr began by declaring that he intended to represent himself, after firing his lawyers, but then, after a recess, announced his intention to boycott the proceedings entirely, prompting Col. Parrish to declare that he would not let Khadr fire his military lawyer if he intended to boycott his trial. Col. Parrish then “directed Lt. Col. Jackson to consult his professional bodies, including the Arkansas bar, as to his obligations regarding Mr. Khadr’s defense,” as the Globe and Mail explained.

Over the weekend, Lt. Col. Jackson responded to the judge’s order by stating that he was “ethically required” to defend Khadr, adding, in a robust defense of Khadr’s rights that also included a ringing denunciation of the Commissions:

Therefore, I intend to provide him with a zealous defense at his trial in August. Omar Khadr continues to be the victim in this case. I never envisioned a scenario in my career as an Army lawyer that would require me to defend a child-soldier against war crimes charges levied by the United States. I always believed we were better than that.

Khadr’s decision to accept Lt. Col. Jackson as his military defense lawyer, which Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian civilian lawyers, confirmed today, means that “a defense motion will proceed on Aug. 9, over the question of whether prosecution evidence against Mr. Khadr was obtained through torture and coercion,” as the Globe and Mail explained. The defense motion follows up on hearings in May in which a psychiatrist and a psychologist, commissioned by Khadr’s defense team, stated that, in their assessment, Khadr was traumatized by his experiences in US custody, and a number of interrogators — some summoned by the prosecution — revealed the dubious circumstances in which Khadr was first interrogated in the US prison at Bagram airbase, immediately after being discharged from the hospital where his life-threatening wounds had been treated, and, in one session, revealed that Khadr had been threatened with gang rape in a US prison if he failed to cooperate.

As the Globe and Mail described it, “If Lt. Col. Jackson had decided differently and that suppression motion not gone forward, it could have ended one of Mr. Khadr’s best defenses.” This is undoubtedly true, although doubts remain about the gray areas in the Commission’s rules regarding self-representation, and what the rules are if a prisoner wishes to boycott the proceedings entirely.

One person who has practical experience of these issues is Air Force Lt. Col. David Frakt, who told the Globe and Mail that, over the weekend, Lt. Col. Jackson had “turned to [him] for advice on how to proceed in Mr. Khadr’s case.” Lt. Col. Frakt was the military lawyer for Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who produced a video for al-Qaeda, and for Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan teenager accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two US servicemen and an Afghan translator in a marketplace in Kabul in December 2002.

In Jawad’s case, Lt. Col. Frakt’s tenacious representation of his client was invaluable, leading to the collapse of the charges against him in his proposed trial by Military Commission, and, last July, a successful habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C. that led to his release. In al-Bahlul’s case, however, all the issues raised last week by Omar Khadr emerged in a riot of confusion that severely dented the Commission’s attempts at credibility.

Since first being charged in 2004 (in the first incarnation of the Commissions, ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006), al-Bahlul had expressed his desire to represent himself, and in 2005 this led to a crisis for his court-appointed military defense lawyer, Army Maj. Tom Fleener, who was obliged to represent him under the Commissions’ rules at the time. Speaking to GQ in 2007, Maj. Fleener explained, “The concept of compelled representation has always bothered the crap out of me. You just don’t force lawyers on people. You don’t represent someone against his will. It’s never, ever, ever done.”

When the Commissions were revived by Congress in the fall of 2006, prisoners were allowed to represent themselves, leading to some lively pre-trial hearings involving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks that further undermined the Commissions’ attempts at credibility.

However, as Sean Flynn explained in the GQ article, “there were reasons to be skeptical, to suspect that the provision wasn’t as clear as it seemed.” The Military Commissions Act stated, “The accused shall be permitted to represent himself, as provided for by paragraph (3), ” but paragraph (3) included “a list of caveats that allowed self-representation to be revoked if the defendant didn’t behave to the presiding officer’s liking.” As Flynn asked, “So what would happen if a man’s idea of representing himself was to boycott his trial? Would a lawyer be forced on him then? That wasn’t clear at all.”

In al-Bahlul’s case, the judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, responded to these problems by ruling that al-Bahlul could not represent himself, and this was how I described what happened next as his trial began on October 27, 2008:

As the court convened today, [al-Bahlul] sat in silence as his appointed military defense lawyer, Maj. David Frakt, announced that al-Bahlul was boycotting the trial, and that he had two specific reasons: firstly, because the judge had repeatedly denied his requests to represent himself, and secondly because he did not wish to be represented by a military lawyer.

Noting that he was obliged to respect his client’s wishes, Maj. Frakt then asked to be relieved, and when the judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, refused, he declared that he too was unable to participate. “I will be joining Mr. al-Bahlul’s boycott of the proceedings,” he said, “standing mute at the table.” He then refused to answer any further questions from Col. Gregory.

In response, Col. Gregory attempted to argue that Maj. Frakt was “obliged to participate,” as the Associated Press described it, and insisted, “The commission will not proceed with an empty defense table.” However, he then appeared to concede that it was not in his power to force Maj. Frakt to represent al-Bahlul, and determined to proceed with a trial based solely on evidence provided by the prosecution.

The result, as I explained in a follow-up article, was that al-Bahlul received a life sentence after a one-sided trial in which neither he, nor Maj. Frakt, uttered a word in his defense, which, of course, only succeeded in bringing the words “show trial” to mind.

