In Kabul, Staff writer Ernesto Londoño met two former prisoners, Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil (discussed below) and Haji Shahzada, a village elder in Kandahar province. About 50 years of age, Shahzada, who is a father of six, was seized in a raid on his house in January 2003, with two house guests, and held at Guantánamo for over two years until his release in April 2005.

Shahzada’s story (and that of the men seized with him) was one that had struck me as particularly significant when I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files, as it was a clear demonstration of how easily US forces in Afghanistan were deceived, seizing innocent people after tip-offs from untrustworthy individuals with their own agendas. In Shahzada’s case, it has not been confirmed whether the tip-off came from a rival or from members of his family seeking to seize his assets, but the entire mission was a disgrace.

One of the men seized with him, Abdullah Khan, had sold Shahzada a dog, as both men were interested in dog-fighting, but he was regarded by the soldiers involved in the raid (and, subsequently, by US interrogators) as Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior figure in the Taliban. The problem with this scenario was not only that Khan was not Khairkhwa, but also that Khairkhwa had been in US custody since February 2002 and was held at Guantánamo (where he remains to this day).

In addition, Shahzada, a landowner who had never liked the Taliban, endured numerous aggressive interrogations in which he was obliged to repeat, over and over again, that his friend Khan was not a Taliban commander, and that he had not been supporting the Taliban. He was also particularly eloquent in warning his captors that seizing innocent people like him was a sure way of losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

“This is just me you brought but I have six sons left behind in my country,” he said. “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.”

In his report about Shahzada, nearly six and half years after his release from Guantánamo, Ernesto Londoño noted that he “never leaves home without a neatly folded scrap of paper that is the closest thing to an apology the United States offered after keeping him locked up in Guantánamo Bay for more than two years.”

The document states, “This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan,” although it also states, as a kind of veiled threat, “This certificate has no bearing on any future misconduct.”

As Londoño noted, however, this is “of little consolation to Shahzada,” as he “struggles to rebuild a life he says is in ruins.” Like other former prisoners who spoke to him, Shahzada said he had concluded that the American presence in his country was “a bigger curse” than the years he spent in Guantánamo.

Around 220 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo were Afghans, although most have been released, and only around 20 remain. As the Washington Post described it, they “serve as legacies of what is arguably the most notorious institution of the US war against terrorism,” and their “different paths reflect some of the unintended consequences of the way the United States has waged this battle.”

Identifying three categories of former prisoners, the Post stated, “Some have again taken up arms against the Americans and their allies. Others have stayed out of the battle but consider their status as a former Guantánamo detainee a badge of honor and express support for the Taliban.” The third group consists of “those who opted to let bygones be bygones, even going as far as keeping an open line of dialogue with Western officials in Afghanistan.”

Shahzada loosely fits into this third category, although he stated that he “remains too angry to forgive.” He added, “I am worried for my life. They destroyed my life, and they made me dishonorable.”

Before his capture, Shahzada, as noted in previous publicly available accounts, “looked after a vineyard in Dand, a village in southern Kandahar province,” which is the birthplace of the Taliban, although that meant nothing to Shahzada. He had fought the Russians in the 198s, but he “sought to keep to himself” when the Taliban rose to prominence in 1994. “They treated people like donkeys, not human beings,” he said.

As the Post noted, “It took several days for news of the worst attack on American soil to reach Shahzada’s dusty village, just south of the provincial capital. It took a few weeks for the first Americans to stream in from neighboring Pakistan hunting for al-Qaeda leaders who had set up shop in this landlocked, impoverished country,” and “It took more than a year and four months for US soldiers to storm into his house,” seizing him on the basis of the thoroughly unreliable evidence outlined above.

In Guantánamo, after the long months of pointless interrogation that he has also spoken about before, he told his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, convened to assess whether the prisoners had been correctly designated on capture as “enemy combatants,” who could continue to be held without rights, “If 20 years from now or even 100 years from now you can find any proof that I helped the Taliban or I was involved with the Taliban, you can cut off my head.”

Although the tribunals were a sham, designed not to honestly assess the prisoners’ stories, but to keep most of them in Guantánamo, Shahzada was one of 38 prisoners judged to be “no longer enemy combatants” at the end of the process, which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and he was freed in Kabul “with little fanfare,” as the Post described it, on April 9, 2005.

However, on returning home, Shahzada “found his home town transformed.” The “influx of cash the Americans and their allies had poured into southern Afghanistan had had a dramatic effect,” he told Ernesto Londoño, but it had unforeseen consequences that were not beneficial. “I saw reconstruction projects and buildings. That created a lot of disunity among people,” he said. “If one person got money to build a building, his relative would turn against him.”

Shahzada also explained that, around 2007, as the Taliban regrouped in Kandahar, they sought to recruit him. “Since I had been in Guantánamo,” he said, “they told me I should stand alongside them and do harm to the Americans. When I told them I was not ready to join them, they branded me an infidel.” As a result, he said, he had “no option but to abandon his fields, leaving grapes dangling on vines,” and moving to “the relative safety” of the city of Kandahar.

If everything about Shahzada’s story demonstrates the human wreckage of Guantánamo, and the delusional truth about America’s inability to recognize what a disaster it has been, and continues to be, the story of another prisoner interviewed by Ernesto Londoño is more nuanced. With reference to other former prisoners “forced to leave their home towns as fighting has spread around the country in recent years,” he spoke to Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, another former prisoner, who has “formed a support group.”

Wakil, who was once a tribal leader in Kunar province, bordering Pakistan, is now living in Kabul as a refugee. “I have a house in Kunar, but I can’t get to it because of the insecurity,” he said, adding that he had “recently met with the US ambassador to Afghanistan and a senior NATO commander to discuss peace prospects.”

He said that many former Guantánamo prisoners had “become pariahs, both in the eyes of the US-led NATO coalition and Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security,” and he added that, as a result, some of them had joined the insurgency. Some of them, he might have added, undoubtedly had pressure exerted on them by the Taliban or other insurgents, as happened with Haji Shahzada.

Even so, Wakil, who was released in May 2008, is a contentious figure, and was regarded in Guantánamo as a tribal leader who was opposed to the Taliban but supported al-Qaeda, because of longstanding connections between al-Qaeda and the people of Kunar province. Moreover, in May 2009, when the Pentagon produced a fact sheet, “Former Guantánamo Detainee Terrorism Trends” (PDF), as part of disputed claims that 1 in 7 released prisoners were “reconfirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities,” he was listed as suspected of associating with terrorist groups.

However, when Nancy Youssef, a reporter for McClatchy newspapers, investigated this claim, seeking out Wakil in Afghanistan, she discovered that he “spen[t] his days going from one high-level official meeting to another” — with President Karzai, his chief of staff, or other presidential candidates — “with the swagger of a tribal elder, advocating for the needs of Kunar province, his home region.” Wakil denied the allegations, of course, but so did others who spoke on his behalf. Presidential candidate Mirwise Yaseeni said, “How could he be a terrorist? He is never far off the government’s radar. His family is here. I have never known him to do anything criminal.”

Youssef explained that “Pentagon officials didn’t respond to a request for comment on why Wakil was included in [the] report that was leaked in May,” although she noted, crucially, that “[t]he discovery that Wakil, far from being in hiding, operates openly among officials of Afghanistan’s US-allied government raises questions about the report’s credibility.”

