I hope to write more about this event and others in the coming days, but for now, while I’m absolutely delighted to be here, meeting up with old friends, making new friends and campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo where it matters the most, I’m also pleased to note that a number of compelling events have been lined up in London, which I’m delighted to publicize below:

Saturday January 7, 2012, 2-4pm: Shut Guantánamo – End 10 Years of Shame
Public Rally, Trafalgar Square, London, at the top of the steps outside the National Gallery.
This event is organized by the London Guantánamo Campaign, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign, Stop the War Coalition and CND.

Speakers include:
Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP (Liberal Democrat)
Louise Christian (solicitor for Guantánamo prisoners)
Lindsey German (Stop the War Coalition)
Kate Hudson (Chair, CND)
Joy Hurcombe (Save Shaker Aamer Campaign)
Cortney Busch (Reprieve)
Victoria Brittain (journalist, Patron of Cageprisoners)
Kanja Sesay (NUS)

See the website here. Also, please sign the London Guantánamo Campaign’s petition for the release to the UK of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian national who fears being repatriated, and who lived peacefully and productively in the UK from 1999 to 2001.

For more details, please email or call 07809 757176. Also see the Facebook page.

Tuesday January 10, 2012, 10.30 am: Press launch of the “Laa Tansa: Never Forget” Guantánamo timeline project
Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1QJ.
“Laa Tansa: Never Forget” is a major online project, undertaken by Cageprisoners over the last six months, to provide the most detailed interactive timeline of Guantánamo to date, for which I played a major role researching prisoner profiles, as featured in my ongoing series, “The Complete Guantánamo Files.”

Speakers:
Moazzam Begg (former Guantánamo prisoner and director of Cageprisoners)
Mousa Zemmouri (former Guantánamo prisoner, Belgium)
Murat Kurnaz (former Guantánamo prisoner, Germany)
Walid Haj (former Guantánamo prisoner, Sudan)
Saad al-Azemi (former Guantánamo prisoner, Kuwait)
Colonel Talal al-Zahrani (the father of Yasser al-Zahrani, who died at Guantánamo in June 2006)
Clive Stafford Smith (Director of Reprieve)

See the website here. For further information, please email or phone 020 3167 4416.

Wednesday January 11, 2012, 6 pm: “Guantánamo Remembered: 10 Years”
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.
On the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, Cageprisoners, Reprieve and the Islamic Human Rights Commission co-host an event to reflect on the impact of a decade of Guantánamo on the lives of those held in the prison and their families.

Speakers:
Moazzam Begg (former Guantánamo prisoner and director of Cageprisoners)
Sami El-Hajj (former Guantánamo prisoner, works for Al-Jazeera)
Mousa Zemmouri (former Guantánamo prisoner, Belgium)
Murat Kurnaz (former Guantánamo prisoner, Germany)
Walid Haj (former Guantánamo prisoner, Sudan)
Saad al-Azemi (former Guantánamo prisoner, Kuwait)
Colonel Talal al-Zahrani (the father of Yasser al-Zahrani, who died at Guantánamo in June 2006)
Michael Ratner (President of the Center for Constitutional Rights)
Clive Stafford Smith (Director of Reprieve)
Massoud Shadjareh (Director of Islamic Human Rights Commission)
Gareth Peirce (human rights lawyer)
Victoria Brittain (Patron of Cageprisoners)
Asim Qureshi (Executive Director of Cageprisoners)

See the website here. For further information, please email or phone 020 3167 4416.

Thursday January 12, 2012, 6.30 pm: “Death in Camp Delta” – UK film premiere
Curzon Cinema (Soho), 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY.

Cageprisoners hosts the UK film premiere of the Erling Borgen film, “Death in Camp Delta.” The film tells the story of Yasser al-Zahrani and two other prisoners who died in Guantánamo in June 2006, reportedly by committing suicide, although that version of events has been seriously challenged by former soldiers working at Guantánamo at the time. The film features former Guantánamo prisoners Omar Deghayes, Moazzam Begg, Sami al-Hajj (Al-Jazeera), Walid Haj, and Colonel Talal al-Zahrani.

Speakers:
Erling Borgen (Filmmaker and director of “Death in Camp Delta”)
Moazzam Begg (former Guantánamo prisoner and director of Cageprisoners)
Talal al-Zahrani (the father of Yaser al-Zahrani, who died at Guantánamo in June 2006)
Cori Crider (Legal Director of Reprieve)

See the website here. For further information, please email or phone 020 3167 4416.

Note: For further information, and to sign up to a new movement to close Guantánamo, please visit the new website, “Close Guantánamo,” which you can join here, and also please sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

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

Please support my work!

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

This is Part 29 of the 70-part series. 359 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, this latest ten-part series covers the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006) and readers will, I hope, realize that almost all of these prisoners were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice. The largest groups released by nationality in 2006 were Saudis (45 in total — 15 in May 2006, 14 in June and 16 in December) and Afghans (35 in total — 7 in February, 5 in August, 16 in October and 7 in December).

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

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America. Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo. Part Seven featured more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006, and Part Eight featured more mental health issues, another juvenile, three men sent to live in Albania because it was not safe for them to be returned to their home countries, and the last of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. This part features the stories of eleven more Afghans. Also see Part Ten.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2006 (Part Nine of Ten)

Mohammed Akitar (ISN 845, Afghanistan) Released August 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, according to the account he gave in Guantánamo, Haji Mohammed Akitar (identified as Akhtar Mohammed), who was 31 years old at the time of his capture, ended up at Guantánamo because a rival of his had told a false story to the Americans. A businessman who worked in the logging business after returning from Pakistan, where he lived with his family as a refugee during the Soviet occupation, he said that he was working for the Karzai government in Jalalabad, and had just returned to visit his family when he was arrested by US and Afghan forces after a rocket attack on a US base in Asadabad in September 2002. He said that he was betrayed by a long-standing enemy, who was with the Americans when he was arrested, as was his enemy’s son-in-law, who was the commander of a local Afghan military division. In his tribunal, he explained that he was never told why he was arrested, and had only been interrogated “two or three times” in Guantánamo.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, in which he was also identified as Akhtar Mohammed, he largely reiterated this account while speaking to a McClatchy reporter in Kabul, saying that he “worked for the Afghan security forces, guarding a bridge near the city of Jalalabad,” and “also had a small company of his own, selling timber and, from time to time, used cars.”

The reporter noted that the US authorities did not disagree with this, but whereas Akitar described himself as “a father and a hard worker who loved his country and devoted his life to his family,” the Americans were intent on establishing him as “the operations sub-commander for an insurgent group,” responsible for the rocket attack in Asadabad. The truth was elusive. Mateullah Khan, described as a former security commander in Akitar’s home province of Kunar, said “he didn’t know for certain whether [he] had been involved with the Taliban or other militant groups.” Khan told McClatchy’s reporter, “Akhtar Mohammed had some personal feuds in his village; I can’t say if he was wrongly arrested or if he was involved with these (insurgency) things. I didn’t have any specific reports of him being involved with anything.”

Akitar’s meeting with McClatchy’s reporter took place at a friend’s house in Kabul, where, with other men, he had been meeting Abdul Salam Zaeef (ISN 306, released in September 2005), who was the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Akitar insisted that the reporter was “welcome to ask about Guantánamo,” but “there could be no discussion about the gathering at Zaeef’s house,” although this was almost certainly not as suspicious as it sounds, given the nuances of business, politics and tribal allegiances in Afghanistan.

Akitar “denied having anything to do with the insurgency,” and was dismissive of any purported significance regarding the eight or nine “rusty rocket/artillery shells” that US and Afghan soldiers in his house, stating only that “his brother had brought them from a government building.” In Guantánamo, however, he had made a point of arguing for his innocence, telling his tribunal, “If I were a bad guy, Gul Karim” — the commander of Afghan forces in Jalalabad — “would not hire me and let me work for him,” and also pointing out that the rocket attack took place in Kunar province “while he was working and living in Nangarhar.”

Speaking of his treatment after he was captured in February 2003, he said that, in the US prison at Bagram airbase, where he was sent after his capture, the treatment was harsh. He explained that “he wasn’t allowed to sleep” during his first five days at Bagram, and he also said, “They threw me off the helicopter and then dragged me to a room where they threw me on the ground. There were dogs in the room, snarling and barking at me. The interrogators shouted, ‘You have links to the Taliban. You have links to Al-Qaida. We found missiles in your house that you were going to fire at the Americans.’ They said I knew bin Laden and [insurgent leader Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar. I told them I have heard of these men, but I never met them.”

After he was sent to  Guantánamo, he said that “the questioning was far milder.” He explained that, “[w]hen he denied being an insurgent leader,” the interrogator “just wrote down his response and moved along.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Akitar was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 20, 2005, in which he was identified as Ahktar Mohammed, born in 1970, and it was noted that he was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, for nine months prior to his capture (on October 10, 2002, apparently, rather than in February 2003), he had been a security guard, assigned to guard a security facility, working as a member of a paramilitary force controlled by the Mayor of Jalalabad. It was also noted that he was seized while he was on leave, attending his brother’s wedding. The Task Force noted that Afghan and US forces had reportedly been looking for his brother, although no explanation was provided as to why his brother was under suspicion. After seizing Akitar instead, at his home in Kunar province, the capturing forces also found the Soviet-era rockets used to incriminate him, although they noted that they “were all old, rusted and not in working order,” adding that they “did not have a head on them and therefore could not be fired in a conventional manner.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 2, 2003, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Members of the Hezb-i-Islami-Gulbuddin (HIG) in the Konar province [because] Detainee will be able to name members of the current government who were members of the HIG, Members of the govemment who were past HIG members [and] Ingress and egress between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In assessing his story, the Task Force reached desperately unsound conclusions, given that he was essentially seized in a random manner. It was claimed that his boss, Gulam Karim, the Security Chief of Laghman Province, who controlled almost 1,500 security guards, had “not overtly attacked coalition forces,” although he “may sympathize with Al-Qaida and Taliban ideologies. What this had to do with Akitar was unknown, however, unless the US authorities proposed rounding up Karim and all 1,500 of his men.

It was also noted that the only reason he was suspected of having been “a sub-commander of a rocket attack on 21 September 2002, in which four rockets were fired at US forces in Asadabad” was not because of anything resembling evidence, but was “[d]ue to name and geographical similarities.” In addition, the only source of the claim that he was “a machine gunner for the Taliban” was Mohammed Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), a well-known fantasist, responsible for numerous false stories about his fellow prisoners.

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value” (and it was also noted that he was “nearly fully exploited,” and had been “very cooperative during interviews and ha[d] not been deceptive.” He was also assessed as posing a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US,its interests and allies,” which, as my research has regularly indicated, only serves to demonstrate how over-classification was built into the assessments, as he clearly was either no risk or a low risk. It was also noted that his “behavior ha[d] been compliant and cooperative,” and he “ha[d] no major violation of camp regulations,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, updated a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated October 28, 2003), recommending instead that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan, ‘[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” which was not specifically mentioned. Even so, he was not released for another 15 months.

Mohammed Nasim (ISN 849, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mohammed Nasim, who described himself as a laborer, was 25 years old at the time of his capture. In Guantánamo, he was accused of taking part in a rocket attack on Kandahar airport in August 2002, but he refuted the allegation, and he also scoffed at an allegation that he was the governor of Zabul province under the Taliban. He claimed that he had been betrayed, as part of the rivalry between two local commanders. Having agreed to work for one, he said that the other told him, “I will kill you and destroy your family,” and arranged for his capture.

In an interview in Jalalabad in June 2007, which was undertaken for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Nasim was identified as Mohammed Nassim, and McClatchy’s reporter tried to work out who he really was — whether, as he said, “he was a brick maker and a day labourer,” and “a simple man who was framed by men in his village in southwest Nangarhar province because of a feud that began when he joined a local police force,” or whether, as the US authorities claimed, he was “a Taliban member trained in machine guns and missiles who was part of a special 40-man unit,” and who “was found with rockets buried in his garden and a Russian artillery officer’s compass, which could be used to site the rockets.”

The US authorities also alleged that, as well as helping to fire rockets at Jalalabad airport, Nasim was also involved in firing rockets “at the home of an Afghan police official,” and, at the review board that followed his tribunal, also added the ludicrous charge, provided without any explanation, that “he’d been the governor of Zabul province under the Taliban, although he’d been in his early 20s at the time.”

McClatchy picked up on Nasim’s fierce defense of his innocence in Guantánamo, explaining that, when he told his tribunal that all their charges against him were false, he exclaimed, “If I lied, I will excuse you even if you kill me. I can’t say more than that.” Significantly, it was also noted that US officials had, as in all the Guantánamo cases, failed to make even the most cursory investigation of Nasim’s story in Afghanistan, and had “never called the Afghan government’s security commander for the area where Nassim was arrested.” The McClatchy article added, “If they had, Gul Jan might have told them what he told a McClatchy reporter.”

What Gul Jan said was significant. “I was suspicious when they found those rockets in front of his house,” he said. “I don’t think he had any connections with anti-government groups.” In the most critical passage, which explains why so many mistakes were made in rounding up prisoners, he also explained, “The Americans had just come to Afghanistan, and everything depended on the agents they were working with. If their agent gave a report that was correct, then they arrested the right man. If the report was not correct, they arrested the wrong man.”

Nasim’s tribal leader, Mateullah, also told McClatchy what the Americans had never asked — that, “[w]hile there certainly were insurgents in the area,” Nasim “wasn’t one of them.” As he proceeded to explain, “When someone in our village is involved with this sort of thing, we make an announcement in the mosque that if his activities bring a reaction from the government and the village is harmed, he is responsible and we will kill him.” He added that “[n]o such message was ever necessary” for Mohammed Nasim.

Nasim himself explained that, every time interrogators “pressed him to tell the truth about his affiliation with the Taliban,” he “begged them to send someone to his village to gather information about him,” although they never did. He also reiterated to McClatchy’s reporter that rivals had been responsible for his capture. He explained that, “after joining the police, he was visited by several Afghans who said they worked for a man who was the tribal rival of [his] police commander,” and who warned him that, if he “continued to work for the officer in charge of his unit,” he would be “punished.” He was seized just a few days later, with the “pile of rockets buried outside,” which, he said, had been “put there to frame him.”

Describing his treatment in US custody, Nasim explained that, after a week in Afghan custody — where, he said, he had his toenails pulled out — he was sent to Bagram, where he was held for four months, and endured the torture technique — often described as “Palestinian hanging” — which partly contributed to the deaths of at least two prisoners at Bagram in 2002. “When they wanted to punish me in the cell, they would put a cloth sack on my head, and then two soldiers would lift me in the air and put my wrists in handcuffs hanging from the ceiling,” he said. “Only the tips of my toes touched the ground. They left me like this many times.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Nasim was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 22, 2005, in which no date of birth was provided for him, although it was noted that he was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, from 1987 to 1995 (in other words, from when he was ten to when he was 18), he had worked on his family’s sheep farm, but that, after his father died in 1995, he “started doing general labor for other people.” It was also noted that, in December 2001, he began working as a policeman under the command of a man named Lashkar Khan. According to his account, however, explaining what he later told McClatchy, in August 2002 he “was awakened in the middle of the night by Shir Jan and Ghulam Ali, two former Taliban members,” who “entered his home armed and told [him] that if he ever worked, talked, or associated with Lashkar Khan again they would kill him.”

After this, he said, “they forced him to go with them to retrieve two hidden rockets,” which they set up and fired “in the direction of Khan’s house.” He also said that he “was told he was going to retrieve more rockets and fire them,” but on October 16, 2002, this mission (if such it was) was stopped in its tracks when the police came to his house and found rockets in his garden, and, also in his possession, a Russian artillery officer’s compass, blasting circuit tester, and three rocket motors.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Shir Jan’s operation and his anti-American/anti-Interim government activist operations including recruitment, Involvement in the 28 August 2002 rocket attacks on Jalalabad, AF [and] Rocket systems and capabilities.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force decided that he was “a possible member of the Taliban,” claiming that he had “confessed to being responsible for the 28 August 2002 BM-12 rocket attack at Jalalabad airport that struck nearby a team of US Army soldiers,” and that he had “named his co-conspirators as Qari Noor Wali, Ghulam Ali, and Qari Sheera Jan [aka Shir Jan], all suspected Taliban members,” who were not captured. It was also claimed that Nasim had “tried to downplay his ties with Jan,” who was described as “a known anti-American activist and probable Taliban commander,” who was “responsible for recruitment of operatives involved in actions against US and coalition forces.”

Anyone analyzing the Guantánamo stories will have to make up their own minds about whether Nasim was lying or not, although I would say that the witnesses who spoke to McClatchy on his behalf tend to tip the conclusion in his favor. Even if this were not the case, however, it ought to remain extraordinary that, until the end of 2003, minor insurgents were being sent to Guantánamo, instead of being held in Afghanistan as prisoners of war.

In assessing Nasim’s story, it is also important to note that all the additional allegations against him are discredited on close investigation, as Mohammed Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), who I described above as a well-known fantasist, responsible for numerous false stories about his fellow prisoners, was single-handedly responsible for the other unsubstantiated claims that he “trained on light weapons, machine-guns, and missiles” (an analyst even noted that this “contradicts detainee’s claims”), that he “fought against US forces in Jalalabad,” and “had been with the Taliban for 5-6 years prior to his capture,” and that he was “a member of a 40-man team who worked for Taliban commander Ameenullah aka Ullah Amin” (ISN 848, released in August 2007, and also identified as Amin Ullah). Hashim also claimed that he saw Nasim “at a training camp south of Kandahar,” and heard [he] was going to attend missile training.”

Despite this, the Task Force determined that Nasim was “of medium intelligence value,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that, regarding his behavior in Guantánamo, on one occasion “he had verbally harassed guards,” and, on another occasion, had “threatened to commit hostile acts,” and had also been “reported for failures to comply as well [as] requesting special meals, then turning them down on arrival.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan, updating a similar recommendation that was made on March 29, 2004, although he was not released for another 18 months (and two years and seven months after he was first recommended for release).

Taj Mohammed (ISN 902, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Taj Mohammed, who was 21 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he was a goat herder from Kunar province, who had been betrayed by a relative. He explained that this relative was a cousin, and that after he had beaten him, because he was working for the Americans, and had installed water pipes for all the houses in the village except his, his cousin retaliated by telling the Americans that he was working with the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (whose militia was a significant part of the opposition to the US presence in Afghanistan) and was planning an attack on an American base. As a result, he was captured and taken to Bagram, but in Guantánamo he insisted, “These are all lies about me. I was a shepherd, and I never can even go out very much, and I was always with my goats on the mountain.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Mohammed reiterated his story. A “self-described sheep herder from Kunar province,” he explained that, although he “had been accused of taking part in an attack on a US Army base and working with an al-Qaida cell leader,” the allegations were untrue. According to the US authorities, he had “admitted to firing rocket-propelled grenades at the base,” but confessions in the “War on Terror” need independent corroboration before they can be taken seriously, and Mohammed also said that “two cousins had set him up” and also that “he’d made the confession only because interpreters working with US forces guaranteed he’d be released if he did so.”

Again making the kind of inquiries that, shamefully, the US authorities failed to do, McClatchy’s reporter spoke to Mohammed Roze, an official with the Afghan government’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission in Mohammed’s area, who stated unequivocally that Mohammed “was detained on false information.” Roze confirmed that his cousin “was working with the American troops in the area,” and “settled a score against him by saying that he was a militant.” It was noted, “Because of the feud they had, his cousins led the Americans to him. We are in the provinces; there are problems between cousins here.”

While this, yet again, was a thorough indictment of the Americans’ chronic intelligence failures when it came to rounding up prisoners and sending them to Guantánamo, Mohammed then ran into further problems because he refused to passively accept his unjust detention, and the insults and humiliations heaped on him by guards and interrogators. He explained that, in Bagram, he “could barely stand the humiliation” of being asked by an American woman in civilian clothes “how many times he’d had sex,” and “whether he’d ever had sex with a donkey.” He said he sat in his chair, “shackled and furious,” and also explained that, earlier that same day, another interrogator, “a black man in uniform,” had called him “a stupid bitch.”

By the time he got to Guantánamo, after two months at Bagram, he “was ready to fight,” and the flight there “settled the matter.” Recalling the flight, he said, “They took us like animals to the plane. Our hands and feet were bound; we were blindfolded.” After deciding that the Americans “weren’t people who could be reasoned with,” he also decided that “Guantánamo would be a place of resistance.”

He said that he “began meeting Arabs who took him under their wing,” and who “were impressed with the young man who’d taught himself Arabic and who spoke with enthusiasm of the cause of spreading Islam,” although he conceded that, at the beginning, “he was more of a prison tough than anything else.” He explained, “I got into fights [with guards] because of bad meals, because of them abusing the Quran, because they didn’t give us enough time in the shower. When they searched our cells the soldiers would flip through our Qurans. The detainees did not like this. We would throw water and shit on the soldiers; we would spit at them. If we could reach the soldiers we would punch them.”

He added that, “as his relationships with the Arabs grew,” he began to see that there were “more important things” than fighting the soldiers. A Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed (ISN 693, also known as Salah al-Salami, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), “became his teacher, lecturing him about the Quran from one cell to the other, and sometimes across the cellblock, depending on where they’d been moved.” He urged him to memorize the Quran “so that he always could review its words in his mind, so that he could recall chapters at a time when he was feeling weak or alone.”

Mohammed said that he “set a daily schedule to keep himself disciplined, written on a piece of paper that he looked at every morning: morning prayers, nap, Quranic studies, lunch, exercise, studying Arabic and English by chatting with Arab prisoners and American guards, resting and read the Quran, then to sleep by 9 pm.” He added that the more he learned, the more he “saw it as his responsibility to enforce Islamic morals,” and so, when his fellow prisoners “failed to pray or chatted with female soldiers,” they were punished. We “stopped speaking with these men,” he said, adding, “Sometimes we beat them.” He cited the example of an Afghan who “repeatedly spoke with female soldiers,” stating, “We beat him because he made jokes with the female soldiers. He was always laughing with them … But he wasn’t beaten too badly, because the soldiers arrived. We just punched and kicked him.”

Despite his resistance, Mohammed said that in 2005 he was moved to Camp Four, where cooperative and/or well-behaved prisoners were allowed to live communally, although he explained that he only lasted nine months before he was sent back to the isolation of the regular cell blocks. ”A friend of mine was sick,” he explained. “There was a female doctor there, but she wouldn’t give him medicine. So I slapped her.”

Four months before his release, in June 2006, Mohammed said that he was woken by a guard, and he and his fellow prisoners were informed that “three detainees had hanged themselves,” and that one of them was Ali Abdullah Ahmed. Mohammed said, “They hanged themselves because they wanted to protest being detained innocently; they were hoping to help the other detainees.”

McClatchy’s reporter noted that, after saying this, Mohammed “got quiet and checked his watch, saying nothing for several moments,” and also noted that one of his fellow prisoners, Zia Khalid Najib (ISN 15, a Pakistani released in October 2006, and also identified as Zia Ul-Shah), said that Mohammed “took the death harder than he liked to admit.” He told a McClatchy reporter, “Taj was very upset. At one point he tried to kill himself.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Mohammed was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 6, 2005, in which he was also identified as Taj Gul, and it was noted that he was born in 1981. It was also noted that he was “in good health,” even though he had “a history of anxiety disorder and a non-specific depressive disorder that has caused him to have hallucinations” (although, at the time, he was “not on any psychiatric medications”).

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he “was part of a nomadic culture that would travel between the mountains bordering Kunar, AF, and Yargul Village,” and that, for most of his life, he had been a goat farmer, although he had “also worked as a brick maker and wall builder.” It was also noted that, in the winter of 2000, he and five companions had traveled to Kashmir where they worked as woodcutters, although he made a point of stating that he “and his party did not engage in any jihad/insurgent activities and were never encouraged by anyone to do so.”

The Task Force reiterated his story about the circumstances of his capture, noting that he said he “was in an altercation with his cousin, Ismail, over water pumps that were to be distributed to the entire tribe,” but that “Ismail neglected to distribute one to the detainee’s family,” and “[i]nsults were exchanged and [he] hit Ismail with a pipe.” He also said that he believed that “Ismail, out of anger, lied to US Forces about his involvement in rocket attacks against the US firebase,” leading to his capture, on December 10, 2002, by Afghan military forces, who seized him with a man named Diam Khan “for attacking a US firebase with rockets.”

He was held at a US firebase in Asadabad, and, after his subsequent imprisonment at Bagram (which was not even mentioned), he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Knowledge of rocket attacks against US Firebase in Asadabad, AF.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that, for the attack on the Asadabad firebase, he was “a reconnaissance scout, coordinating attacks for the insurgency,” and “was seen near a stream, in a vehicle, talking on a radio, approximately one half kilometer south of the firebase around the time of the rocket attack.” No source was provided for this allegation, and although the Task Force provided a list of anti-coalition figures with whom he was supposed to have met, or was supposed to have been hired by to take part in the attack, there was nothing resembling proof.

In addition, a claim that, after his capture, he “admitted he attacked the Asadabad, AF, US firebase with three RPG’s” and “said he received initial payment” from a man named Mullah Sher is not necessarily trustworthy, not just because he subsequently “denied his involvement,” but also because, on capture, it seems to have been almost routine for prisoners held in forward operating bases to be horribly abused. Related to this is Mohammed’s statement, also mentioned above, that “he only admitted to firing the rockets because his interrogators, Waheed and Hajji, promised he would be released.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him of being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that, despite what he told McClatchy abut his “resistance,” his “behavior for the most part ha[d] been compliant with guards’ instructions,” although he “had a few outbursts of anger regarding missing letters,” and “had arguments with other detainees,” and had “harassed the guards because he could not get something he felt he needed.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan, updating a similar recommendation that was made on March 29, 2004, although he was not released for another 17 months (and two years and seven months after he was first recommended for release).

After his release, and after speaking to McClatchy’s reporter, he was photographed for Time, when he said, “I used to buy and sell cows, how can I be arrested for being a terrorist?” and added, “I tried to commit suicide three times by hanging myself because of my own depression and mental trauma being tortured inside of this horrible prison. It was not in my destiny to die I guess … I only talk [about it] because I want everyone to know I am not guilty.”

By February 2010, however, his situation had improved, as, by then, he was actually working for US forces, as ABC News reported. “That man over there, he speaks Spanish,” a soldier told reporter Karen Russo, pointing to Taj Mohammed. “Guess where he learned to speak it?” the soldier asked. Not waiting for an answer, he added, “Guantánamo.”

Mohammed said he didn’t “harbor hard feelings” about his imprisonment, pointing out that he used the time praying and learning about the Koran,” and “also worked on his English and learned Spanish, he said, from members of the Puerto Rican National Guard.”

ABC News added, “He now speaks English, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto,” and “has a great appreciation for pizza, brought to him by his legal team along with vegetarian subs, ice cream and nuts to make their meetings feel ‘less like a prison environment,’” according to his attorney, Paul Rashkind, who told ABC News, “He never did anything to deserve the detention to which he was subjected. When I was appointed to represent him, after years of his detention, we demonstrated to the government that he was simply a goat herder. Shortly after, he was released without explanation.”

After returning to his life as a farmer, Mohammed told ABC News that he was also calling himself a “business agent,” involved in “buying and selling cows and sheep for villagers,” and, because his village is near a US base, he “attended a veterinarian clinic held by Agribusiness Development Team from California National Guard 40th ID.” Lt. Col. Max Velte, the mission commander for the ADT, explained, “He came up and talked to me in perfect English and I didn’t recognize him as a translator.” Then, he said, he “explained how he knew English.”

Velte added, “I, of course, didn’t believe him,” but he then researched his story and found out it was true, although he also said that he “knew that Mohammed’s livestock skills were essential for the work his Agribusiness Development Team,” which was “helping to improve the local economy by providing agricultural support, including free veterinarian clinics which offer vaccinations and medicine for farm animals.”

He was hired to work at the team’s clinics and “was allowed on the American base to meet with US officials,” but after two weeks he “was refused clearance” to visit the base, although he was still allowed to work at clinics off the base “several times a month.” He was also working “as a translator when needed,” and was “prized for his good humor, animal skills and understanding of American culture,” although his bluntness was still in evidence. When asked if he supported the Taliban, he said, “The PRT guy [American Provincial Reconstruction Team] makes the building, the school, everything. The Taliban doesn’t make anything for us. Stupid guy, the Taliban.”

Habib Rahman (ISN 907, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of a group of 30 prisoners rounded up after a raid by US Special Forces, on December 11, 2002, on a compound in Musawal village, near Zormat, in Paktia province in Afghanistan, which was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan. Eight of the 30 were subsequently transferred to Guantánamo, even though they appeared to have had nothing to do with the supposed anti-coalition activities of their boss, and, as I also explained, four of them were children at the time of their capture — the youngest was only twelve years old, and others were only 13, 15 and 16. Five of the eight were released in 2004 (see here and here), but Habib Rahman, who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, was one of the last three, who, for some reason, had to wait until October 2006 until they were freed — the others being Mohabet Khan (ISN 909) and Shardar Khan (ISN 914), discussed below.

Rahman, who was a cook, denied the US authorities’ combat allegation — that he and the others were captured after allegedly firing on US forces — explaining, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, that he thought it probable that, if Samoud was attacking anyone, those attacks would not have been directed against the Americans but against his many enemies. Moreover, when it came to another, more outrageous allegation — that the prisoners were “instructed to fight to the death” when US forces raided the compound — he said that this statement was obtained under duress by US forces in Gardez:

When we were in Gardez, they had taken all our clothes off. I was naked with eight other people … when I made that statement at that time. Americans were beating us really hard, and they had dogs behind us and they said if we didn’t say this, they would release the dogs. After that, an American grabbed me by the throat and said, “Has this happened to you?” and then I said “yes,” and that is why I made the statement, “Samoud told me to fight.”

Rahman also explained that he had heard that, although Samoud had escaped on the day that he and the  others were seized, he had later been captured by US forces and was being held in Bagram.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Rahman was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 13, 2005, in which it was noted that was born in 1982, and it was also noted that he was “in good health,” although he had latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), for which he “refuse[d] medication,” and also had “a chronic skin condition that does not pose a health risk.” It was also noted that he “was evaluated by behavioral health and ha[d] no psychiatric conditions,” which suggests that something about his behavior had prompted officials to undertake a psychiatric assessment in the first place.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he “never attended school,” and “worked from a very young age to earn money for his family, including one year as a general laborer in Kashmir.” It was also noted that he “was hired as a cook and guard for Samoud Khan’s compound,” where he lived with 19 others, because Khan was a friend of his father, and “came to [his] home and hired [him] to help provide protection against his enemies.”