Bringing the story up to date with reference to Omar Khadr’s case, Lt. Col. Frakt explained to the Globe and Mail that the problems he encountered in the fall of 2008 had still not been adequately addressed, and that “Lt. Col. Jackson’s conclusion didn’t come from a bar association or military directive” (Jackson himself “would not elaborate on whether the ethics opinion came from his Army judge advocate corps or his Arkansas Bar,” as the Miami Herald reported). Lt. Col. Frakt added that the lawyers in the Commissions are left “to sort of fend for themselves on these things,” and that their responses only arise after “lengthy discussion[s].”

“In these situations there’s two concerns a lawyer has,” Lt. Col. Frakt continued. “One is, ‘How do I represent the client and carry out the client’s wishes?’ And, two, ‘How do I not lose my license to practice law?’ … There’s an added layer of complexity in these cases because the court is ordering Jackson to represent [Mr. Khadr], but what does that really mean?”

Nevertheless, in Khadr’s case, as Lt. Col. Frakt also explained, the most crucial element is that he “needs an active defense.” He added that refusing to provide a defense or insisting on representing himself would have been “basically a recipe for getting convicted on all counts and getting a very lengthy sentence. Al-Bahlul was willing to sacrifice himself for what he saw as a greater cause, [but] Khadr, from my understanding he’s not a jihadist, he’s not a martyr. He’s just a scared, angry kid that wants to go home.”

Under the rules of the new Military Commissions Act (PDF, pp. 9-10), introduced by President Obama, who bears the ultimate responsibility for reviving Khadr’s prosecution by Military Commission, rather than in a federal court, the accused still has the right to self-representation, if he “knowingly and competently waives the assistance of counsel, subject to the provisions of paragraph (4)” (which replaces the earlier paragraph (3) mentioned above). This stipulates, as before, that the right to self-representation is dependent upon “deportment” and “conduct” that conforms “to the rules of evidence, procedure, and decorum applicable to trials by military commission.”

For now, at least, Omar Khadr has stepped back from testing the rules on self-determination, and is undoubtedly in a far better position to actually defend himself as a result of Lt. Col. Jackson’s assistance. As Lt. Col. Frakt explained in an article in May, this ought to mean that the government is required to explain how, under the Commissions’ absurd rules, he can be “charged with murder in violation of the law of war,” even though “there is no evidence that he violated the law of war” in allegedly throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer.

If all goes to plan, Lt. Col. Jackson will be able to expose this absurdity, as well as other glaring holes in the government’s case, in Khadr’s favor (including airing the long-established claim that he never even threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer), leaving the unresolved issues about self-representation — and the headache that will undoubtedly represent for the government — for some other prisoner to raise instead.

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

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

Cross-posted on Cageprisoners, The Public Record and Uruknet.

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

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009), 9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President! (November 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), Rep. Jerrold Nadler and David Frakt on Obama’s Three-Tier Justice System For Guantánamo (November 2009), Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship (November 2009), Chaos and Confusion: The Return of the Military Commissions (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010), Lawyers Appeal Guantánamo Trial Convictions (February 2010), When Rhetoric Trumps Good Sense: The GOP’s Counter-Productive Call for Military Commissions (March 2010), David Frakt’s Damning Verdict on the New Military Commissions Manual (May 2010), Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy (May 2010), The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantánamo (May 2010), Bin Laden Cook Accepts Plea Deal at Guantánamo Trial (July 2010).

Odaini’s case had become an embarrassment for the administration, which had been obliged to concede that it had no basis on which to appeal the judge’s decision. As an official explained to the Washington Post on June 19, it would be “unconscionable” to appeal Odaini’s case. “This is a bad case to argue,” the official stated. “There is nothing there. The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid. The judge wants a progress report by June 25th. We have to be able to report something other than we are thinking about it.”

Alarmingly, one of the administration officials who spoke to the Washington Post also stated that the administration was prepared to release him because senior officials were “comfortable” with making an exception for him “because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen,” thereby admitting that the perception of a prisoner’s family background is now more important than whether he is innocent or not.

In order to release Odaini, the administration had to break a moratorium on repatriating any Yemeni prisoners, which was introduced by President Obama in January, in response to a wave of hysteria following the revelation that the would-be Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, had been recruited in Yemen.

Implicit in the moratorium was the unacceptable notion that all Yemenis were potential terrorists, but the President chose to ignore this so as not to make his life uncomfortable, and, in doing so, also ignored the fact that some Yemenis were going to win their habeas petitions while the moratorium was in place. If he had any doubt about this, he need only have consulted the final report of his own Guantánamo Review Task Force, which had concluded that, of the 97 Yemenis still held, 59 should be released.

Obama’s indifference paved the way for the devastating ruling on May 26, when Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. revealed not only that Odaini had been cleared for release by the Bush administration, and by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also that, since his arrival in Guantánamo in June 2002, interrogators and the prison authorities had repeatedly approved his release. This was so intolerable that Judge Kennedy forcefully ordered Odaini’s release and concluded his ruling by stating:

Respondents have kept a young man from Yemen in detention in Cuba from age eighteen to age twenty-six. They have prevented him from seeing his family and denied him the opportunity to complete his studies and embark on a career. The evidence before the Court shows that holding Odaini in custody at such great cost to him has done nothing to make the United States more secure. There is no evidence that Odaini has any connection to al-Qaeda. Consequently, his detention is not authorized by the AUMF [the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, and used to justify the detentions at Guantánamo]. The Court therefore emphatically concludes that Odaini’s motion must be granted.