That was an understatement, as President Karzai’s chief of staff, Omar Daudzai, told McClatchy that Wakil was “an honorable man,” although controversy still dogs him. In August, when a man named Sabar Lal was killed as an insurgent in Afghanistan, it was claimed that he was Sabar Lal Melma, an aide to Wakil who was also held in Guantánamo, and released in September 2007. Wakil and Melma were seized together in August 2002, while attending a meeting with US military officials, but Mohammed Roze, the director of the Afghan government’s Peace and Reconciliation Commission in Kunar, said in 2009 that Wakil “was never a threat to American troops,” and, by extension, the same verdict applied to Melma. Roza was convinced that Wakil (and Melma) had been betrayed by the head of a rival tribe, who had persuaded the Americans that he was an enemy.

Although NATO officials said that Sabar Lal “was responsible for attacks and the financing of operations in the Pech District, and was in contact with senior members of Al-Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan,” and that he was shot dead after coalition forces “located him at a compound near Jalalabad” and he “came out with an assault rifle,” Wakil said that, after his release from Guantánamo, Lelma “chose a civilian life” and “was not in the insurgency.”

Whether or not this is true, Wakil remains an astute commentator on the US presence in Afghanistan. He “said he harbors no ill will toward the Americans who detained him for more than five years,” although he was critical of  their “war strategy,” stating that it had “done far more damage than good.” He added that “[t]he Afghan government that the West empowered and bankrolls is hopelessly weak and corrupt,” and that “Afghans continue to be detained without being charged or are prosecuted in an unfair system.” His conclusion was that, “By staying in Afghanistan, NATO soldiers are emboldening the Taliban and allied groups.”

“The existence of the foreign troops is an excuse for the Taliban” to fight, he said. “Once the foreign troops leave, the people will stand against them and defend their districts and provinces.”

Shahzada, according to the Post, had a gloomier prognosis, concluding that “the rifts that the US invasion [has] created in Afghan society will result in an escalation of bloodshed, regardless of how soon the foreigners leave.” He said, “What they have done is created more enmity. Once the Americans go, they will leave behind a river of blood.”

In conclusion, Siyamak Herawi, a spokesman for the Afghan government, said that most former prisoners led “normal lives” after being released. He added that the government estimated that “between eight and 10 percent rejoined armed groups fighting the NATO-backed government.”

That’s an interesting statistic on which to conclude, as it appears to confirm, once and for all, how the Pentagon’s regularly aired claims of “recidivism” amongst the former prisoners, which involved 74 “confirmed or suspected” recidivists in May 2009, but which rose to 1 in 4 by the start of this year, without any evidence being provided whatsoever, are so unreliable that they are nothing more than propaganda, pumped out by those with an agenda to keep Guantánamo open, and, presumably, to prolong the occupation of Afghanistan.

1 in 4 of the 600 men released from Guantánamo is 150 prisoners in total, and it is simply inconceivable that this is an accurate figure. In January, the New America Foundation established in a report, “Guantánamo: Who Really ‘Returned to the Battlefield’?” (PDF), that 49 was a more accurate figure for those confirmed or suspected of “engag[ing] with insurgent groups that attack or attempt to attack the United States, US citizens, or US bases abroad.”

That list contained 15 Saudis, 13 Afghans and 21 others, and whereas the Pentagon’s claim would genuinely require the number of Afghan “recidivists” to be around half of those released (around a hundred in total), because there is simply no evidence that released prisoners from other countries (beyond those mentioned in the available reports) are involved in any kind of insurgency, the New America Foundation’s report tallies broadly with the Afghan government’s own figures — between 8 and 10 percent of the 200 or so prisoners released; in other words, between 16 and 20.

I’m not convinced that the New America Foundation report is completely accurate, as I believe some of those cited in did nothing wrong, but as the 9/11 anniversary recedes, and the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches (on January 11, 2012), the accounts in the Post‘s article, and the figures quoted by Siyamak Herawi, ought to contribute to a much-needed understanding that Guantánamo has done incalculable damage to America’s standing in the world, and that, of the 171 men still held, the 89 cleared for release but still held, largely because of Congressional obstruction, and false “recidivism” claims, should be freed as soon as possible.

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.

Guantánamo has become largely forgotten by those who should be alarmed at what its continued existence reveals about America’s humanity and sense of justice, but who, in all too many cases, are misled by their media and by the senior Bush administration officials who are still allowed to continue defending their dreadful policies and criminal activities in public, even though they should be held accountable for their part in implementing torture.

For Esquire this month, Tyler Cabot, an editor at the magazine, has profiled Noor Uthman Muhammed, otherwise known as Prisoner 707, a Sudanese prisoner who was subjected to a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo in February this year, as I explained in my article, “Hiding Horrific Tales of Torture: Why The US Government Reached A Plea Deal with Guantánamo Prisoner Noor Uthman Muhammed.” The military jury in Muhammed’s case gave him a 14-year sentence, although he is only supposed to serve 34 months as the result of a plea deal, but such is the injustice at Guantánamo that it is by no means certain that he will actually be released.

Cabot’s connection to the case is through his father, Howard Cabot, a corporate lawyer who, to his son’s immense surprise, ended up working on Muhammed’s case. With the assistance of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, an organization that supports journalism on underreported topics, Cabot wrote “Stories My Father Told Me,” a feature on his father, and his involvement in Noor Uthman Muhammed’s case, for the June 2009 edition of Esquire, and he also reported on Muhammed’s trial in February this year, in two blog posts for Esquire (here and here).

I recommend all of the above, but with his latest article, “The Prisoners of Guantánamo,” Tyler Cabot has issued an accomplished, important and timely reminder about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo through a thorough analysis of Muhammed’s story and of the terrible and unjustifiable position that America has found itself in ten years after the 9/11 attacks, and nearly ten years after Guantánamo opened.

Cabot not only tells, with some sensitivity, Muhammed’s own back story, but also the story of the Khalden training camp, where he was a trainer and then a quartermaster under Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [described as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi], later a notorious CIA “ghost prisoner,” how the camp was closed when al-Libi refused to bow to pressure from Osama bin Laden to bring all the camps in Afghanistan under al-Qaeda control, and Muhammed’s capture in Faisalabad in March 2002 with Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee,” who was in fact Khalden’s mentally damaged gatekeeper.

Cabot does an excellent job of creating sympathy for Muhammed, explaining how, at Khalden, where he disliked being a trainer and preferred instead to look after the supplies, and to cook, he was nothing but a minor player in a camp that was primarily associated with defensive jihad — or, as he stated at Guantánamo during is Combatant Status review tribunal in 2004, Khalden was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business.

Moreover, at the end of the account of Muhammed’s journey from Sudan to a trial by Military Commission, Cabot sums up the baleful legacy of Guantánamo in a handful of powerful passages, which I include below, and which I hope will reverberate powerfully with any Esquire reader who is not knowledgeable about Guantánamo:

There was a time, early in the “war on terror,” when word came from the highest levels in Washington that Guantánamo was to be the preserve of the “worst of the worst.” This was obviously never true, but it’s not until now that we know it. And not before surrendering to fear and abandoning the rules of evidence and the value of due process and eroding the foundation of the rule of law itself. The truth is that most of the 779 men who wound up at Guantánamo were like Noor — low-level, rather inconsequential, possessed of nothing useful to the United States nor posing any particular danger. In fact, people close to the team that prosecuted Noor quietly even voiced sympathy for him, describing him as “one of life’s losers.”