It was also confirmed that Samoud Khan was in US custody at Bagram (he was identified as ISN 1850), although doubts remained about his allegiances. The Task Force described him as “a well known warlord in Afghanistan who has links to both Al-Qaida and the Taliban,” even though those captured with him emphasized his independence. In addition, it was noted that Habib Rahman “knew ISN 1850 was in Kashmir, PK, during the Taliban era,” and, as the Task Force also noted, he “returned to Afghanistan when the Americans invaded,” all of which is behavior that ought to have encouraged an assessment that he was not actually inked to Al-Qaida and the Taliban at all, as he went into exile when they were in power or had influence, and only returned when they had fallen or fled.

In further descriptions of Habib Rahman’s role, and Samoud Khan’s activities, the Task Force noted that Rahman’s duties “included cooking and security,” although he apparently also “admitted to participating in rocket attacks with [Samoud Khan's] group against coalition forces,” and claimed that these attacks were aimed at the coalition base at Gardez. Given what Rahman said about the false confession he produced while being abused by US forces in Gardez, it is reasonable to assume that this additional confession — also dubious — was produced at the same time.

Bearing in mind that Rahman himself had stated that Samoud Khan had many enemies, but not the Americans, there was no reason to presume that he had attacked US forces, especially as, to quote from Rahman’s file, he said that Samoud Khan “was hired by the local community to decide the punishment of criminals within the district,” and that he (Rahman) “obtained an identification card, which he wore around his neck, to show he had a positive relationship with the Americans in his district.” It also seemed significant that Rahman said that, while he worked for Samoud Khan, everyone at the compound “wore green battle dress uniforms similar to the ones worn by US soldiers,” which the General Atik, an Afghan “who was working for the US,” had provided for Khan’s men.

Writing of his capture, on December 11, 2002, the Task Force noted that Samoud Khan “was at the compound, but was warned of the attack and escaped by motorcycle,” and also noted that two of the boys seized with him — Asadullah (ISN 912), Naqibullah (ISN 913) — plus a third boy, Mohammed Ismail Agha (ISN 930), who was mistakenly described as having been seized in Khan’s compound, had been classified as “Juvenile Enemy Combatants (JEC),” an official classification that I did not know existed.

Habib Rahman was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Terrorism operations, Key personnel biographies, Sociological factors and biographies [and] Hostile installations in Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force focused in particular on the claim that Rahman had “admitted to participating in a rocket attack conducted by [Samoud Khan's] group against US forces located at Firebase Salarno [Salerno] in the Gardez-Zormat area,” although an analyst noted that he had “recanted his admission to participating in the rocket attack and provided three different accounts of this event; each distancing himself further from incriminating activity.”

Most of the rest of the case against him revolved around Khan’s alleged activities, and also a claim that he was “reported to possess direct ties to former Taliban commander and ACM [anti-coalition militia] leader Saifullah Rahman Mansour.” According to the US authorities, Khan was an associate of Mansour, who was “the Taliban 8th Division Commander,” and was allegedly given “the responsibility to attack coalition forces” in Khost province by Osama bin Laden, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Mullah Omar, although this sounds deeply suspicious, not least because of the doubts about Khan’s alleged ties to Al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Equally dubious, therefore, may be claims by Shardar Khan (identified by the juvenile prisoner Asadullah as Rahman’s cousin) about Habib Rahman’s “direct ties” to Mansour, including an array of claims about being in regular touch with him, and delivering letters to him. Asadullah was also responsible for a claim that Rahman’s father was “a Minister of ‘Islamic Virtue’ during the war against the Russians,” who “went from village to village to enforce Taliban law.” Despite the fact that the Taliban did not exist until five years after the war against the Russians, an analyst took this baseless allegation as an indication that it “probably means detainee’s father held a leadership position in his village and also with the Taliban,” and, “additionally, it is likely that familial ties of this extent would breed a strong commitment to extremist militant Islam in the detainee.”

Another almost certainly baseless allegation came from Faisal Saha Al-Naser (ISN 437, released in February 2007, and also identified as Faisal al-Nasir), who identified Rahman as “a facilitator,” and claimed that he met him in Quetta, where he “was looking for people who wanted to fight the jihad in Afghanistan.” Although this allegation sounds remarkably like a random false confession, an analyst interpreted it as indicating that Rahman presumably helped al-Naser “with travel arrangements for his trip to the Al-Qaida-operated Al-Farouq training camp in Kandahar.”

In conclusion, the Task Force described Rahman as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his behaviour had been “assessed as mostly compliant.” He had, it was noted, “assaulted the guards three times, including spitting on the commanding officer,” and “[t]he other two assaults were against the guards and involved [him] throwing Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) wrappers at the guards.” It was also noted that he “had two failures to comply with orders given by guards.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated November 20, 2003), recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan, although he was not released for another 17 months.

Mohabet Khan (ISN 909, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of a group of 30 prisoners rounded up after a raid by US Special Forces, on December 11, 2002, on a compound in Musawal village, near Zormat, in Paktia province in Afghanistan, which was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan. Eight of the 30 were subsequently transferred to Guantánamo, even though they appeared to have had nothing to do with the supposed anti-coalition activities of their boss, and, as I also explained, four of them were children at the time of their capture — the youngest was only twelve years old, and others were only 13, 15 and 16. Five of the eight were released in 2004 (see here and here), but Mohabet Khan was one of the last three, who, for some reason, had to wait until October 2006 until they were freed — the others being Habib Rahman (ISN 907, see above) and Shardar Khan (ISN 914, see below).

In his tribunal, Mohabet Khan said that he had been forced into service, and insisted that the circumstances that led to his capture could not be described as “a raid.” He explained that “they opened the doors to let the Americans come in and it really wasn’t forceful or an impressive action.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Mohabet Khan was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 7, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1972, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he was “single and lived with his sister,” and “worked as a farm hand” and a stream digger. Despite his abject poverty, it was also claimed that he had stated that Samoud Khan was his uncle, and that, after Khan “sent for him,” he went to his compound, where he “cut wood and cooked for the group.”

After describing his capture, and noting that Samoud Khan “left his compound because he knew US/Coalition Forces were going to raid the location,” the Task Force noted that he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The Mousawal compound Samoud Khan and his associates who may have an anti-American agenda [and] Second compound operated by Samoud Khan in Shirwa Kalai, AF.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that Samoud Khan worked for another Guantánamo prisoner, Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khaul (ISN 1001, released in December 2007, and also identified as Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khail), who was allegedly “a subordinate to Saifullah Rahman Mansour,” a local Taliban leader — although it is not known how much truth there is to any of these allegations, as those captured with him emphasized his independence, and Habib Rahman (see above) stated that he doubted Khan was involved in any anti-coalition activities because of his many other enemies. One of these was discussed in Mohabet Khan’s file, when it was noted that Samoud Khan “was in conflict with a rival warlord named Abdul Ali because Samoud killed Abdul Ali’s son,” after he “had captured and maimed three of Samoud’s friends.”

In conclusion, the Task Force described Mohabet Khan as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because, as was claimed elsewhere in the file, he had been “indoctrinated into Islamic extremist ideology.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan, updating a similar recommendation that was made on November 18, 2003, although he was not released for another 16 months (and two years and eleven months after he was first recommended for release).

Shardar Khan (ISN 914, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of a group of 30 prisoners rounded up after a raid by US Special Forces, on December 11, 2002, on a compound in Musawal village, near Zormat, in Paktia province in Afghanistan, which was owned by a warlord called Samoud Khan. Eight of the 30 were subsequently transferred to Guantánamo, even though they appeared to have had nothing to do with the supposed anti-coalition activities of their boss, and, as I also explained, four of them were children at the time of their capture — the youngest was only twelve years old, and others were only 13, 15 and 16. Five of the eight were released in 2004 (see here and here), but Shardar Khan, who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, was one of the last three, who, for some reason, had to wait until October 2006 until they were freed — the others being Habib Rahman (ISN 907) and Mohabet Khan (ISN 909), discussed above. As I explained in Website Extras 12, Shardar Khan said in Guantánamo that he had served Samoud as a cook, and denied taking part in the alleged attack.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Shardar Khan was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 22, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1982, and was “in fair health.” Largely refuting this claim, it was noted that he had “spent most of his detention time in treatment for bipolar disorder, a non-specific personality disorder, along with Cluster B traits.” It was also noted that he was “on anti-anxiety and anti-convulsant medications,” that an “appropriate updated history from mental health [was] required prior to travel,” and that he “may require medical attendants for behavioral intervention.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had “no formal education” except for five months at a madrassa when he was 14, and that he had “worked as a shepherd since [the] age of seven.” He had been “imprisoned in the past for using hashish but was released when his friend Feda Mohammed [ISN 908, also identified as Peta Mohammed, released in March 2004] paid 9,000 Pakistani Rupees for his bail, in approximately July of 2002.”

Shortly after, he and Mohammed went to see Samoud Khan, who “was in conflict with a rival warlord named Abdul Ali after Samoud killed Abdul Ali’s son because he captured and maimed three of Samoud’s friends.” He said that they were recruited on November 20, 2002, to act as bodyguards for Samoud “in case of retaliation by Abdul Ali,” and it was also claimed that he “fought with Samoud during a battle between Samoud and Abdul Ali.” As in Mohabet Khan’s file, it was also claimed that Samoud’s supervisor was another Guantánamo prisoner, Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khaul (ISN 1001, released in December 2007, and also identified as Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khail).

After describing his capture, and noting that Shardar Khan said that “Samoud left his compound because he was fearful of being arrested for the murder of Ali’s son,” the Task Force noted that he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, to “provide information on the following: The Mousawal compound, Samoud Khan and his associates who may have an anti-American agenda [and] Second compound operated by Samoud Khan in Shirwa Kalai, AF.”

Most of the rest of the case against him revolved around Khan’s alleged activities, rather than his own, and, in conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted, without there being any evidence that the guards had been told about his mental health issues, that he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and “many instances of inciting a disturbance,” and also “expose[d] himself to guards on a regular basis.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he should be retained in DoD control (dated November 22, 2003) recommended his transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan,”[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” which was not specified. Even so, he was not released for another 18 months.

Faiz Ullah (ISN 919, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how the capture of Faiz Ullah, who was 46 years old at the time of his capture, appeared to be the most outrageous ineptitude on the part of the Americans, because he was a Shiite from Bamiyan province, and therefore a Hazara (one of Afghanistan’s four main ethnic groups, along with Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks), and the Hazara, and Shiites in general, were massacred by the Taliban, who were Sunni and Pashtun.

In Guantánamo, he was accused of supporting the Taliban and being a member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (the militia of the anti-American warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), although he stated that he had been betrayed by a local leader who was frustrated in his efforts to marry his sister, and decided to get rid of him by telling lies about him to the Americans. These allegations would have been insensitive enough in the case of any Afghan Shiite, but in Faiz Ullah’s case, as he pointed out, the Taliban killed hundreds of Shiites in Bamiyan, including his uncle and his brother-in-law, and HIG members killed his mother and took his land, forcing him to become a refugee.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Faiz Ullah was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which he was also identified as Faizullah, and it was noted that he was born in 1956, and that he had “completed therapy for latent TB,” and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, during the Soviet occupation, as the eldest son in his family, he “became a farmer growing wheat and potatoes to supply food for his family upon the death of his father.” Later, when the Taliban took control of Bamiyan, he moved elsewhere in Afghanistan, and only returned to his home and farms” in spring 2002, after “the removal of the Taliban by US forces.” It was also noted that he had “worked as a farmer, shoe repairer, and woodcutter.”

Around December 2001, according to his account (although this was a typo, and it should have read December 2002), Adel Khan, the Deputy Director of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Bamiyan province, who was “a former schoolmate” of Faiz Ullah’s, apparently recruited him “to act as a spy for the Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly)” following the fall of the Taliban. It was noted that he “was to work on behalf of the local government in efforts to assist in cleaning up the region.” After he “accepted the position,” Adel Khan “wrote a letter to HIG commander, Mullah Nasim, asking him how many and what type of weapons he had,” and “then asked him to deliver the letter.”

In response to the letter, Mullah Nasim apparently provided Faiz Ullah “with four letters and asked him to deliver them to various individuals throughout Bamiyan, AF, during the latter part of December of 2002.” He said that he “brought the letters home, read through them with his family, and kept them for four days pondering what to do with them,” and then “sought advice from his neighbor, Sher Agha,” asking him to “help him deliver the letters that night” (December 24, 2002), but Sher Agha “talked [him] into staying for dinner, and he later told [him] to go and stay at [his] uncle’s house for the night.”

He added that, the following day, “Sher Agha and his family were going to deliver the letters” with him, but instead he was seized by Afghan military forces at his cousin’s house in the early morning on December 25, 2002. He said he believed Sher Afgha “provided false information to the US linking him to the Taliban and terrorist organizations,” the explanation being that he “was taken into custody after an inter-tribal dispute over a request to marry his sister.”

He was handed over to US forces a short time later, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, to “provide information on Mullah Nasim, HIG Commander; Mullah Zoi, an Al-Qaida leader in Khamard; Madr; and Commander Rahmatullah, Afghan Military commander.”

In assessing his story, the fact that he left Bamiyan when the Taliban were in power, and only returned after they fell, plus the fact that he was recruited to “assist in cleaning up the region” as a spy by the Deputy Director of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, was not considered. Instead, the Task Force believed he was “Mullah Nasim’s most trusted man and was believed to be involved in an assassination plot against Afghan Military Forces (AMF) General Toufon,” with unspecified “reporting” indicating that “HIG commanders Mullah Nasim and Mullah Zoi sent [him] to Bamiyan” to kill General Toufon, and offered him “between $5,000 and $10,000 USD and a pick-up truck as a bonus to assassinate the general.”

Perhaps these claims were true, even though it seems extremely unlikely. For the Task Force, the conclusion was that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour pattern ha[d] been of compliance.” It was also noted that he was “in Camp 4 and at a Low Risk Level [O]ne, which indicate[d] a passive and compliant behavior pattern.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he should be retained in DoD control (dated November 15, 2003) recommended his transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan, “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment,” which was not specified. Even so, he was not released for another 16 months.

Swar Khan (ISN 933, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 18 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Swar Khan, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, was a police officer who had specifically provided his tribunal at Guantánamo with the phone numbers of witnesses who would have been able to establish his innocence — just one of the many examples of an institutional inability to contact outside witnesses, which demonstrated that the US authorities had no intention of finding out whether prisoners had been seized by mistake.

As I explained in Website Extras 12, Khan was captured by US forces in Khost and accused of being a Taliban intelligence officer and selling weapons to anti-coalition forces. In response, he explained that a long-standing rival, Habib Noor (not the man of that name who was held at Guantánamo), had taken a job with the Americans and had then used that position to lie about him. He pointed out that two Afghan military leaders — “trusted commanders of the Americans” — that he worked for had also been betrayed, although they were released from Bagram after a few months.

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khan, who explained that his name was actually Swatkhan Bahar, repeated his story, and included his complaints about the Americans’ apparent inability to track down his witnesses. The McClatchy article noted that, at his tribunal, he had listened as the US Marine colonel presiding over his hearing told him that he “had bad news: The witnesses that Bahar requested were unavailable.” In response, Bahar “pointed out that he’d provided the phone number of one of them,” but the colonel replied that “it wasn’t possible for tribunal members to make such phone calls.” However, he assured Bahar that “a request had been made with the State Department and the relevant embassy,” although, as he explained, “They were unable to provide that information or contact. They were not able to give word back to us.”

Accurately analyzing the significance of this exchange and others that are readily apparent from a review of the transcripts, the McClatchy article pointed out that “this wasn’t an unusual turn of events during the tribunals at Guantánamo,” and that the tribunals and review boards “told one detainee after the next that witnesses outside Guantanamo weren’t ‘reasonably available,’ a standard that wasn’t defined during the proceedings” — or, for that matter, afterwards.

After also noting that, during his review board at Guantánamo, “an officer asked Bahar whether he’d thought about sending a letter to his commander in the Afghan Interior Ministry to obtain a note describing his service in the police — something the US military could have easily done itself,” McClatchy’s reporter proceeded to demonstrate how easy it was to track down witnesses, confirming, as I noted above (and as was emphatically demonstrated in 2007 in an affidavit by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who worked on the tribunals) that they were more concerned with establishing the prisoners as “enemy combatants” than they were with discovering the truth. As the article explained:

[A] McClatchy reporter had little trouble finding Bahar’s Interior Ministry boss, one of the witnesses discussed during his tribunal. All it took was a couple of telephone calls, through a translator, to local Khost officials to find Mohammed Mustafa, who was the Interior Ministry’s security chief for Khost from late 2001 to mid-2003.

Mustafa confirmed much of Bahar’s story: that a rival in the Afghan security services who was working for American troops in the area framed him. “There was no proof against him, nothing indicating he was involved with these sorts of activities,” Mustafa said. “I went to the Americans’ base and asked them to release him, but they wouldn’t.”

In attempting to refute the claims against him, Bahir was required to counter allegations that he was “a former Taliban intelligence officer who’d attacked or participated in military operations against the US military and its partners,” that he had “about six truckloads of weapons and ammunition — including mortars and artillery — stored in his house,” that he had “weapons that later were used to attack American-led coalition forces,” and that he had sworn allegiance to the Union of Mujahideen, described as “a coalition of local warlords who’d fought against the Soviet occupation, some of whom allegedly were directing their men to fight against US soldiers.”

In response, Bahar “denied being a member of the Taliban,” explained that the weapons “were at a warehouse that he helped guard, not at his house, and that he’d never sold any of them,” and also explained that US forces were actually working with the Union of Mujahideen “to form a local security force.” Instead of these outlandish claims, the truth, he said, was that he was seized “because a local Afghan security officer with whom he was feuding, and whose two sons worked as translators for the US military in the area, made false allegations about him.”

In his review board hearing, the fact that he received three months of police training was used against him, as was his association with two men described as “local warlords,” although he explained that “both were aligned with US commanders when he knew them,” and that one of them had since become a member of the Afghan parliament.

During his four and a half years in US custody, Bahar was not only subjected to ludicrous allegations; he was also, he said, subjected to violence as well. He said that “guards punched him and suspended him from the ceiling of an isolation cell by his wrists at Bagram Air Base, and a soldier kicked him in the back of a head on a bus that took him from the plane at Guantánamo.” He added that some of the Arab prisoners had “ridiculed him” for having worked with the Karzai government.

He also explained that he had “tried to commit suicide at Guantánamo by hanging himself with a pair of pants,” and, on another occasion, “beat his head against a metal pole in the corner of his cell until he passed out,” and, in conclusion, he lamented that his entire bitter and pointless experience could have been avoided if the Americans had, as McClatchy described it, “done the simplest of things before detaining someone mired in the complexities of Afghan tribal and political rivalries: spoken with more witnesses.” He added that, since his return to Khost, the local governor “asked him to rejoin the police,” but he refused. “When I was at my [police] checkpoint the American soldiers would stop and have lunch with me,” he said. “I still have the pictures at home. But these disloyal people sent me to Guantánamo.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Swar Khan was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 20, 2005, in which he was also identified as Swat Khan, Naswar Khan and Sawat Khan, and it was noted that he was born in 1969, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted, based on his account, that he “worked as a police officer, farmer, taxi driver, and construction worker,” who “had three months of security and police training and an additional five days of training with US Forces during July 2002,” and was then “in charge of a checkpoint in the Takhta Bega Mountains” near Khost, where he “searched each vehicle, wrote down the serial numbers of any weapons confiscated and turned them over to the Americans.” It was also noted that he “had written permission from the Governor of Khost, AF, to charge vehicles a fee to pass through his checkpoint.”

He also explained, as he did at his tribunal, and after his release, that, on January 12, 2003, he was arrested by Habib Noor, who he claimed was “his personal enemy,” and said that it was “because he had a vendetta against him because [he] once arrested one of Noor’s aides,” adding that Noor arrested him “for having an illegal checkpoint.” It was also noted that he “possessed no weapons, passport, or equipment at the time of his capture.” He was transferred to US custody on January 12, 2003, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 28, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Corrupt government officials in Khost [and] Route of egress from Afghanistan.”

Although the Task Force noted, crucially, that a report from Bagram “infer[red] Habib Noor may have set the detainee up,” this was completely ignored, as the US authorities set about proving that he was not a pro-Karzai, pro-US checkpoint official. In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “a high-ranking member of [the] Union of the Mujahideen,” and that a document had been found listing him as a commander, just below the “Commander in Charge,” Malem Jan, who was described as “a commander directly under Jalaluddin Haqqani,” a significant warlord opposed to the US presence in Afghanistan. In this version of events, Malem Jan worked for Haqqani, and Khan traveled to Pakistan every day to meet Jan and Pacha Khan Zadran (a US ally who was later discovered to have been using the Americans for his own ends), and then returned to Afghanistan. Ignored in all this was Khan’s insistence that the Union of Mujahideen was actually working with the Americans, as McClatchy later pointed out.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” claiming that he was “deceptive” during interviews, but picking up on information he provided about Habib Noor, described as “a former general who fought against the Russians and [was] working in the Afghan government,” but who “was corrupt and was using his position … for his own personal gain.” He was also assessed as posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his “behaviour ha[d] been mostly compliant and cooperative in the cellblocks,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated May 20, 2005), recommended that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan, “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment” (which was not specified), although he was not released for another 17 months.

Anwar Khan (ISN 948, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Website Extras 12, I explained how Anwar Khan, who was 35 years old when he was seized, was captured by Afghan soldiers, while crossing the border to Pakistan, with identification documents in different names. This was a common occurrence, and although it was alleged, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, that he was directed to carry Taliban weapons from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and that he assisted the Taliban by helping to transport, stockpile and hide weapons caches, he explained that he worked as a security guard for various shopkeepers in Pakistan and commuted regularly between the two countries. In a statement in his Administrative Review Board in November 2005, he explained that he had fought against the Taliban, and said:

I was and I am against the Taliban. I was and I am for the American forces. I was not and will not be a danger to the Americans … I was going to Pakistan and I had a Pakistan card with me on my way to my job. They stopped me and told me they had five questions and then brought me to Bagram and in Bagram they punish me a lot and now I am here. It’s up to you if you believe me or not, but they were unjust when they brought me here and they have to pay me back for that. The Doctors beat me up and they did not give me the medicine … I am sick and they did not give me medicine. They put me in mental facilities for people who are completely crazy for ten months and then injected me with some medicine that was not good. It damaged my mental status.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Anwar Khan was an “Update Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated August 29, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1967. For some reason, no medical information was available.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force did not start off well, claiming that, in approximately 1985, at his local mosque, he “met Taliban sympathizer Mullah Ashraf,” even though, of course, the Taliban was not founded until 1994. He was then apparently “banished from the village,” and a friend of Mullah Ashraf in the government at the time, Said Jalil, put him up in his house in Mazar-e-Sharif. In approximately 1991, his father “sent him to live with his uncle in Punjab, Pakistan,” and “allowed him to work the winter months in Punjab as a security guard at the bazaar and travel to his parents’ home in Afghanistan in the summer months.”

At an unspecified date, but perhaps in 2002, Said Jalil apparently asked him to transport weapons from his home in Afghanistan to a Taliban commander in Pakistan. The Task Force was unsure of the exact circumstances of his capture, as he provided two stories, and no information was provided from any other source to establish which was true. The first, when he claimed he was traveling from Pakistan to Afghanistan to visit his family, involved him being “detained at the border and taken into custody because he had many identification cards,” and in the second he “claimed he returned to Pakistan after he dropped weapons off in Afghanistan,” and “was stopped at a US checkpoint near Asadabad, AF, taken into custody by US forces and transferred to a questioning facility.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on February 16, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Said Jalal’s associates and activities, Taliban ammunition and weapon caches in Noorgal District, Kunar Province, AF [and] Taliban leaders and regional facilities/bases in the Noorgal District, Kunar Province.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force decided that he was “a probable arms smuggler with probable ties to the Taliban,” who had “continually changed his timeline and story to fit the line of questioning.” His pocket litter, including the business cards, was also regarded as suspicious — in the words of the Task Force, “several identification and business cards, a piece of paper with a name and number on it, an invitation to an extremist meeting, an oath, and several other items,” and an oath, for an unspecified organization, that read as follows: “I will not disclose anything from my organization and will never lie. I will follow the rules and regulations of the said organization.”

It was also noted that his “activities during interrogation [were] deceptive, evasive and indicative of a higher level of education than he admitted],” but the authorities failed to come up with anything conclusive to prove their doubts. In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low-moderate threat from a detention perspective,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated July 2, 2004), recommended, instead, that he be transferred with conditions, although he was not released for another 14 months.

Abdul Zahor (ISN 949, Afghanistan) Released December 2006

In Website Extras 12, I explained how Abdul Zahor, who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, told his review board hearing at Guantánamo in 2005 that he was a shopkeeper, and responded to an allegation that he had knowledge of a bomb plot against the US embassy in Kabul by saying that he was told about the plot, but that when he went to the Americans to inform them about it, he was seized instead. He also denied an allegation that he was a member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), the anti-US militia headed by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, ironically, had received the lion’s share of US aid during the Soviet occupation, by explaining that he had spent five years in prison after a short-lived alliance between Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud (the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated on September 9, 2001) had broken up in the early 1990s, and that HIG members had killed three of his brothers and had shot him in the back and the foot.

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Zahor (identified as Abdul Zuhoor) claimed that he had lied in Guantánamo, and said that he actually commanded 350 men and had, at one point, been allied with the Taliban, although Abdul Odood, a community leader in the governor’s provincial office in Zuhoor’s home town, pointed out that, although he had at at one point allied his militia with the Taliban, “He did not join the Taliban because of any ideology. He joined them because he was having a feud with the Northern Alliance people,” aligned with Massoud.

Zuhoor’s story was, in short, the kind of web of alliances and betrayals, common throughout recent Afghan history, that was impenetrable to US forces, and although he had fought both Hekmatyar and Massoud, and had both opposed and aligned himself with the Taliban, it was ludicrous that he was sent to Guantánamo. As he explained in reference to the bomb plot, “I don’t care if [in the future] they need me to report a bomb that will kill 500 people or 5,000 people, I will not” tell anybody.

Because of his propensity for lying, it is unknown how much else of what he told McClatchy’s reporter was true. He said that, when he was held in Camp Four (the camp reserved for cooperative and/or well-behaved prisoners, who were allowed to live communally), he used to argue with a Taliban member, Mullah Ghafoor, fulfilling his “reputation as a contrarian militia leader who’d fought with multiple factions in Afghanistan,” according to Tom Lasseter of McClatchy, who wrote the article based on the interview, and who also described this activity as a “throwback to the country’s tradition of warlords switching sides with the changing fortunes.” Lasseter also explained that Zuhoor “considered himself more a man who owned his turf than anything else.”

In these discussions, Mullah Ghafoor “would walk alongside Zuhoor and needle him about his lack of loyalty to any given militia,” while Zuhoor “would accuse Ghafoor of hypocrisy.” He told McClatchy’s reporter, “Mullah Ghafoor, he was preaching the benefit of jihad, the rewards that would come in the afterlife. I told Mullah Ghafoor, ‘Why don’t you go to jihad first? Then I will follow you.’”

However, he said that Mullah Ghafoor also told him what decisions had been made by the “senior Taliban and al-Qaida leadership in Camp Four,” who, in whispers and messages, discussed “the most pressing issues at Guantánamo” and issued fatwas, calling for hunger strikes, for example, or banning chess and card playing.

While McClatchy’s team noted that Zuhoor’s statements had to be treated with skepticism, it was also noted that Akhtar Mohammed (aka Akitar Mohammed, see above) said that “the riots that shut down much of Camp Four temporarily in 2006 largely were triggered because ‘some of the elders of the camp were demanding trials because they had been there for months or years without being interrogated.’”

It was also noted that one of the prisoners’ attorneys “said that his client at one point said he couldn’t meet with his legal team anymore,” and explained, “He said there were five or six detainees who had assumed positions of leadership in the camp, and that he had to deal with them. And they said that he would need a fatwa to continue speaking with us, to continue speaking with Americans.”

From its investigations, the McClatchy team concluded that a fatwa “couldn’t come from just any imam: It had to be from a senior cleric in Saudi Arabia,” but it seems unlikely that Zuhoor’s statements regarding the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006 can be trusted, when such profound doubts have been expressed about the official story — that the three committed suicide simultaneously. Zuhoor said that, on the afternoon of June 9, 2006, Mullah Ghafoor told him that the shura council had “sat together and issued a verdict. Three of the men volunteered to kill themselves to get more freedom for the other detainees.” Zuhoor added that Ghafoor told him that “the sacrifice will begin tonight,” and the next day he heard about the three deaths.

In another contentious statement, Zuhoor said that “inmates associated with the shura council often said they had seen US soldiers stepping on the Quran,” adding that these stories “would enrage the detainees who heard them,” although he claimed that the stories were not true, and that it was, instead, “a plot by the Taliban and the Arabs to cause trouble so they could get concessions from the Americans.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Zahor was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was also identified as Zahoor Khan, and it was noted that he was born in 1963. It was also noted that he was only “in moderate health,” because he “suffer[ed] from chronic pain syndrome,” and had multiple psychiatric diagnoses.” In addition, it was stated that he was “very manipulative,” as though this had nothing to do with his psychiatric problems.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force began by noting that three of his brothers were dead, although the circumstances — Zahor’s claim that they were killed by HIG members — were not mentioned. It was also noted that he had married two of their widows, was planning to marry the third, and also intended to have a fourth wife.

It was also noted that, when the Taliban came to power (in 1996), Zahor moved to Pakistan for two and a half years, before returning to Afghanistan, presumably sometime in 1998. He apparently “traveled every 20 days with his 12-year old son to Kabul, AF to purchase supplies (i.e. rice, food, soap, and shampoo).” It was also noted, without comment, that, at some unspecified point in time, He “moved into an abandoned house in Kabul, AF for approximately 45 days.”