What makes this story all the more depressing, as Charlie Savage explained in the New York Times last week, is that the administration already knew that it would lose the case. As Savage wrote, “The suspension on transfers meant that habeas corpus lawsuits that had been frozen since the detainees were due to be released anyway started to move forward, putting the Justice Department in the position of fighting to keep the detainees imprisoned.” As I added in an article yesterday, “In other words, the Justice Department is arguing in court that the administration should be allowed to continue holding men that it has already conceded it has no reason to hold.”

Another depressing realization is that Odaini was not released until now not just because of inertia on the part of the administration, but because, as law professor (and former Guantánamo military defense attorney) Lt. Col. David Frakt has explained, for 15 days before his release, Odaini was held “in the status of ‘Congressional prisoner,’ a status for which there is no Constitutional authority,” while the administration fretted about whether it could break its appalling moratorium on just this one occasion.

Lt. Col. Frakt was referring to a law, passed last summer, which requires the administration to give Congress 15 days’ notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo, and his full explanation of why this is unconstitutional, which he illustrated with reference to his own client, Mohammed Jawad, who was held for 22 days before being released last summer, after winning his habeas petition, is revealing:

I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad’s case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of “Congressional prisoner,” a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.

He added:

[F]or those detainees determined to be unlawfully held, this law simply arbitrarily extends their unlawful stay at Guantánamo. This provision, coupled with the refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States — even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum — shows the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.

For Mohammed Hassan Odaini, his vulnerability to the whims of an unprincipled administration and a constitutionally depraved Congress is now over, but others are not so fortunate. In May, Congress proposed to extend the period in which it can hold men as “Congressional prisoners” from 15 to 30 days, and the administration has been true to its word regarding the moratorium. When administration officials spoke to the Washington Post three weeks ago, one of them stressed that it was just a one-off exception, and that the moratorium was still in place. “What isn’t being considered is lifting, in a blanket fashion, the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen,” he said.

This is in spite of the fact that, as the officials also explained, President Obama “may come under further pressure to quickly release Yemenis besides Odaini,” because “[a]s many as 20 more Yemenis could be ordered released by the courts for lack of evidence to justify their continued detention.” The official added, “There is a group of Yemenis who are going to win their habeas cases. Some of them will not be as clear as this case, but some will be, and that poses a real dilemma.”

One of those men may be Hussein Almerfedi, who won his habeas petition last week, and others will doubtless follow, given that the Justice Department is now pursuing cases that it knows it will lose. However, in releasing Odaini — and Odaini alone — the administration has just demonstrated that it will put off thinking about this dilemma until, as with Mohammed Hassan Odaini, it has no choice.

Note: With this release, 180 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was approved yesterday. 592 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners (my first article on the brand-new website — check it out!). Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, Uruknet, Rebel News and Blog from Middle East.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 59 prisoners released from February 2009 to May 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain.

Judge Friedman’s unclassified opinion has not yet been released, so it is not, at present, possible to know why he granted Hussein Almerfedi’s habeas petition, but clues can be found in publicly available documents released by the Pentagon, which I drew on for my explanation of his story in my book The Guantánamo Files.

Extraordinarily, Almerfedi was one of ten prisoners transferred to Afghan custody by the Iranian government in early 2002, and then handed on to US forces, in circumstances that have never been explained. One of the ten, an Afghan taxi driver named Aminullah Tukhi, who was released from Guantánamo in December 2007, said that the Iranians had delivered six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik to the Afghans.

Although six of these men ended up in Guantánamo, it is not known what happened to the other four — one of the Arabs, one of the Afghans, and the Uzbek and the Tajik.

However, it would be surprising if their stories ended well, because Aminullah Tukhi, Hussein Almerfedi and the four other men were all held in secret prisons run by the CIA before being sent to Guantánamo, even though most, if not all of them appear to have been nothing more than random foreigners seized opportunistically.

Hussein Almerfedi’s story

In Guantánamo, Almerfedi stated that he had been a student in Yemen, and had traveled to Pakistan in the hope of using members of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, an enormous missionary organization with headquarters in Pakistan, to help him emigrate to Europe. As the New York Times explained on Thursday, he said “he left Yemen because life was intolerable there and that he wanted to go to Europe and seek asylum in a more open, Western society.”

When he found that the Tablighi organization was unable to help him, he “paid a smuggler to take him through Iran and into Turkey and then Greece,” but was seized in Tehran. He added that “he had never been in Afghanistan until the Iranians handed him over to the United States military.” This was disputed by the US authorities, but in an unconvincing manner that was undoubtedly dismissed by Judge Friedman. Unidentified sources — often revealed in previous cases to have been other prisoners subjected to torture or other forms of coercion — alleged that Almerfedi “was seen” at al-Qaeda guesthouses in Afghanistan and described him as “an old junior al-Qaeda member,” and, in desperation, the authorities resorted to declaring, as they have in numerous Guantánamo cases, that although Jamaat-al-Tablighi, which has millions of members, is a “legitimate” organization, it was also used “as cover to mask travel and activities of terrorists including members of al-Qaeda.” This allegation is so vague and sweeping that the authorities might as well have substituted the word “Islam” for “Jamaat-al-Tablighi,” and thereby have attempted to justify imprisoning any Muslim who came into US custody.