It is a strange population, the 171 men still left at Guantánamo. There is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another two dozen hardened militants, who will never be released. This class of prisoner represents a small minority of the population. Then there are the others — about a hundred men, mostly Yemeni, who have been cleared to leave but have no place to go, as no country will take them. And there are another thirty-five or so like Noor. They are nameless, low-level operatives, or hapless men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are the detritus of a decade-long war. They can’t simply be released. That would be admitting that they aren’t as bad as the government once said they were. And most can’t be tried, either, because much of the evidence against them — if there is any — is too fraught, as it was gotten by torture, and would never have even been considered to be evidence in any American judicial proceeding before September 11, 2001.

The Prisoners of Guantánamo
By Tyler Cabot, Esquire, September 2011

After a decade, it’s hard to tell who the captives are — us or them. Here, we follow Prisoner 707 to find out how the unlucky men got to the island prison, and whether it’ll ever be possible for us all to leave.

A man is born in the 1960s, but in the wrong place. His life is untouched by modernity, and in fact the people who live where he lives — mostly nomads or goatherds or subsistence farmers — carry on as they have for a thousand years. Compared even with the people in this arid Sudanese borderland west of the Red Sea he is poor. He is illiterate, can’t even tell you when he was born, and after his parents die when he is a child, he doesn’t think to ask why. It’s simple: People don’t live long, and then they die. The movements of his life are dictated by elemental concerns — what to eat, where to sleep. He collects what he finds and trades what he can — sticks, cardboard, tattered robes, tires. And when your abiding interests are so basic, you likely don’t have time for something so luxurious as a personal history or self-regard. He makes no claims for himself, possesses nothing resembling the Western notion of ambition. He has no conception of the outside world — knows little of Europe, has barely heard of America, doesn’t have the frame of reference even to conceive of a signal bouncing off a star and sending a picture or someone’s voice around the world. By the standards of the late twentieth century, or of any century, really, he is one of the unlucky men. Maybe God will provide something a little better in heaven, inshallah.

And then something most unexpected happens. Improbably, the unlucky man encounters the United States of America and becomes subject to the full might of the mightiest, most consequential power the world has ever known. His life will be changed forever, to be sure. But what one could never have imagined is that the man — not much more than a peasant in rags, after all — would become the very essence of what our mighty country fears the most. What one could never have imagined is that the peasant in rags would change the United States as much as the United States changed him.

*****

Today, nine years after he arrived on the island, Noor Uthman Muhammed is a whiff of a man. His orange prison jumpsuit hangs on his slight body. His cell is new. Until recently, he had been charged with no crime, and he’d lived for the past few years communally. He had a cell where he was locked up at night, but by day he could wander through the block, talk with the other brothers, watch one of the large TVs bolted to the wall, wash his white robe himself, and hang it on the railing to dry. Today, as a convicted war criminal, he lives on a cell block with three other men. They are the men whose cases have gone before military commissions at Guantánamo. Enter his cell and to the right there are a stainless-steel toilet and sink bolted to the wall. The toilet has no seat, the sink no knobs. Across the tiny concrete room, almost close enough to touch from the toilet, is a platform that extends up from the floor and out from the wall. It is topped by a thin blue foam mattress where at night he closes his eyes and dreams.

After his parents died, Noor didn’t have a place to sleep. He was passed from aunt to brother to uncle, hut to hut to hut. He slept where he could, ate what he could find or trade for. This didn’t change when, after one drought or famine too many, the family moved far from the town where he was born, Kassala, eventually landing in the city of Port Sudan. From above, the port looks like the lucky half of a broken wishbone, narrow and straight where the Red Sea first breaches land, then curving up and around the asphalt roads, tan government buildings, and colonial settlements of Main Town, built by the British in 1909. Yet as the channel curves farther west toward the Nile and the desert beyond, signs of civilization ebb. Roads turn to dirt, electricity lines vanish, running water is replaced by mule-drawn water tanks. Here in Deim al-Nur and the slums of Tata and Al Qadsiya, the low jerry-rigged dwellings are similar to the huts Noor lived in as a young boy, except instead of branches and twigs, some are made of empty food-aid sacks, tin, salvaged cloth, plastic bags. Many of the residents are former shepherds and nomads. Now they are dockworkers, carpenters, junk collectors, prostitutes.

Noor had no skills and no education, so he did what he could do best. He scavenged. Wood, old sandals, broken wheels, anything he could find that might be of some value to somebody he brought to the market to trade. There were dozens of corrugated-metal-and-plastic booths selling bags of spices and piles of bananas, meat, and fish. At night he looked for a corner of a hut or lay down in the dirt outside. He had a small cupboard, his one solid possession, where he kept his clothes and Koran. He was alone. Even around family, he didn’t talk or socialize. He had a mind full of fears and ideas he wouldn’t share.

It’s the same in Guantánamo. He doesn’t like talking about his past, refuses even to look at the recent pictures from his brother or write letters to his family. There was one letter conveyed by the Red Cross, and that was all. Noor had been engaged to marry his cousin, and he wanted to release her to marry someone else, as he wasn’t sure he’d ever be going home. For a boy from Kassala, Noor traveled a long way, and then he just vanished from the face of the earth. Now at least they know where he is, but he doesn’t want to worry them, doesn’t want to raise their hopes, and for years didn’t want to burden them with a singular hell — the prospect of being imprisoned for life but charged with no crime. “Please pray for me,” he wrote in his only letter home. “I am being held by the Americans.”

Also, he wants to remember all of them as he knew them when he was a boy, before he knew anything about America, before his name was spoken at the White House. When people ask about his childhood, whether it be interrogators, lawyers, or investigators, his face goes dark. He sits way back in his white plastic chair under the fluorescent lights, so far that he looks as though he’ll fall over, his lips tightened and wide, his eyes dead.

*****

In 1992, Noor was about twenty-five. He had never been very religious, but he started talking to some of the men in the market about Islam. Port Sudan is almost directly across the Red Sea from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, so most African Muslim pilgrims pass through here on their way to Mecca. Because Noor couldn’t read, the men gave him audiotapes of sermons, and later they showed him films. There were murdered Muslim women and children in the films, bloody and broken. They need help, Noor was told. The men told him about the mujahideen, the heroic brothers who were protecting these Muslims. They were doing Allah’s work. They were fulfilling their obligation to wage defensive jihad. And they told him that he, too — even Noor — could be a hero and make something of his life.

Decisions and choices and circumstances can push and pull a life in unexpected directions. You can wake up in a cell and not quite understand how the door got locked behind you.

Noor wanted a way out of the bleakness of his life. Having a larger purpose sounded good to him. Having a job sounded better. He took a $700 loan from a local cattle trader and left.

*****

Three black office chairs behind three microphones in a double-wide trailer. The chair in the middle is taller, wider, made of padded leather. This is where the tribunal president sits. Behind him there is a two-way mirror, about four by six feet. Behind that? Impossible to know. A translator? An intelligence analyst? Guards wearing desert camouflage? There is a small American flag hung flat above the mirror, an AC unit poking through the wall on the right.

Perpendicular to where the tribunal sits is a small off-white table with two cheap vinyl chairs that look like they belong around a kitchen table. This is where the recorder sits. Directly across, against the back wall, is another chair. It is made of white molded plastic. No cushion, nothing detachable, no materials that could be used for other means. This is where the detainee sits. Detainee, the word itself, it must be noted, is one of the great Orwellian inventions of the past decade. A word that would have had great meaning to Solzhenitsyn, meant to describe a prisoner for whom, for a variety of good and terrible reasons, a suitable judicial system cannot be found. A “prisoner” knows his fate. A “detainee” just lingers.