If the notes about his mental health provided an insight into how his comments to McClatchy were not necessarily at all reliable, the Task Force’s interpretation of Afghan history also provided a cause for alarm. It was claimed that he “spent 17-18 years fighting jihad,” although it was also claimed that these 17-18 years were spent as “a member of Massoud’s Shura-e-Nazar,” which was described as “a suspected anti-American organisation,” even though Massoud is Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance (America’s allies in Afghanistan), who was the most implacable opponent of everything to do with Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and Shura-e-Nazar was the supervisory council created by Massoud in 1984 to coordinate the activities of the various groups in the non-Pashtun parts of Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviet Union.

This is such a huge error that it colors everything else in the file — as well as casting even graver doubts on the reliability of any purported US intelligence relating to Afghanistan.

The rest of the supposed case against Zahor is flaky at best. At one point he said that he was imprisoned for four months in the Barak prison in the Panjshir valley, “because people accused him of religious infidelity,” although on another occasion he said he was imprisoned for five years for serving under a Taliban commander named Salangi, which seems to be a particularly untrustworthy claim. It was also claimed that he was “a soldier” for two military commanders identified as being involved in actions against US and coalition forces.

On the specific details of his capture, the story was also confusing. It was noted that a woman named Layla, described as his “girlfriend,” told him that two friends “were possibly planning on bombing one of the buildings in Kabul.” After discussing this information with his father, Zahor decided to report it to the US authorities, and visited a US base the next day, telling a soldier named James about what he had heard. He then visited his son, who was ill, and, on his return, Layla told him that she had “seen the explosives intended for the bombing.” Zahor then informed James of these developments, and was told the return the next day, but when he did so, he was seized and held by US forces. That was on February 1, 2003, at the Kabul Military Training Center,” and he was then sent to Bagram “due to his involvement in a possible US or UK embassy bomb plot in Kabul.” He was sent to Guantánamo on March 23, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on HIG and Taliban personalities.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “a commander of the Taliban and affiliated with the HIG and Al- Qaida,” although neither of these connections rings true. Given what Zahor himself said to McClatchy, and what Abdul Odood said about him, it may well be true that he was a commander of a group of men, and that he had been involved with the Taliban because he fell out with Massoud. This would explain why documentation was found in his possession addressing him as Commander Zahoor Khan, and it would also explain how other documentation that “was obtained” may have “listed personalities identified as [his] troops.”

Rather less weight, I think, can be attached to his alleged relationship with Salangi, who was described to US forces (by an unknown source) as “a former Afghan anti-Soviet fighter who joined the Taliban after a falling out” with Massoud (correctly described here as an “anti-Taliban cammander”), and who, it was also claimed, “was placed in jail by Massoud in 1996 but escaped in 1998 and joined the Taliban.” This evidently provided a point of contact between Zahor and Salangi, if, as seems probable, Zahor also fell out with Massoud and was imprisoned by him, but it is unknown if it was correct of US forces to describe Zahor as “subordinate to Salangi,” or to draw inferences to incriminate Zahor from additional claims that Salangi “specialized in assassinations and other terrorist operations,” and “remained loyal to Mullah Omar.”

Also of doubt is a claim that Engineer Obad, described as “a friend who spent time in prison” with Zahor (when he was allegedly imprisoned in the Panjshir valley), stated that Zahor “used to be HIG with ties to Al-Qaida,” as it seems clear, despite the confusions in Zahor’s story, that he was never involved with Hekmatyar’s militia, and there seems little reason to doubt that the deaths of his brothers were attributable to his conflict with HIG.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk,as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted, in a description of his conduct in Guantánamo that failed to mention his obviously severe mental health issues, that, on February 10, 2005, he “expressed the idea to commit self-harm,” and, on other occasions, had “tried to hurt himself by banging his head against the cell.” It was also noted, again without comment, that he “repeatedly refuse[d] to obey the rules of the guard force and the cell block,” and had “a history of harassing the guard force.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan, updating a similar recommendation that was made on March 20, 2004, although he was not released for another 19 months (and two years and nine months after he was first recommended for release).

Abdullah Khan (ISN 950, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdullah Khan, who was 43 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three villagers seized in Kandahar province on January 29, 2003, the other two being Haji Shahzada (ISN 952, released in April 2005), who was 46 years old, and Allah Nasir (ISN 951, released in August 2007) who was 55. The three were captured during house raids by Afghan soldiers, and Shahzada, a prominent landowner and the local representative for the Karzai government, explained that it happened after an enemy of his told a false story to the Americans, who believed it.

In Guantánamo, Shahzada explained, “In Afghanistan they heard that American forces are providing $25,000 to capture each Arab and $15,000 to capture each Afghan. Is it [that] you want to buy people with money? The enemy who sold me for $15,000 to you, I will charge him $200,000 and I will make sure that I hand all of his family to you, so they will work like me in Cuba.” Warning that capturing innocent people like him was a sure way of turning the population against the Americans, he also said, “this is just me you brought but I have six sons left behind in my country. I have ten uncles in my area that would be against you. I don’t care about myself. I could die here, but I have 300 male members of my family there in my country. If you want to build Afghanistan you can’t build it this way … I will tell anybody who asks me that this is oppression.”

Ludicrously, most of the allegations against Shahzada centered on Khan, a poor shopkeeper who had just sold him a dog. Captured at Shahzada’s house, and accused of being Khairullah Khairkhwa, the governor of Herat (who had been in US custody since February 2002), he was also accused of being an airfield commander for the Taliban, and the ridiculous exchanges in his tribunal at Guantánamo are available here. The third man, Nasir, was an old family friend of Shahzada. An ethnic Uzbek, he was a poor shopkeeper, and was also subjected to ludicrous allegations: that he worked for the Saudi charity al-Wafa in Herat, and that he was involved in an international bomb plot, although he was even less fortunate than Khan, as he was not released until August 2007.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khan was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 20, 2005, in which he was also identified as Kheirallah and Mullah Khair Khah, and it was noted that he was born in 1956. It was also noted that he was “in good health,” even though he had ”some chronic diseases.” By way of explanation, it was stated that he had “Type II Diabetes, treated with oral medications,” and was “currently on the following medications: Glucophage, Avandia, Glipizide, Zocor, Tricor, and Amitriptyline.”

In Khan’s file, the Joint Task Force conceded upfront that, “due to name similarities [he] was misidentified as the former Taliban Commander of Kandahar Airfield,” and explained that he “was captured shortly after it was reported that Haji Khairullah, a former Taliban commander of Kandahar airfield, was sighted in Kandahar city and had attended a meeting with a number of other individuals to discuss attacks aimed against US or coalition forces.” In another shocking demonstration of the inept gathering and processing of intelligence, the fact that the real suspect, Khairullah Khairkhwa, was in US custody and had been since February 2002, was again ignored, with the Task Force noting that it had been “assessed through current reporting that the Haji Khairullah whom the detainee was mistaken for is still working with the Taliban,” and “was conducting Anti-Coalition Militia operations against US/Coalition forces as of early 2005.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he was married with eight children (three sons and five daughters), and was a storeowner from Uruzgan province, who, for the 15 years before his capture, had, with his father, run a store that “sold foodstuffs, makeup, plastic flowers, and fabric for clothing.” His only military history involved two years fighting against the Russians in the 1980s, and, latterly, “three months as a conscript serving food for the Taliban.”

On January 27, 2003, Khan said that he traveled to Kandahar to sell goods at a bazaar, where he met Haji Shahzada (described as Haji Shah Zadah) and another man named Miram Zah (who is probably Allah Nasir). Shahzada invited the two men to stay the night at his house, but after they left the bazaar on foot and walked through another bazaar, Khan “saw his enemies, Mullah Noor Jan and Omar Jan.” He explained that they “spoke briefly and [he] said he would visit them in a few days.”

He and Shahzada and Zah then took a car to Shahzada’s house, where they stayed the night, and, the following evening, after the three men “had spent the entire day listening to the radio and playing with [Shahzada's] five children,” Shahzada told them “to stay another night since it was raining.” That night (January 29, 2003), Khan “was awakened by a noise and was arrested along with five others,” although only he and Shazada and Allah Nasir “were actually detained,” and he explained that “Mullah Noor Jan arranged for the arrest because of a longstanding feud.” The Task Force confirmed that the three men “were believed to have been involved in a meeting to discuss plans of attack against US and coalition forces,” even though it was later realized that this belief was completely ungrounded.

He was sent to Guantánamo on February 16, 2003, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Mullah Berader and Saifullah Mansour, Taliban Air Command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, and logistics capabilities [and] Planned attacks against US/coalition forces.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force once more acknowledged the mistakes that had been made, noting that it was “assessed that US/Coalition forces erroneously identified” Khan, and that “[i]n-depth research of all national-level counter-terrorism databases failed to provide reporting to support original claims that [he] was the Former Taliban Commander of Kandahar Airbase.” It was also noted that there was “a lack of reporting to support the original accusations that [he] was involved in planning future attacks against US/Coalition Forces.”

By way of explanation, the Task Force claimed that Khan “used the alias Khairullah or Mullah Khair Khah, which led to[him] being connected to a report received on 25 January 2003,” which “stated that Mullah Khair Khah [actually Khairkhwa], the former Taliban Commander of Kandahar airfield, had been sighted in Kandahar City, AF, and would be returning in two days to finish conducting business.” However, revealing again how shambolic the entire intelligence operation was, the Task Force also claimed that Haji Khairullah (i.e. Khairullah Khairkhwa), identified as the brother of Mullah Shahzada (not Haji Shahzada), and “the actual Taliban Commander of Kandahar Airfield,” reportedly “attended a Taliban meeting with 40 other Taliban commanders in 2004,” even though, as I explained above, and as should have been blindingly obvious, the real Khairkhwa was in US custody and had been since February 2002. Despite this, the claim about the 2004 meeting, rather than the fact that Khairkhwa was already in US custody, was used by an analyst to indicate that the claim that he “was originally captured and thought to be the Taliban Kandahar Airfield commander” was wrong, and he “had been misidentified.”

It was also noted that unspecified “[a]dditional reporting,” indicated that Khan (when regarded as Mullah Khair Khah) “was believed to have a cache of weapons,” although, unsurprisingly, “none were found at the time of his capture.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and also of posing “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although, despite the fact that his capture was so clearly a case of mistaken identity, he was “assessed as being a low-level member of the Taliban or Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” which was an outrageous claim, as no evidence whatsoever was provided to indicate that there was any truth to it. It was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant, aggressive, and belligerent.”

As a result of the above, Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a previous recommendation that he be transferred to continued detention in Afghanistan (dated March 29, 2004), instead recommended him for release, in a decision that was “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment” — in other words, the discovery that his was a case of mistaken identity. Even so, it took another nine months until he was released.

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

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

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

This is Part 28 of the 70-part series. 348 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, this latest ten-part series covers the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006) and readers will, I hope, realize that almost all of these prisoners were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice. The largest groups released by nationality in 2006 were Saudis (45 in total — 15 in May 2006, 14 in June and 16 in December) and Afghans (35 in total — 7 in February, 5 in August, 16 in October and 7 in December).

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

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America. Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo. Part Seven featured more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006, and this part features more mental health issues, another juvenile, three men sent to live in Albania because it was not safe for them to be returned to their home countries, and the last of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. Also see Part Nine and Part Ten.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2006 (Part Eight of Ten)

Abdullah Al Qahtani (ISN 652, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, after his release, Abdullah al-Qahtani, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, told the newspaper Asharq Alawsat that, in Afghanistan, he had taken part in the Taliban’s military conflict, which he described as “skirmishes with the Russians and allies such as Ahmad Shah Massoud,” and also said that, after the US-led invasion began, he and a number of other Arabs negotiated a surrender with the Northern Alliance, and were surprised when they were handed over to the Americans.” In contrast, the Pentagon’s limited allegations are here.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Qahtani was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated December 3, 2004, in which he was also identified as Abdulla Hamid al-Qahtani and Abdullah Mohammed, born in 1979, and it was also noted that he had latent TB, in common with many of the prisoners, but refused therapy “after three treatments.” It was also noted that he had “been seen for tooth decay” and “had a left 5th metatarsal fracture (foot) noted on x-ray after ankle injury,” for which he “received therapy” — for “chronic ankle pain.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after one year of high school, “he worked for his father in a family owned business,” and then, in January 2001, met Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi (ISN 5, released in December 2007, and also identified as Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi) who was identified as “the national director of Al-Wafa in Afghanistan/Pakistan.” A Saudi-based charity which was demonstrably involved in humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Al-Wafa was also regarded as a front for terrorism, and was blacklisted by the US, and defined by the Intelligence Interagency on Counter Terrorism (IITC) “as a Tier 2 NGO,” meaning an organization that has “demonstrated the intent and willingness to support terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests.”

Al-Matrafi apparently recruited al-Qahtani, and his cousin Jabir al-Qahtani (ISN 650, released in November 2007), “to establish an Al-Wafa organisation in Lahore, Pakistan,” and in early February 2001 gave him $200 for travel expenses. After he and his cousin took a three-week vacation in Egypt, they met al-Matrafi in Lahore in April 2001, and “were driven to a large storage facility in Lahore,” where al-Matrafi told them “they would be accountable for all goods received from the United Arab Emirates and take regular inventories.” They apparently “lived on the second floor of the storage facility and were told by [al-Matrafi] to keep a low profile and not to be seen by the local populace.” Al-Jabrani explained that he “was told this [was] because he was a foreigner and it would make people in the area suspicious,” and said that he was also “introduced to a local Pakistani, Muhammad Gola, who was the acting director of the Al-Wafa office in Lahore, PK, and was told if he needed anything [to] talk to Gola.”

In September 2001, having not been paid, al-Qahtani said that he asked al-Matrafi “to pay him so he could travel back to Saudi Arabia,” and al-Matrafi told him that “if they travel[ed] to Afghanistan they would be paid the back wages plus any time worked while in Afghanistan.” He and his cousin agreed and traveled to Kabul, where they met al-Matrafi “in his villa” in the Wazir Akbar Khan District of Kabul, and where, according to al-Qahtani, he “was only paid $3000.00 USD.” He and his cousin then “continued working for Al-Wafa in the Wazir Akbar Khan District until captured by Northern Alliance on [sic] November 2001.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 3, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Activities of the Al-Wafa organisation under Abdul Aziz aka Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi, Aspects of Al-Wafa funnelling financial support to illicit purposes, Lahore, PK, and Kabul, AF, offices of Al-Wafa [and] Recruitment procedures and network for Al-Wafa in Mecca, SA.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

Given what he said after his release, it may be worth considering that, in this latter period, he may not have been working for Al-Wafa as he stated, but I see no reason to dispute the whole of the story of his humanitarian work with Al-Wafa, although this is what the Task Force did. Noting that he was assessed as being “affiliated with Al-Wafa” and “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” the US authorities were deeply suspicious about al-Qahtani’s claim that he “was promised over $6000.00 USD for working six months in Pakistan,” which was regarded as “an excessive amount of money since the average employee of Al Wafa was paid between $250- $300 USD per month.” It was claimed that Al Wafa “was known for providing money transfers for Al-Qaida” (although this allegation was never actually tested in an objective manner), and that, as a result, it was “possible that [al-Qahtani] was involved in that activity or distributing money to Mujahideen as they were exiting Afghanistan.”

In addition, it was noted that it had been “assessed that he [was] possibly a higher-ranking employee in the Al-Wafa or other extremist organization and received weapons training at Al-Wafa’s training camp in Kabul, Afghanistan (AF), and did not work in an alleged ‘warehouse’ in Lahore, PK, which research has proven to be non-existent.”

As a result of all these doubts, al-Qahtani was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a high force protection threat,” with “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and “multiple acts of assault on his disciplinary record,” who had “routinely been aggressive and ha[d] two incidents of forced cell extractions,” had “incited disturbances on many different blocks and fail[ed] to act within the detention facility SOP.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although he was not released for another 17 months, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Khudaidad (ISN 655, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Khudaidad (aka Khudai Dad), who was 45 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in a night-time raid by Afghan soldiers in Uruzgan in April 2002. It was alleged that his compound was used by Mullah Berader, a senior figure in the Taliban, that he himself was a Taliban official and that he was supposed to “assume a prominent leadership role in Kandahar,” but he said that he was actually just a poor farmer.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khudaidad was an “Update Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Kudai Dat, born in 1957, and it was noted that he had been “diagnosed with Schizophrenia,” although it was also claimed that he was “otherwise in good health.”

In fact, Khudaidad had severe mental health problems, as was revealed in an attachment from the “JTF GTMO Behavioral Health Service and the Behavioral Science Consultation Team,” who reported that he “began to report symptoms of anxiety in November 2002, which resulted in his being hospitalized for acute symptoms of psychosis.” In January 2003, “he was referred to the transfer assessment team, which conducted a final interrogation,” and “was not interrogated again” for several months “while his file was being processed.” According to JTF GTMO’s daily incident reports, “he often refused his medication during this period,” but “[h]is condition improved, and he was cleared for a polygraph examination.” However, when this was to take place, he “began to have hallucinations again, and the polygraphers determined he was mentally unfit to examine.” It was also noted that it was “consistent with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, controlled with medication, for an individual to react to increased stress with psychotic symptoms.”

In July 2003, “he was started on a monthly dose of an antipsychotic to assist with compliance with his medication regimen.” It was noted that he then “responded well” to monthly does of Haldol Decanoate, and was “free of psychosis.” However, it was also noted that he could “be expected to experience intermittent difficulties related to psychosis over time without constant supervision of medication compliance,” and would “require continued psychiatric follow-up upon return to his native country.” Regarding his planned repatriation, it was noted that he would “require a mental health escort and supplemental medications ‘as needed’ in-flight,” and it was also noted that “[h]is long-term prognosis appear[ed] poor.”

Despite this, the “Update Recommendation,” following up on a recommendation that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another movement,” which was based on an assessment that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader” (dated March 22, 2003), included “New Information,” which led to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller’s recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, and was “contrary to his statements that he [was] nothing more than a farmer.”

According to “sensitive reporting,” which was not specified, Khudaidad was “referred to as a Mullah,” and “was possibly involved in negotiations between Mullah Omar and other Pashtun commanders for control of Kandahar during the disintegration of the Taliban regime.” According to this account, he “would have been acting in a leadership position,” but this was not convincing, given the use of the word “possibly.”

It was also noted that, “according to new information,” his claim that “he had only two brothers,” was untrue, as “he may have as many as seven brothers,” although, again, this was not presented as a hard fact. Related to this was a claim that he “supplied biographical information on a senior Taliban facilitator by the name of ‘Zainullah,’” who was regarded as a “possible brother” of his.

In addition, although it could not be confirmed that there was any significance to the claim that the compound where he was seized was “identified as the last known location of Mullah Berader and other top Taliban commanders,” and Khudaidad “denie[d] any knowledge of these individuals or of Taliban involvement in his town,” it was noted that his home “remain[ed] the center of Taliban resistance to the current government of Afghanistan,” and the authorities were deeply suspicious about that.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” It was also noted, evidently by the guard force, and evidently without having ever been apprised of his severe mental health issues, that he had “shown by his actions in the cell that he ha[d] little regard for himself and [would] not listen to authority,” and that he had “refused medications, banged his head against the floor, exposed himself to others, and in general ha[d] been non-compliant.” Most alarmingly, given what was indicated elsewhere about his mental health, it was also noted that, “at many times, [he] trie[d] to make it appear that he [was] suffering from a mental breakdown,” when, in fact, he probably was.

As a result of the Task Force’s intelligence and threat assessments, Maj. Gen. Miller made his recommendation, although the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as a low risk. However, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF [deferred] to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a medium risk.” CITF’s opinion may eventually have prevailed, but not for another 23 months.

Rashid Al Uwaydah (ISN 664, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Rashid al-Uwaydah, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he arrived in Pakistan in July 2001 “to escape possible arrest by the Saudi authorities for drug dealing,” but hoped nevertheless to buy drugs in Pakistan to sell in Saudi Arabia. After losing his passport, he was arrested in Islamabad with some Libyans he had met, who, he said, were from an official group recognized by the Libyan government, but who the Americans claimed were “helping Arabs get out of Pakistan.” It has not, to date, been possible to identify what happened to the Libyans seized with al-Uwaydah.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Uwaydah was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 15, 2004, in which he was also identified as Rashid Awwad Rashid al-Uwaydha, born in 1976, and it was noted that he was “in good health, although he complain[ed] of acid reflux.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he said, as he did in his review board at Guantánamo, that he “left Saudi Arabia to avoid being arrested for selling and smuggling pills in Saudi Arabia,” and “was advised by a Pakistani hashish smuggler” to go to Pakistan, where he was provided with a contact. He apparently arrived in Pakistan in June 2001, and planned to stay for a month before returning to Saudi Arabia.

Al-Uwaydah said that “he never attended any Taliban or Al-Qaida (AQ) affiliated training camps,” either in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, where, he said, he had never set foot. On approximately January 20, 2002, he was arrested by the Pakistani police “while residing at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Islamabad.” He was transferred to US custody on April 5, 2002, and the circumstances of his transfer to Guantánamo were not known to the Task Force, as it was stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, which was obviously impossible, and, in addition, it was “not documented in [his] file why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

In assessing his story, the Joint Task Force noted, bluntly, that his “cover story of going to Pakistan to buy drugs and never entering Afghanistan [was] untrue,” although there was little information provided to establish if this was indeed the case. The Task Force noted that it was “unclear if [he] was arrested with a group of Libyans that were operating in the same hotel,” as he claimed, but the US authorities had no witnesses to any of his activities, only a few dubious claims that his name was found on Al-Qaida-related documents recovered from house raids.

Particularly significant was the fact that his name “was listed as one of 77 Saudi nationals whom a visiting Saudi Delegation considered to be of low intelligence value,” and “indicated the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to have these 77 detainees transferred to Saudi Custody for possible prosecution.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it should be noted that he was assessed as being a high risk, and the words “medium to” were added in a hand-written note. In assessing the risk he allegedly posed, the Task Force claimed that he “appear[ed] to be well connected to key facilitators in the Al-Qaida’s [sic] intemational terrorist network, ha[d] probably participated in terrorist training and hostilities against the US and coalition forces, and maintain[ed] the capability to continue to do so if released,” and therefore, it was “imperative” that he be ”retained in the custody of the US Government or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Govenment,” because his “continued detention [would] allow for further exploitation of his past affiliation with various terrorist groups and prevent him from engaging in further terrorist activity.”

The Task Force also declared him to be “an extremely hostile, radical Islamic,” whose threat assessment was “high,” because he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” had “aggressively assaulted the guards and ha[d] made many threats towards the guards.” As a result, it was perhaps surprising that Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although it was noted that this decision only applied “if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence,” and that, “If a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached for his continued detention in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he should be retained under DoD control.”

The Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as “a medium risk on 7 May 2004,” but CITF deferred to JTF GTMO’s assessment that he posed “a medium to high risk,” in “the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” but even with the Task Force’s conditions, he was not released for another 19 months, and was then put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, Russia) Released in November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Zakirjan Asam (aka Zakirjan Hassam), from Saratov Oblast, part of the Russian Federation bordering Kazakhstan, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled below — the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718).

In Chapter 14, I explained how Asam, a refugee, said in Guantánamo that he was deported from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan in spring 2001, and was betrayed, after the US-led invasion began, by Afghan villagers anxious to avail themselves of the reward money offered by the Americans for vulnerable individuals who could be passed off as members of Al-Qaida or the Taliban. He explained that the inhabitants of two villages in Kunduz province negotiated between themselves and asked him to pay them a $3,000 bribe or they would hand him over to the Americans. He said that “they knew they could sell me to the Americans for $5,000,” and that they explained to him that “because I am a Muslim they lowered the price for me.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Asam was  an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 25, 2005, in which he was misidentified as an Uzbek, and it was noted that he was born in May 1974. It was also noted that he “was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder with psychotic features and a non-specific psychosis,” and that he “suffer[ed] from migraine headaches.” It was also noted that he was taking “three psychiatric medications to control his illness,” and that the only restriction on his ability to travel (in other words, to be released from Guantánamo) was the requirement “to have his migraine and psychiatric medications available for the flight.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, after working as an auto mechanic, he moved to Kazakhstan in 1999, where he “was employed as a wheat farmer and construction laborer” until the spring of 2001, when Kazakh officials arrested him “due to lack of identification paperwork.” He was then apparently turned over to Tajik government officials “and was housed for two and a half months in a house with two unarmed guards,” before being “placed on a helicopter with a ‘Red Crescent’ emblem on the side and flown to Afghanistan,” where he was “put in a truck and transported to Kunduz.”

There, he said, he studied in a mosque, and, from May to November 2001, shared a house outside of the city “with eight women and three other males,” where he “maintained the generator for room and board.” When the US-led invasion reached Kunduz, he “fled to the mountains where he stayed for three days,” until Northern Alliances forces captured him “while he and two Uzbek-ethnic Afghans were sitting by a fire,” although “he was the only individual arrested.”

He was then taken to Dasht-e-Archi, where he was held in a house with “a group of unidentified Afghans for 25 days,” and where his captors said that, if he could raise $300, he would be freed. They then “released him to be able to acquire the funds,” but he “was later recaptured and jailed for one month before being turned over to US forces.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] and their activities in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that Asam was “assessed as being a probable member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” although no witnesses were found who had identified him, and all that the Task Force had to go on were similarities to the stories of others, which is hardly very convincing. It may be that he was an IMU recruit, as his story was full of holes, although there were certainly also a number of other strange stories circulating, concerning Afghanistan, the IMU and the countries to the north, indicating that men like Asam had been deported to Afghanistan, or deported and pressed into military service, meaning that his willingness, if he was indeed recruited, was difficult to gauge.

Above all, though, his mental health problems plagued his case, and, it seems to me, made any kind of objective assessment impossible. He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” but part of that assessment involved a claim that his “psychological disorders may make him vulnerable to recruitment or manipulation by Islamic extremist organisations, who would exploit this vulnerability to utilize him to conduct terrorist activities.” It was also noted, in an analysis of his conduct (presumably submitted by the guard force) that he was “extremely violent and ha[d] been labeled as a psychiatric patient,” that he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and that he had “six self-harm incident reports on record.”

Although it had been recommended that he be retained in DoD control on December 20, 2003, Brig. Gen. Hood drew on “information obtained since [his] previous assessment” to recommend that he be transferred to another country for continued detention, although this “information” was not specified. Of course, as the government evidently regarded it as unsafe to return him to Russia, the transfer recommendation was meaningless, as no third country would accept a former prisoner and then imprison them on America’s behalf. As a result, the trigger for his release was the decision, by his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, that he was not an ‘enemy combatant,” although it still took over a year and a half for a country to be found — Albania — that was prepared to accept him.

Since his release, no information has been provided regarding his mental health issues or how he has coped with his new life in a country that has offered him shelter, but very little in the way of support.

Salah Ahmed Al Salami (ISN 693, Yemen) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, al-Salami (generally identified in Guantánamo as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), who was 25 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi (who was just 17 at the time of his capture), and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, and all three were long-term hunger strikers, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before their deaths.

The administration’s response to the deaths was extraordinarily callous. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.” Stung by international criticism, the administration rapidly back-tracked, and Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was put forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. In the case of al-Salami, one of 15 men seized in a raid on a student house in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, the same night that Abu Zubaydah, who was later tortured and became one of the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoners,” was seized. After al-Salami’s death, the Pentagon alleged, without providing any evidence at all, that he was “a mid- to high-level Al-Qaida operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Although none of the men had taken part in any tribunals, more detailed allegations against al-Salami surfaced in the alleged evidence against him in his CSRT, although a close inspection of the allegations reveals that they were mostly made by unidentified “members” of Al-Qaida, either in Guantánamo or in other secret prisons: “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator” identified him, another senior Al-Qaida figure — a “lieutenant” — identified him as being “associated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the “Al-Qaida weapons trainer from Tora Bora” allegedly identified him from his time in Kabul and at the Khaldan training camp. He was also identified as “an Al-Qaida courier,” and as someone who “worked directly for Osama bin Laden’s family.” Shorn of these allegations, which summon up images of various supposedly “significant” prisoners being shown photos of tier fellow prisoners — in what was known as the “family album” — in painful circumstances, the only other allegation was that the “Issa” guest house received the equivalent of jihadi junk mail: apparently, the residents of the house “routinely received endorsement letters from a well-known Al-Qaida operative” to attend the Khaldan camp.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Salami was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated October 1, 2004, in which he was not identified by his real name, but only as Ali Abdullah Ahmed and Ali Abdullah Saleh, and it was noted that he was born in August 1979, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had “a history of hunger striking and nephrolithiasis (kidney stones).”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, he “was a street vendor who sold clothing,” but “had been thinking about religious education for a long time and was prompted to travel to Pakistan to receive this education upon hearing God’s calling.” Around May 2001, “he quit his job, left his young wife, spent $500 USD on a passport, visa, and plane ticket,” which “was good for a return trip up to one year after purchase,” and flew from Sana’a to Karachi.”

After a week in Karachi, he took a bus to Faisalabad, where he “enrolled in Jamea Salafia University and began religious studies.” He said that he “was living in on-campus dormitories for five to six months,” but, about one month after the 9/11 attacks, “was asked to move out of the dorms on-campus,” and, “with several other Arab students, moved to an off-campus safehouse ran [sic] by a man named Issa.” He explained that, by the end of March 2002, he “was planning on staying in Pakistan until his plane ticket was just about to expire (another month and a half), but his plans were cut short” when Pakistani authorities raided the house, which was identified as the Crescent Textile Mill, on March 28, 2002.

He was then turned over to US authorities, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 19, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on: The safehouse in Faisalabad, PK, which was used to house foreign students who were attending the Jamea Salafia University [and] Routes of ingress between Yemen and Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force stated its belief that he was “using the guise of studying Islam at the Jamea Salafia University while residing at the Issa safehouse as a cover story to conceal his true activities in Pakistan/Afghanistan.” An analyst pointed out that the Jamea Salafia University was “a religious madrassa (school) and not a state-funded or state-regulated school,” and that “[r]eligious madrassas in Pakistan are perceived to encourage militancy, religious extremism, and intolerance while thriving on anti-Western sentiment,” which may well have been true, but it did not mean that al-Salami was not a student.

It was also noted that he was captured “with fifteen others, many of whom have been identified by senior Al-Qaida personnel,” although this claim was extremely difficult to corroborate. What was clear was that Abu Zubaydah had some sort of connection with the house, but it was unclear exactly what that connection was, beyond being a place where, on occasion, men fleeing Afghanistan — whether as combatants of civilians was unclear — could be housed.