Torture in secret CIA prisons

In Guantánamo, Hussein Almerfedi also explained that he was held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan — “two under Afghan control and one under US control,” although he added that they all “seemed to be under US supervision.” One of these prisons was Bagram, and another was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. Almerfedi stated that he was only interrogated on three occasions in Afghanistan, and that on each occasion he was told that the authorities knew he was innocent and would soon be released.

Almerfedi’s claims that he was not tortured tend to reinforce the suggestion that he was a nobody seized so that he could be sold to US forces — or used as a pawn in some sort of diplomatic deal — as most of the other men seized with him who ended up in Guantánamo have stated that they were tortured extensively in CIA custody, as described in a recent UN report on secret detention:

Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian released in April 2004, was seized with his wife and child while returning from a religious visit to Pakistan. In 2006, he told Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, that the CIA “put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days, in a cell that “was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days,” and was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially.

Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni transferred to Yemeni custody in April 2004, was held in the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. He told UN representatives that US officials “cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to al-Qaeda, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two meters by three meters with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell.”

Rafiq al-Hami, a Tunisian released in Slovakia in January this year, explained in Guantánamo that he was held in secret prisons for “about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another. I was tortured for about three months in a prison called the Prison of Darkness or the Dark Prison.” He added, “Back in Afghanistan I would be tortured. 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. I was not allowed to fast during Ramadan. These things are documented. You have them.”

No release from Guantánamo

Despite Hussein Almerfedi’s victory in court, which means that the Guantánamo prisoners have now won 73 percent of the cases decided, this success rate will mean little to him, as ten other prisoners who have won their habeas petitions are still held.

Moreover, as a Yemeni, Almerfedi is in an extraordinary, and, frankly, unjustifiable position, apparently doomed to be held for an unknown amount of time (even if the government does not appeal the ruling) because of a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo that was issued by President Obama in January.

In a craven display of capitulation to political bullying, the President allowed critics to assert that, because the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, it was acceptable not to release any Yemenis from Guantánamo — even if they had been cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration, by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and by a US court, because no Yemeni could be trusted, and they were all potential terrorists.

The President did not use these words of course, but the subtext of his decision was unmistakable to anyone prepared to look beyond the bullish rhetoric at the time about Yemen as a failed state, which might need a good dose of US military aggression to sort it out.

When President Obama issued his moratorium, two Yemenis who had won their habeas petitions were still held, although one of these cases — that of Mohammed al-Adahi — had been appealed by the government (and was won today), and since the moratorium three more Yemenis (including Hussein Almerfedi) have won their petitions, putting the administration in a quandary of its own making.

Two weeks ago, government spokesmen told the Washington Post that, in the case of one of these men — Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002, who was just a guest of other students on that particular night — the administration was prepared to lift the moratorium. One of the spokesmen stated that this was because senior officials were “comfortable” with making an exception for Odaini “because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen,” thereby admitting that the perception of a prisoner’s family background is now more important than whether he is innocent or not. However, it was also because he was so clearly an innocent man seized by mistake and held for eight years that, for a change, it was embarrassing having to try to justify his detention. “This is a bad case to argue,” one of the officials explained. “There is nothing there. The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid.”

Even so, Odaini was not released until today, even though it beggared belief that the US military could not spare one plane to accomplish the task of returning him immediately to his family. Moreover, the administration must now grapple with further problems relating to its moratorium, as highlighted by Judge Friedman in the case of Hussein Almerfedi.

Defending the detention of prisoners already cleared for release

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage explained that the administration was now in a truly ridiculous place because “[t]he suspension on transfers meant that habeas corpus lawsuits that had been frozen since the detainees were due to be released anyway started to move forward, putting the Justice Department in the position of fighting to keep the detainees imprisoned.” In other words, the Justice Department is arguing in court that the administration should be allowed to continue holding men that it has already conceded it has no reason to hold.

The scale of this problem is extraordinary. In its review of the prisoners’ cases last year, Obama’s Task Force approved 66 of the remaining 97 Yemenis for release, although 30 were put in a novel category — “conditional” detention — pending an improvement in the security situation in Yemen. Seven of the remaining 36 were freed last year, leaving 29 who may well have been freed had it not been for the moratorium.

Three weeks ago, the officials who spoke to the Washington Post acknowledged that these men presented a problem for the administration. One of the spokesmen stated that President Obama “may come under further pressure to quickly release Yemenis besides Odaini,” because “As many as 20 more Yemenis could be ordered released by the courts for lack of evidence to justify their continued detention.” The official added, “There is a group of Yemenis who are going to win their habeas cases. Some of them will not be as clear as this case, but some will be, and that poses a real dilemma.”

According to Charlie Savage, the truth may be even bleaker for the administration. Savage noted that all 59 of the men cleared for release by the Task Force “present weak cases for continued detention,” and secured advice from Robert Chesney, a national security law expert at the University of Texas, who explained that the moratorium had created “a difficult policy dilemma”:

If the administration lifts the moratorium to avoid losing those cases, it could be attacked by conservatives for sending detainees to Yemen whom it had not been ordered to release. But if it keeps the moratorium, it could face a string of defeats that will undercut its effort to keep holding other detainees.

Chesney added:

The coverage of the Odaini case made them look ridiculous. Imagine them experiencing some 50-plus individual defeats. By the time they are done, the narrative of the innocent detainee being blindly or stupidly detained by the administration would be so entrenched that there would be real strategic harm to the administration’s case that there are people they actually need to and can justify keeping in military detention.