And so the detainees pass through like ghosts, their stories flickering for minutes, before they are shuttled back to the cells. The Algerian accused of planning an explosives attack against the U. S.: “I just want to defend my case. It is a false accusation against me and I just want to clarify it.” The Brit who demands rights under international law: “So the government evidence has been classified?” The Tunisian who offers his hands as literal proof that he is innocent: “How could I have trained? If you look at my hands, I am injured. My hand is only 35 percent functional.”

It is July 2004 and there are roughly six hundred men at Guantánamo but no legal system for distinguishing between the relative few true militants and the misbegotten. The government is still gathering evidence, all questions of justice and due process put on hold by the imperatives of war. The purpose of these primitive tribunals is not adjudication but rather compliance with the Supreme Court’s order that the detainees have at least some means of challenging their imprisonment.

Noor is led up the trailer stairs and through the door. He slowly lowers himself into the white plastic chair. He is weak and moves far more slowly and with more caution than a man his age should. He arrived two years earlier, in August 2002. His body has begun to slip away, weakening, aching.

“Do you understand why we are here?” asks the tribunal president, an Air Force colonel. He is pleasant and very concerned with procedure.

“Yes, I understand why we are here.” Noor’s answer is translated from Arabic into English, then played back to the military officers in the room. They wear no name badges, their identities concealed to protect them from the shackled man before them.

“Do you understand that you do not have to provide us any statement, but you may if you wish?”

Yes, Noor understands. Directly in front of his chair a steel eyelet and lock protrude from the green-gray office carpeting. Across the room, on the back wall, is a red panic button.

The unclassified evidence is read for the record. If Noor wants to go home to Sudan, his chance is now. He must convince the people before him that he is not who they think he is. He is not dangerous, he is just a man who was lost for a while but does not want any trouble. There are no lawyers present — as no lawyer has yet been assigned to the case or allowed to meet him. Noor must make the case himself.

The detainee delivered an electronic communication machine, possibly a facsimile machine, to Osama bin Laden.

“I did not see bin Laden, nor did I meet him,” Noor says. “As far as the facsimile, I wanted to buy that facsimile for myself.”

The detainee corresponded with a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant concerning the potential closing of Khalden camp.

“What happened was this,” he begins. He is trying to explain that he didn’t know anything. The camp was run by the sheik’s son and Abu Zubaydah, he says. “The rest of the trainers … we just simply follow what they have to say.”

The detainee was the “70th Taliban Commander.”

“Again, I don’t know anything about the Taliban,” he says. “I never carried arms with them. I don’t know anything about the Taliban. I am not even convinced of the Taliban, so how do you associate me with the Taliban?”

How do you reason with captors who don’t understand where you’ve been, what you’ve seen? How do you tell a captor you’re innocent when everything in your file says that you’re a terrorist?

The detainee worked as a weapons instructor on the use of the AK-47, PK, and RPG at the Khalden camp.

“All I trained on was the Kalashnikov, the light weapons. I trained for a period of three months only … That’s all I did.”

The detainee provided logistics support at the Khalden training camp.

“I want to tell you something,” says Noor. Here it is. The point that will finally make them understand, his chance to finally get through.

“I used to bring the rice, and all the required food, vegetables,” he says. “That’s all I was doing. Sugar and other things, I would get for cost, take it to the camp or somewhere else.”

The faces stare back at him, his words met with silence.

One tribunal member leans toward his mic: “Just had one clarifying question. At one point you said you don’t know anything about the Taliban, and you’re not even convinced of the Taliban. What do you mean by that?”

It is not a complicated question. “I am not convinced with their cause or with the Taliban,” answers Noor.

The tribunal member is incredulous. “You’re not convinced they even exist, or what?”

Noor stares back. “Everything that you want to do in life, you want to be convinced of what you’re doing. When it comes to the Taliban, even scientists go against each other. Everybody sees it a different way.”

The guards close their fingers over his frail wrists and help him down the trailer stairs and back through the tropical humidity to his cell. Noor doesn’t understand much from the proceedings, but he understands enough to know that he will never leave Guantánamo.

*****

He didn’t tell his brother or sister or uncle what he intended to do. He simply told them he was going to Khartoum to study. Once there he boarded a Kenya Airways jet — likely the first plane he’d ever seen up close, let alone flown in — and hopscotched southeast to Nairobi, then on to New Delhi. In that swarming city of foreign faces, he switched to the train, 250 miles to Lahore, Pakistan, then another 250 miles to Peshawar. The journey took him two years. What Noor did in those two years — did he travel by train or truck, foot or mule? Did he stop to work or study, to rest and pray? — is hard to know. But as the Soviets had been routed from Afghanistan just a few years before, the CIA still thought of the mujahideen fondly, and global jihad was as yet only notional — nothing he did would have put him in conflict with the United States.

On an unremarkable day in 1994, in a border town in Pakistan, Noor arrives at a safe house. There is a clear system for entering a jihadi training camp. Noor offers the proprietor of the safe house a letter of introduction, likely from one of the men in the market in Sudan. The proprietor asks Noor a series of questions. Who do you know in Port Sudan? Why did you come here? How did you travel? Nervous and scared, Noor answers all the questions. He passes the test; his future ticks forward further. He enters the house and another exchange takes place. He is given a traditional salwar kameez, the dress worn by both women and men, and a letter. In return he offers his Sudanese passport and his name. From here forward he will be known as Farouk and Akrima and Zamir. A new kunya every few years, but never Noor. Noor is the past. The past is gone.

A guide takes Noor to the Afghan border. Early in the morning the guide walks him through, past the Pakistanis standing guard — straight, don’t stop or ask questions — and into the mountains of Khost. They rise tall and black, then settle into brown hills, then eventually into beautiful green valleys. In just such a valley sits the camp. It is called Khalden and has been here since at least 1988, when Arab mujahideen built it to train for their fight against the Soviet empire. The Soviets eventually left Afghanistan, but Khalden and the mujahideen stayed. They still had weapons, they still had American tactical manuals, and they still had Muslims to protect — from the communist Najibullah in Afghanistan, from madmen in Bosnia, and from the Russians again, this time in Chechnya.

Khalden is the size of one and a half football fields. There is a brick mosque with a metal roof and a small shack made of stones and topped with leaves and plastic sheeting, where food is cooked. The barracks have earthen floors. On the far side is a classroom with a blackboard, the surrounding mountain walls used for target practice, the caves used for storing munitions and baking bread. There is one water source, the river. Candles, gas lamps, and fire the only means of light and warmth. Noor is given a filthy sleeping bag that previously was used for transporting the bodies of brothers killed in battle. But he is filled with great pride. He has made it, he is now a brother.

His first day begins with formation. There are many men here. Yemenis and Algerians and Chechens and Saudis. At any time there can be anywhere from fifty to seventy men. They come for different reasons. Some to return home to fight, others hoping to move up to another camp where they can learn more advanced skills, and still others like Noor who are just looking for something to do. They come not to fight but to escape. (Every so often a group of rich Saudis roll through for a week or two, not to train but rather so they can tell everyone back home they shot guns at a mujahideen camp.) In the morning these men stand together united as brothers as the camp’s emir, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, leads formation. Then they divide into groups, the Chechens with other Chechens, the Jordanians with other Jordanians, and so forth.