It was certainly not appropriate for the Task Force to declare that “The Issa safehouse was under the control of Abu Zubaydah, an Al-Qaida top lieutenant and aid to Osama bin Laden,” as the house was under the control of the Pakistani named Issa, and the claims about Zubaydah were and are wildly exaggerated.

As  a result, it was worth regarding with skepticism an analyst’s note that, although ”[s]everal Arabs captured at the Issa safehouse ha[d] used the same rigid cover story that they were merely educating themselves and studying Islam,” it was possible that “the house could have been used as a collection point for Al-Qaida members seeking and returning from Al-Qaida terrorist training.”

There are also grave doubts about the legitimacy of a raft of other claims made by Zubaydah and others seized with him in another house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002. Zubaydah, for example, allegedly “identified” al-Salami, claiming that he had seen him in Kandahar with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and that “he might have seen detainee in Kandahar three or four times,” but there is no reason to trust this statement, and nor is there any reason to trust a statement made by Abu Yasir Al-Jaza’iri, described as “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator,” who “identified” al-Salami, and made a number of outlandish claims about him, as al-Jaza’iri was a “ghost prisoner,” also seized in Pakistan in March 2003, whose whereabouts have never been explained by the US government. Either held in secret CIA torture prisons, or in Pakistani custody, his testimony is, therefore, probably as unreliable as that of Abu Zubaydah.

Al-Jaza’iri apparently said that al-Salami’s cousin was arrested on arrival in Karachi in 1999 “due to visa violation issues,” and al-Salami “was sent by the family to secure his cousin’s release from jail.” He also said that he first met al-Salami at a guesthouse in Kandahar in the spring of 2000 and “place[d] him back in Pakistan in late 2000 assisting in efforts to release his cousin.” It was also al-Jaza’iri who claimed that he was “an Al-Qaida courier,” and he also claimed that he “was the younger brother of Assadallah al-Sindhi, a popular Al-Qaida member killed in 1996,” and also, most outrageously, it seems to me, that al-Salami “and his cousin Nadim were responsible for caring for the logistics of the families of [Osama bin Laden]‘s son-in-laws, Awa al-Madani and Abdallah al-Madani, that included travel arrangements, lodging, and healthcare arrangements.” An analyst noted that this claim “establishe[d] the detainee’s stature in relation to UBL and adds validity to Zubaydah’s statements identifying that detainee associated with Senior Al-Qaida Operational Planner KSM,” but it does no such thing, as there is no indication that any of it is true.

Other dubious claims were made by Noor Uthman Muhammed (ISN 707, captured with Zubyadah), and described as the “Al-Qaida trainer from Tora Bora,” who allegedly identified al-Salami as having been in Kabul and at the Khaldan camp, although no further details were provided to corroborate his claims, and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014), another “high-value detainee” held in secret CIA prisons, and sent to Guantánamo in September 2006 with Zubaydah, KSM and 11 others. Bin Attash, described as a “senior Al-Qaida operational planner,” said that he “recognized detainee by his distinct birthmark, but cannot remember any details,” which is also meaningless as an allegation.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium to high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he had “a history of aggressive behaviour in the camp, often defiantly failing to comply with instructions.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be retained under DoD control, and he went on to resume the “history of hunger striking” and resistance to his detention identified in his file until his death 20 months later. What is particularly sad, reading through this file, is that, although JTF GTMO notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of its recommendations on October 1, 2004, CITF did not agree, having “assessed [him] as a low risk on 12 April 2004.”

In spite of the government’s official account of the men’s deaths, the claim that they committed suicide was doubted by their fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

In December 2009, the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the official investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and in January 2010, Harper’s Magazine published an extraordinary article by law professor Scott Horton (which I discussed here), revealing the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed” by the NCIS — who suggested that, earlier in the evening on which the men allegedly committed suicide, they had been taken from the cell block in which they were held to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions. “They didn’t die in their cells,” Sgt. Hickman explained to me in March 2010.

Despite these claims, the Justice Department shut the door on a proposed inquiry in November 2009, and an attempt by family members (including al-Zahrani’s father) to pursue accountability in the US courts was turned down in September 2010, and is currently being appealed.

Jamal Kiyemba (ISN 701, Uganda) Released February 2006

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Jamal Kiyemba, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born in Uganda, but had been a British resident since the age of 14, when he was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK following the death of his father and came to live in the UK with his mother, eventually embarking on a degree in pharmacy at Leicester De Montfort University that he never completed.

Although he lived in the UK for eight years, Kiyemba never claimed British citizenship, and on his release, he was sent to Uganda, and home secretary Charles Clarke prohibited him from setting foot in the UK again. As was reported in an article about him in the Mail on Sunday after his release, he told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, “I may not be British according to some bit of paper but in reality I am a Brit and always will be. My doctor, my local mosque, my teens, my education, employment, friends, taxes, home and above all else my family — it is all in Britain.” In contrast to this account, the limited allegations against him in Guantánamo are available here.

Kiyemba was arrested in March 2002 in Pakistan, where he went to study Arabic and the Koran because it was “very cheap,” without ever having set foot in Afghanistan, although he admitted that he was taught how to use a Kalashnikov by a Pakistani he met, and that he “left England with the intention of finding a way to fight jihad” in Afghanistan, “to defend the Muslims who were being killed.” After his arrest, he was held for two months, beaten by Pakistani intelligence officers, threatened with torture and then transferred to Bagram.

In Chapter 14, I explained how, in describing Bagram, Kiyemba recalled a 48-hour period, when he was “hung on the door for two hours and then allowed to sit for half an hour but never allowed to sleep,” and was then taken for interrogation for two hours at a time, adding, “I had to kneel on the cold concrete throughout the interrogations with my cuffed hands above my head.” He was also interviewed by MI5 officers, who showed him photos of supposed terrorists in the UK and told him they would only be able to help him if he helped them, but he didn’t know any of them. He recognized Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, but had only ever seen them on TV.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kiyemba was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated November 3, 2004, in which the Joint Task Force recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” following his last assessment, dated August 2, 2004, in which he was actually recommended for “Release or transfer to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD).” The full details of this assessment were not included , although it was noted that he was assessed as being of low intelligence value, and of posing a medium risk.

In assessing his threat level, the Task Force claimed that he was “an admitted jihadist who attempted travel to Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks,” and that he was “committed to defending Islamic nations against aggression, citing any system like democracy which tries to end Islamic law is worthy of Jihad against it,” and “adding that such systems are ultimately oppressive.”

It was also claimed that he “had acquired support in the UK and abroad from tiered organisations” including the vast, apolitical missionary organization Jamaat al-Tablighi (which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for terrorism), and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and, additionally, it was claimed that he “received military training in the use of the AK-47 while in Peshawar, PK, from support members belonging to the LET.”

It was also noted that “Pakistani police arrested [him] near Peshawar where he was attempting to enter Afghanistan with three other men who also ended up in Guantánamo — Mohammed al-Amin (ISN 706, a Mauritanian released in September 2007, but described as having been “assessed as a low level jihadist”), Mustafa al-Hassan (ISN 719, a Sudanese prisoner released in October 2008, but described as “a suspected Al-Qaida operative”), and Amir Yacoub al-Amir (ISN 720, another Sudanese prisoner, released in May 2008, but “assessed as a probable Al-Qaida operative”).

On his return to Uganda, Kiyemba was “confined to a ‘safe house’” for two months, according to the Ugandan press, although it would seem fairer to explain that he was held under a form of house arrest for this period. On April 17, 2006, he told a reporter, Emmy Allio, “I am now a very happy man because I am free to live my life. I have visited all my relatives. This is the first time I am free since 2002.” He also said, “I did not expect anything good in Uganda but I was instead treated quite fairly. I thank the Uganda security for being good to me. I thank all Muslims in Uganda and elsewhere who have been praying for me.”

He added, “Last week, the Uganda security told me that I am a free man. The officer told me, ‘You are free to go out and live your life but be careful with wrong groups out there.’” A security source told the reporter that the Ugandan government “did not find any cause to continue to detain him,” although the official added, “He is a free man, but we shall nab him if he falls in wrong groups.”

Even so, as the reporter described it, “his joy upon being released has quickly brought misery. Kiyemba is afraid of the future, saying he does not know what to do, having dropped out of university in 2001 to join ‘an Islamic cause against western imperialists in Afghanistan’ after the Taliban fell.” At the time, he said, “I was ready to assist my brothers there in any possible way, financially or by holding a gun, to defend them,” but now, he said, “I am looking for a job. I want to complete the university course. I want to be independent. I need help. I am determined to complete my studies but I need my independence. I need to sustain myself, not be a burden to relatives.”

He was unwilling to speak about his experiences in US custody, stating only, “In Guantánamo Bay, it was more of psychological torture. As a Muslim, you must be prepared to suffer and die for your religion. Being in Guantánamo Bay taught me one thing: to be patient and to put my trust in God.”

There have been no recent reports about Jamal Kiyemba.

Ala Salim (ISN 716, Egypt) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ala Salim (aka Allah Saleem), a religious scholar who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, see below).

In Chapter 13, I explained, drawing on the Pentagon’s documents, how Salim was one of several dozen prisoners seized in house raids in Pakistan in 2002 (mainly in April and May) who were mostly working for charities regarded by the US authorities as fronts for terrorism. Those seized were, in general, office workers or teachers, but in some cases people who just happened to live at an address regarded as a house where “terror suspects” were being “harbored” were also seized.

Salim, who became an influential figure to the Arabs in Guantánamo, had lived until the age of 22 in Egypt, where, like thousands of other young men, he was arrested several times but never charged, and after living in Saudi Arabia he moved to Pakistan, where he was distributing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan for the International Islamic Relief Organization at the time of his capture.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Salim, identified as Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh, spoke to reporter Matthew Schofield, although the reporter noted upfront that, “After years of imprisonment, alleged torture, countless interrogations and unrelenting psychological pressure, there are some things that Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh won’t talk about. He won’t say why he was in Pakistan in late 2001 or early 2002, when he was arrested. He won’t talk about how he made a living. He won’t discuss why he can never return to Egypt, his country of birth, or his three previous arrests and — according to documents filed with the Albanian government — torture in those prisons.”

He did, however, discuss why he thought “there can be no doubt that he’s innocent of all terrorism charges and suspicions, and why “there can be no doubt that the US never had any evidence against him.” As he said (via an interpreter), “I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Is there any reason to believe that if the United States could produce any evidence against me, any evidence at all, they would have set me free? I was innocent when I was arrested. I am innocent now.”

Mazruh (Salim) said that “a US military tribunal at Guantánamo told him in 2005 that he was innocent.” McClatchy noted that “there are no public records to confirm that,” but added that the decision to “declare him no longer an enemy combatant” was “the closest [the US government has] come to admitting that it made mistakes.”

Describing him as a “timid, soft man,” the McClatchy article also noted that he recalled that the allegations against him — and specifically, a claim that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — “created waves of laughter” from his fellow prisoners, who, he said, told him, “You were his bodyguard? And he’s still alive? He’s still free, and he hires the likes of you to protect him? You need a bodyguard; how could you be one?”

Turning to his limited freedom in Albania, McClatchy noted that it was not “a freedom he cherishes.” Living in “a small room in a refugee center, in a walled complex on the edge of the capital, in a neighborhood of rutted and pitted gravel roads cut through by a trash-filled creek,” he was, in Schofield’s words, “trapped without knowing the language, without work or even a permit to work. His wife and children wait in northern Africa, and he’s filed a petition with the Albanian government to allow them to join him, a petition that other former detainees are watching closely because they haven’t seen their families since they were arrested, either.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Salim was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated July 2, 2004, in which he was identified as Allah Muhammed Salim, born in January 1967, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he “had a lung biopsy prior to detention,” had “a history of migraines,” and had also been a hunger striker.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after graduating from an Egyptian university in 1989, he was sponsored by a mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to travel to Islamabad to assist Afghan refugees. After explaining that he was “not allowed to train or fight in the Soviet-Afghan War due to his poor hearing and vision,” he said that he traveled to Peshawar, where he worked as an assistant storage supervisor for the [International] Islamic Relief Organization” until 1991, when he began ten years of religious study — six at a university in Peshawar, and four more at a university in Sadiqabad.

After the 9/11 attacks, however, “he heard that Americans were rounding up Arabs in Pakistan,” and an acquaintance “advised him to go to a larger city [Lahore] and stay with a Pakistani man called Wasim.” He did so, staying at the house “with five unidentified men,” but just ten days after his arrival he was seized by Pakistani police. he said that he “spent nearly 70 days in a Lahore, PK, prison, followed by two months in an Afghanistan prison.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “possibly has information pertaining to: Beit Al-Ansar, a Saudi charitable organization operating in Peshawar, PK [who he stayed with for ten days in 1989], A facility near the Pakistan border belonging to Jalal Al-Din Al-Haqqani [the Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani] in 1989 [and] Refugee operations and weapons training taking place at the “Center” [elsewhere described as being close to the Afghan/Pakistan border, and a place where, in 1989, he reportedly "went to see a famous, but unidentified, fighter who fought against the Russians"]. Ironically, when it came to attempts to justify his detention, the Task Force noted that he had “admitted that he [was] a jihadist, that he traveled to Pakistan to assist the Muslims in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviets,and that he would kill Russians if he had the opportunity” — exactly the same sentiments that, when he traveled to Pakistan in 1989, were being financially supported by the US government to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

Despite having no information about him indicating that he was involved in any way with militancy or terrorism, the Task Force nevertheless stated that he had been “associated with three terrorist organisations” — Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaida and Harkat Ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a Pakistani militant group that he allegedly “attempted to train with,” and with whom he allegedly worked, at “the Center,” which was “affiliated” with Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to US analysts. The main problem with this allegation was that this alleged involvement took place in 1989, when Haqqani was a US-funded ally against the Soviet Union.

The US authorities suggested that he had been “arrested twice in Egypt for distributing propaganda for the EIG [Egyptian Islamic Jihad],” and that he admitted in one interrogation that he was actually deported from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, rather than being sponsored by a mosque, but it is uncertain how much truth there is to these accounts, or how relevant what Salim was doing in the late 1980s was to his activities nearly 15 years later.

No satisfactory reason was given for his alleged involvement with Al-Qaida, although, in assessing the risk he posed, the Task Force stated that it was assessed that he was “very intelligent/educated” and had “provided support to multiple terrorist groups by organizing their finances and personnel.” Even though no evidence was provided to support this assertion, it was further claimed that his “poor vision and hearing and other medical problems [we]re probably valid, but this would make the perfect cover as being not useful to the fighting force and being underestimated by anti-terrorist forces.” In addition, it was claimed that “[t]hese disabilities would not hinder him from distributing material, collecting data, organizing records and delegating tasks to be completed by junior personnel.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because of the groundless assessment above, and an additional claim that, “by examining his attitude to pursue jihad,” the Task Force had decided that he had “performed hostilities against the US and coalition forces by supporting terrorist organizations in an administrative role.” It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally non-compliant and aggressive,” that he had been “preaching and teaching to the other detainees in an angry manner,” and, “[w]hen asked to stop, he continue[d],” that he had “involved himself in a riot,” had “participated in hunger strikes,” and had been “caught hoarding food.” In general, this section concluded, he had “refused to follow the guard force’s instructions.”

For this, he was, no doubt, regularly punished, but for the authorities, all that counted were the assessments of the risk he posed and his intelligence value, leading to Brig. Gen. Hood’s recommendation that he should be retained in DoD control, which lasted until a tribunal concluded, instead, that he was not an “enemy combatant,” and should be released, setting in motion the process that eventually led to his release in Albania.

Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, Algeria) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Fethi Boucetta, a teacher who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716, also see above).

In his tribunal in Guantánamo, Hamad Gadallah (ISN 712, released in July 2005), who was a Sudanese accountant for a charity, the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, that had fallen under US suspicion, mentioned that his downstairs neighbor, who did not work for the RIHS, had also been seized on the same day as him, May 27, 2002. The neighbour was Fethi Boucetta, one of three teachers, working in a school run by the Saudi Red Crescent, and the other two teachers were also captured at the same time. The Pentagon’s limited allegations against him are available here.

A doctor who fled Algeria in 1996 to avoid military service, Boucetta sought asylum in Pakistan, where he was taken on as a teacher by the Red Crescent. Speaking of the circumstances of his arrest, his lawyer told the Washington Post in May 2006 that the Pakistani police “went to his house and asked to speak with somebody else [Hamad Gadallah], and Fethi said he didn’t know that person and that he wasn’t there. [They] came back with Americans in plain clothes, and they said they wanted to question him. That’s when he was arrested.”

Despite being arrested by mistake, it took until May 2005 for the Americans to accept that he was a completely innocent man, and in the meantime the allegations that mounted up against him were staggering. It was alleged that he “reportedly was an active member of the Islamic Salvation Front” (the Algerian political party whose suppression by the army in 1992 provoked the civil war that began the following year), that he traveled to Afghanistan from the Yemen, where he taught from 1993 to 1996, “at the request of the Taliban” (he actually travelled to Pakistan and carried on teaching), that he “reportedly organized combatants to fight for the Taliban,” and that he “reportedly has organized extremist networks in Arab countries and has contacts throughout the Middle East.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Boucetta, identified as Abu Mohammed, told the reporter Matthew Schofield that, “[o]n the night the soldiers came for him, [he] was resting at home with his pregnant wife and five children.” He added that they “showed him a list of the men they were looking for,” and that “[t]he address for his building was on the list, but his name was not.” He added, “As they turned to leave, he asked the soldiers what they needed, but was told it was none of his concern.”

However, the soldiers returned 15 minutes later, and “asked whether they could look through his apartment.” He said that he remembered “thinking he had nothing to hide, so he stepped aside,” and was handcuffed, while the soldiers searched the house. They then “uncuffed him, apologized for the inconvenience and departed,” but they returned for a third time, and it was on this occasion that his nightmare began, when “they asked him to accompany them to a nearby office, to answer questions.”

Boucetta told McClatchy’s reporter, “I did not like to leave my family at night, but knew in my heart I had done nothing wrong, and I was not on their list — they showed it to me — so I knew I had nothing to fear.” That should have been the case, but instead, he did not see his wife and children again, and still had no idea “why he was taken away that night or why he then was told he was being taken home but instead was shackled, then flown to a US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Or why, after two months there, he was told that he was being taken home to his family but instead was flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, half a world away, where he was kept locked up for four more years, including 18 months after he was told that he was, in effect, innocent of charges that he says were never fully articulated.”

After asking, “So why was he arrested?” McClatchy analysed the supposed evidence, noting that, beyond simply dismissing the charges against him as laughable — the claim that he was a member of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, that he left Yemen for Afghanistan at the request of Al-Qaida, and that he helped recruit fighters — Boucetta “said he doubted that these could really be the reasons he was picked up.”

He explained that the Islamic Salvation Front “formed after he left Algeria in 1989,” and in any case he “was never a member,” and he also explained that he had ”worked as a doctor for a non-governmental organization in Afghanistan until 1992,” adding that it “would have been easy to find out that he hadn’t been back since,” and that “he’d been working for and with the United Nations and Red Crescent, the Islamic-nations version of the Red Cross, from that point on.”

The details in his story were pretty compelling. He explained that, from 1996 to 2002, his “medical license and passport needed to be renewed,” but he had “refused to return to Algeria and instead lived in a United Nations refugee camp in Pakistan,” where “he taught math and Arabic in a Red Crescent-sponsored school.” As a result, “there were multiple witnesses to his presence and many sign-in documents, none of which was brought before the tribunal” at Guantánamo. This was unsurprising, as the presumption was that everyone had been correctly designated as an ‘enemy combatant” on capture, even though no effort was made to ascertain whether or not prisoners had been seized by mistake, and it was, therefore, something of a miracle that even 38 prisoners were, like Boucetta, found not to be “enemy combatants” by their tribunals.

Highlighting further omissions, Boucetta said that, “although United Nations workers could have vouched for his presence in Pakistan — and, according to his attorney, spent years working for his release — US officials refused to listen to them,” and in the end he “boycotted his own hearing because he thought it was a sham.”

He also explained that throughout his detention — “both in Afghanistan, where he was made to stand for hours with his hands cuffed high above him, and in Cuba, where the punishment was far more psychologically than physically challenging” — he was repeatedly interrogated about Algeria, even though, as he said, “I told them, ‘I have not been in Algeria for 15 years.’” Despite this, he said, “They would ask about political movements there, and I had to say, honestly, that I had no idea what they were talking about.” All the questions, he explained, related to radical Islamist groups which “formed after he’d left Algeria.”

After explaining that he had been in Guantánamo “with two men he used to commute to work with in Pakistan, men with whom he was seen every day teaching at school and who, like him, were subjected to occasional home searches as refugees,” he said that the fact that he had become a refugee in Pakistan had aroused US suspicions, but stated that the reasons he didn’t want to return home had nothing to do with terrorism, and were, instead, to do with “a personal feud.”

As a result, he was stuck in Albania, reflecting on a broken promise by officials at Guantánamo, who “had promised him a home, a place where he could bring his family and start a new life.” Instead, he said, there was no work, and “no hopes of ever being able to provide a home and education for his children.” When asked about his life, he replied, “My life here? I wake in time to go to breakfast at the refugee center. That’s my life. There is nothing more.”

Even though he had so obviously been seized by mistake, the US authorities were determined to find reasons to justify his detention, hence the long list of allegations that I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, which duly surfaced in the classified documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. The file relating to him was a “Transfer Recommendation to Another Country for Continued Detention,” dated August 30, 2003, in which he was identified as Fatai Busita, born in 1963, and it was noted that he had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force presented all the allegations that were later dismissed by his tribunal at Guantánamo. It was noted that the left Algeria in 1987 after completing medical school, but an analyst claimed that this was because of the alleged terrorist connections that he later dismissed. It was also noted that he stated that he then traveled extensively through Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1989 to 1993, working for five different NGOs, including the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, which were all regarded as “known cover organisations for several terrorist groups including Al-Qaida,” even though this was generalized scaremongering at its worst, as the organizations he was working for were actually involved in humanitarian aid and charitable work.

The Task Force noted that he then traveled to Yemen in 1993, where, he said, he “got married, and found employment until 1996, when he bought a forged passport, and moved back to PK because he feared a crackdown on non-Yemeni Arabs,” and added that he “claimed” that “he worked as a teacher for primary and middle school, and as an Arabic teacher at a school funded by the Saudi Red Crescent Organization.”

Regarding his capture, it was stated that the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Directorate arrested him in Lahore “as part of a crackdown on Arabs in Pakistan in May 2002,” which was perhaps not meant to be what it sounded like — a confession that social cleansing was taking place, using terrorism as a cover. In further explanation, the Task Force claimed that the ISI “conducted a series of raids against suspected Al-Qaida residences and support facilities connected with the Afghan Support Committee,” adding that “[n]ine individuals were arrested including the detainee, all on suspicion of being Islamic extremists,” but neglecting to mention that Boucetta’s arrest was, very literally, an afterthought. It was also noted that he was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of NGOs in the Peshawar, PK area.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” but posed “a medium threat to the US,” because he had been “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and, more specifically — again without anything resembling evidence — that he was “an Al-Qaida member and ha[d] severed [sic] in that capacity for many years, becoming a hardened and trusted terrorist operative.” It was, however, particularly noted that he was “considered a high threat risk to the government of Algeria,” and also “a significant threat,” who “may be wanted there for his subversive activities.” In addition, although the Task Force claimed that he “refuse[d] to be cooperative concerning his role as an operative” — because he had no role as an “operative” — it was nevertheless claimed that he “may still also possess intelligence information that the Algerian government would find beneficial in its efforts to curtail extremism within Algeria.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended him for transfer to another country for continued detention, although he was not actually released for another three years and three months, and, after his tribunal intervened to discredit the allegations against him and to conclude that he was not an “enemy combatant,” it was also obvious that he could not be returned to Algeria, hence the long search for another country that was prepared to take him.

Shams Ullah (ISN 783, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners’,” I explained how Shams Ullah was seized by US forces, some months before his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, and, as I also explained in “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” was just 16 or 17 years of age when he was seized.

According to the US military, he had fired “a whole magazine of ammunition” at the American and Afghan soldiers who had stopped him during a patrol, but although Shams himself had vague recollections of the events, his uncle, Bostan Karim (ISN 975), who was seized some months later by US forces (and is still held in Guantánamo), noted that he had “a mental problem,” and gave an alternative explanation for the circumstances surrounding his capture, when he appeared as a witness at his review board hearing. “When the Americans came to our house there was a Kalashnikov in our house and he knew that the Americans would take this gun,” Karim said. “So, he took the gun and went to the mosque. The Americans asked him to stop and he didn’t stop, so they shot him and he became lame.”

As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles held at Guantánamo, Shams was never treated with anything approaching the kind of care that juveniles are required to receive under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, and in fact, in his book Enemy Combatant, the released British prisoner Moazzam Begg explained how the authorities’ disregard for Shams’ age — and his wounds — was apparent when they were held together at the US prison in Kandahar airport. “Shams had been shot in the upper thigh, and the bone was shattered so he couldn’t walk,” Begg wrote. “He couldn’t make it to the toilet, he couldn’t get his own medications, or his water, or his food. And he couldn’t wash, so he started smelling quite badly.”

Begg ended up teaching the boy how to walk again, and also explained the story of his capture, as it had been explained to him, which backed up the story told by Bostan Karim: “Shams told me the story of his wounds: US helicopters had descended one night and attacked his house during a sweep of the area. He fired his uncle’s weapon at them. They fired back. He was hit, and captured.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Shams Ullah was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated October 26, 2004, in which, essentially confirming his story, it was noted that he “was captured during a raid on his family compound in Khost, Afghanistan (AF), conducted by US Special Forces and Afghani Military Force (AMF) personnel,” and that, when the raid began, “he grabbed his AK-47 and went to hide it,” and, when the AMF ordered him to stop, “a firefight broke out,” and he fired his magazine full of ammo at the AMF forces, threw down his weapon and attempted to flee,” but “was shot in the hip and captured.”

It was also noted that the compound he was captured in belonged to his uncle, Bostan Karim, described as “a suspected Al-Qaida cell leader and bomb-maker” (although this has not been proved) “who was captured by Pakistani Forces at the Khurgi checkpoint in Pakistan on 13 August 2002 along with Abdallah Muhammad aka Wazir” (ISN 976, released in December 2007).

In addition, it was claimed that he was “a member of the Arbaqi security group,” which “provide[d] security to all merchants and their businesses at the bazaar located in Khost,” and, when it came to assessing him, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value,” and that, “[a]fter extensive searches on national-level counter-terrorism databases, no further intelligence ha[d] been collected or found” concerning him. It was also noted that he was assessed as posing “a Medium threat to the US and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, dated November 11, 2003, in which he was assessed as being a high risk, and of medium intelligence value, recommended instead that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD),” although he was not released for another two years.

Abdul Salaam (ISN 826, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Salaam, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was part of a family of businessmen from Bermel, in Paktika province, who were caught up in what the Americans described as “a sweep of the Bermel town bazaar,” which was as random as it sounds. Khan was seized with his brother Haji Osman Khan (ISN 818, released in March 2004), who was 50 years old, and 19-year old Noor Aslam (ISN 822, also released in March 2004), who was his cousin, and the family ran a hawala (a money exchange/forwarding business) with branches in Pakistan and the UAE. Salaam explained in a review board at Guantánamo that he was seized at his shop by American and Afghan soldiers, but he insisted that he was an honest businessman and had never received money on behalf of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He also explained that the money the family received at the hawala was from families outside the country who were supporting their families in Afghanistan.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Salaam was an “Update Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was also identified as Abdul Salam Ghulamjohn, born in 1975, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had been seen for “chronic low back pain, acid reflux, and constipation,” and was “currently on Zantac and Metamucil.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force managed only to flesh out the story he and his relatives had repeatedly told, Abdul Salaam said that his family business, established 30 years before, consisted of a “Hawala (money exchange/forwarding business), telephone public call office business, and limited travel reservations,” and that, after living with his family as a refugee in Miram Shah, Pakistan from 1983 to 2000, where he and his cousin opened a money transferring business that they operated for nine years, returned to Afghanistan and opened another money transferring business in Bermal with his brother, Haji Osman Khan.

It was also noted that, when pressed about the money transferring business, he “finally admitted to transferring large amounts of money, the largest being 2.5 million rupees, which equals to [sic] about 42 thousand US dollars,” and also explained how the business also involved another branch in the UAE, couriers, and an accountant in Afghanistan responsible for keeping money in a safe and distributing it.

The intention of all these questions was, of course, to demonstrate that the hawalas had been involved in transferring significant funds for Al-Qaida and/or the Taliban, but there was no truth in those suspicions, as the US authorities finally realized, although not until after he had been seized, sent to Guantánamo and held for up to three years before his innocence was more or less admitted.

In telling the story of his capture, he said that he “went to work on the morning of 7 September 2002,” but, approximately twenty minutes later, “three Afghan army soldiers and three US soldiers entered his shop” and “took his telephones and searched his store,” and “also confiscated five personal photographs that he had of himself, relatives and friends.” The soldiers also searched the shop next to his, where his accountant had his shop (and the safe), and then “led him away from his shop and took him to the Afghanistan Government building in town.” He “did not know why he was arrested, but believed that someone must have provided false information to the US or Afghan Governments,” which sounds like an accurate analysis.

After his capture, he was held first at Bagram, and was then sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Economic issues in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Foreign trade in Pakistan, Afghanistan,and the United Arab Emirates [and] Hawala money transfer system in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value to the US,” and also that he posed “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” This was, to be honest, another example of over-classification, as he was clearly of no intelligence value and did not pose a threat to the US at all, because, in a more thorough analysis of his case, it was stated unequivocally that he was “assessed as not being a member of the Taliban and/or Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” and that, although it “was first assessed [that he] was involved in money laundering operations,” the Task Force had concluded that “nothing ha[d] been found to support this claim,” after “reviewing all of the available documentation.”

It was also noted that it was “highly probable” that his “statements that he and his family [we]re honest businesspeople, ha[d] no connections to the Taliban or Al- Qaida, and ha[d] never transferred any money for or on behalf of the Taliban or Al-Qaida [we]re truthful.” The Task Force added “Through debriefings with relatives of detainee and other individuals who operated Hawalas in Pakistan (PK) and Afghanistan, it cannot be confirmed [he] was doing anything illegal.”