Ridiculous, blind, stupid: These are hard words to have directed at you if you’re an administration struggling to clean up a mess inherited from the previous President, but when courage and principles are lacking — and at stake is the freedom of men unjustly deprived of their liberty for up to eight and a half years — the words are entirely appropriate.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation (as “Freeing the Innocent from Guantánamo”). Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, Campaign for Liberty, Uruknet, New Left Project, Rebel News and GCN.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (February 2010), The Black Hole of Bagram (May 2010), What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials (June 2010).

I’ve cross-posted below a report on that meeting, plus a copy of the letter submitted by Witness Against Torture, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Defending Dissent Foundation, No More Guantanámos, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International and Voices for Creative Non-Violence, which provides an excellent round-up of the problems with the Obama administration’s failure to thoroughly repudiate its predecessor’s “War on Terror” policies, and to hold accountable those who committed crimes in the name of national security.

Activists meet with Justice Department official

On Tuesday, June 15th — a day after the acquittal of Witness Against Torture members in D.C. Superior Court of charges stemming from a January protest — a coalition of groups and individuals met with Portia Roberson, the head of the Office of Public Liaison at the Department of Justice. Our goal was to express our frustration with detention policies under the Obama administration and articulate steps we’d like to see the Justice Department take. The letter we submitted to DoJ, which outlines those steps, is attached [I’ve posted it below].

The meeting included Richard  Sroczynski, Matt Daloisio, Helen Schietinger, and Jeremy Varon from WAT; Sue Udry from Defending Dissent; Leili Kashani (Education and Outreach Director) and Bill Quigley (Legal Director) from the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Orlando Tizon from the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International. We were honored to have, as late additions to the meeting, Syed Anwar Hashmi and Jeanne Theoharis. Syed is the father of Fahad Hashmi, a student from Queens, NY, who spent over 3 years in severe pre-trial solitary confinement at the MCC prison in New York City. He was accused of housing a suitcase with waterproof socks and rain ponchos that were delivered to a terrorist organization in Pakistan. Fahad continues to be subject to draconian “special administrative measures” (SAMs) that create conditions of detention amounting to torture [Note: Fahad Hashmi received a 15-year sentence for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization on June 10]. Jeanne Theoharis, Fahad’s academic advisor at Brooklyn College, has done extensive work to publicize Fahad’s plight, rally support on his behalf, and expose the unjustifiable brutality of SAMs.

The meeting was both interesting and constructive. Ms. Roberson conveyed repeatedly that she appreciates our disappointment and anger even, and was very intent on learning more about our point of view. She was particularly impressed that we are not, for the most part, professional human rights advocates but instead “everyday people.” Her message was that she’d love to advocate, internal to DoJ, on our behalf. She would therefore like from us documentation supporting our position and demands. She also expressed a strong willingness to have a follow-up meeting.

We were both gracious toward Ms. Roberson and honest about our upset. We certainly appreciate the openness to dialogue. We will provide the materials she requested, and pursue additional meetings with her and others in DoJ. That said, actions speak far more loudly than words, and we insist on real changes in policy, not simply expressions of sympathy. We made all this clear, representing our position with both force and dignity.

The most moving portions of the meeting were hearing from Orlando, as a torture survivor, about the need for accountability, and from Mr. Hashmi about the nightmare his son and the entire family have endured. Ms. Roberson appeared personally touched by this.

The consensus in the group was that we should pursue things with DoJ as far as they will take us. Whatever her sympathies, Ms. Roberson does not set policy.  Others in the Justice Department have staked out deeply disturbing positions on various matters — from indefinite detention to the use of Military Commissions — knowing full well the objections of our community. It will be interesting to see if we will be granted a hearing with those at DoJ responsible for policy, and if any aspect of our demands will be met.

Many thanks, everyone.

Jeremy Varon, Witness Against Torture

Witness Against Torture’s Letter to the Department of Justice

Ms. Portia Roberson
Director of the Office of Public Liaison
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001
June 10, 2010

Dear Director Roberson,

We appreciate the discussions with your office over the last months, as well as your agreeing to meet with us on June 15. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department has appeared more open to dialogue than previously, and we value this change. In advance of the meeting, we would like to outline our concerns and the steps we urge the Department of Justice to take.

Who we are:

We represent some among the countless Americans sick at heart at U.S detention policies who are determined to see them change. We have worked at the grassroots level for the closure of the detention camp at Guantánamo, the release and resettlement of men detained in error, an end to U.S. torture, and accountability for those who designed and carried out torture policies. We have assiduously followed intricate policy and legal debates. We have learned the stories of men detained so as to plead their cases publicly. We have advocated for justice in the face of official hostility and public fear. And we have supported those in government who have sought to end extra-legal detention, immunity for state crimes, and the cruel and degrading treatment of others. Our guiding belief is that lawful and moral detention policies are essential both to U.S. security and to being a good and just society, worthy of its ideals.

Our Concerns:

Encouraged by his campaign, we shared the hope that the election of Barack Obama would mean restored respect for the rule of law and human rights. So also we envisioned a Justice Department no longer captive to the partisan agenda of the Executive. We were therefore heartened when, on day one of his administration, President Obama signed executive orders mandating the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo in a year and banning the torture practices labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These measures, along with a rhetoric promising transparency and accountability, augured well for a decisive break with Bush-era policies.