The men train physically, they run for hours through the mountains, they learn how to crawl and surveil and bury their secrets. Their muscles grow and their heels and palms become callused. In the classroom they are quizzed on tactics, how to spot a target, how to evade an attack. There is small-arms training, handguns, assault rifles, machine guns. They shoot at the mountainside, learning how to peer through a scope, how to exhale as they squeeze the trigger. The more advanced students are broken down into smaller groups and given explosives training — how to lay dynamite, how to install a trigger in a ball of C-4, how to plant a bomb. At night there is Islamic study. Someone might give a sermon or teach a lesson or urge the brothers to help push the Israelis out of Palestine.

There are many different philosophies on jihad. The men who run this camp subscribe to defensive jihad, the idea that all Muslims have an obligation to protect themselves and other Muslims from attacks. Their camp is not a Taliban camp or an Al Qaeda camp. It is independent. The men come here to learn basic skills. What they decide to do with them when they leave is their concern.

Most of the men stay for weeks, three to four months at most, then they head back to their home countries with the vague notion of protecting themselves or their families, or they head off to fight the Russians in Chechnya. Those who are more fervent are sent to more advanced camps, Derunta if they want to learn explosives. A Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah is responsible for transferring them. He’s emir of the main guesthouse into Khalden. When recruits arrive in Pakistan, he takes their passports and funnels them to Khalden, and when their training is over, he funnels them back out.

Noor is not funneled anywhere. He never graduates to another camp or goes home. He stays at Khalden, where he feels he belongs.

At first he works as a small-arms instructor. He teaches the recruits to treat their weapons as if they were their own limbs. He shows them how to take them apart and clean the barrels, wiping the dirt away, oiling them, then reassembling them. And he teaches them to shoot. There are hand pistols and single-shot rifles and Kalashnikovs, passed down from fighter to fighter. For a few months, Noor’s job is to teach the trainees how to use these weapons. But he does not enjoy the work. Eventually he works up the courage to ask Ibn Sheikh for a transfer. In Noor, Ibn Sheikh sees a man he can trust. He offers him a new job, one better suited to his skills and disposition. Noor becomes the camp’s quartermaster, responsible for making sure there is enough rice and beans and water and wood. He collects what the camp needs, and at the end of the day he goes to sleep in his corner.

There is a profound sense of isolation, of remoteness, to Khalden. And for six years the men come and go, hundreds, perhaps thousands as the years pass. The barracks stay the same, the biting cold comes each winter, and each winter Noor knows what the camp needs to make it through — how much firewood to gather for warmth, how much food. He has a job and a purpose. He doesn’t ask questions. In 1995, Osama bin Laden moves his operations to Afghanistan and begins setting up his own camps. Noor gets up and does his job. In 1998, fatwas are heard over the radios, men blow up the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Noor helps out when Ibn Sheikh is out of town, leads formation. Cruise missiles rain down on Al Qaeda training camps, and still Noor checks the food supply. Until one day in late 1999, the outside finally pushes through.

First comes word that Khalden must be moved. Ammunition, weapons, food stores, everything loaded up and caravanned ninety miles over dirt roads to Kabul. Soon after, a meeting is called. The men meet in Wazir Akbar Khan, an upscale district of Kabul lined by embassies and government buildings. Ibn Sheikh is there. Abu Zubaydah comes from the safe house in Pakistan. Noor and the other trainers, most of whom are part of the camp’s advisory council, attend. The problem is laid out. Bin Laden is consolidating power in Afghanistan. He does not like the idea of independent camps. He wants all the camps to be Al Qaeda camps, and he wants to be the emir of them all. They can allow bin Laden to run the camp as an Al Qaeda facility and train the men for offensive jihad, or they can shut it down.

The men in the room voice their opinions. And at last Ibn Sheikh makes a decision. Khalden will close. The trainees go to other camps. The trainers look for other jobs. Noor begins wandering again, this time toward home.

He doesn’t know what is coming — the hijackers and airplanes and falling bodies and crumbling towers. He doesn’t know that he will soon collide with the greatest power in the history of the world. For a few months more, he is simply a peasant without a passport.

*****

He sleeps on a mat cramped on the floor with a dozen others. They come from different places: Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia. Some have traveled here in small groups, wearing hijabs over their beards, long salwar kameez to their toes. Others rose from their caves in Tora Bora after bin Laden escaped and the Americans left. They journeyed by white pickup truck and donkey and on foot from Kandahar up to Khost and across the border. They were alerted where to cross the border by contacts on the Pakistani side, then they began moving from safe house to safe house until they came to this floor in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Most were driven by fear, others like Noor simply followed. Noor has never led in his life. It is hard to believe that he would lead now.

The home is two stories of stucco topped by rectangular balconies that double as a watchtower. The only color is a blue gate that keeps cars out and the people in. Some of the men have been here for two or three weeks. Others for just a few days. In the kitchen there are vegetables, some chicken and rice, wildly mismatched silverware and plates. There’s a chore list taped to one wall, and little furniture. The men eat on the floor. It is also where they pray. Where they wait. One of the men, Ghassan al Sharbi, a Saudi who attended an aeronautics college in Arizona and knows English, teaches some of the others. Noor works on his English vocabulary and assumes a role similar to the one he had at Khalden — he gets the food, cooks, makes sure the safe house has the supplies it needs. It is boring here. They are safe, there is food and a place to sleep, but little more to do than pray and wait.

It is extremely hard to get a good fake passport in Faisalabad. Sometimes you can get documents in Afghanistan, but only pictures in Pakistan. Once you have both, you need an expert who can seamlessly bind them together. They must be near perfect, or else they are useless. A former jihadi might make it home, but then what? He can never leave again. Getting married, having children is not an option, because the man cannot travel with his family. Inside the house there are dozens of passport photos. The same man is in many of them, in front of the same red background that is often used in passports in the Middle East. In each he looks slightly different. Here he has a beard, there a mustache. Here a suit, there a robe. There are also multiple blank passports with no pictures or names. This is downstairs where the men waiting for documents are staying. There is also an upstairs. But Noor is not allowed upstairs. To get upstairs you need to go through the steel door at the top of the stairway. To go through the steel door you need a battering ram.

On March 28, 2002, at two in the morning, the battering ram comes.

The Pakistanis go in first, over the blue gate and through the front door. This is one of a dozen simultaneous raids tonight — a dozen houses, each handpicked by the CIA after weeks of surveillance, in search of Abu Zubaydah. He’s the man Noor first met two years earlier when Khalden was closed, the one whose responsibility was getting passports and paperwork for the men leaving the camp and moving onward to other training or perhaps home. Since 9/11 he’d become one of the most wanted men in the world, third after bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The commandos lead with 9mm handguns, the same handguns stenciled on their black Punjab Elite Police uniforms. Most of their equipment for the raid — a battering ram from Galls police supply in Kentucky, night-vision goggles, body armor — was shipped in by the CIA on a charter plane just days earlier. The commandos are well trained and brutally efficient. The safe-house front door bursts open, pistols punch into the darkness, and the men on the thin mats awaken from the last good sleep they will have for years. There is no resistance. Hands up, Noor and the rest simply surrender.