It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” and, as a result, the only remaining problems with his case were that, even after his release was recommended by Brig. Gen. Hood, it took another nine months for him to be freed, at which point he had pointlessly spent three years and four months in Guantánamo.

Qadir Khandan (ISN 831, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Qadir Khandan, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, was a pharmacist, who seems to have been a victim of the warlord Pacha Khan Zadran and his nephew, Jan Baz Khan, who lied about him to the Americans to get him arrested. Zadran was a US ally until it was finally realized that he was using them for his own ends, but along the way he was responsible for sending several men to Guantánamo on the basis that they were involved in anti-coalition activities, when they were actually his own enemies.

Khandan insisted in Guantánamo that he was “enemy number one of Jan Baz and Pacha Khan,” and got into trouble with them because, he said, he realized that, when they were working with the Americans, they were using them for their own ends. Arrested at his home in September 2002 and accused of running a safe house for a bomb-making cell, Khandan pointed out that he was working for the Karzai government in the National Security Office in Khost, and that, as a pharmacist, bombs were “truly against my ideology.”

He also explained that he was badly abused by American soldiers in a prison in Khost. “They put tight round glasses around my eyes, had my ears shut with plugs and I was covered with a bag,” he said, adding, “I was ordered to stand up 24 hours for 20 days in a row. I had blood coming out of my body and my nose for days because I was tortured so much.” Describing what appear to be otherwise unreported murders in US custody, he also said, “I saw four people die right in front of me.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khandan (identified as Qadar Khandan) he said that, “no matter how many times the American soldiers struck him,” he insisted that “he’d worked as a nurse for warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization during its fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s — when the US supported Hekmatyar — but that he’d broken off all links afterward.”

He told the same story to McClatchy’s reporter, but Ismail Khosti, the head of the Khost office of the Afghan Commission for Peace and Reconciliation, said that, despite sticking to is story, Khandan “was closely aligned with Hekmatyar.” Khosti said, “He was a commander for them in this province, not the top commander, but a commander. When the Taliban left Khost, there was a mujahideen (holy warriors) council formed, and Khandan was the only representative of Hezb-e-Islami on that council.”

McClatchy’s reporter noted that this association “appear[ed] to be what sent US troops to his door,” although Khandan was concerned to explain how US forces had abused him, stating that, when Special Forces operatives “took him to a nearby base and questioned him,” they “made him stand for two days straight with no food or water,” and “frequently punched him” and “played loud music and brought dogs in to bark and snap at him.”

Khandan “said he wouldn’t break down and confess,” and, McClatchy’s reporter noted, “it appears that he never did,” also noting that he remained angry about his experiences in US custody. From Khost, where, he said, he was deprived of food and water, he was sent to Kandahar for four days and then to Bagram for about five months.

On arrival at Bagram, he said, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped naked and photographed,” and then the questioning began again, and the Hekmatyar allegations that he persistently denied. “They told me to accept their charges or they would send me to isolation,” he said. “I told them they could send me to isolation for 10 years and those things would still not be true.”

He added that he was indeed sent to an isolation cell, “a small plywood box with metal bars over the top,” where guards “hung him by his wrists from the bars” and “left him there for 20 days, taking him down only for three 15-minute meal breaks and for the bathroom when he needed it.” He explained, “My heels weren’t touching the ground, only my toes, and I had on earphones, goggles and a hood. Three or four times I became unconscious. The guards would open the gate and come in and punch me in the stomach.”

Discussing Guantánamo, where he was sent early in 2003, Khandan said that his “experience with the interrogators was the same,” but that “no one hit him at Guantánamo.” He also said that he “told them, repeatedly, that he’d left Hekmatyar’s fold many years before,” but “was questioned every day during his first month,” although “then the sessions dropped to once a month, then once every two months and, at one point, almost a year.” He also said that “he spent much of the time between interrogations in isolation cells, twice for seven-month stretches,” and estimated that “he spent some 17 months in isolation” during his three and a half years at Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khandan was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated September 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Khadan Kadir and Khandan Kadir, born in 1969, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had “a history of a panic disorder with agoraphobia.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he attended school at a refugee camp in Pakistan, and then “participated in an Afghan refugee medical training program,” and “received his nursing certification in 1989 and worked at a Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) hospital during the war against the Soviets.” It was also stated that he “worked with HIG between 1987 and 1992, and completed high school in Peshawar, PK, in 1991.”

It was also noted that, from 1995 to 2002, he worked at his own pharmacy in Khost, and claimed he also worked in the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Khost, during the Karzai government, “working in office number 7, which was responsible for monitoring open sources  i.e. radio, newspapers.” He also admitted that “he owned a Kalashnikov and a pistol, but he only used these weapons for protection,” and also insisted that he had “never been a member of any terrorist organization.”

The Task Force also noted that US and Afghan forces came to his house in Khost on September 20, 2002, but he “jumped a fence, and hid in a room housing women and children,” until one of the women told US forces that the was hiding there. After he surrendered, he was “found to have several documents and a small address book.” After being held at Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, to “provide information on the following: Security services, Security forces, Intelligence, security programs and capabilities, Counter Intelligence services [and] International terrorism.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was apparently seized with Pacha Khan Zadran’s son, Abdul Walid, and his nephew,Jan Baz, but an analyst, revising history to erase the fact that Zadran was initially a US ally, described him as “a significant warlord who appointed himself governor of the Paktia province, AF, undermined US and Coalition forces along the Afghan/Pakistan border, [and] opposed the Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA), and President Hamid Karzai’s appointments for local leadership positions in Khost, Paktia, and Paktika Provinces.” It was also claimed that he was related to Pacha Khan Zadran, and it was noted that he said he “was jailed for not supporting Zadran’s bid for Provincial Governor.”

There were more allegations concerning Khandan’s supposed ties to three other Guantánamo prisoners — Bostan Karim (ISN 975, still held), Obaidullah (ISN 762, also still held) and Shams Ullah (ISN 783, released in October 2006, see above), which will be discussed in detail in articles dealing with Karim’s and Obaidullah’s cases.

Overall, his story was quite confusing, and I’m not sure that the US authorities knew what to make of it either. However, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low-moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] recently been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan (on August 20, 2004), recommended him for “transfer with conditions,” although he was not released for another 13 months.

After his release, following the McClatchy interview, Khandan was also interviewed by the BBC, when, in a broadcast in June 2009, he said, “They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans. They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death.” He added, “They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you.”

Nothing more was heard about Khandan until January 15, 2010, when the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU in April 2009, and released the first ever list of prisoners held at Bagram, as of September 22, 2009, when Khandan, identified by his Guantánamo number, and named as Khadan Kadir, was included, although no further information has been provided to explain what he was supposed to have done to be recaptured, when it took place, and whether he was still held.

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

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

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

This is Part 27 of the 70-part series. 337 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners themselves, and also on the testimony of their fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements in the hope of securing better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, this latest ten-part series covers the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006) and readers will, I hope, realize that almost all of these prisoners were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice. The largest groups released by nationality in 2006 were Saudis (45 in total — 15 in May 2006, 14 in June and 16 in December) and Afghans (35 in total — 7 in February, 5 in August, 16 in October and 7 in December).

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

For further information, also see Part One, which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006, and Part Two, which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America. Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo, and this seventh part features more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. Also see Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2006 (Part Seven of Ten)

Nawaf Al Otaibi (ISN 501, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (2) – Tora Bora,” I explained how Nawaf al-Otaibi, who was 29 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in June 2001 and training at a Libyan camp. It was also alleged that he “was identified as being captured in Tora Bora,” although he stated that he did not receive any training and never possessed a weapon while he was in Afghanistan, and added that, if given the opportunity to return home, he would “seek employment as a school teacher.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Otaibi was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated September 7, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in November 1972, and had latent TB, in common with many of the prisoners, although he was described as being in “good health.” It was also noted that he had been “seen several times by the medical teams during routine and sick call rounds,” and had been “complaining of back, ear and head pains,” and also that he had been “treated in Kandahar for multiple wounds of an unidentified type,” and had “also been treated for abrasions on both ankles (resolved).”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, around June 2001, he met a man named Adil, who had apparently “trained at a Libyan training camp — described as “a Libyan terrorist training camp” — in Afghanistan. Having reportedly “decided to train there as well,” he traveled to Karachi, where “he met a man named Hassan” — presumably, therefore, some sort of facilitator — “who paid for his travel to Quetta.” He then traveled to Kandahar and on to Kabul “with a man named Abu Assam,” who was evidently another volunteer.

The two were then told that the training camp — in common with others, it should be noted — “was closed due to the events of 9/11,” and the fear of retaliation. They then stayed for a month in a safehouse, allegedly “hoping for the training camp to reopen, but it never did.” When Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, he and twenty other Arabs “spent three weeks trying to make it to the Pakistan border,” although only “six or seven individuals” survived the US bombing campaign that accompanied their travel.

They then went to an Afghan village, where they surrendered. Imprisoned in Jalalabad for ten days, al-Otaibi was then transferred to a prison in Kabul for another month (probably a prison run by the Northern Alliance), and was then sent to the US prisons at Bagram airbase and Kandahar airport. He was sent to Guantánamo on May 4, 2002, allegedly because he “may be able to provide information on the following: A Libyan terrorist training camp in or near Kabul, AF [and] A safe house in Quetta, Pakistan, Kandahar and Kabul, AF.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that the man named Hassan, who paid for his travel to Quetta, may have been “the Al-Qaida facilitator Hassan Ghul,” who, according to the Task Force, “worked under the Al-Qaida Senior Operational Commander Khalid Shaykh Muhammad [aka Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, ISN 10024].” What the Task Force failed to mention was that Hassan Ghul was a CIA “ghost prisoner,” seized in Iraq but held in a variety of locations as part of the CIA’s network of secret torture prisons.

Beyond al-Otaibi’s own words, there was nothing to incriminate him directly in any activities directed at the United States. The Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and posed “a medium risk,” as “he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because he was assessed as “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” who had “shown deception by changing his story (when the Saudi delegation came to visit, he said that “he went to AF on a self-appointed religious mission, to investigate the Taliban’s unorthodox method of praying for the deceased and to see ‘The Cloth’ that purportedly belonged to the Prophet Mohammad”).

It was also claimed that he had “demonstrated a commitment to Jihad by paying for and traveling to Afghanistan on his own accord,” and that he “left college to take up arms against the US and its allies and, if released, he will probably attempt to aid the enemy once more” — which was an interesting way of describing an intention to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, before the 9/11 attacks, when the Northern Alliance were, to be honest, only nominally allies of the US, which had done little to help them in their long battle against the Taliban.

It was also noted that his “overall behaviour ha[d] been generally noncompliant and aggressive,” although “most [of] his behavior problems were failures to follow simple directions; such as not giving trash to guards.” Although Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia (on the basis of nothing more than intent), and although the Saudi government clearly had no suspicions about him (or they would have been mentioned), he was not released for another 20 months, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Saleh Al Zuba (ISN 503, Yemen) Released December 2006

In Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Saleh al-Zuba, who was 46 years old at the time of his capture, had a non-military explanation for being in Afghanistan. Accused of fighting in Tora Bora, he said that he had coronary artery disease and went to Pakistan for medical treatment, and was only in Afghanistan because he did not have enough money for an operation, and was told that a charitable organization in Afghanistan might provide extra funding.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Zuba was an “Update Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated June 27, 2004, in which the contradictions in the US military’s assessment of him were not reconciled. The file did not include any detention information, meaning that the claims aired in his CSRT are all that exists to evaluate what he was doing in Afghanistan. As a result, the claims that he admitted” to “being at Al-Farouq training camp” and to “being in Tora Bora while Osama bin Laden was present” and “participat[ing] in the battle for Tora Bora” must be weighed against his evident illness, which, I believe, can only lead to a conclusion that his confessions were lies, produced under unknown circumstances to appease his captors.

In the file released by WikiLeaks, the Task Force described a serious, and life-threatening medical history, which would make armed adventures in the Tora Bora mountains seem particularly unlikely. It was confirmed that al-Zuba had “known coronary artery disease with symptoms for 8-10 years,” that he had a catheterization in Yemen” that was “not successful,” according to al-Zuba, and that he “had stents place[d] in two vessels in March 2003,” when “he had an occluded, non-operable right coronary artery.” “Since then,” the report continued, he “had some episodes of chest pain, but no myocardial infarction.”

It was also noted that he had “a history of hypercholesterolemia and hypertension, also with H. pylori and history of epigastric pain,” but he “refused to finish medical regimen for eradication of H. pylori.” He also had a “history of shrapnel to left shoulder in 2001,” and a history of depression in Yemen in the 1990s, before his capture. It was also noted that his “medications include[d] Tricor, Atenolol, ECASA, Plavix, Lipitor and Isordil.”

Finally, it was noted that he reported that “he estimate[d] he walk[ed] 2 km twice per day,” presumably before his capture, as walking was severely restricted in Guantánamo, and that every couple of weeks he would have “an episode of chest tightness and mild dyspnea [shortness of breath] while walking that resolve[d] when he rest[ed].” It was also noted, “These symptoms have not worsened or become more frequent and do not occur at rest,” but in their prognosis, the medical professionals at Guantánamo advised that al-Zuba’s “coronary artery disease could reoccur,” and that he “require[d] regular surveillance, as the stents can fail.”

Although al-Zuba was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and it was noted that, on June 4, 2004, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “considered for transfer for continued detention,” his case was reassessed just three weeks later, and he was recommended for release or transfer, because JTF GTMO had determined that he posed “a low risk, due to his medical condition.” Without his serious health problems, it is not known how long he would have been held, as, when it came to his behaviour in Guantánamo, as opposed to anything he may have done before his capture (even though in al-Zuba’s case there was nothing), it was noted, with obvious disapproval, that he had “a history of noncompliance,” and that, although his “reported occurrences ha[d] typically been refusal of meds and meals,” he “also had incidents requiring physical restraint by guards and appear[ed] to be a leader on the blocks.”

Even with the recommendation for his release, on health grounds, he was, shockingly, not freed for another two and half years, although he was still one of the lucky Yemenis, as only 23 have been released from Guantánamo throughout the prison’s history, primarily because of institutional fears regarding security in Yemen, and as a result over half of the 171 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo at the time of writing are Yemenis.

Two and half years after his release, al-Zuba was interviewed by Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star, one of three former prisoners to meet “for an afternoon at a hotel lounge.” The three men — who also included Walid al-Qadasi (ISN 10014, released in March 2004) and Mohsen al-Askari (ISN 221, released in June 2007, and also identified as Ali Mohsen Salih) — “said it was the first time they had been together since Guantánamo.”

According to the US authorities, he would have been 53 or 54 years old at the time, but he told Shephard he was 60, “maybe more,” and “his weathered face and occasional labored breathing [did] make him appear older.” He was working as a pipefitter and handyman, but he said that work was “hard to find.” Repeating his story, he said that “his only connection with Afghanistan was to ask for help from an Afghan charity to have an angioplasty in Pakistan,” and he also stated that, during interrogations at Guantánamo, “they spared no method of torture or humiliation in dealing with us.”

He also said that “he spent time with many of the Yemeni detainees still in Guantánamo,” and argued on behalf of those he believed were “wrongly imprisoned” — men he described as teachers, students and charity workers. “The longer these people stay in detention, the more complicated their mental state is and the state of their relatives,” he explained. “And this definitely will lead to negative consequences. So why don’t they address this issue in the proper way so that the person can return to his country safely and not be a threat?”

In March 2010, al-Zuba spoke to a reporter from NPR, explaining that, on his return to Yemen in December 2006, he had “spent a few more months in Yemeni custody, then was freed when a relative vouched for him.” He also explained that his employment prospects had taken a turn for the worse. According the reporter, he was spending “most days at home, watching TV.” He said he “tried to open a honey store, but the owner wouldn’t rent to him because he heard Zuba had been in Guantánamo.” Once a month, he explained, he had to “check in with local security officers.” The article was about a possible rehabilitation program for Yemenis in Guantánamo, but as al-Zuba said, “I don’t need a rehabilitation program. Right now, I just need a job.”

In another interview, for AFP in January 2010, al-Zuba was more talkative, warning that, “If the former detainees of Guantánamo, who were released after being unjustly imprisoned for a long time and tortured, do not receive help to quickly reintegrate into their society, they could be tempted by extremism and violence,” and adding, “If an innocent man who has been tortured does not get support from the authorities in his country in order to reintegrate … he could become extremist, explode himself (as a suicide bomber) and kill innocents.”

Noting that he had two wives and ten children, the author of the article, Taieb Mahjoub, wrote of his unemployment, noting also that he complained that the government had “done nothing to look after him or help him find a stable source of income.”

Describing himself as a “pacific Islamist” who wants to “apply (Islamic law) sharia … but not according to the model of those who launch attacks or kill innocents in the name of Islam,” al-Zuba ran through his story again, adding more detail. He said that “he was nabbed by chance in the Afghan region of Tora Bora” by Afghans “who “sold (him) for 5,000 dollars” to the Americans. After traveling from Pakistan to Afghanistan for medical treatment, as advised by some Arabs he met, he said that he ended up in a training camp and then in Tora Bora, where he “saw Osama bin Laden getting out of a minibus accompanied by gunmen, following an air raid on the area.” He added, “They did not try to recruit me due to my age and frail health.”

Speaking of his treatment in Guantánamo, he said, “At the beginning, the Americans did not treat me for the heart problems I had, but after medical exams, they operated on me and hospitalized me for four months. After that, physical torture stopped, only to give way to psychological torture.” He added, “My memory has suffered, but I shall never forget how much I suffered at Guantánamo, where at the end of six years I was told that my detention was unjustified and that my presence was a mistake. Although I have never been to school, I learned a lot during this journey, much more than I could have learned at university. At Guantánamo, I learned a lot about Al-Qaida and radical groups, stuff that I had never known.” He also remembered “remarks made by a US investigator to prisoners as they were being released.” The investigator said, “You are not members of Al-Qaida, but from now on, you are well placed to become so.”

Khalid Al Muri (ISN 505, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (2) – Tora Bora,” I explained how, in the case of Khalid al-Muri, who was 26 years old at the time of his capture, all that was available until WikiLeaks released the Detainee Assessment Briefs in April 2011 was a one-page Summary of Evidence for his CSRT, in which it was alleged that he was “a member of al-Qaeda,” who traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, and “received military training at an Al-Qaida camp near Kabul” until September 2001. It was also alleged that he “manned a fighting position in the Tora Bora mountain region from mid-November through mid-December 2001,” and that he surrendered to coalition forces near Jalalabad, which could indicate that he fled from Tora Bora.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Muri was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated September 24, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in September 1975, and had “a history of testicular pain.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he and a friend traveled to Zenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Bosnian War, in 1995, where they “taught the Koran,” and “spent their summer vacation working on behalf of a charitable organization.” In 2000, he traveled to Mecca for the Al-Umra ceremonies with three friends, and “met a Yemeni named Abu Thabitt who owned a molasses business,” and who, after al-Muri confided in him that he wanted to travel to Afghanistan “to teach the Koran and learn military training as part of the jihad,” said he would assist him and provided him with a contact in Karachi.

After resuming his university studies, al-Muri “purchased a round trip ticket In the summer of 2001, and traveled with Nasir Maziyad Abdallah al-Qurayshi al-Subi’i (ISN 497, released in February 2007, and also identified as Nasir al-Subii). On arrival, their contact, Abu Omar, traveled with them to Quetta, where his “personal vehicle was waiting for them.” They then traveled to the Al-Nebras guesthouse in Kandahar. Soon after, al-Subi’i reportedly left the guesthouse to attend the Al-Farouq training camp (identified as “the Al-Farouq terrorist camp”), while al-Muri went to Kabul to “attend training at Camp 9, also known as Camp Malik.”

In November 2001, after two months at Camp Malik, al-Muri “and an unknown group” left “when the fighting began,” and fled to the Tora Bora mountains, where he “was assigned to an unidentified fighting position.” He said that he never saw the leaders, but only “heard them on the radio.” After leaving Tora Bora, he traveled with a group towards the Pakistani border, but they were captured by Northern Alliance forces on December 18, 2001. He was imprisoned in Jalalabad for eight days, and then in Kabul (probably in a prison run by the Northern Alliance) for another month, and was then taken to the US prison at Bagram airbase. He was sent to Guantánamo on April 30, 2002, on the spurious basis that he “could provide information on: Training Camp Number 9, Curriculum of mountain and plains warfare taught by Al-Qaida, Safehouse in Quetta, PK, and Kandahar, AF [and] Abu Thabitt, possible jihad recruiter in Saudi Arabia, and his counterpart in Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, an analyst first claimed that Zenica served as “a major stronghold for Al-Qaida and other extremist Islamic groups within Bosnia,” and that it was “unlikely [he] performed charity work in Bosnia.” There was actually no reason for believing the analyst’s point of view, but it was typical, as every analysis was geared towards establishing that prisoners were significant.

Regarding his time in Afghanistan, the Task Force tried to make out that he was suspicious, although they had little to go on, beyond an odd claim that “other US Intelligence Agencies” had identified him “as the subject of an attempt by extremist[s] to buy the freedom of a large number of foreign fighters captured in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan,” in which “[p]articular urgency was given to freeing a captive identified as detainee, Khalid Rashid al-Marri,” to which an analyst noted, “Due to the specific request for assistance to be rendered to detainee, he is possibly a high-level operative or has connections with some of the more influential members of Al-Qaida.”

Beyond this outlandish-sounding claim, there were only more general suspicions — that his credibility was low, that he was “believed to have been deceptive during interrogations,” and that he had a “changing cover story.” He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and although no specific threat level was included, I imagine that he was assessed as “a medium risk.” It was noted that he was assessed as “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” and that “his knowledge of weapons and commitment to jihad in Afghanistan as well as intentions of jihad in Chechnya make it imperative [he] be retained in the custody of the US Government or Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Government,” which “will allow for further exploitation of his past affiliation with various terrorist groups and prevent him from engaging in further terrorist activity.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “transferred for continued detention to his country of origin (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence,” adding, “If a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached for his continued detention in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he should be retained under DoD control,” and it evidently took a while for a “satisfactory agreement ” to be reached, as he was not released for another 20 months, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Sultan Al Anazi (ISN 507, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sultan al-Anazi, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he traveled to Pakistan before 9/11 to study with Jamaat al-Tablighi, the vast and apolitical missionary organization that, nevertheless, was regarded in Guantánamo as a front for terrorism, and then went to Jalalabad on a specific mission. After the collapse of the Taliban, he said that “Afghanis would look for Arabs to hold as hostages or kill so they could take our money and possessions,” and described how he fled with the other Jamaat al-Tablighi members to a village near Tora Bora, where they waited for an opportunity to escape that never came. “When I was in the village,” he said, “it was bombed by the United States and I decided to give up because I didn’t want to die. Many people were killed as a result of the bombing of the village and I didn’t want to be next. The people from Jamaat al-Tablighi that I fled with were killed by the air raids and I was injured.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Anazi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated June 15, 2006, in which he was identified as Sultan Sari Sayel al-Ja’afari al-Anzi, born in July 1976, and it was noted that he was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, in 1998, he began working as a personal driver for schoolteachers, and, in mid-2001, “decided to travel to Pakistan on vacation,” choosing Pakistan “because he had already traveled to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.” Later in the year (on an unspecified date), he flew to Karachi, where he met a man at a mosque, Abu Islam, a member of Jamaat al-Tablighi, who convinced him to travel with him to Kandahar.

In contrast to al-Anazi’s claim that he was a missionary, the Task Force picked up on one interrogation in which he allegedly stated that his “intent was to receive training in Afghanistan,” and claimed that, in Kandahar, he and Abu Islam “stayed in a guesthouse owned by an Arab,” but al-Anazi “was unable to attend a training camp,” because “they were all closed” — indicating that he arrived in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Anazi said he then met a friend, Abu Yahya, from Saudi Arabia, who invited him to stay at his house in Jalalabad. After two months at Yahya’s home, he said that, on or about November 17, 2001, he, Abu Yahya and five other Arabs “went to the Abu Zubayr (variant: Zubair) Center in the Tora Bora region to hide,” where he “worked as a cook” for “approximately one month,” and then left for Pakistan with a group of other men. One major problem with this particular scenario was that the Abu Zubayr guesthouse (aka Hajji Habash) was actually in Kandahar, many hundreds of miles from Tora Bora.

According to the Task Force, the “Senior Al-Qaida commander” in Tora Bora was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi (aka Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi), the former emir of an independent training camp, Khaldan, and one of the most notorious of all the CIA’s “ghost prisoners,” as he was sent to Egypt to be tortured, where he came up with the false claim (used to justify the invasion of Iraq) that Al-Qaida operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, and, after being sent around a number of secret prisons, was returned to Libya, where he died, in deeply suspicious circumstances, in May 2009. The Taliban had closed al-Libi’s camp in 2000, when he refused to allow it to be taken over by Osama bin Laden, so it is unlikely that al-Libi, if he was indeed commanding forces in Tora Bora, could adequately be described as a “Senior Al-Qaida commander.” However, while this story needs to be explored in further detail, what is clear from al-Anazi’s file is that it contains the first statement in the Detainee Assessment Briefs that I’ve so far come across that was attributed to al-Libi, who apparently “reported that an air strike hit the first group as they were led out of Tora Bora but only those capable of walking accompanied him.”

Afghan forces then took al-Anazi, “along with other wounded individuals, to a Jalalabad hospital.” He was then transferred to what was described as “the Ministry of Security prison in Kabul” (perhaps Pol-i-Charki), and was transferred to US custody on January 21, 2002, and taken to Bagram. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Recruitment for terrorist organizations or the Taliban.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was “assessed to be an Islamic extremist affiliated with Jamaat [al-] Tablighi (JT) and a probable Al-Qaida member,” which only really reveals the extent to which Jamaat al-Tabighi was unjustly regarded as a front for terrorism. Facts, however, were elusive or non-existent, leading the authorities to note that he “probably received training at Al- Farouq and then stayed in a series of caves in Tora Bora with a possible Saudi Al-Qaida cell operative,” and that he was “probably part of a group of fighters sent out of Tora Bora by Al-Qaida commander Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.”

That reference to “a possible Saudi Al-Qaida cell operative” involved a slightly desperate attempt to tie him to a man named Abu Zubayr al-Rimi, who he was apparently with in Tora Bora “during the entire month of Ramadan 2001.” The authorities noted that this was the alias of Sultan Jubran Sultan al-Qahtani (killed on September 23, 2003), who was “on Saudi Arabia’s 19 most wanted list from early May 2003 as well as an FBI Be On the Lookout (BOLO) Alert.” An analyst, clutching at straws, noted that, if this was “the same al-Rimi,” then al-Anazi “may have heard al-Rimi speak about future operations,” or he “possibly ha[d] knowledge of associates of al-Rimi, like Abu Bakr al-Azdi, who is in Saudi custody.”

More realistically, it is, of course, very possible that al-Anazi came up with a cover story that disguised both his intention to participate in jihad, and his arrival in Afghanistan in time to attend Al-Farouq, as the Task Force repeatedly insisted, and it may be, as also noted, that his story was very similar to that of two other prisoners, Abdullah T. al-Anzy (ISN 514, released September 2007, and also identified as Abdullah al-Anazi) and Ranam Abdul Rahman Ghanim al-Harbi (ISN 516, released July 2007, and also identified as Ghanim al-Harbi), who “reported that they spent the entire month of Ramadan at Tora Bora, departed Tora Bora on or about 17 December 2001, and were wounded during an air strike,” and who were also “treated at a Jalalabad hospital after being wounded,” and “transferred to the Ministry of Security prison in Kabul and then to the custody of US forces on 21 January 2002 at Bagram.”

However, there was nothing in his file to indicate that he was anything other than an insignificant foot soldier, and this appeared to have been recognized by the Task Force, which assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing ”a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was assessed as “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” but as his behaviour included “exposing himself to guards,” it is, perhaps, worth considering that he had unaddressed mental health issues.

The most important assessments came from the Saudi intelligence service, and al-Anazi’s fellow prisoners throughout the “War on Terror” prison network. Significantly, it was noted that, “After the 2002 Saudi delegation visit, detainee was identified by the Saudi Ministry of Interior’s General Directorate of Investigations (Mabahith) as one of the 77 Saudi nationals of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US Government but of whom [sic] the Saudi Government would attempt to prosecute if transferred to its custody from US control.”

On the US end, it was also noted that “[m]ultiple Al-Qaida operatives and leaders in US custody were not able to identify the detainee,” to which an analyst added, “This gives some validity to detainee’s timeline — that he was not in Afghanistan for very long and/or did not participate within significant Al-Qaida circles of influence.” As a result, although it was recommended that he be retained in DoD control on October 1, 2004, and Rear Adm. Harry Harris recommended him for continued dentition, it was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO)” — and this happened just six months later, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Abdul Rahman Khowlan (ISN 513, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Rahman Khowlan, who was 29 years old at the time of his capture, denied allegations that he received military training at the Al-Farouq training camp and was captured in Tora Bora. He said that he was captured in Jalalabad, and told what appeared to be a particularly fantastical story — that he went to Afghanistan to “retrieve the clothing of the Prophet Mohammed from a shrine in Kandahar with financial backing from a prominent Saudi businessman,” a mission which, if successful, would have made him “more popular than Michael Jackson,” in his own words.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khowlan was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 31, 2006, in which he was also identified as Abd al-Rahman Muhammad Husayn al-Khawlan, born in 1974, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had “chronic eczema,” was “a former hunger striker,” had “a history of chronic right shoulder pain,” and “had a left anterior cruciate ligament tear in August 2005.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that the story he told, as recounted above, of being “an artefact thief in search of the clothing of the Prophet Mohammed” only came about as an abrupt change in his story, after he had already admitted “several key associations” as part of “his claimed motive and purpose [of] traveling to Afghanistan [for] jihadist training to fulfil a religious obligation.”

In this version of events, he “dropped out of high school in 1990 and worked part-time at a family convenience store until 2001,” when he went to Afghanistan. How that came about was complicated. He apparently “decided he wanted to get married, but felt his excessive weight would pose a problem.” On a visit to Jeddah, with his older brother, he “saw a poster declaring a fatwa supporting training for jihad as a religious duty,” and then met a man named Abu Muith, “who sold dates near his brother’s house,” and who, in summer 2001, had a conversation with him “regarding his desire to marry, his weight concern, and the fatwa supporting jihadist training.” Abu Muath recommended that he visit Afghanistan “for two months of training to fulfill the religious obligation,” noting that “[t]he physical training regimen would also afford him an opportunity to lose weight.”