Yet, in the last eighteen months, our hope for change has been almost entirely drained. The achievement of what should be modest goals, such as the closure of Guantánamo, now lies in grave doubt. The Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department have sustained many of the most objectionable of the Bush policies. The administration has consistently acted to accommodate the fear mongering and belligerence of the rightwing, rather than to fulfill its mandate to restore fairness and justice. Our country now stands at a crossroads. Its current path risks entrenching policies inimical to the Constitution and American values. We are reaching out to you in hope that it is not too late to turn in the direction President Obama first promised.

Below we outline areas of our greatest concern, highlighting how the Obama
administration and DoJ have worked against their stated intentions and proper charge.

Guantánamo

The detention facility remains open long after the deadline for its closure. Men cleared for release continue to languish there, as do some who have had federal judges rule that there are no valid grounds for their detention. This is unacceptable. If Guantánamo was, on day one, a foreign policy liability and a stain on the rule of law, it remains so eighteen months later.

We appreciate the difficulties in closing the camp. The Republican leadership and rightwing media consistently distort key facts and stoke public fear, making rational discussion about the camp’s fate difficult. Still, this is no excuse for the failure to close it. As habeas petitioners continue to win their hearings, as a fuller picture of the detention of innocent men emerges, and as evidence of the role of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other ills in radicalizing America’s enemies mount, the rationale for closing the prison only grows stronger.

Moreover, the Obama administration and the Department themselves have had a hand in the current morass. We make note here of the Department’s tragic decision to challenge [Judge] Ricardo Urbina’s ruling in October 2008 that 17 Uighurs at Guantánamo be released immediately into the United States. Had the DoJ let that ruling stand, allowing the Uighurs to peacefully settle here, foreign governments may have been more willing to take in men from Guantánamo. Further, their resettlement would have pre-empted the baseless argument sweeping through Congress that bringing men from Guantánamo into the United States in all cases represents an intolerable security threat.

In addition, the administration continues to erect obstacles to forestall the repatriation even of men allied to governments who have done everything the United States has asked to guarantee that they pose no security risk. Documenting such delays with respect to his Kuwaiti client [Fayiz al-Kandari], Lt. Col. Barry Wingard recently concluded that “the US’s ever-increasing demands have now entered the realm of the absurd.”

We should add that the DoJ’s invocation of qualified immunity, political question doctrines and state secrets privilege to block lawsuits concerning extraordinary rendition and torture (as in Arar v. Ashcroft, et. al.) has not only denied the plaintiffs a chance at restitution, but prevented an accounting of how some of those detained — far from “evildoers” — are themselves victims of American incompetence and cruelty.

Finally, the administration has never publicly refuted the Pentagon’s grossly exaggerated tally of detainees “returning to the battlefield” upon release from Guantánamo. As Professor Mark Denbeaux has shown [PDF], the Pentagon’s numbers are based in flawed methods, such as counting speech acts critical of US policy as evidence of “recidivism.” Quoting these baseless numbers, pundits and politicians perpetuate the myth of a “revolving door” from Guantánamo to terrorism. In general, the Obama administration has let stand the big lie regarding Guantánamo: that it always housed, and continues to house, the “worst of the worst.” With the entire prison population stigmatized this way, the principled resolution of the fate of the men imprisoned there remains remote.

Bagram and Habeas Corpus

The problem with Guantánamo is not the physical existence of the prison, but the effort to contrive areas outside the boundaries of U.S. and international law. To maintain “legal black holes” elsewhere perpetuates the Guantánamo problem. The prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is one example. We have learned, by virtue of a FOIA request, the names of men detained at Bagram. However we do not know their nationalities, the circumstances of their capture, or what evidence, if any, warrants their detention (leaked [Maj. Gen. Doug] Stone report indicates 400 of 600 should never have been detained and should be immediately released). Nor do Bagram prisoners have proper legal counsel. It may be that many of those prisoners, like those at Guantánamo, were detained on flimsy bases. But without more information about them, as well as a system for assessing the validity of their detention, we will never know. Further, Bagram has been the subject of allegations of gross physical abuse — including the fatal beating of captives — beyond what is alleged to have taken place at Guantánamo.

The recent ruling holding that men captured away from the Afghan battlefield but brought to Bagram have no habeas rights is distressing; we are appalled that the Department of Justice would even contest the lower court judgment. The new ruling substantially undoes the victory for the rule of law that the 2008 Boumediene decision represents, reviving Bush-era conceits of executive power. We understand that prisoners captured in war have not historically enjoyed habeas rights. But all such prisoners are entitled, according to the Geneva Conventions, to an expeditious and competent hearing to determine the validity of their detention. This is a right that the Bush administration systematically denied. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals fell far below minimum standards of due process, and were rightly rejected by the Supreme Court in favor of habeas hearings. The spirit of Boumediene is the proposition that “war on terror” suspects should have a legitimate chance to argue the wrongfulness of their detention, and that this opportunity should exist for all suspects, regardless of where they are imprisoned. Given the frequent imprisonment of innocent men, nothing inspires confidence that one could dispense with the habeas process.

The Obama administration has taken the dangerous position that foreign nationals can be captured nearly anywhere in the world, brought into an active war zone, and denied the ability to plead their innocence. This position validates the reckless view that the United States is less safe if it takes prudent steps to ensure that it does not detain innocent men.