They cannot see what is happening elsewhere in the house, but they can hear. Shouting on the stairwell, huge bangs as the metal of the battering ram pounds the reinforced upper door. Then the sound of hinges breaking, metal giving, and the sounds of a man gasping as a knife is thrust into his neck. Now commotion, shouts in Punjabi as the commandos storm through the door and up to the roof. Then the sound of 9mm’s firing. Gravity takes over from there. Two thumps on the ground, boots surrounding the bodies, one dead, the other — Zubaydah — wounded with shots to the leg, groin, and stomach, but still breathing. A voice in accented English: “He killed my man, he stabbed him in the neck, he killed my man! We will fuck him!” Now another voice, this one the CIA officer in charge: “We’re fucked if he dies. Let’s get him to a hospital.”

By now, Noor and the other men from the first floor are sitting outside the blue gate, hands cuffed behind their backs, faces staring forward. Around them, the Pakistani commandos laugh and smoke. Upstairs the CIA and FBI begin collecting evidence. There is a magnifying glass and a couple card-sized screwdriver kits, dirty and smudged. A toothbrush, its head blackened by grease, red wire strippers, a yellow-and-blue box-cutting knife. Then the switches, dozens of bags of them, little matchbook-sized boxes in individual plastic bags, and the batteries, Duracell AAs. There are no beds and few personal items upstairs, but there is a folding table. On it lies a black timing device, two wires sticking out, a blue soldering iron, its metal tip still warm. Nearby is a map showing the British school in Lahore.

A paddy wagon arrives. Then the moving begins — the imagination starts a game that won’t end for years: Where are they taking me? What will happen? Noor is taken by the arm, pushed into the wagon. Then into a holding pen at a jail in Faisalabad. The next day a jail in Lahore, filthy cells, squalor. The not knowing, the inability to gain any mental traction, is worse than the conditions. Time slows, measured in breaths. Some of the men cry, others fervently shout and pray, others stay silent.

Another day, moved once again. This time to a house in Lahore bought by the CIA. Up out of the paddy wagon, Noor and the others are situated on the kitchen floor. On the ground they sit, hands cuffed behind their backs. Silence enforced by the gun. September 11 is still an open investigation, so the FBI is in charge here. The bedrooms are interrogation rooms. They are led to the interrogation rooms, one by one. The questions drilled at them in Arabic. Name? Birth date? Nationality? How did you get here? What were you doing in Afghanistan? Where were you on September 11? Have you ever met bin Laden? Where did you meet bin Laden? What did he say to you?

The men all have the same story. They are in Pakistan to study Arabic, that is the only reason. “There are no Arabic schools in Faisalabad,” the interrogators tell them. At this, the men pretend to grow tired, exhausted, some nodding off in their chairs, sliding forward off their seats. Others claim nausea, extreme distress. In America the politicians are already bragging. Abu Zubaydah is the biggest capture so far. In 2002 they don’t yet know that he actually knows very little, that he had nothing to do with the embassy bombings or 9/11, that any useful information Zubaydah may have given the Americans is hopelessly compromised by the fact that he was repeatedly tortured to get it.

No matter, in Lahore the prisoners are moved to the dining room for processing. Fingerprints, cataloging of items found with the men, mug shots. In one a man stands stone-faced and dirty. He has not slept or showered in days. He has the look of a man lost in a current he can’t control or understand, his eyes wide in shock. He holds a handwritten sign across his chest with his name. The flash pops, and he is led back through the kitchen, out of the house, and into the unknown.

*****

In the cage in Lahore where he and the others live and sleep for two months, he’s interrogated for days at a time without being fed. When not being questioned, Noor and the others beg the Pakistani guards to pull weeds or brown grass from the ground outside so that they might have something to eat. The hunger is crippling and all consuming. But there are other worries, other dark fantasies. Growing up in Sudan, Noor had heard about the security forces in Egypt and about how they would take people from the streets and make them disappear. In his cage in Lahore, Noor thinks about what it would be like to disappear and never be heard from again.

At Bagram Air Base, where the prisoners are transferred, Noor has a bag placed over his head, his arms suspended from the ceiling by chains, or else the opposite, feet and hands bolted to the floor, knees bent, a man stuck to the earth. At times the air-conditioning is turned to freezing, his clothes stripped away. These are the good days, because as uncomfortable as he is, he knows what is happening. He has begun conditioning himself to routine. The worst is when the guards rush in at night and push him against the wall and tell him that his time has come — he’s going off to Egypt with the others. He will disappear.

The flight to Guantánamo is more than twenty hours. He is hooded and handcuffed to the other men, unable to move, unable to urinate. When he arrives, he is taken to Camp 5. Here he is locked up in solitary and interrogated daily. He has no idea what will happen to him, what his future could be, whether anyone even knows he’s here. He only knows what to fear — the interrogation room, where the music is so loud he feels like his head is being beaten. And Romeo, an even smaller room, with no mattress or blanket or clothes. You could be left in Romeo for days, forgotten.

Noor is moved to Camp 6. He is still kept in solitary, but some of the worst treatment ends, the routine becomes more routine, and the days pile up. The mind adjusts. But he has begun changing physically. There are nightmares. He replays the raid, the worst hours of interrogation. But other things, too. He feels achy all the time. Also he has become bloated and nauseous, his digestive system never quite right, always on the verge.

The body has ways of coping with stress. A mugger pulls a pistol or your car is sideswiped and adrenaline and cortisol immediately flood your system. Your heart rate rises and your breath quickens so oxygen can reach your muscles faster. Glucose is released into your bloodstream, a boost of energy to aid in escape. And your brain’s levels of the memory-stamping hormones called glucocorticoids and catecholamines increase so that you remember the situation and avoid it in the future.

Allostasis is the process by which the body constantly adjusts its hormone levels to remain stable. Allostatic load occurs when the stress switch that controls the flow of cortisol and adrenaline gets stuck in the on position. Doctors who have spent time treating Guantánamo detainees call this “Guantánamo syndrome.”

In May 2008, six years after he arrived, Noor is at last charged with conspiracy and supporting terrorism. The penalty is life imprisonment. He does not trust his lawyers; he does not trust anyone. But by now he is in Camp 4. Here the brothers live communally, up to ten men to a room. Life gets considerably better. Noor takes classes, reads and studies. There is open sky and a yard and a soccer field. And yet one thing doesn’t change — the not knowing. He is trapped in a legal system that seems to change by the day. There is no end to his confinement in sight. Five months later, in October, the charges are abruptly dropped after a lead prosecutor resigns, citing a crisis of conscience, claiming that the military has been withholding exculpatory evidence in the case against a child soldier from Afghanistan. Two months later, a month before President Obama will take office, the charges against Noor are reinstated.

At Noor’s military-commission trial in February 2011, many observers will comment how odd it is that he doesn’t stand when his lawyers stand. What they don’t know is that he is not able.

*****

Thursday night is the night of enlightenment. And on Thursday, the brothers are together and Noor is laughing and smiling and at ease. He is usually quiet, spends his time alone reading and memorizing the Koran. But on Thursday nights he joins his brothers in singing nasheeds. They come together out of their cells and sway slightly. Noor sings loud, his dark face turned to the sky, facing his home, his voice rising into the Caribbean night.

Between nasheeds the brothers recite poems or tell jokes. Noor has a favorite. It is about Adarob, the local name for his extended tribe in Sudan. The Adarob are known for their smarts, and extreme patience. They can wait and wait and wait; their forbearance is bottomless. The joke is about an Adarob thief who tries to mug a schoolteacher.

Adarob says, “Give me what’s in your pocket!”

The teacher says, “I don’t have anything in my pocket.”

“Then give me your watch!”

“I am not wearing a watch.”

“Then give me a cigarette!”

“I don’t smoke.”