Abu Muath then bought his plane ticket and provided him with some spending money (3,000 Saudi riyals, or approximately $800), and set off for Karachi in July 2001. On arrival, he liaised with Abu Muath, and, after a week in a guesthouse, flew to Quetta with an unidentified man who had bought tickets for them. They were then met by a man named Muhammad Rahim (aka Rakhim Khan) and taken to a guesthouse, “where they stayed for less than a week,” and he “and five others then traveled to an unknown location near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border,” and “drove motorcycles over the border,” before taking a bus to the Al-Ansar guesthouse in Kandahar, where he stayed for up to two weeks “waiting for enough recruits to gather before being taken to Al-Farouq.” It was also noted that, at this time, Osama Bin Laden “visited the guesthouse and encouraged the trainees to continue the jihad.” He also apparently said he “shook UBL’s hand during this visit.”

He then “traveled to Al-Farouq with approximately fourteen other individuals,” where he stayed for approximately a month and a half, until, two days after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden reportedly “came to the camp and gave a speech to the trainees.” Two days later, he “and approximately forty-nine others were ordered to leave the camp,” and traveled to Kabul, and then Jalalabad, where they “stayed in the Nejma Al-Jihad Guesthouse (variant: Najim Al-Jihad),” and, after approximately two weeks, went to a crop field or forest at the foot of the Tora Bora mountains, where they stayed for three weeks.

During Ramadan (presumably in late November 2001), he and others apparently “traveled to the top of the Tora Bora Mountains,” where “they were subjected to constant attack from coalition air strikes.” The leaders then “told the group that they could have the passports back and leave Afghanistan when the bombing ended,” and Khowlan said he left in a large group, “traveled back down the mountain and surrendered to unidentified Afghanis” on December 10, 2001. He was then transferred to a Northern Alliance prison in Kabul for a month, and was “initially screened” by US forces on January 28, 2002.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 5, 2002, to “provide information on the following: UBL [Osama bin Laden] visits to Al-Farouq and Al-Ansar Guesthouse, Al-Farouq and Al-Ansar Guesthouse, Al-Qaida/Taliban recruiter and travel facilitator Abu Muath [and] Abu Mahajin (Star the Jihad) Guesthouse in Jalalabad.”

In assessing his story, much was made of his relationship with Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the hijacked plane that hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. They had apparently been friends since they were teenagers, and Khowlan apparently “stated in a letter to his interrogator on 2 May 2005, that he had ‘a very strong relationship with the beloved brother and dear friend Hani Hanjour al-Tawirqi who used the name Arwa. He was the pilot of the plane that headed to the Pentagon and he was a skilled pilot.’”

Despite this, Khowlan’s relationship predated Hanjour’s drastic radicalization, and I find other claims improbable — primarily, the claim that “he knew about the mission to which had been assigned Hanjour [sic] prior to 11 September 2001,” which I’m 100 percent certain is completely untrue, as the 9/11 attacks depended for their success on as few people as possible knowing about them. I’m also suspicious of claims that he knew three other 9/11 hijackers, and I also found other inferences suspicious, such as the following passage, for example:

When asked whether he knew senior Al-Qaida operative Abu Faraj al-Libi [ISN 10017, still held], detainee responded, “Who did not know him?” The interrogator noted that this was stated with a tone that indicated, “of course he knew al-Libi;” however, despite attempts, detainee did not explicitly state a relationship.

A good reason for that would be that Khowlan did not know Abu Faraj al-Libi at all, and that this and other allegations were only extracted from him because of his relationship with Hanjour, and the presumption that he was therefore significant, even though there appears to be no reason for coming to that conclusion about an overweight young Saudi foot soldier in the Afghan jihad.

The Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” acknowledging that his connection with Hani Hanjour “appears to be that of a longtime friend rather than a co-conspirator in the 11 September 2001 attacks,” and that no reporting indicated that he “served in a leadership or operational planning capacity.” It was also noted that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because he was “assessed to be a member of Al-Qaida.” He was also “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” whose “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control (dated July 25, 2005), recommended him for continued detention, although he was released nine months later, to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Yakub Abahanov (ISN 526, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abahanov was one of three Kazakhs from the same village, who were captured in Kabul in December 2001. According to the US authorities, he was an assistant cook at a Taliban camp from August to October 2001, and this was apparently confirmed by one of the Kazakhs seized with him, 18-year old Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev (ISN 521, who was not released until November 2008), who “was a cook for the [Taliban] back-up forces.”

Abahanov did not take part in his tribunal or review board, but Kerimbakiev did, and he explained that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 with ten family members, including his grandmother, his mother and his sisters and brothers, and also Abahanov. He denied allegations that he worked as a cook for the Taliban, saying that he lived a simple life in a house in Kabul, where he spent most of his time growing vegetables. This was difficult for his tribunal to accept, and prompted one of its members to say, “We’re trying to understand why you’re here. The United States wouldn’t detain someone for more than two years for simply growing vegetables. Can you help us understand?” Although it was quite possible to be imprisoned for growing vegetables, it was at this point that Kerimbakiev explained that Abahanov had been a cook for the Taliban.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abahanov was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated January 7, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1977, and was listed by medical officials at the detention clinic as being in “good health,” although the psychiatric staff were “still treating him for psychosis and his prognosis [was] ‘fair’ with continued treatment.” It was also noted that he “often complain[ed] of chest pains,” which, he claimed, were “caused by his medication,” although he had been “evaluated for his chest pains and no special care ha[d] been directed.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he served in the Kazakh Army from 1995 to 1997, when he was discharged, and then returned home, where “he farmed and tended the neighbourhood sheep until 2000.” In August 2000, two Tajiks, Abdullah and Farhat, apparently recruited him “to travel to Afghanistan to study the Koran and truly learn Islam,” telling him that the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, “would provide a better life.”

On April 9, 2001, with Abdullah and Farhat, Abahanov, his sister and her children, and his great-grandmother flew to Karachi, and then took a train to Islamabad, and a bus to Kandahar. Abahanov apparently “had $10,000 in US currency from the sale of his home and personal savings,” although that seems unlikely. After a complicated story, which involved them all staying in a guesthouse for a month, while he regularly attended a mosque, he said he “began to run short on money and told Farhat and Abdullah he could no longer afford the hotel room,” and they suggested they should all go to Kabul “because the government (Taliban) would be able to house them and give [him] a job.” In Kabul, they reportedly “were provided a home,” but he “remained unemployed, studying the Koran full time and attending a mosque.” After a few months, Abdullah and Farhat left, and in August or September 2001, Abahanov said, he “began working as a cook in a restaurant that was somehow affiliated with the Taliban.”

In rather blunter terms, cutting through the largely unconvincing twists and turns of his story, the Task Force stated that he “worked as a cook for the Taliban,” and that “[a] provincial Taliban commander named Saif Rahman gave the house to [him],” and he lived there “with his mother, sister and two nephews.” He also apparently said that he attended a Taliban training camp, and also “admitted to fighting as a member of the Taliban in a mixed Uzbek/Afghan unit under the command of Gul Rahman,” although it is uncertain whether, as a cook, he would in fact have been made to fight.

What does seem certain is that, “[a]fter the US bombing began in Kabul, he had enough money to send his family back to Semeya,” although he was “unaware if they made it back.” and that, as he and his fellow countrymen stated, he was seized at the house in Kabul by Commander Zalmai Topan of the Northern Alliance, who “arrested him during Ramadan 2001 (17 November – 16 December 2001),” and held him in a jail in Kabul before handing him and his companions over to the US military, who held him at Bagram and Kandahar.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 19, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: General information on hostilities in Kandahar and Kabul obtained during his stay in those cities, Routes of ingress/egress for jihadists from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan, Jihadist recruitment practices within Kazakhstan [and] Islamic extremist recruiters in Kazakhstan.”

In assessing his story, beyond those aspects mentioned above, it was also noted that he was “assessed as “a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and affiliated with the Al-Qaida global terrorist network,” and Farhat was identified as Furkat Yusupov, a recruiter and a member of the IMU, who was arrested in Uzbekistan in March 2004, apparently in possession of ten home-made bombs, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. However, Abahanov himself was clearly insignificant. It was noted that he “advised he was unaware of the September 11 attacks on the United States until he was questioned about them in Kandahar,” and “was saddened to hear so many innocent people were killed and the perpetrators were not true Muslims,” and “expressed an interest in cooperating with the United States in any manner he could.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” providing an example of how over-classification was built into the risk assessments. It was also noted that his “overall behaviour ha[d] been passive-aggressive and his conduct at times [was] non-compliant,” but Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Kazakhstan, although he was not released for nearly two years.

On his return, with Ilkham Batayev (ISN 84, see Part One of this series) and Abdullah Magrupov, all three men “were met by relatives who took them home, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov said,” as reported by the St. Petersburg Times. Omarov “said the three would not face investigation and charges ‘because their release means that they had been cleared of all suspicions of having terror links,’” which rather undermines the accumulation of colorful claims against them in Guantánamo.

Abdullah Magrupov (ISN 528, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Magrupov, who was 18 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three Kazakhs from the same village, who were were captured in Kabul in December 2001 — Yakub Abahanov (ISN 526, see above), and Abdulrahim Kerimbakiev (ISN 521, released in November 2008). According to the US authorities, he was held because, although there was no evidence that he had done anything, he was captured in a Taliban house with two individuals who “worked as cooks for the Taliban.” In his tribunal, he explained that he had only been at the house for five days, after studying at a madrassa in Karachi, when he and the others were captured by a Northern Alliance commander, who held them in “some kind of huge container” and “a place like a barn,” before transferring them to US custody.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Magrupov was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 17, 2005, in which he was identified as Abdullah Makrubov and Shukrat Tokhtasunovich Arupov, born in May 1983, and it was noted that he was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that, after leaving school, he “worked as a farmer in an orchard,” and then, in August 2001, traveled to Pakistan, where he attended madrassas in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore for several months. With Yakub Abahanov and Abahanov’s two brothers, he then traveled to Kabul “to visit a state that practiced Islamic law.” However, within a week of their arrival, he said, the US bombing of Kabul began, and “[s]everal unidentified people came to the house and offered to help them.” Magrupov said that they “packed all of their belongings into a truck and fled,” but that he and his friends “were taken in a separate vehicle” to “an unknown location and kept in a basement for approximately 10 days.”

He added that, on December 10, 2001, “Afghan Military Forces commander Tufal [assessed to be Commander Zalmai Topan] “captured them in Kabul” and took  them “to a container with 2 other Arabs (one of them named Abdullah),” where they were held for eight days until Tufal [Topan] turned them over to US forces on 2 February 2002.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 19, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Recruitment practices in Semey, Kazakhstan, Madrassas he visited in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan [and] Traveling companions (current detainees at JTF GTMO).”

In assessing Magrupov’s story, which was very different from the one told by Abahanov, the Task Force noted that he was “assessed to be a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),” even though he had just turned 18 when he arrived in Afghanistan, and claimed that Commander Topan had captured the three Kazakhs “and five other suspected Al-Qaida members,” the inference being that they had been seized together, although this does not appear to have been the case. The other five were a Saudi, a Kuwaiti, and three Pakistanis. According to the Task Force, the Saudi was a 28-year old named Mohammad Abdullah, who “offered his captors USD $1,000,000 for his freedom and transport to Pakistan,” and told them “he could arrange for the money [to be sent] via a contact in Riyadh,” the Kuwaiti was a 27-year old named Abdullah Ali Abu-Salem, and the three Pakistanis were Patshah Douai Khan, a 30 year old, Mohammad Anwar and Israr al-Haq. To the best of my knowledge, only the last two ended up in Guantánamo — Mohammed Anwar (ISN 524) was released in September 2004, and Israr al-Haq (ISN 515, also identified as Israr Ul-Haq) was released in March 2004.

It was also claimed, as it had not been in Abahanov’s file, that the three Kazakhs were “part of an Islamic Jihadist Group terrorist cell originating from Kazakhstan,” and that “when the group split, one half stayed in Kazakhstan to continue their terrorist activities,” while “the other half” — allegedly Magrupov and his companions — “traveled to Afghanistan, joined the IMU and trained to be terrorists.” It is not known whether there was any truth to this claim or, indeed, whether there was any truth to a claim that Abahanov had stated that Magrupov was the nephew of Furkat Yusupov, a member of the IMU who reportedly recruited the three Kazakhs, and who was arrested in Uzbekistan in March 2004, apparently in possession of ten home-made bombs, and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed Magrupov as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that his “overall behaviour pattern ha[d] been compliant and non-hostile in nature,” and that he had “a relatively low amount of reports with the majority being leading prayer or physical training and martial arts.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred to another country for continued detention (dated August 9, 2003), recommended him — again — for transfer to continued detention in another country, noting that he was “assessed as a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is associated to [sic] Al-Qaida Associated Movements (AQAM),” although he was not released for another 18 months.

On his return, with Ilkham Batayev (ISN 84, see Part One of this series) and Yakub Abahanov, all three men “were met by relatives who took them home, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov said,” as reported by the St. Petersburg Times. Omarov “said the three would not face investigation and charges ‘because their release means that they had been cleared of all suspicions of having terror links.’” which rather undermines the accumulation of colorful claims against them in Guantánamo.

Abdul Majid Muhammed (ISN 555, Iran) Released October 2006

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Majid Mohammed, a poor Iranian well-digger, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, occasionally dealt in opium and hashish, and said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan in December 2001 to make money out of drugs and to bribe the military so that he would not be punished for desertion. He denied an allegation that he served as a watchman for the Taliban, explaining that the Taliban had been known to kill Iranians, and that he was particularly at risk because he was a Catholic, and said that he was captured by Northern Alliance soldiers, who thought he was an Arab and handed him over to the Americans.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Muhammed was an “Update Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated June 3, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1979, and had been “diagnosed with severe Anti-social Personality Disorder,” for which the “long-term prognosis [was] poor with expected continued frequent use of psychiatric services for poor impulse control and maladaptive behavior pattern.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force assessed him as “not being affiliated with Al-Qaida or the Taliban,” because he “was involved in the sale and trafficking of drugs.” It was noted that, in 1997, he worked as a clerk at a florist’s that was “a cover for illegal drug sales of opium, hashish, and heroin,” and that, from 1998 to 2000, he “delivered opium and hashish for Aiduk Khan, a major Iranian drug trafficker.” He explained that he “owed Aiduk Khan a large debt,” and that, as collateral, Khan “held [his] two younger brothers,” and “stated he would kill them if [he] did not repay the debt within one year.” In order to repay the debt, he “traveled to Afghanistan in early February 2002 looking for construction work as part of the rebuilding effort after the war,” after paying $2,000 for a travel letter “issued by the Islamic Party of Afghanistan office” in Iran.

After noting that he “received no [military] training” in Afghanistan, the Task Force explained that he “spent three days traveling to Kabul, AF, looking for work,” but that, on the third day, “he stopped to wash his clothes at a river in the vicinity of Ghazni,” when “an Afghan soldier approached [him] and accused him of being an Al-Qaida member.” On capture, he had “11,000 Iranian Rials, 300,000 Afghanis and a notebook,” but he “possessed no other items and was not carrying a weapon.” Afghan forces turned him over to US forces on February 18, 2002, and he was then held in the US prison at Kandahar airport.

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 2, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Drug trade operations across the Afghan-Iranian border, The organisation and operation of a large heroin/hashish production ring operating across the Afghan-Iranian border, The transportation of poppy and hashish from Afghanistan to Iran [and] Drug production facilities run by Aiduk Khan” — all of which serves only to emphasize how everyone who ended up in US custody in Afghanistan was sent to Guantánamo, and how, if there were no allegations of militancy or terrorism-related activities, then any other excuse would do.

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he “claimed to have no knowledge of Taliban and Al-Qaida activities,” and that he “claimed he did not know why US forces were in Afghanistan,” and “had no interest in fighting and only wanted to find work.” It was also noted that he “denied knowledge of extremist groups in Iran and stated that because Iran is mostly Shi’ite, Iran would not tolerate any Al-Qaida in the country because Al-Qaida is predominantly Sunni.”

Even so, it was noted that, although he had been “cooperative,” his “veracity [was] questionable.” It was noted that he had “changed his story on at least three separate debriefings,” stating, on one occasion, that he “lied about selling drugs and he really deserted the Iranian army” (as noted above), and, on another occasion, claiming “he was trained as a SCUBA diver, paratrooper, in mountain climbing techniques, and was a member of the Revolutionary Guards Marines.”

Ignored in all this were Muhammed’s obvious mental health issues, which provided a perfect explanation for why anything he said might have been unreliable. As was noted elsewhere in the file, in a specific analysis of “Detainee’s Conduct”: his “behaviour is extremely maladaptive. [He] had several self-harm incidents and often exhibits extreme emotion. He threatened to harm himself on several occasions as an attempt to gain attention.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a treat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation to release him or to transfer him (dated September 27, 2002), recommended again that he be released or transferred. Even so, it took another 16 months for him to be freed, and that was four years and two months after he was first recommended for release.

Ehsanullah Peerzai (ISN 562, Afghanistan) Released August 2006

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ehsanullah Peerzai, who was 24 years old and had been imprisoned in Iran for smuggling hashish, was accused of carrying lists of Taliban members and radio codes, when he was captured by US forces in Helmand province in February 2002. A clerk for the new government, he said that he was betrayed by two members of the Taliban in his home district, and his four and a half year imprisonment seemed to be based on the US authorities’ claim that he was “extremely evasive and use[d] multiple resistance techniques,” and their suspicion that he was recruited by Iranian intelligence to work in Afghanistan as a spy.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Peerzai was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated January 7, 2005, in which he was identified as Qari Hasan Ulla Peerzai, born in 1977, and it was also noted that medical officials at the detention clinic listed him as being “in good health,” although psychiatry staff “diagnosed him for Dissociative Disorder,” and, “since he refuse[d] treatment, his prognosis and condition [we]re both poor.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force admitted up front that he had been seized by mistake, noting that “[n]o capture data ha[d] been found” in his case, and that it appeared that “the initial reason for capturing [him] was due to suspicions by US Forces in Afghanistan [that he] was a trained Iranian agent” (as noted above), although, based on the information he had provided, it was assessed that he was “not a trained intelligence agent and ha[d] no discernible associations with terrorists or terrorist support.” It was also confirmed that he “had a low rank and position within the post-Taliban government,” and “never held a position of leadership within the Taliban.”

From Helmand province, Peerzai, who had three brothers and four sisters, and was married, but had no children, “fled to Iran for safety during the chaos in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation came to an end, and, from the age of 14, “began trafficking hashish,” and also “became a user of opportunity using ‘whatever he could get his hands on,’ to include hashish, marijuana, heroin, cigarettes and snuff,” but he was arrested with four others for trafficking hashish, and given a ten-year sentence. After nine years, In 1999, his sentence was commuted, and he was released.

After returning to Afghanistan with his father, he then spent 18 months doing “odd jobs such as selling medicine, picking poppies for a month, day labor, and selling, in Quetta, PK, prayer rugs he made in prison.” He said that he “wanted a job as a clerk and applied to the Taliban government in Kandahar, AF, but was rejected.” After the fall of the Taliban, two of his uncles apparently “helped him to get a clerk position” with the local post-Taliban government, where his responsibilities “included typing documents and complaints that came into the district, typing food vouchers for some of the local residents, and resupplying US personnel that were staying in a nearby building.”

Peerzai was seized on February 24, 2002, and said that, on the day of his capture, “he was trying to turn in two former Taliban members” who had been harassing him. As “he delivered food to the Americans, he attempted to tell them, without an interpreter, about the two men,” but, “because of the language barrier, they were unable to determine what [he] wanted.” However, after he returned to work, the Americans requested that the most senior figure in the area “come to their location to explain what [he] wanted.” Afterwards, he “was summoned back,” but when he arrived, “some of the men tackled him and took him into a room.”

He then spent approximately three months in US custody in Kandahar, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: general to specific information concerning prison facilities in or around Zahidon [Zahedan], IR [and] specific information about: Abdul Wahid, commander in Bagram, AF; Mullah Kabir, Mullah Mawd Yaqub, Taliban commander; Mir Gul, brother of Taliban Defense Minister; Haji Abdul Khaliq, brother of Taliban Defense Minister; Haji Baran; and Mullah Khan Mohammed, whom he claims was the Taliban Defense Minister.”

In assessing his story, although the Task Force effectively conceded that he had been seized by mistake, accepting that no further information had been “found since his incarceration that would support the supposition [that he was] an intelligence operative,” and that he did not “appear to have special skills, education, or the capability to organize, coordinate or participate in acts against the US,” it was still claimed that, despite having had “no involvement in hostilities” and having “not demonstrated a commitment to jihad or a propensity towards violence,” he nevertheless “may be susceptible to recruitment for terrorist organizations or support groups.”

This, I believe, was unforgivable, given his severe and debilitating mental health problems. It was noted that he “had a continuing history of psychiatric problems since his arrival at JTF GTMO,” and the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) explained that he was “being treated for Dissociative Disorder,” described as “the failure to integrate one’s memories, perceptions, identity or consciousness properly,” whereby he “cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy.” The BSCT representatives also noted that his condition “was probably caused by deep psychological trauma” and “appear[ed] to be worsening [as he was] refusing treatment,” and the Task Force added that, because of his Dissociative Disorder, his “overall behaviour varie[d] from aggressive to incoherent, from threatening to friendly.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk to the US, its interests and allies,” although it was noted that, “[d]ue to his psychiatric condition it [wa]s difficult to conduct a risk assessment.” It was “also strongly recommended [that he] be transferred to his country of citizenship and committed for further custodial psychiatric care,” and this was endorsed by Brig. Gen. Hood, although he was not freed for another 19 months, and it is not known whether, on his return, he received the psychiatric care that he so clearly needed.

Mani Al Utaybi (ISN 588, Saudi Arabia) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, Mani al-Utaybi, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Yasser al-Zahrani, another Saudi (who was just 17 at the time of his capture), and Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni, and all three were long-term hunger strikers, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before their deaths. As was revealed in weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, which I analysed for a report in 2009, “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation,” al-Utaybi only weighed 114 pounds on his arrival at  Guantánamo, but in September and October 2005, as a hunger striker, his weight dropped to just 89 pounds.

The administration’s response to the deaths was extraordinarily callous. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.” Stung by international criticism, the administration rapidly back-tracked, and Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was put forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. In al-Utaybi’s case, all the Pentagon had to go on was his involvement with Jamaat al-Tablighi, the vast and apolitical worldwide missionary organization, with millions of members worldwide, which, nevertheless, was inappropriately regarded as a front for terrorism by the US authorities, and was duly described by the Pentagon as “an al-Qaeda 2nd tier recruitment organization” in a statement following his death.

Heartless to the last, the administration also admitted that he had actually been approved for release — “transfer to the custody of another country” — in November 2005, although Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand said he “did not know whether al-Utaybi had been informed about the transfer recommendation before he killed himself.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Peerzai was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Mana Shaman Allabardi al-Tabi and Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi, born in 1976, and it was noted that he was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he had served in the Saudi army for three months at the age of 20, and after that “worked as an office gopher” for “an agricultural company selling dates and oranges.” He also became interested in the work of Jamaat al-Tablighi, and in early 2001 “attended a three-day bonding session with JT members.” Afterwards, the organization “directed and financed [his] travel to a JT missionary school in Qatar,” where he performed 40 days of missionary work,” and met a man named Hamid al-Ali, who convinced him to travel to Pakistan with him in September 2001 “to complete a five-month mission there.”

On or around September 3, 2001, al-Utaybi flew from Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates, where he met al-Ali, and they flew to Karachi to then took a bus to the Jamaat al-Tablighi center in Lahore. There, he “was assigned to a preaching group that traveled to various villages in the area,” and that “spent the whole month of Ramadan (17 November to 16 December 2001) in Faisalabad.” They then traveled to Bannu, near the Afghan border, where “they set up operations at a mosque on the outskirts of the city.”

At this point his story became complicated, because, in trying to leave Bannu — for reasons that were not explained, but were, I presume, because he wanted to return home to resume work, and/or because it was getting dangerous for Arabs in Pakistan — he said that he left the Bannu mosque on 17 January 2002, wearing a burka and in the company of four other individuals fleeing in a car. One of the four was Ibrahim al-Umar (ISN 585, released in May 2003, a juvenile — aged 16 or 17 — who had been studying at a religious school, and had left after “the school director requested that [he] leave Pakistan for his own safety, and so that the Pakistani authorities would not close the school.” The others were Adel Noori (ISN 584, a Uighur released in Palau in October 2009), Brahim Benchekroun (ISN 587, a Moroccan released in July 2004, but later imprisoned in his home country), and Ahmed Errachidi, (ISN 590, a Moroccan chef who had lived and worked in London for 18 years, and who had no involvement with terrorism whatsoever, who was released in Morocco in March 2007).

As al-Utaybi described it, the Pakistani driver “failed to yield the right-of-way at a stop light and accidentally struck a woman crossing the street.” However, to “avoid confrontation with the authorities, the driver continued without stopping,” although the car was “stopped at the next checkpoint,” where al-Utaybi was arrested with a Yemeni passport containing a photo of someone similar looking to him, having apparently had his own passport stolen from his luggage. Pakistani officials then took the passengers to a Pakistani prison, and, on March 8, 2002, he was transferred to the US authorities in Afghanistan. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the Jama’at Tabligh [Jamaat al-Tablighi] and its operations in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force was anxious to establish that he had connections with militants or alleged terrorists, but there was little to go on. It was claimed that he had made “several inconsistent statements to his debriefers,” who assessed that he was “hiding information from the debriefers to avoid supplying them with incriminating evidence about his true purpose for traveling to Pakistan,” but this was nothing more than supposition. In addition, the Saudi intelligence service did not designate him as a significant detainee, noting only that he had been involved in criminal activities as a teenager, had gone AWOL from the army during military service, and, allegedly, “met with a number of suspicious individuals” prior to setting off for Pakistan.

He was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and it was also assessed that, overall, his behaviour had been “belligerent, argumentative, harassing, and very aggressive,” and that he had “a number of cases where he ha[d] failed to comply with the rules of the cellblock and the guard force,” and had “assaulted the guards, incited disturbances, and used sign language to communicate with detainees in other cells.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood, following up on a recommendation that he be released or transferred (dated September 27, 2002), but drawing on information obtained since that assessment (which was not specified, as such), recommended his transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia.

It is, of course, a depressing irony that al-Utaybi could have been freed three years and nine months before his death, and could have been freed (with conditions) a year before he died, but it was not to be, and he went to his death without an apology from the government, which had omitted to mention his force-feeding in his Detainee Assessment Brief, and which, as mentioned above, unforgivably slandered him after his death.

Even so, and despite the government’s official account of the men’s deaths, the claim that they committed suicide was doubted by their fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

In December 2009, the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the official investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and in January 2010, Harper’s Magazine published an extraordinary article by law professor Scott Horton (which I discussed here), revealing the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed” by the NCIS — who suggested that, earlier in the evening on which the men allegedly committed suicide, they had been taken from the cell block in which they were held to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions. “They didn’t die in their cells,” Sgt. Hickman explained to me in March 2010.

Despite these claims, the Justice Department shut the door on a proposed inquiry in November 2009, and an attempt by family members (including al-Zahrani’s father) to pursue accountability in the US courts was turned down in September 2010, and is currently being appealed.

Qari Esmhatulla (ISN 591, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In a footnote to Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Qari Esmhatulla was the only prisoner captured after “Operation Anaconda,” a mission to oust remnants of Al-Qaida from the Shah-i-Kot valley in Paktia province in March 2002, which involved 2,700 US and Afghan troops and was hailed as a major victory by the US, even though there was never any evidence of the bodies of the 500 al-Qaeda soldiers that the US military claimed to have killed.

At the time, I was not sure of his age at the time of his capture, and cannot be certain even now, but in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” I explained how he was possibly a juvenile, as he was born in 1984, and seized on March 10, 2002 (when he was 17, or possibly 18). If under 18, he — like the other juveniles at Guantánamo — should have been rehabilitated rather than punished, according to America’s obligations under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified on December 23, 2002. However, only three juveniles were ever treated differently from the adult prisoners (as described in “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)”).

In Guantánamo, he told a story in which he claimed to have been set up by Afghan soldiers while returning from a shrine. He stated that he “admitted the things that were not true only to make them stop beating me,” and added, “I heard my captors talk about receiving a bounty from American forces for people they captured. They placed a grenade near me so they could have an explanation for arresting me.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Esmhatulla was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated November 19, 2004, in which he was also identified as Hesmatullah, and it was confirmed that he was born in 1984. It was also noted that he was “in good health,” although, as with many of the prisoners, he had latent TB, although he “completed treatment with INH in March 2004.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he was born in a refugee camp in Miram Shah, Pakistan, and that, when his family returned to Afghanistan, he stayed on to finish his schooling, returning to his family in Gardez sometime in 2000. In February 2002, he attended the funeral of a Taliban member (reportedly a friend of his), where “two Taliban recruiters approached [him] and convinced him to join the jihad against the Northern Alliance and US forces,” and told him to go to Shah-i-Kot “and to wait for further instructions.” He said that he traveled to the town of Zormat, near the valley, and met a Taliban commander named Ali Ghul, who directed him to a madrassa in the town, which, in one interrogation, Esmhatulla apparently described as “a mustering point for Taliban and Al-Qaida forces preparing to return to the front.”

After staying a night at the madrassa, he set off towards Shah-i-Kot, but, “[a]fter several days of traveling, sleeping in abandoned houses and cars, encountering several corpses, and being hit by mortar shrapnel in the head,” he decided to return to his village, but was captured on the way. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 10, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the movement of supplies and weapons from Gardez to the area of Tamir.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force repeated the claim by the capturing forces that he “was captured with two grenades and a hand-held radio,” and noted that he agreed “to join the jihad against the Northern Alliance and US forces,” and that he reportedly “consider[ed] himself a member of the Taliban,” and “admit[ted] to wanting to martyr himself.”