Indefinite Detention

As outlined in President Obama’s May 2009 address, the administration plans to detain some Guantánamo prisoners indefinitely, without charge or trial. This measure would apply to those against whom insufficient evidence exists for prosecution or from whom “evidence” was extracted through torture. The administration thus proposes a system of the preemptive incarceration based on the alleged probability of future crime, and not verifiable past conduct. This is as a frightful plan, which grants the U.S. executive near-tyrannical powers. Such a scheme must be rejected out of hand given its blatant inconsistency with the constitutional requirement of due process.

Accountability

Despite its promise of a new era of accountability and respect for the rule of law, the Obama administration has repeatedly acted to ensure immunity for nearly all those under the Bush administration who committed and authorized torture. In simplest terms, the administration has failed to enforce the law.

The President has declared that waterboarding is torture, and has suggested that other “enhanced interrogation” techniques are as well. We are bound by the Convention Against Torture to investigate and prosecute those who ordered or committed such acts. The DoJ, however, has declined any comprehensive criminal inquiry, limiting its investigation to those who allegedly committed acts beyond what “enhanced interrogation” protocols authorized. In this decision, it has endorsed the Bush administration claim that the law is whatever the administration says it is.

Even if one accepts the limited culpability of those who acted in accordance with what they thought was lawful, one might expect meaningful sanction for those who distorted the law. We therefore applauded the judgment of the Office of Professional Responsibility that John Yoo and Jay Bybee not only adopted tenuous legal opinions but also engaged in lawyering that fell well outside established professional norms. Its findings were to trigger potentially severe professional sanctions. Yet DoJ’s David Margolis, on spurious grounds, over-rode OPRs findings, issuing a tame reprimand of Yoo and Bybee that largely vindicates them. We thus find ourselves in the shameful circumstance in which torture was committed but no one is held accountable.

Some have suggested that to conduct a comprehensive inquiry into torture would be to politicize already sensitive issues. We disagree. The rule of law should be blind to politics. To decline mandatory prosecution is itself to politicize the law. President Obama has defended the grant of immunity as an effort to have the country “move forward” rather than “look back.” But the best — and perhaps only — way to prevent future torture is to hold accountable those guilty of torture in the past.

Recommended Steps

The above reflections all speak to our core demands: that Guantánamo be closed immediately, with its inmates released or charged and tried in civilian courts; that there be no system of indefinite detention anywhere; that habeas rights be granted to all detainees held by the US; and that the Justice Department conduct a comprehensive investigation of alleged torture under the Bush administration. Short of these broad measures, we have articulated smaller steps the Justice Department, in combination with other offices, should take.

Grant family visits: The United States should immediately grant the families of all detainees the right to visit them. Family visits are commonly granted to prisoners of all kinds, and those at Guantánamo and Bagram should be no exception.

Human rights assessment: The history of abuses at US detention facilities has been extensive. The United States should therefore consent to a comprehensive, public assessment by a credible human rights organization to verify that conditions at the prison are consistent with the Geneva Conventions. Such an inquiry should feature access to the detainees and look seriously at such controversial measures as extended solitary confinement and the force-feeding of those refusing food. We likewise propose such an assessment of Bagram prison.

Expand investigation and prosecution: The Justice Department should expand the investigative mandate of prosecutor John Durham to include former senior officials possibly complicit in authorizing torture policies.

Investigate obstruction of justice: Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently signed a declaration for a court case indicating firsthand knowledge that in August 2002 Vice-President Cheney and other senior administration officials knew that many of those at Guantánamo were detained in error. However, according to Col. Wilkerson, the Bush administration did not want to “look bad” and so suppressed knowledge of this fact. Wilkerson’s statement should be the basis for a DoJ obstruction of justice inquiry focusing on the possible suppression of evidence of the innocence of captives at Guantánamo.

Investigate human experimentation: The Justice Department, especially in light of the newly released report by Physicians for Human Rights, should investigate the authorization and commission of potentially illegal human experimentation in the application and monitoring of “enhanced interrogations.”

Address “recidivism” claims: DoJ and other relevant agencies should issue a credible report assessing the frequency of men released from Guantánamo who then engage in criminal activities against the United States. Such a report should be based in sound, transparent methods, not based on flawed or self-interest reports, reviewed by extra-governmental bodies, and include a detailed work-up of all known or suspected cases of former detainees’ involvement in terrorism.

We thank you for your time and consideration, and look forward to a productive meeting.

Sincerely,

Witness Against Torture
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Defending Dissent Foundation
No More Guantanámos
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International
Voices for Creative Non-Violence

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

I also discussed my increasing obsession with the fundamental failure of the detention policies inherited by Obama from the Bush administration, which have led to the majority of the prisoners who have lost their habeas petitions being consigned to apparently endless detention, on a purportedly legal basis, not because they had any involvement with terrorism, but because they had been fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan (or otherwise serving soldiers in Afghanistan, as a cook or a medic, for example) and should, therefore, have been held — if at all — as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Scott and I also discussed the case of Mohammed Hassan Odaini, which I have covered in three articles recently — Why is a Yemeni Student in Guantánamo, Cleared on Three Occasions, Still Imprisoned?, Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo, and Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture. I recommend these articles for those who want to know more about a prime example of President Obama’s cowardice when it comes to releasing cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, because Odaini was cleared by a Bush-era military review board, by Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and by a US judge, but is still held, even though, on Saturday, the administration conceded, with some reluctance, that he will soon be released.

It was a pleasure to talk to Scott, as ever — and I was honored to be referred to as “the heroic Andy Worthington” — and I also look forward to talking again soon.

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

No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.

Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months, conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.

In the first of these two bleak stories, “US to repatriate Guantánamo detainee to Yemen after judge orders him to be released,” anonymous administration officials told the Washington Post that the President had generously decided to release a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, whose release was ordered last month by a judge in the District Court in Washington D.C.

As I explained in an article following the judge’s May 26 ruling, it had been publicly known since November 2007 that the government had conceded in June 2005 that Odaini, a student, had been seized by mistake after staying the night with friends in a university guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on the night that the house was raided by Pakistani and US operatives, and that he had been officially approved for release on June 26, 2006 (ironically, on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture).

Nevertheless, the Justice Department refused to abandon the case against him, and took its feeble allegations all the way to the District Court, where they were savagely dismissed by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. When the judge’s unclassified opinion was subsequently released, an even grimmer truth emerged: that shortly after Odaini’s arrival at Guantánamo in June 2002, an interrogator recommended his repatriation (after he had been exploited for information about his fellow prisoners), and that, in April 2004, “an employee of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (‘CITF’) of the Department of Defense reviewed five interrogations of Odaini and wrote that ‘[t]here is no information that indicates [he] has clear ties to mid or high level Taliban or that he is a member of al-Qaeda.’”

Odaini was not subjected to specific torture techniques, but there are many people — myself included — who are happy to point out to the Obama administration that subjecting an innocent man to eight years of essentially arbitrary detention in an experimental prison camp devoted to the coercive interrogations of prisoners who were deliberately excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is itself a form of torture, especially as, unlike the worst convicted criminals on the US mainland, no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, and many have never even spoken to their families by phone.

Moreover, the fact that the administration proceeded with his habeas case, despite knowing that he was innocent, and then refused to release him as soon as the judge delivered his ruling, confirms that, when it comes to lawlessness and cruelty, the Obama administration is closer in spirit to the Bush administration than it cares to admit.

On Saturday, via its anonymous spokesmen, the administration confirmed how far it has fallen from all notions of decency. The officials explained that the moratorium on any releases to Yemen that was issued by President Obama in January, in response to cynical hysteria whipped up in the wake of the failed plane bomb plot involving a Nigerian who had reportedly trained in Yemen, “remains in place,” but, as one of the officials stated:

The general suspension is still intact, but this is a court-ordered release. People were comfortable with this … because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen.

In other words, a mouthpiece of the administration told a major US newspaper that Odaini, a patently innocent man whose release was ordered by a US judge, and whose ongoing detention was cynically sought by the Obama administration, was only being released because government officials were happy about his family background (his father, it transpires, is a retired security officer).

I shouldn’t really need to explain to the government that it’s unconstitutional to detain an innocent man, even if his father happened to be Osama bin Laden rather than a security officer, nor to point out how it would appear if this vetting procedure were to be applied to the criminal justice system in general, but in Obama’s world it is apparently necessary to point out these basic facts.

The second story that arrived in time to cast a mocking light on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture — “Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority” — was published in the New York Times. Since President Obama failed to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22 this year, the administration has failed to set a new deadline — and for a depressing reason, as Sen. Carl Levin explained to the Times.

“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” Sen. Levin said, adding that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration in 2013.

Sen. Levin had no doubt that this failure had come about because of a lack of political will on the part of the administration, which contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of Barack Obama in August 2007, when he was still a Senator. On that occasion, he spoke compellingly about how, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power.” However, since coming to power, as Sen. Levin explained, the administration has been “unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence.”

With a sharp eye for how principled rhetoric has not been followed up with any attempt whatsoever to persuade Congress of the importance of closing Guantánamo, Sen. Levin contrasted the administration’s “muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with ‘very vocal’ threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes,” and added that last year the administration “stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution,” and also responded with silence just a month ago, when the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating a prison in Illinois to take the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been cleared for release.

“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Sen. Levin concluded, adding, “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”

“Dormant” is a good word, but something like “extinct” may be more appropriate, if, as Sen. Levin asserts, Guantánamo will still be open in January 2013. If that occurs, Guantánamo will have been open for 11 years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about. This is especially true because, as it stands now, nearly eight and half years after Guantánamo opened, the Obama administration’s refusal to take leadership on the issue, to drop its unacceptable moratorium on releasing Yemenis cleared by its own Task Force (and in some cases, like Mohammed Hassan Odaini, by the courts), and to abandon an unprincipled policy of continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial demonstrates that senior officials, including the President, genuinely have no interest in bringing to an end a regime founded on torture and arbitrary detention. In most respects, their actions — or their inactivity — represent a ringing endorsement of their predecessors’ vile policies.

The “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the Bush years may have come to an end, but anyone doubting the baleful effects of long-term detention without charge or trial should recall what Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the New York Times over six year and a half years ago: “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

That was in October 2003, and I dread to think what the mental state of some of those prisoners must be by now. The very thought that, two and half years from now, some of these men might still be held because the Obama administration doesn’t care enough to do anything about it cannot be excused for reasons of political expediency. Instead, it confirms that, in failing to bring to an end key elements of the Bush administration’s program of torture and arbitrary detention, the Obama administration has lost its principles.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Aletho News, Eurasia Review, New Left Project, Another World is Possible, United Progressives and The World Can’t Wait.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. Also see the archive of articles about Guantánamo and habeas corpus here. For articles about US torture, see the links following the article here, here and here, and the archive of articles here. For chronological lists of all my articles, with links, see here.