“What do you do for work?”

“I am a schoolteacher.”

Adarob then sits on the ground and says, “Give me a lesson! I swear I will get something out of you!”

Noor breaks out in laughter, his face beaming. It is the one evening a week he allows himself the pleasure of small things.

“You must be patient,” he tells the brothers. “Being here is divine destiny. God tests humans in their lives to know their faith and patience.” The brothers hear this and they see how he perseveres with calm and patience, and they are inspired. He is serving the time for all of them.

They come to him for counseling on other matters, too. He is an elder the other men depend upon, his advice always honest but never disrespectful. When some of the brothers go on a food strike, he tells them that he does not believe not eating will solve their problems. But he also skips some meals himself out of solidarity and respect. “I cannot eat if they are going on a food strike,” he says. Some of the brothers spit on the guards as they walk by; they throw urine and feces on them. He tells the brothers, “Even if I hated a guard, I am not convinced that this is a good thing to do.” He tells them, “I respect your convictions, but it’s not something I want to do.”

Some days after morning recitation Noor spends an hour with his Sudanese brothers on a prayer rug in the yard, the high barbed-wire fences stretching to the sky, the smell of the ocean strong. They talk about home and soccer, Noor recounting games he played as a young boy and trips to the social club, watching his favorite team, Al-Hilal. They reminisce about Flamingo and Kilo 8, where the teenage kids would gather and camp, and evening Ramadan meals of assida, millet pudding, and hulu-mur, the spicy drink that is on every table in Sudan.

“You should not be in jail,” he tells brother Adel, from Port Sudan [Adel Hassan Hamad, released in December 2007]. “You did not do anything, you are a respected person, like an older brother. It saddens me that someone your age would be here.” To brother Mustafa from Khartoum [Mustafa al-Hassan, released in September 2008], he makes a request: “If you ever get out and meet my niece and nephew, remind them to be of good morals.”

He does not like to waste his time on television. He is often silent. He reads and studies and thinks and prays to Allah. Because this he knows: Whether he will get out of here or not is Allah’s will.

*****

The courtroom looks like a prefabricated barn, a light-yellow box made of metal siding surrounded on every side by barbed wire. Around it sit other metal boxes, trailers for the defense and prosecution teams, five trailers for five defendants. The courthouse was specially built to try the 9/11 plotters concurrently and broadcast the proceedings to the world. Inside, it is outfitted with a media box and large-screen monitors and a sound system that can be delayed so that sensors can muffle classified information before it reaches the journalists who sit behind triple-paned, soundproof hurricane glass.

Noor sits in the front row with his defense team. His robe is white, as is his cap. He has a blue jacket that he wears when he gets cold. In his mid-forties, he is old and weak. He speaks the most the first day, but says only one thing. Na’am. Yes. Yes. Yes he understands the charges, yes he pleads guilty, yes he knows what that means, yes he has seen the translation, yes he has made the decision to plead guilty on his own, yes, yes, yes, yes. Over and over again he is prompted to tell the judge that he is guilty, that nobody has made him plead guilty. Yes, yes, I did it. And then he sits, his gaze often to the left, away from his own trial and the judge and his legal team, a phantom in a custom-built $12 million courtroom. It is not that he’s uninterested in his fate. It is that his fate has already been decided. Everyone knows this. Despite what has been agreed upon and signed behind closed doors, he must still stand trial, he must still be publicly sentenced. He must be patient, let the lawyers and government do what they need to do.

Virtually overnight the prosecution team has doubled, tripled in size. Whereas two young JAG lawyers spent months shepherding the case, the big brass has shown up for court, seven men huddled around the prosecution tables. Nobody wants to miss the trial, nobody wants to be left out of history and the photo ops after.

Arthur Gaston steps before the jury. He is tall, brown hair, small head, wire-rimmed glasses, a southern Navy commander, a second-generation Eagle Scout. He walks with the swagger and confidence of a man used to being right. His grin shows that he knows it.

“Terrorists are not born, they are made,” he tells the jury. “And Noor has made hundreds of them.” Noor does not move, does not flinch, he simply sits and waits.

Over three days, the government makes its case: Khalden is where terrorists are made. By working there, Noor was cultivating terrorists. There are photos of bomb switches projected onto the large screens and pictures of cards rigged to explode when opened, all items found in the safe house. The stories of three terrorists are explained in detail over hours during each day: Mohamed al-Owhali, who helped blow up the U. S. embassy in Nairobi; Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to bring down LAX during the millennium celebration; Zacarias Moussaoui, who the government at one point posited was the twentieth 9/11 hijacker. Noor did not know what would become of these men, but he did cook rice for them.

The defense counters. Noor has owned up to working at Khalden but shouldn’t be charged for the crimes of others. He should not be forced to be made culpable for 9/11. Noor’s posture does not change; the figure in perfect white robes simply sits. Whether the arguments are for or against him does not matter. Noor knew nothing of the terror plots carried out by men years after they left Khalden, the defense continues. He should not be held responsible for them, nor for the actions of Abu Zubaydah in the safe house. Of the 1,050 fingerprints taken from the second story, where the bombs were being made, not one belongs to Noor. He was not there to build bombs and has never been accused of such. He needed a passport. He wanted to go home.

Still. Noor wants to go home, which is why he says nothing. Let the lawyers argue, let the government preen and justify his incarceration, let 9/11 survivors and military families take solace in his guilty plea, let the journalists and human-rights observers denounce the commission system. It does not matter to him. The politics of this bizarre ritual are not his concern.

After three days, the jury comes back with its sentence. Noor rises, puts his blue jacket on. “Fourteen years.” He is emotionless. The jury is led from the room, and his plea deal is unsealed, the real sentence read. Thirty-four months. In exchange for pleading guilty and agreeing to be interviewed by the FBI under oath, Noor will be released in less than three years.

He is led out of the courtroom and into a transport van. Outside, in competing press conferences, the government celebrates its victory and extols the virtues of the commission system while the human-rights observers denounce the outcome as a sham. They would have had Noor fight the charges, even if it meant another six, seven, or eight years waiting for a trial.

Meanwhile, back at his cell in Camp 6, Noor thinks about none of this. He is carefully packing his belongings, his Koran, his prayer items. For the first time in nearly ten years, there is a sentence and an end point. He knows how much longer he must be patient. One thousand and twenty days. Twenty-four thousand four hundred eighty hours.

He is happy.

*****

His family waits in the same two-room home that Noor left nearly twenty years ago. The yard he slept in remains, as does the dirt alley where he would play soccer. His older brother Osman supports the family now, and he waits. Any time Noor’s nephew Mus’ab, who was born around the time Noor was captured, sees something on the television about Guantánamo, he shouts and tells the family to come watch. “They’re talking about Noor!” he says. He dreams of Noor coming home, wishes he could be transformed into a superhero for one day so he could rescue him. His sister Muna waits, too. But she has the most trouble. Ask her a simple question and she cries, goes sick. The memories hurt. But they all also have faith. This is all God’s predestined plan. If Allah wants Noor to be released, Noor will be released. “When he comes back, we will find him a wife, celebrate his return, build him a home, inshallah,” says Osman. “We will greet him with a parade like that of the president of the republic. After that we will do anything he wants,” says his cousin Sa’id.

To the family, he is a lost son they want back. In Guantánamo he is prisoner 707. And throughout, he has become what we needed him to be. When he was captured, he was what we most feared — an Arabic-speaking man found in a house with bombs. Then, because we feared fair trials in courts of law, he became a judicial problem, a man to be processed and moved. Nine years later, the government has now made him proof that our commission system works.