Despite this, no information was provided to justify regarding him as anything more than a lowly Afghan recruit, who almost certainly never raised arms against anyone, and an example of the lengths the US authorities went to in an attempt to portray him as more significant that he was can be found in a passage dealing with a fatwa that was “signed by 113 Afghan Mullahs,” and was “found in poster format in a mosque in the town of Zormat in April of 2002.” An analyst suggested that this was “possibly a place detainee entered during his travels through Zormat,” which was a rather desperate claim, and the Task Force proceeded to explain how the poster “explained the Afghan public how the war against terrorism started; that the authors blame the president of the US for not resolving the Osama Bin Laden (UBL) issue peacefully; that the Taliban government conveyed to the US that they asked UBL to leave the country on his own, but this proposal was not acceptable to the US; and despite all efforts to the contrary by the Taliban government, the US attacked the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,the only pure Islamic system in the world.” Apart from the final sentence, this was a pretty accurate summary of what actually happened, but what made it relevant to Qari Esmhatulla’s case was an analyst’s note that, because he had been given the title “Qari” (bestowed on those who memorize the Quran), it had been assessed that he may have had “knowledge of who issued this edict,” which is a ridiculous claim.

Another ludicrous claim, but one which was specifically noted, was a mention of the fact that, on October 19, 2003, he “commented to the guard force that he [wa]s a Taliban commander of 150 men earning $2,000 a month and he was on leave during his time of capture,” which ought to have been obviously a lie, as it was inconceivable that a 17-year old would have been commanding 150 men.

Despite these feeble attempts to incriminate him in any kind of significant anti-coalition activities, even though he was nothing more than a wandering youth picked up randomly, the Task Force conceded that he was “of low intelligence value,” but also claimed that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” which, yet again, demonstrated how over-classification was built into the assessment system. It was also noted that his behaviour ha[d] been passively aggressive,” and he had “repeatedly harassed the guards and failed to comply with the rules of the cellblock,” but in the end Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Afghanistan, even though he was not released for another 23 months.

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

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

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

This is Part 21 of the 70-part series. 271 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the publication of thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. These documents drew heavily on the testimony of the prisoners’ fellow inmates (either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA), whose statements are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion, or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

The documents were compiled by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo (JTF GTMO), which operates the prison, and were based on assessments and reports made by interrogators and analysts whose primary concern was to “exploit” the prisoners for their intelligence value. They also include input from the Criminal Investigative Task Force, created by the DoD in 2002 to conduct interrogations on a law enforcement basis, rather than for “actionable intelligence.”

My ongoing analysis of the documents began in May, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. This was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources. This was followed by another five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005,” dealing with the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released.

This, as I explained, was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a sham process designed to rubber-stamp their designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely.

With just 38 prisoners cleared for release after the CSRTs, another review process — the annual Administrative Review Boards — took over, reviewing whether prisoners still had ongoing intelligence value, and whether they still posed a threat to the US. These were essentially the decisions being taken by JTF GTMO and CITF, and they reveal how, in the “War on Terror,” prosecuting criminals (the few genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo) and holding soldiers off the battlefield until the end of hostilities had largely given way to the strange mixture of threat assessments and intelligence assessments that fill the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

With 260 prisoners profiled in the first 20 parts of this project, this latest series covers the stories of the 111 prisoners released in 2006 (and the three who died at the prison in June 2006) and readers will, I hope, realize that almost all of these prisoners were freed because of political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice. The largest groups released by nationality in 2006 were Saudis (45 in total — 15 in May 2006, 14 in June and 16 in December) and Afghans (35 in total — 7 in February, 5 in August, 16 in October and 7 in December).

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

Also see Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten.

The Complete Guantánamo Files: WikiLeaks and the Prisoners Released in 2006 (Part One of Ten)

Zia Ul Shah (ISN 15, Pakistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Zia Ul Shah, from Karachi, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan to look for work, and was employed by the Taliban as a driver. Able to stipulate his own conditions, because the Taliban was in desperate need of drivers and he had his own truck, he refused to transport fighters to the war zone and mostly delivered food to a school in Kunduz that was used as a Taliban base.

Denying an allegation that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance in Kunduz, he explained, “I did not go to surrender. They asked me to take these [other] people to surrender and then they said I could go home. I took them to surrender and dropped them off, and then I left. There were a lot of other drivers that they let go, but they arrested me because I was the only Pakistani.” He said that this was only the beginning of his problems, and that his truck was then fought over by different factions of the Northern Alliance. Abandoned during the wrangling over the truck, he was taken in by an Afghan who offered him food, asked him where he was from, and kept him captive for five days before selling him to another Afghan, who promptly sold him to another Afghan who “was beating me up everyday.” This man then sold him to the Americans who “beat me up a little bit also [and] broke my nose. You can see that the bone is fractured. Then they took me to Kandahar.”

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, when as was noted, there was little in his tribunal transcripts to suggest that he was anything but a truck driver for the Taliban.” Ul Shah (identified as Zia Khalid Najib) reiterated that he was seized “after he’d driven a load of Taliban fighters to surrender,” and explained that he’d “made the trip between his home on the outskirts of Karachi to Afghanistan on a regular basis since 1999, often doing jobs for the Taliban,” such as “transporting troops, food and blankets.” He added that he “did the work more for money than out of conviction.”

Although he “may or may not have come in contact occasionally with low- to mid-level Taliban leaders and ‘possible’ Pakistani intelligence agents inside the Taliban,” as the transcripts suggested, for that he was, as McClatchy pointed out, “imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than four years, longer than many top Taliban leaders and men accused of being Al-Qaida militants.”

McClatchy’s reporter concluded that “Najib and many more like him were detained for years not because of their actions on the battlefield or their links to terrorist groups, but because they tangled with guards at Guantánamo. There were exceptions, but some militants who behaved well in their cells were released relatively quickly while men at the bottom of the Taliban pecking order or those such as Najib who appeared not to be Taliban members were held far longer because they’d gotten into fights.”

Confirming this, Afghanistan’s attorney general, Abdul Jabar Sabit, said after visiting Guantánamo that “he was struck that detainees were classified into groups, marked in descending order from orange to white garb, by how well they behaved and not by whether they were suspected of terrorist or anti-American activities.” “This division did not have anything to do with the crimes attributed to them,” he said. “Only their behavior in the prison was taken into account.”

Najib said that, when guards “teased him by dropping a copy of the Quran or flipping through its pages,” or when they “got into confirmations” with other prisoners, he could not contain his anger. “I could not bear it, so I reacted violently,” he said, stating again, “I would react violently.”

As a result, he spent most of his time in solitary. “They would say they were taking me to isolation for three days, and then leave me there for three months,” he said. “Then they would bring me back to a cell, and three or four days later take me back to isolation … I would say, and this is a guess, I spent 15 days a month in isolation.”

Turning to his interrogations, he spoke about how he had been obliged to deny an allegation that he had been a driver for Osama bin Laden, and explained, in a succinct description of the pointlessness of these sessions, “The interrogators spent entire sessions asking me why I was staring at them and yelling at me that I should look at the floor.”

Speaking about a review board hearing before his release, he further highlighted the absurdity of his predicament, telling the board of military officers that “many of the reasons listed for keeping him at Guantánamo — that he knew various militants and their organizations — were the result of his telling interrogators that he knew of the men.” As he explained, “When they asked me if I know of them or did you hear about them I said yes,” he said. “[T]hese people have big banners hanging all over Karachi and in Pakistan. Of course I heard of them.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Zia Ul Shah was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 22, 2005, in which he was identified as Zia Ul Shah (not Zia Khalid Najib), born in January 1976, and it was noted that he was assessed as being eligible for “Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR)” on November 20, 2003, but that new information had led to the revision of this recommendation, so that it did not involve the possibility of release.

To reach this conclusion, the Task Force had reassessed him, and, perhaps because of his behavior, had gone to great lengths to dress up a driver — who, at most, “support[ed] the Taliban against Coalition forces on the front lines by transporting food, supplies, weapons and personnel” — as someone more significant. He was assessed as being a member of the Taliban with “ties to” or “institutional knowledge of” four Pakistani militant groups — Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), Harkat-ul-Mujahidin (HUM) and Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LET) — described as “Tier 1 Terrorist Target[s],” which “are defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

Due to what was described as his “extensive knowledge” of Taliban, HUJI, JEM and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) operations as well as his placement and access to key figures and front line positions,” it was claimed that it was “most likely [he] was an active participant against US and Coalition forces,” who was “concealing his true affiliations with Pakistani Islamic extremist organizations and his support of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and that he was therefore “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

Seeking to justify this exaggerated analysis, the Task Force explained how, after Ul Shah left Karachi for Afghanistan, he met a Taliban member in Kabul, who “told him if he went to Kunduz, AF, he could start driving a truck immediately for the Taliban,” and who “wrote [his] name on a piece of paper allowing [him] authorization to board a plane to Kunduz.” In relating the work he did, the Task Force claimed that “he acquired knowledge of the JEM and HUJI terrorist organizations, Taliban communication security procedures such as code words and simple encryption techniques, as well as observed Taliban and Al-Qaida leadership to include Senior Al-Qaida Commander Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi [later captured and sent to Guantánamo], the leader of Osama Bin Laden’s (UBL) Arab Brigade in Kunduz, AF, region.”

To be honest, this doesn’t seem to constitute anything more than would be required of a driver doing his job, although it undoubtedly involved some information that would be useful as intelligence, as, presumably, was an additional claim that he “interacted with what he believe[d] to be Arab members of the Pakistani ISID that would spy against the Northern Alliance and report to Taliban/HUJI commander Sajjad and Taliban commander Ayubi.” However, if intelligence was what was being extracted, then it was somewhat dishonest to dress it up as information that contributed to the threat level he posed.

In addition, some of it was also of distinctly dubious provenance. An allegation that he was a member of HUJI, for example, was made under unknown circumstances by a fellow prisoner, Abdul Sattar Safeezi (ISN 11, identified as Abdul Sedar Nafeesi), and another implausible sounding claim — that he told Isa Khan (ISN 23, identified as Isaka K Bannu) that “he had four brothers, who were Taliban truck drivers as well” — was, according to an analyst, supposed to “add validity to the assumption [that his] family supports jihad and likely provides insight as to [his] true motives for going to Afghanistan.”

In detailing the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force noted that he “drove a truck full of Taliban soldiers to surrender to General Dostum’s forces,” and that a Northern Alliance soldier “boarded [his] truck and told him to drive to a prison near Mazar-e-Sharif,” from which he subsequently “escaped, but was recaptured by Northern Alliance soldiers.” Apparently handed over to US forces on November 26, 2001 (although the US had no general detention facilities at that time), he was sent to Guantánamo on May 13, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Punjab foreign fighters from the Punjab region who supported the Taliban operating north of Konduz, Punjabi leaders, Commander Qari Saleem and deputy, Bayee Moogheerah [and] Punjab recruiting practices, to include madrassas used as recruiting places in Pakistan.”

However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In conclusion, Ul Shah was assessed as being of medium intelligence value (as well as a medium threat risk) and Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood recommended his transfer for continued detention in Pakistan. He was not actually released for another 17 months, although there is no evidence that, on his return, he was subjected to further detention, as the US authorities wished.

Mohammed Al Zayla (ISN 55, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mohammed al-Zayla, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, admitted, in Guantánamo, that he had received military training at the Al-Farouq training camp (the basic training camp for Arab recruits), but said that he didn’t fight the Northern Alliance because he wouldn’t fight other Muslims. He said that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to fight in Chechnya, and an ex-Chechen fighter told him he should first receive some training in Afghanistan, and added that he was in Kabul, on the back lines, when the US-led invasion started, and that everyone in the house that he was staying in decided to leave for Pakistan via Khost.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Zayla was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 3, 2006, in which he was identified as Muhammad Yahya Muhsin Al-Zaylai, born in July 1977, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although “Behavioral Health ha[d] seen him for personality disorder and outbursts,” and it was also noted that he had “a history of gastroenteritis,” and “a history of episodes of orthostatic hypotension due to dehydration from the hunger strike, which was resolved after hydration with IVF.” It was also noted that he “was on a hunger strike in March 2002 and August 2005,” and that he had scars “on his right bicep, mid abdomen, lower back and right knee.”

In assessing al-Zayla, the Task Force provided a detailed version of his story, noting that he said that, in February or March 2001, he bought and watched a video about the “atrocities being committed by the Russians against Muslims in Chechnya,” and “then made the decision to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad.” This was a reason given by many of the prisoners, and there was, to be honest, no reason to doubt it necessarily, especially as numerous sources confirm that, to have a chance of getting to Chechnya, volunteers needed first to undertake training in Afghanistan. This, al-Zayla said, is what friends told him, and he was then put onto a facilitator, who arranged his visit to Afghanistan.

After arriving in Kandahar via Pakistan, and the Taliban’s office in Quetta, al-Zayla said that he was taken to a guest house (Al-Nebras), where “he was asked his name, asked if he was anxious to begin his training, and offered a safe to store his personal belongings.” He said that he “stayed in the guest house for two days, accepting the offer of safe storage, before going to Al-Farouq in mid-April 2001,” where he “trained under Abu Saliman, a Filipino.” However, when he “became sick and another trainer took over, [he] decided to leave Al-Farouq.”

He and another recruit then stayed in the “Arab House” in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul “for two or three days before heading to the front lines,” where he was part of a group commanded by Abu Obeida. He said, however, that he “was never involved in any direct fighting, but did drill for an attack and was trained on the AK-47.” he also said that he “learned of the events of 11 September 2001 while on the front line.”

Al-Zayla also said that, in November 2001, he “and twenty others retreated from the front lines to Kabul,” where he “spoke with his family and decided to return home.” His personal belongings were in Kandahar, however, and when he tried to get them back, he was told that they had been sent to Khost for safekeeping. He then traveled to Khost, but was told that they had been sent on to a small village in Pakistan. He then traveled to Pakistan with approximately 28 others, split into two groups, each led by a guide. However, on arrival in Pakistan, the Pakistani authorities were waiting, and he was taken into custody, and was transferred to US custody in Peshawar on December 27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (the day after the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Al-Farouq training camp [and] Guesthouse in Kandahar, AF.”

Of interest in his file are the statements made by his fellow prisoners, as they reveal the extent to which the authorities relied on the prisoners to incriminate each other, or to provide exculpatory information. In most cases, however, the reliability of these witnesses can, and should be called into question. In al-Zayla’s file, for example, after stating that he had been “photo-identified by known and assessed Al-Qaida members,” the Task Force revealed that those “known and assessed Al-Qaida members” included the Australian David Hicks (ISN 2), who was not an Al-Qaida member, and who is credited with having “photo-identified [al-Zayla] as someone he last saw in the Madafa in Kandahar” (which an analyst assessed as being a reference to the Al-Nebras guest house), and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (ISN 39, still held), identified as Ali Hamza A Ismail, who was an al-Qaeda member, and who “stated that [al-Zayla] was in his group upon capture.”

Other dubious claims were made by Abd Al-Malik Abd Al-Wahab (ISN 37, still held), a probable Taliban fighter identified as an “[a]ssessed Al-Qaida operative and UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguard,” who “identified [al-Zayla] as Mahmoud from Saudi Arabia,” and said that he “knew [him] from the road fleeing Afghanistan,” but “did not know why [he] was in Afghanistan” (which does not sound very convincing), the British prisoner Richard Belmar (ISN 817), described as an “[a]ssessed Al-Qaida member,” who “stated [al-Zayla] and many others looked familiar when asked to review the photos of suspected UBL bodyguards,” but who “provided no further information on where he may have seen [him] before” (which is a particularly weak claim), and Sami El-Leithi (ISN 287), identified as Al-Muntasir Billah Ahmad Al-Bibr, and described as an “[a]ssessed jihadist” (which is ridiculous, as he was a teacher), who “photo-identified [al-Zayla] as a Saudi named Mohammed Omar aka Grandfather, who [he] knew from JTF GTMO” (which is also a very weak claim, as he did not claim knowledge of al-Zayla from anywhere except at Guantánamo).

Further information, which played in al-Zayla’s favour, as it involved repeated claims that he was not a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, also came from numerous other sources, revealing the extent to which prisoners were plugged for information about each other. Those who did not name al-Zayla as a bodyguard were: Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), who was tortured in Guantánamo, Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016, still held) and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014, still held), who were tortured in secret CIA prisons, Abdu Ali Al-Haji Sharqawi (ISN 1457, still held) and Sanad Yislam Al-Kazimi (ISN 1453, still held), who were also tortured, Salim Hamdan (ISN 149, released in November 2008), a driver for Osama bin Laden, and Mohammad Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), an Afghan fantasist who claimed to have escorted bin Laden out of Afghanistan (and was believed by the US authorities).

In analyzing his case, the Task Force assessed that he was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] occasionally been both non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” In terms of the threat he reportedly posed to the US, he was assessed as “a jihadist who traveled to Afghanistan for training,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention. However, it was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, he can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” Nine months later, he was indeed transferred out of Guantánamo, to take part in the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Salim Al Harbi (ISN 57, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,’“  I told the story of Salim al-Harbi, who was 33 years old at the time of his capture. His story was unknown while I was researching and writing The Guantánamo Files, and was not made available until the Pentagon released a batch of documents relating to the prisoners in September 2007.

As I explained in the online chapter, al-Harbi’s story provided a break from most other narratives with its bold statements that he “left Mecca to get away from debts he owed from his failing business,” sold his automobile and decided to go to Afghanistan “to make a profit from the drug trade,” or, as he put it elsewhere, because he wanted “to get away from everything and stay high,” as opium and hashish were “very cheap in Afghanistan.” He was apparently no stranger to drugs and jails, as it was stated in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence that he was jailed in Mecca “after some financial problems with Interpol in 1998-99,” that he was also jailed — both in Riyadh and the UAE — for defrauding a telephone company, and that he also “spent two years in prison for stealing and possession of a controlled substance.”

Al-Harbi claimed that he stayed with a drug dealer in Khost, and “had access to the drug trade,” and he also seems to have come into contact with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, who, he pointed out, were “known to pay off the debts of members willing to travel for the group,” and, it should be noted, were also more than likely to want to “save” a drug addict who came into contact with them. Although the US authorities doubted his story that he was taken to the Pakistani border and apprehended either after being injured in a motorbike accident or while traveling in a bus that was hit in a US bombing raid, they secured little in the way of allegations against him, other than a claim that his trip was facilitated by a man who later became a jihadist martyr, and, bizarrely, that his alias was found “in the pocket litter of a Mujahedin [sic] traveling from Bosnia to Croatia in 1996.” It is unknown whether his stated aim on his return to Saudi Arabia — to “build a house and open a restaurant” — came true.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Harbi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated February 3, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in November 1968, and also had an extensive medical history at Guantánamo, in which it was noted that he “was on a hunger strike in July 2003 and August 2005,” had a “history of latent TB but refused therapy,” had “a history of low Body Mass Index last recorded at 19.4%,” had “a history of chronic bilateral knee pain,” had “a documented episode of atrial fibrillation in 2002 that ha[d] now reportedly converted,” and had “a history of hypothyroidism but [had] refused all jabs and medications.”

Despite al-Harbi’s story about his drug history, and his intention in traveling to Afghanistan, the Task Force assessed him as “a probable jihadist,” who claim[ed] to have traveled to Afghanistan (AF), for a drug consumer holiday.” It was also noted that, while in Afghanistan, he “resided in several guesthouses and associated with members of a known Al-Qaida affiliated organisation, Jamaat al-Tablighi,” which was an outrageous distortion, as Jamaat al-Tablighi is a vast apolitical missionary organization, and that he “resided in known Al-Qaida and Taliban havens for extended periods of time,” although it was added, crucially, that he had “no documented attendance at training camps” — and, it should have been added, there was no evidence that he had engaged in combat against the US.

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he began using drugs at school, at the age of 15, dropped out of school, and was then imprisoned after “defrauding a satellite cellular phone company.” In prison, he met a man who suggested that he should go to Afghanistan “because the drugs were abundant and cheap,” which he did. Although he took a familiar recruitment route — from Karachi to Quetta, and then to Kandahar and Kabul, he denied ever participating in any armed conflict while in Afghanistan,” and said that he stayed in Khost (one of the “known Al-Qaida and Taliban havens” referred to above) for four months, where he decided to kick his drug addiction.

After the US-led invasion began, he traveled to Peshawar, via Miram Shah, with two Afghan members of Jamaat al-Tablighi, where he “and another six or seven Pakistanis and Arabs were stopped and then taken to jail.” He was transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, although “no reasons for transfer” were documented.

The Task Force stated that his account “appears to be a cover story; however, there is limited additional information with which to counter his claims.” It was noted that he “fail[ed] to mention his previous participation in jihad and his association with Bosnian mujahideen,” but although it was difficult to be suspicious of the information from the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Dlrectorate of Investigations (Mabahith), which stated that he “went to Afghanistan in 1990 or 1991 for jihad,” there was no evidence that he had been in Bosnia, as it relied on a very thin claim that a “variation of [his] alias” was “found in the pocket litter” of a Saudi and a Pakistani who entered Croatia from Bosnia as mujahideen in January 1996. In addition, although at one point it was stated that the Mabahith “identified detainee as a high priority detainee,” in July 2002, “a delegation from Saudi Arabia visited JTF GTMO and interviewed detainee, [who] was identified as being of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US, and unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests.”

In conclusion, al-Harbi was assessed as “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been both non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” although, in terms of the threat he reportedly posed to the US, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he should continue to be held. However, it was also noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” In addition, “A visiting Saudi delegation indicated that the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to take custody of detainee for possible prosecution.”

Musa Al Wahab (ISN 58, Saudi Arabia) Released June 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,’“  I described the thin set of allegations leveled against Musa al-Wahab, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture. By his own account, he “received a fatwa to conduct Dawa activity [providing religious guidance] in Afghanistan,” and “used his own money to pay for his trip,” but he was, typically, the brunt of other, unsubstantiated claims. Although he was not specifically accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — it was noted, instead, that he was “captured with a group of 30 individuals that include some of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and a weapons trainer” — he “was reported to have attended a known terrorist training camp,” and to have “been in Tora Bora,” where it was additionally “reported” that he was “an Emir of a group of fighters.”

Apparently jailed in Saudi Arabia for theft (with two Nigerians who were later deported), he was variously — and confusingly — described as being on a foreign government watch list for a supposed trip to Chechnya (not mentioned elsewhere), regarded as a “high priority” detainee by the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, and regarded by a foreign government service (the Saudis again, I presume) as being of “low intelligence or law enforcement value to the United States and also unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests.” His release, of course, suggested that the latter was true.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Wahab was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated January 21, 2005, in which it was stated that he was born in July 1977, he was also identified as Musa A. Al-Hawsawi, and it was noted that he had “a history of a depressive disorder and a personality disorder not elsewhere specified.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted his own version of events, whereby he left Saudi Arabia on July 27, 2001, traveling to Afghanistan via Karachi, to meet an Afghan friend, and, unsuccessfully, to seek a wife. When his Afghan friend returned to Saudi Arabia, he then traveled to Khost, hoping to meet other Arabs, but ended up, as the US-led invasion had begun, traveling to Pakistan with about 30 other people, led by Afghan guides. Seized by the Pakistani military in Parachinar, on December 15, 2001, he was imprisoned in Peshawar, and then handed over to the US authorities on December 27, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, although his “file [did] not indicate why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

The Task Force assessed al-Wahab as part of “the Dirty 30″ — mostly regarded as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, despite problems with these claims — although no one claimed that al-Wahab was actually a bodyguard. Instead, a variety of unreliable witnesses claimed that he trained at Al-Farouq: torture victim Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63), the notorious liar Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), and the British prisoner Richard Belmar (ISN 817), who was also subjected to abuse. Basardah additionally identified him as being in Tora Bora, and Mohammed Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), a notorious Afghan fantasist, “identified [him] as an individual he had been seen with [at] the Abu Hasan Arab Military division in Kunduz, AF, while they were standing outside of their building.”

In conclusion, he was “assessed to be a low-level member of Al-Qaida and its terrorist network,” because of the unsubstantiated allegations outlined above, and it was also noted that, although he had been “erroneously tied to” Amran al-Hawsawi (ISN 368, released in September 2007), “there [was] a possibility that [he had] familial ties with ISN 368 and his brother,” who, it was stated, was “in Saudi custody.” It was also noted that the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Directorate of Investigations (Mabahith) had stated that al-Wahab had been in Chechnya, which was considered significant by the Task Force, although it was not corroborated elsewhere. As a result, although he had “not admitted to being in Tora Bora or attending an Al-Qaida run training camp,” he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for transfer to continued dentition in Saudi Arabia.

Murat Kurnaz (ISN 61, Germany) Released August 2006

In the history of Guantánamo, only a handful of former prisoners have become prominent in the media after their release, helping to publicize both the injustices of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and also the complicity of other governments. One of those is Murat Kurnaz, who wrote a book about his experiences, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens: Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo, which was published in 2007, and who has made frequent media appearances since his release. His book was then published in English in 2008, as Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo.

As I explained in Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, Kurnaz, who was 19 years old at the time of his capture, was an apprentice shipbuilder who was born and raised in Bremen, Germany. The son of Turkish immigrants who had moved to Germany in the 1970s, he was accused of being “a member of Al-Qaida who had been trying to reach Afghanistan to fight against US forces.”

In fact, he went to Pakistan to study with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and was captured on a bus in Pakistan in November 2001. Transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport, he experienced many of the brutal methods of treatment described by other prisoners, as Amnesty International explained in a case sheet dealing with his predicament in May 2005. He said that “interrogators repeatedly forced his head into a bucket of cold water for long periods” and “gave electric shocks to his feet,” that he was “held for days shackled and handcuffed with his arms secured above his head,” and that on one occasion an officer loaded his gun and pointed it at his head, “screaming at him to admit to being an al-Qaeda associate.”

What I found disgraceful about Kurnaz’s case was that, initially, the German government washed its hands of him, even though it had been established early on in his detention that he had no connection to terrorism. As the Washington Post explained on his release, “By early 2002, US military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information linking Kurnaz to al-Qaida or terrorist activities, according to declassified records in his case.” These were made public in January 2005, when US District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green “criticized the military for ignoring evidence in Kurnaz’s favor and ruled that his detention was illegal,” as the Post explained, noting also that her ruling “was stayed while the government appealed.”

The German government ignored Kurnaz’s plight for four years because, although he was born in Germany, the status of his parents as gastarbeiter (guest workers) meant that, like all gastarbeiter, they were not allowed to claim German citizenship for themselves or their children, and his fate was left in the hands of the government of Turkey, where he had never lived. It was not until Angela Merkel became Chancellor in November 2005 that moves were made to secure his release, which took place nine months later.

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, in which McClatchy confirmed that investigators had found “no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat toward the US,” and Kurnaz explained — as he has so many times before and since — that when he was seized (in December 2001, in his account), “he was on his way to the airport after a month of studying in madrassas,” as part of “an effort to become a better Muslim man for his new, conservative, Muslim wife from Turkey.” He said that “his primary fear at first was that he’d miss his flight,” but that this changed when “Pakistani police handed him over to American forces for a $3,000 bounty” and he was sent to the US prison at Kandahar airport.

As he explained, “The closest I came to death, I believe, was when they hung me by my hands for five days. It may have been longer. It seemed an eternity.” This type of punishment is more commonly associated with the abusive regime at Bagram, the other prison used to process prisoners for Guantánamo, and it is clearly a form of torture. Describing it further, Kurnaz said that “his wrists were handcuffed together, a chain was connected to them and he was hoisted up with a pulley. The guards took him down only to check his vital signs.”

Kurnaz has also explained that, in Kandahar, another prisoner subjected to the same treatment died. He did not mention this to McClatchy’s reporter, but it is discussed in his book, and in an article published in the Washington Spectator in 2007, he said, “They were hanging me and pulled me up higher than the other times. I could see the man in the other room. He was hanging, too. Maybe they lifted him higher that time, too, I don’t know. I had heard him moaning and breathing; this is the first time I saw him. He was dead. The color of his body was changed and I could see he was dead.”

On another occasion, “he was questioned while he was being dunked in cold water,” and he explained that “when his American questioners kicked him in the stomach while his head was submerged, he began to fear that he’d inhale water and drown.” This story — again, one that Kurnaz has often repeated — was recently picked up on by the psychologist and reporter Jeff Kaye, for an article on the types of water torture used in the “War on Terror,” which I cross-posted here.

After he was moved to Guantánamo, Kurnaz has maintained, his ordeal continued. In his book, he wrote powerfully about the perils of surviving solitary confinement, where those who were regarded as uncooperative were held for at least a month, and often longer, in isolation cells with so little oxygen that it was an effort just to survive. Kurnaz also claimed, as McClatchy described it, that “he was beaten frequently, blasted with pepper spray, shackled to the floor for long periods and sexually molested by three female interrogators.” He added that his weight dropped from 220 pounds to 140.

In the article in the Washington Spectator, he “theorize[d] that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists.” As he explained in his own words, “They didn’t have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. ‘I know Osama’ or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.”

Speaking to McClatchy about his release, and his life since, he said that, although he learned that his grandfather and his favorite uncle had died and that his wife had divorced him, he thought he had “adapted well to normal life.” He was working as a city researcher in Bremen, had “bought a red sports car and a fast motorcycle, and he dream[ed] of finding a new wife.” As he explained, in conclusion, “Of course, I can never forget my life in prison. But I hold nothing against the people of America. What was done to me was done by their government. I understand most Americans had no idea what was happening to me, or the others, in that horrible place.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kurnaz was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated May 19, 2006, in which he was identified as Murat Kunn, Murat Karnaz and Mourad Kournaz, born in March 1982, and, in defiance of a lack of evidence, was “assessed to be a member of Al-Qaida’s global terrorism network with membership in the Bremen Al-Qaida Cell and Jamaat al-Tablighi (JT) and probable associations with Lashkar-E-Tayiba (LET).” With the exception of Jamaat al-Tablighi, which is a vast apolitical missionary organization, despite the US authorities’ attempts to dress it up as an organized front for terrorism, Kurnaz had no involvement with the other organizations — Al-Qaida and LET, and the Bremen cell that didn’t even exist.

Despite a lack of evidence of any wrongdoing or planned wrongdoing on Kurnaz’s part, the Task Force persisted in claiming that he “traveled to Pakistan intent on receiving training and participating in hostilities against US and coalition forces operating in Afghanistan in preparation for the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom,” which, I believe, reveals primarily how, once in Guantánamo, and the longer prisoners were held, the more the supposed evidence against them was often little more than an accumulation of unsubstantiated allegations.

Repeating Kurnaz’s own story, the Task Force noted that, in the mosque in Bremen, he met two Jamaat al-Tablighi members, and, after speaking to them, “decided to travel to Pakistan to learn Arabic and increase his knowledge of Islam.” After he “stayed at a series of JT guesthouses and mosques before settling in Peshawar, PK, to teach the Koran,” he was then seized near Peshawar on a bus, after traveling to Miram Shah, on the Pakistan/Afghan border, with an associate, Mohammed, who was “helping him change his plane ticket for his return to Germany.” Transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001, he was sent to Guantánamo on February 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to provide information on the following: Jamaat al-Tablighi in Pakistan [and] Jamaat al-Tablighi at the Quba Mosque in Bremen, GM.”

After claiming that Kurnaz was “deceptive in answering questions and contradict[ed] himself on several occasions,” the Task Force also claimed that he was “standing by his cover story to avoid revealing his connections to extremists,” and assessed him as “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” drawing in particular on a claim by former CIA “ghost prisoner” Mohammad Haydar Zammar, described as “the Al-Qaida recruiter of 9/11 lead pilot Mohammad Atta,” who, it was conceded, was being held in a Syrian jail, where torture was rife. Zammar had apparently stated that he had “sent [Kurnaz] to Afghanistan in the days following 9/11,” and an analyst had added that “Zammar’s comment that detainee was sent by him to Afghanistan for terrorist training ‘just like Atta’s group before him’ suggest[ed] that [he] was to possibly be groomed as a suicide operative.”

This was a horrible example of what happens when people who are tortured are shown photos and obliged to identify the people in the photos, and there were other examples in Kurnaz’s file: a statement by Mohammed al-Qahtani, tortured at Guantánamo, who “photo-identified [him] as a German who was captured at Tora Bora,” even though he was not captured at Tora Bora at all.

Despite the lack of evidence against Kurnaz, and the creativity required to conjure up a case against him, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., the commander of Guantánamo, recommended his continued detention.

For further information about Murat Kurnaz, see this article in Der Spiegel about Kurnaz’s initial claims that German operatives abused him in Afghanistan, this Al-Jazeera interview in 2008 (when I was also interviewed), this article featuring Kurnaz’s thoughts about the alleged triple suicide at Guantánamo in June 2006 (also see the story of Yasser al-Zahrani (ISN 93, below)), this article featuring his comments to interviewers from the United Nations, this article discussing a Human Rights Watch report about the complicity in torture of Germany and France, and this interview with Kurnaz on Russia Today in August 2011.

Abdel Hadi Sebaii (ISN 64, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdel Hadi al-Sebaii, a police officer who was 31 years old at the time of his capture, went to Pakistan “for charity purposes to build houses,” as he said in Guantánamo, but decided he would be able to do more in Afghanistan. He explained that he “didn’t only go to build houses but anything that would help the poor and needy,” and added that it would cost him up to $300,000 to build a mosque in Saudi Arabia, whereas in Afghanistan it would only cost about $2,000. Speaking of the circumstances of his arrest, he raised the issue of prisoners (himself included) being sold to the Americans. He said that when he entered Pakistan and asked to go to his embassy, having shown the border guards his passport and travel tickets, he was told he would first be required to fill out some forms:

We were getting along famously. They didn’t put me in prison or place any restrictions on me … Suddenly, I was turned over to the United States. I don’t know why I was turned over to the US … My only problem was with the Pakistani government. Why did they do that? Pakistan is the reason I am here. Pakistan was greedy and wanted money, so they sold me. This might have put the US in a very precarious position.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Sebaii was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was identified as Adl Al-Hadi M. Al-Subay and Abdel Hadi Mohammed Badan Al-Sebaii Sebaii, born in August 1971, and it was noted that he had “food allergies to include: wheat, peanut and potato-based products.”

In assessing his story, it was noted that he had been previously assessed as “Retain in DoD [Control]” on January 10, 2004, but his case had been reconsidered, and he was “assessed as a low-level member of Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” who, in response to a fatwa, “traveled along a known jihadist route to Afghanistan for jihad,” but “used the cover story of traveling to Afghanistan to help build mosques.” Even so, despite his apparent repudiation of his story about traveling to build mosques, it was odd that he was not captured with any fighters, but with two Kuwaitis, Adel Kamel Haji (ISN 60, released in November 2005) and Omar Rajab Amin (ISN 65, see below), who “were traveling together.” He “spent five weeks in their company,” and was captured by Pakistani authorities on December 20, 2001, held in prison in Peshawar, and then transferred to US custody on December27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, although no reason was provided. Instead, the Task Force noted that “Bagram processing documents indicate[d] detainee was transferred to JTF GTMO to provide information on the training and tactics of the Saudi Governmental Police Department; however, [he] may be able to provide information on facilitators that aided him in his travels to Afghanistan and Al-Qaida terrorist connections.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that a man he had stayed with in Afghanistan prior to meeting the Kuwaitis, Mohammed al-Afghani, “was actually Majid Bin Muhammad Bin Sulayman Abal Khayil aka Arsala Khan,” described as “a known Al-Qaida and Taliban facilitator that was captured and [was] being held in US custody,” although I have been unable to discover any information about him, and he was never held at Guantánamo. Nothing else of substance was put forward, and, as a result, Sebaii was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to Saudi Arabia for continued detention.

Omar Rajab Amin (ISN 65, Kuwait) Released September 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Omar Rajab Amin, who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, had studied at the University of Nebraska and then spent seven years heading a Kuwaiti charity in Croatia and Bosnia, which supported orphans from the war zone. In October 2001, as he explained in Guantánamo, he was inspired by the plight of the Afghan people, and set off for Afghanistan with 3,000 Kuwaiti Dinars (about $10,000) donated by himself and his brothers and sisters. After traveling to the Iranian border, he didn’t find any refugees, and then decided to enter Afghanistan, traveling to Kabul to find people who might need his help, secure in the knowledge that the Americans had stated that the war would be “a political war, an economical war, an information war and an intelligence war.” “The Americans were not stupid,” he added. “They were not going to commit all their troops to go into Afghanistan to die, like the Russians and the British.”

In Kabul, he found an interpreter, and said that they were “working every day from the morning until the sunset … meeting the poor people and the orphans,” until one day his interpreter advised him not to return to the city because it was about to fall to the Northern Alliance. He then began trying to escape from Afghanistan, eventually meeting up with a group of Afghans and other Arabs, who were heading to the border — and giving a lift to Adel Kamel Haji (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part One of Five)“), where they turned themselves in and were sold to the Americans. He added that he would never have entered Afghanistan in the first place if he had known that the Americans “were not going to apply the Geneva Convention, especially to people who worked in charity organisations.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Amin was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated January 6, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in June 1967, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that ”[h]is inprocessing Body Mass Index on 12 Jan 02 was 21%,” that he had “a history of latent TB for which he ha[d] refused treatment,” that he “was diagnosed with GERD [Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease aka Acid Reflux or Heartburn] in May 2002,” and that he “had a hemorrhoidectomy performed in July 2004.”

In relating his story, the Task Force noted that he had traveled to the US on a family visit in 1981, when he was 14, and also that he had studied in Arizona and Colorado from 1985 to 1987, and had attended the University of Nebraska from 1987 to 1992, where he “received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture.” These visits undoubtedly counted against him in detention, as anyone who had visited the US was regarded as a possible — or probable – member of an al-Qaida sleeper cell.

From 1994 to 1999, he worked for an NGO, the Kuwaiti Joint Relief Committee (KJRC), in Croatia and then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, providing aid and humanitarian assistance to those affected by the war, and he then returned to Kuwait, where he was employed by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor.

In 2001, “[i]nfluencedby the media, [he] decided to travel to Afghanistan for two months,” and, “[i]n light of his experience at an NGO, [he] stated he wanted to try and help the orphans and refugees.” After collecting money from his family and his local mosque, and traveling to Iran and taking a taxi to Afghanistan, Amin “stated he had only been in Afghanistan for two or three days before the coalition began bombing near Kabul,” and that, “after approximately a month, conditions become perilous and he was advised to leave the city.” He said that he left his passport and other documentation with “his government-provided translator,” who “promised [him] that he would forward it to him at a later date,” and that he then traveled to Pakistan with Adel Kamel Haji (ISN 60, described as Adil Kamil Abdullah) and Abdel Hadi Sebaii (ISN 64, see above, described as Abdel Hadi Mohammed). The three men, it was noted, “traveled on foot to the Pakistani border,” were arrested by Pakistani forces in mid-December, and transferred to US custody in Peshawar on December 27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (the day the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The inner workings of the governmental ministries, which coordinated relief efforts with the KJRC [Kuwaiti Joint Relief Committee], in both Bosnia and Croatia [and] The refugee community in Bosnia and Croatia between 1993 and 1999, as well as specific information on the civil war in Afghanistan.”

Although there was no reason to doubt Amin’s explanation of his activities, the Task Force assessed him as “an Islamic extremist who used his management position with the KJRC for over six years in Bosnia and Croatia to help facilitate mujahideen activity.” This analysis was based on a claim that his “narrative of his time as Deputy Director of the KRJC is basically empty, devoid of his responsibilities and personalities he met while in Bosnia and Croatia,” which actually means nothing, as he may have been unwilling to name names, knowing that to do so would only endanger any innocent people he had ever met in his travels.

It was claimed that he was “associated with known Kuwaiti terrorism financier Jabir Jalamah,” although this claim came from “a source with direct access but undetermined reliability,” who alleged that Jalamah was “a sheik in Kuwait who collect[ed] money from lesser financiers and funnel[ed] it to the Al-Qaida terrorist network, as well as the Zarqawi and Ansar al-lslam groups.” This was a spectacularly unreliable claim, although there was also little weight that could genuinely be attached to other claims: that “Kuwaiti Intelligence link[ed] detainee to Sulayman Abu Ghayth,” who worked for the Saudi-based humanitarian aid charity Al-Wafa in Afghanistan, but was “listed as the ‘official spokesman for the Al-Qaida organisation’ by Kuwaiti State Security,” and that Amin “possibly assisted in delivering funds to the director of Al-Wafa.”

The Task Force alleged that Al-Wafa was a front for terrorist-related activities (although this was never proved), and that the organization’s director, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi (ISN 5, released in December 2007) had stated that “a group of six Kuwaiti nationals visited him in Afghanistan during late September 2001.” This may be true, and it may also be true that Amin was one of them, but nothing proves that any of these men had any purpose in mind beyond providing donations to support Al-Wafa’s humanitarian work, or that any of them actually knew about Abu Ghayth’s purported connections to Al-Qaida.

What was most significant, in the list of “Reasons for Continued Detention,” even though it was indicative of the exact opposite was the following note:

During a Kuwaiti delegation visit in January 2004, the Kuwait State Security (KSS) interrogated detainee. The KSS believed Amin was not dangerous and would release him directly if he was returned to Kuwait. Amin admitted he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and does not blame the United States for arresting him.

Despite this assessment, which should have led to Amin’s immediate release (although he was not freed for another two years and eight months), the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and as posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention, even though it was also conceded that he was “a low threat from a detention perspective,” as he was “mostly well behaved while in Camp Delta and ha[d] not taken part in any voluntary total fasts, made any jihadist statements, and ha[d] only rarely conducted PT in his cell.”

Yusif Khalil Nur (ISN 73, Saudi Arabia) Released June 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I explained how Yusif Khalil Nur, who was 19 years old at the time of his capture, was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, which took place in an ancient fort in northern Afghanistan, where hundreds of Taliban foot soldiers (and some civilians swept up by mistake) were taken after surrendering as part of the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban-held city in the north. Most of these men died after some staged an uprising, which was put down with savage force, and the survivors huddled underground in a basement, as the Northern Alliance and their US allies bombed them, attempted to set them on fire, and finally flooded the basement.

Nur, who was wounded in the uprising, said in Guantánamo, “I didn’t fight. I was just sitting there, and I got injured.” In his review board hearing, he insisted that he had not traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, telling the board, “When I went to Afghanistan it wasn’t in my will to go and fight for the Taliban. I went there to visit my brother … The main reason was my brother, not the Taliban or the Northern Alliance … It doesn’t make any difference to me who is the Taliban and who is the Northern Alliance.” He did, however, admit that he traveled to Khawaja Ghar and received training in the use of hand grenades, and also admitted that he had traveled to Afghanistan previously, when he had been trained to use a Kalashnikov.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Nur was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated December 11, 2005, in which he was also identified as Yusef Khalil Abdullah, born in March 1982, who had “a history of malnutrition as a result of hunger striking and a gunshot wound to the abdomen upon detainment,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

Nur’s brother, according to the Task Force’s account, was Abdul Rahman Abdullah Nur, described as “a known Taliban member and assessed Al-Qaida recruiter,” and it was clear that Yusif was under his spell. Having traveled to Afghanistan in 2000, with his brother’s help and financial assistance, when he studied as the Malik Center in Kabul (described as “an Al-Qaida training facility”), he left to attend the Hajj, returning in March 2001, where he was reunited with his brother on the Taliban’s “secondary line” near Kabul. The two then stayed in a guest house while awaiting transportation to the front lines at Khawaja Ghar, which was where Nur’s brother trained him to use hand grenades, and then traveled to the front lines, where he stayed for six months.

The Task Force noted that, according to Nur, “When the coalition bombing campaign began, [t]hey decided to depart Afghanistan,” but were informed that the borders were closed. They then retreated to Kunduz, where they stayed in a guesthouse “until a deal was made between the Taliban and General Dostum, for safe passage to Kandahar.” Instead, however, “Dostum’s men told Taliban forces to surrender their weapons and took them to the fortress in Mazar-E-Sharif” (actually, Qala-i-Janghi, where the massacre took place that left only 86 survivors). In the file, the only mention of the massacre was that Nur “was wounded in the stomach during the uprising.”

From Qala-i-Janghi, he was taken to the brutal, overcrowded prison in Sheberghan, run by General Dostum, and then transferred to US custody. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Abd Al-Salam Al-Hadrami – a former senior ranking Arab fighter supporting the Taliban and senior Arab officer who commanded over 150 fighters, Gharib Al-Sunai — a senior ranking Arab fighter supporting the Taliban who assumed command of the Arab element after Al-Hadrami’s death, Abdul Rahman Khalil Abdullah Nur — A known recruiter and suspected trainer of Arab fighters supporting the Taliban [and] Combat operations involving his Arab element of the Taliban.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida” who served in Osama bin Laden’s 55th Arab Brigade, and “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was, however, noted as being “of low intelligence value,” and “a medium threat from a detention perspective,” who had “recently been somewhat compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff,” but “did provide moderate support to the 2005 voluntary total fast by refusing 33 meals in August, as well as 9 meals in September.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention.

Najib Lahcini (ISN 75, Morocco) Released February 2006

in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I told the story of Najib Lahcini, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, and was, I thought, probably a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, although no mention of it was made in the available documentation. It was alleged that Lahcini, who, it was stated, had entered England illegally and had been persuaded to travel to Afghanistan “by a man he had met at the Baker Street mosque” in London, lived at a Taliban guest house in Jalalabad, “near the Taliban intelligence center,” attended a Taliban training camp for a month, and then spent another month in the mountains near Jalalabad, digging trenches with the Taliban. It was also stated that he was sent to Khawaja Ghar, but was forced to retreat by US bombing, and that he subsequently surrendered to General Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces near Mazar-e-Sharif. More vaguely, it was alleged that he “may have trained” at al-Farouq, and “was possibly in charge of a group of 20 fighters in Zormat,” in Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan, although both these allegations, I thought, sounded suspiciously like confessions obtained from other prisoners under duress.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Lahcini was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Najeb Lahassini (or Lahassimi or Lahassihi), born in September 1978, and it was noted that he was “in good health with the exception of chronic traumatic orthopedic injuries,” and was “followed by Behavioral Health Service for Personality disorder.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he had repeatedly tried to leave Morocco from 1999 onwards, and had finally managed to reach the UK in January 2001, via Spain and France, where he sought asylum. In London, he met a Sudanese man, Hamed, “who offered him food and a place to stay,” and he then “became a devoted Muslim,” and, in May 2001, agreed to travel to Afghanistan with Hamed to live “as a true Muslim.” In Jalalabad, they stayed for five months with a man named Abu Mohammed Al-Jazeeri, who Hamed had fought with against the Russians, and who, in July and August 2001, apparently provided weapons training to Lahcini, Hamed and “others who stayed at his home.”

After September 11, 2001, Lahcini said, he “was “sent to the mountains outside of Jalalabad, AF, along with Hamed and approximately one hundred other Arab fighters,” where they reportedly “prepared defensive positions,” and in late November 2001, he “and the others in his fighting group were told to retreat to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, where they would surrender their weapons to the Afghan Duston (aka Dostum) Army. Thereafter, they would travel to Kandahar, AF, and be allowed to return to their home country.” Instead, of course, he and “approximately three hundred fighters” (other reports suggested, convincingly, that there were at least 450 prisoners) were taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where the notorious massacre took place, which was described in his file as follows:

Sometime throughout the detention process, some of the prisoners broke free and overpowered several troops. These prisoners took over the prison’s weapons and engaged Dostum’s troops. Detainee was untied by one of the prisoners as the fighting broke out. Shortly after being untied detainee claims an RPG round severely damaged his left arm. After being hit by the RPG he laid in the courtyard while the gunfight continued between the prisoners and Dostum’s troops. Detainee advised the fighting continued for five days. Some time during the fighting all the injured prisoners were placed in the basement of courtyard house number two (Analyst note: this was done by the Arab fighters). Detainee claims on the seventh day Dostum’s troops began pumping water into basement and between one hundred to one hundred and thirty prisoners drowned, including his friend Hamed. On the eighth day of fighting, the surviving prisoners were taken out of the basement and placed on stretchers, then taken to a Red Cross shelter.

He was then “taken to a hospital in Sheberghan, AF, where he remained for thirty days,” and was then turned over to US forces and taken to Kandahar. He was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Arab foreign fighters.”

In the Task Force’s assessment, what was missing from Lahcini’s account was a confession that he had been part of Osama bin Laden’s Arab Brigade, and had fought in Kunduz, where he was reportedly identified as having been seen by other prisoners. However, as he had what was described as an “extreme uncooperative disposition,” he had not provided the information the Task Force desired, and had also not responded to allegations made by other prisoners, including extremely dubious claims made by torture victim and CIA “ghost prisoner” Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), who said that he “might possibly be a Yemeni national who may have trained at Al-Farouq camp” (he was a Saudi), and who was also responsible for the claim that he “was possibly in charge of a group of 20 fighters in Zormat.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida,” who was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour pattern” had been “one of hostility and aggression directed towards the guard force and staff.” He was also assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, it was perhaps surprising that Brig. Gen. Hood signed a memo that updated a recommendation to “Retain in DoD [Control],” dated November 11, 2003, and, instead, recommended his transfer to continued detention in Morocco.

In November 2006, Lahcini and the other two Moroccans released with him in February 2006 — Muhammad Hussein Ali Hassan (ISN 123, see Part Two of this series), and Mohammed Laalami (ISN 237, also identified as Suleiman al-Alami, see Part Four of this series) — were sentenced by a criminal court in Salé. As Jurist described it, Laalami (identified as Mohamed Slimani) was “sentenced to five years in prison for his alleged role in creating and participation in a ‘criminal gang, practice of activities in a non-recognized association and organization of un-authorized public meetings,’” and Lahcini (identified as Najib Houssani) and Hassan (identified as Mohamed Ouali) “each received three year sentences for falsifying administrative documents.” Jurist added that the charges were “related to the men’s connection with Salafia Jihadia [an offshoot of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group] and unrelated to their detention at Guantánamo Bay.”

However, in May 2007, Laalami (described as Mohamed Slimani Alami) had his sentence quashed, and was acquitted of all charges, and Lahcini and Hassan had their sentences reduced to one-year suspended sentences.

Ilkham Batayev (ISN 84, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ilkham Batayev, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, was another survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre. In Guantánamo, he said that, after traveling to Tajikistan to sell apples, he was kidnapped by thugs working for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and transported to Kunduz, where he was forced to work as an assistant to a Taliban cook. In the chaos surrounding the fall of Kunduz, he saw his chance to escape, and hopped in a car with some other men who were hoping to escape to Iran, but was captured by Northern Alliance soldiers and taken to Qala-i-Janghi. Sick with malaria, and in pain from a recent operation to remove his wisdom teeth, he decided to leave the basement behind everybody else on the Sunday morning, when the massacre began, but was injured by a grenade as soon as he emerged, and then crawled back underground, where he spent the next six days hallucinating because he had lost a large amount of blood.

Batayev was also subjected to one of the most risible claims in the whole of Guantánamo’s history, which is full of implausible allegations, as I explained in Chapter 15 of The Guantánamo Files, in a section dealing with false confessions, when I noted that he “was reportedly caught smuggling $600,000, which, if true, suggests that he managed to keep the money safe while trying not to drown in the basement of the Qala-i-Janghi fort.”

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners. Interviewed in Abay, a “small town on the Kazakh-Uzbek border, a 12-hour train ride and a three-hour car trip from the nearest large Kazakh town,” Batayev “refused to talk about how he — a coach at a sports clinic, the son of a supervisor at a state-run cotton business — got from his home in rural Kazakhstan to the badlands of Afghanistan,” telling the reporter, “This is ancient history … I don’t want to say anything about it.”

As a result, McClatchy’s team was left with what was regarded as Batayev’s implausible story about traveling to Tajikistan to sell apples, which, as was noted, would have involved him “hav[ing] to travel all the way through another country, Uzbekistan, to go sell apples in Tajikistan, a country that has plentiful apple orchards of its own.”

This doesn’t mean that the US authorities’ version of events was true — that he wasn’t kidnapped by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan whilst on a trip to sell apples, but was a willing volunteer — and it is not necessarily persuasive that, as was asserted in Guantánamo, representatives of a foreign government — presumably Kazakhstan, whose agents visited Batayev in Guantánamo — confirmed his membership in the IMU,” as the Kazakh authorities may have lied, and it was impossible to be sure what the truth was when that absurd claim about having $600,000 on him was contained in the allegations.

However, it was noted that, while he was imprisoned in Afghanistan in 2001, before his transfer to Guantánamo, he was interviewed by a Kazakh journalist, and, in that interview, “said he was hiking in the mountains in Tajikistan with some friends when a gang of men loyal to Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Juma Namangani kidnapped them.” It was also noted that he later told his American lawyer, Thomas R. Johnson Jr., that “he’d gone to Tajikistan to buy goods to bring back to Kazakhstan and sell,” but that, in the market in Dushanbe, “he met a trader who invited him to his orchards.” Once there, however, “a group of armed men kidnapped him” and took him to Afghanistan.

Although there are different points of view about whether or not the Taliban-linked IMU kidnapped people and took them to Afghanistan to fight, Johnson told McClatchy, “I never saw any credible information anywhere linking him” to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, adding, “I would feel completely confident going into a court of law in the United States and getting an acquittal based on the information in their files.” He also spoke about the absurd allegation regarding the $600,000 he reportedly had in his possession, calling it “ridiculous,” and explaining that “the first time that he was ever interrogated somebody said $600 … the amount has only grown.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Batayev was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated July 25, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in July 1973, and it was revealed that he had been initially identified as an Uzbek, and had previously been recommended for “Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD) on 23 February 2004.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he “graduated from a physical training college in Kazakhstan in 1992,” and then “worked as a youth sports instructor and a fruit vendor” prior to allegedly joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), supporters of the Taliban identified as “a Tier 1 target, which is defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

In explaining how he ended up with the IMU, the Task Force shed light on the earlier discrepancies between versions of Batayev’s story, stating that, although he initially claimed he was kidnapped by a man named Makhmudzhon Kirgizov, he “later changed his story under questioning from the Kazakhstan National Security Committee (KNB) in early October of 2002.” He was then flown to Kunduz in January 2001, “by civilian helicopter,” ending up in an IMU training facility near Mazar-e-Sharif, where, he said, he “declined to participate in the training and did not participate in any military activity.”

Instead, he said, he “worked as a cook’s assistant in a guesthouse” until July 2001, when he was hospitalized with malaria (until September 2001). He then reportedly contracted pneumonia in October 2001, and was then taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where he “was wounded during the battle at the prison.” He was then held for a month in Kandahar, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif.”

In assessing his story, which involved detailed claims about his involvement with the IMU, the $600,000 became $60,000 in counterfeit money, which was apparently discovered in 2000 in the possession of a group of men (of which Batayev was one) by the Tajik Ministry of Internal Affairs,” and which apparently led to the Task Force’s bold claim that he “was involved in money laundering and counterfeiting operations with the IMU,” even though this had not been proved. Other claims were that he had been involved with the IMU since 1998, and, as a result, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “overall behaviour pattern ha[d] been compliant and often respectful to the operations of the Camp and the guard force.”

Yasser Talal Al Zahrani (ISN 93, Saudi Arabia) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, Yasser al-Zahrani was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni, and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi.

As I discussed in two articles, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” al-Zahrani was just 17 years old when he was seized, and was, therefore one of at least 22 juveniles at Guantánamo who should have been rehabilitated rather than punished, according to America’s obligations under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified on December 23, 2002. However, only three juveniles were ever treated differently from the adult prisoners (as described in “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)”), whereas al-Zahrani and the others were treated as harshly as all the other prisoners — or, in al-Zahrani’s case, worse than most, as he was a long-term hunger striker, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before his death.

The administration’s response to the deaths was extraordinarily callous. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.” Stung by international criticism, the administration rapidly back-tracked, and Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was put forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. Al-Zahrani, who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, was accused of being “a front line fighter for the Taliban who facilitated weapons purchases for offensives against US and coalition forces,” even though this scenario was highly unlikely (to say the least) for a 17-year old who had only recently arrived in Afghanistan. Similarly deluded and/or heartless allegations were also levelled against the other two prisoners.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Zahrani was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 20, 2006, in which it was confirmed that he was born on September 22, 1984, and was therefore, just 17 when he was seized. It was also noted that he had “a history of rheumatoid arthritis,” and that he “went on three hunger strikes in the past, most recently in July 2005,” although it was not noted that he maintained this hunger strike until his death (or shortly before his death), and that, although he weighed 118 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped to just 87 pounds in January 2006.

The Task Force also noted that he had “a history of dehydration due to hunger strike treated with intravenous fluids,” that he “had surgery to remove a cyst from his lower back while detained,” that he had “a history of recurrent Pilonidal cyst,” and that he “suffered a gunshot wound to his right calf prior to his detention.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that his father was a senior official in the Saudi Interior Ministry, and that, after completing the eleventh grade in June 2001, al-Zahrani stayed at home for two months until, after “hearing that sheikhs from neighboring towns were saying jihad in Afghanistan (AF) was a religious duty, [he] decided to travel to Afghanistan.” He reportedly “financed the trip himself with savings he had earned selling perfumes to hajj pilgrims,” and “intended on returning in approximately October/November 2001.”

On arrival in Karachi, Pakistan, after being met by a go-between, he was apparently taken to Kunduz, where he received weapons training in a place call the Talban Center, and “was then assigned a guard position at a second line post between Kunduz and Tallogan.” He and his group then retreated Kunduz which fell approximately nine days later, when “a deal was struck with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance allowing fighters to leave with their weapons and travel to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, where they would surrender.” They were then taken to the Qala-i-Janghi prison,” where al-Zahrani was one of 86 survivors of the uprising and subsequent massacre. As was explained in his file:

The day after they arrived at the prison, detainee and others were taken to a square in the prison yard. Detainee heard gunfire and explosions coming from the prison and then a firefight ensued injuring detainee in the leg and foot. He fell to the ground and remained in the same position until nightfall, when other prisoners retrieved him and carried him back to the underground prison. They remained there for seven days before they were forced to surrender. Detainee was removed from the prison, taken to a prison/clinic in Sheberghan, AF.

After a month, he was transferred to US custody, and was initially screened on December 29, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban training center in Kunduz [and] Taliban training center outside Kunduz used as a rear operating base.”

In assessing his story, it was noted that he had “provided a fairly consistent timeline that ha[d] been corroborated (for the most part) by other detainees,” and this was indeed the case, as he was identified by John Walker Lindh (the US citizen who was seized at Qala-i-Janghi, but was never held at Guantánamo), who said that he “was approximately 17 years old and was always joking and talking.” Lindh also said that he “was involved in food services,” along with Ghaleb al-Bihani (ISN 128, still held, who lost his habeas corpus petition for being a cook).

Al-Zahrani was also identified by Ali al-Tayeea (ISN 111, released January 2009), who was the source of unbelievable claims that he “trained at Al-Farouq, that he “purchased weapons for the Taliban,” and that he “was a money courier and a man with a suspicious nature.” Al-Tayeea was known as a notoriously unreliable witness in Guantánamo, and it was noticeable that an analyst had noted that his identification of al-Zahrani “as attending training at Al-Farouq [was] a contradiction to detainee’s story in which he indicate[d] he attended training outside Kunduz with seven others for one month,” and also noted that “[n]o other reporting identifies detainee as a money courier or weapons broker,” even though the latter claim was shamefully used by the Pentagon after al-Zahrani’s death.

It was also noted that, “When shown detainee’s picture, senior Al-Qaida detainees were unable to identify detainee,” and, as an analyst explained, “While not conclusive, this suggests that detainee lacked both experience and rank within the organization,” which was, of course, true as far as it went, although it stopped far short of recognizing that, in analyzing Al-Qaida, there was a big difference between the leadership interested in pursuing acts of international terrorism, and the much bigger military side of things, which was only concerned with supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed al-Zahrani as “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” and amongst the behavior noted was a description of him as “a major participant in the voluntary total fast of 2005-2006.” He was also “assessed to be a jihadist who traveled to Afghanistan (AF) to fulfill what he perceived to be a religious duty,” and was described as being “of low intelligence value,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

It was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).”

That, of course, never happened, as al-Zahrani died less than three months after this updated assessment was completed. However, the claim that the men committed suicide was doubted by the men’s fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

In December 2009, the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the official investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and in January 2010, Harper’s Magazine published an extraordinary article by law professor Scott Horton (which I discussed here), revealing the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed” by the NCIS — who suggested that, earlier in the evening on which the men allegedly committed suicide, they had been taken from the cell block in which they were held to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions. “They didn’t die in their cells,” Sgt. Hickman explained to me in March 2010.

Despite these claims, the Justice Department shut the door on a proposed inquiry in November 2009, and an attempt by family members (including al-Zahrani’s father) to pursue accountability in the US courts was turned down in September 2010, and is currently being appealed.

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

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