There was a time, early in the “war on terror,” when word came from the highest levels in Washington that Guantánamo was to be the preserve of the “worst of the worst.” This was obviously never true, but it’s not until now that we know it. And not before surrendering to fear and abandoning the rules of evidence and the value of due process and eroding the foundation of the rule of law itself. The truth is that most of the 779 men who wound up at Guantánamo were like Noor — low-level, rather inconsequential, possessed of nothing useful to the United States nor posing any particular danger. In fact, people close to the team that prosecuted Noor quietly even voiced sympathy for him, describing him as “one of life’s losers.”

It is a strange population, the 171 men still left at Guantánamo. There is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another two dozen hardened militants, who will never be released. This class of prisoner represents a small minority of the population. Then there are the others — about a hundred men, mostly Yemeni, who have been cleared to leave but have no place to go, as no country will take them. And there are another thirty-five or so like Noor. They are nameless, low-level operatives, or hapless men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are the detritus of a decade-long war. They can’t simply be released. That would be admitting that they aren’t as bad as the government once said they were. And most can’t be tried, either, because much of the evidence against them — if there is any — is too fraught, as it was gotten by torture, and would never have even been considered to be evidence in any American judicial proceeding before September 11, 2001. And no serious person would have ever argued for it as such.

This condition — this stateless and inconsequential group of ghost detainees — might well be described as another form of Guantánamo syndrome. Except this syndrome is a debilitation of the American legal system, whereby it becomes possible for a prisoner to be held forever, without charge. With a court system, the envy of the world, simply too afraid to present evidence and hold trials. As one lawyer for a high-profile detainee put it, the best thing that happened to Noor is that he was at last charged with a crime. It forced the government to act and make a deal. They could no longer simply let him linger indefinitely. His charges were his way out. A military lawyer puts it another way: “One of the running jokes of Guantánamo is that you have to lose to win.”

Noor wouldn’t speak to me for this story, nor would my father, who is a member of his legal team (See “Stories My Father Told Me,” July 2009), nor would anyone else involved in Noor’s defense. They are all extremely cautious, because even still, there are no guarantees that Noor will actually leave when his sentence is up. The convening authority could decide in the end that he is too dangerous to release. Or he could be the victim of fractious American politics. In February 2011, the day after his sentencing, the House passed a bill stipulating that no Guantánamo detainees can be transferred to countries that are state sponsors of terror. Sudan, whose president is wanted for war crimes committed in Darfur, is on that list. It does not matter that nine other detainees have returned to Sudan and none have returned to militancy. It does not matter that the Sudanese government tracks their every move. If Sudan is on that list in 2013 when Noor’s sentence is up and the House bill becomes law, the secretary of defense would have to make an explicit exception.

Noor can’t worry about these things. It is all up to Allah, he tells his lawyers. “I put this in God’s hands. If He wants me to leave from here, I will go.”

Recently, Noor has begun to allow himself to think of the future. The camp doctors told him that his cholesterol is high, so he has begun eating better. He doesn’t touch the cheese or the carbs. Every week his lawyers send a packet of news articles to read. Lately he has asked for stories on omega-3′s. During recreation time he uses the elliptical machine or treadmill, and the pain in his joints and in his back is giving way to muscle. The belly beneath his robe is flat again. In his forties, he is already an old man. But with exercise now, he will be able to carry the child he’ll have when at last he makes it home.

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

However, although it’s reassuring to see renewed interest in Guantánamo — and to see a decent amount of insightful reporting about the crimes and distortions of the Bush administration in the reporting of WikiLeaks’ media partners in the US and throughout Europe — I’m not yet persuaded that the release of these documents has caused significant enough ripples in the US to effect any kind of change to the existing policies.

This may not be possible — given the current deplorable state of US politics, and the New York Times‘ damaging introduction to its own unofficial release of the WikiLeaks documents last week — and it may be, as I have been suggesting all year, that the only answer to the appalling inertia regarding Guantánamo is for the international community, including the UN, to reassert the kind of criticism to which George W. Bush was particularly subjected in his second term in office.

With more articles by WikiLeaks’ media partners to be published in the weeks to come, and with my own detailed analyses of some of the documents also forthcoming, the story is far from over, but for now, as I continue to release links to interviews in which I discuss the importance of the released documents — and the particular importance of recognizing that the supposed intelligence in the files is in fact thoroughly infected with the unreliable testimony of tortured, coerced and bribed prisoners — I’m posting below the notes I wrote for WikiLeaks explaining how to read and understand the different sections in the documents, and also the introductions I wrote for a handful of briefing documents that were also made available last week by WikiLeaks.

Of particular interest, I hope, is my observation, under “5. Capture Information,” that the “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 gven in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer. As a senior interrogator who worked in Afghanistan explained in a book that he wrote about his experiences, every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by US forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

No exceptions to these rules were allowed, which explains why Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, an early commander at the prison, complained about the large number of “Mickey Mouse prisoners” that he was expected to deal with, and the lack of screening also helps to explain why Marine Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert, the prison’s first commander, told the BBC in February 2002 (before he was silenced) that “A large number [of the prisoners] claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files

The nearly 800 documents in WikiLeaks’ latest release of classified US documents are memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), the combined force in charge of the US “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to US Southern Command, in Miami, Florida, regarding the disposition of the prisoners.

Written between 2002 and 2008, the memoranda were all marked as “secret,” and their subject was whether to continue holding a prisoner, or whether to recommend his release (described as his “transfer” — to the custody of his own government, or that of some other government). They were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a higher level, but they are very significant, as they represent not only the opinions of JTF-GTMO, but also the Criminal Investigation Task Force, created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the “War on Terror,” and the BSCTs, the behavioral science teams consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the “exploitation” of prisoners in interrogation.

Under the heading, “JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment,” the memos generally contain nine sections, describing the prisoners as follows, although the earlier examples, especially those dealing with prisoners released — or recommended for release — between 2002 and 2004, may have less detailed analyses than the following:

1. Personal information

Each prisoner is identified by name, by aliases, which the US claims to have identified, by place and date of birth, by citizenship, and by Internment Serial Number (ISN). These long lists of numbers and letters — e.g. US9YM-000027DP — are used to identify the prisoners in Guantánamo, helping to dehumanize them, as intended, by doing away with their names. The most significant section is the number towards the end, which is generally shortened, so that the example above would be known as ISN 027. In the files, the prisoners are identified by nationality, with 47 countries in total listed alphabetically, from “az” for Afghanistan to “ym” for Yemen.

2. Health

This section describes whether or not the prisoner in question has mental health issues and/or physical health issues. Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and/or physical problems.

3. JTF-GTMO Assessment

a. Under “Recommendation,” the Task Force explains whether a prisoner should continue to be held, or should be released.

b. Under “Executive Summary,” the Task Force briefly explains its reasoning, and, in more recent cases, also explains whether the prisoner is a low, medium or high risk as a threat to the US and its allies and as a threat in detention (i.e. based on their behavior in Guantánamo), and also whether they are regarded as of low, medium or high intelligence value.

c. Under “Summary of Changes,” the Task Force explains whether there has been any change in the information provided since the last appraisal (generally, the prisoners are appraised on an annual basis).

4. Detainee’s Account of Events

Based on the prisoners’ own testimony, this section puts together an account of their history, and how they came to be seized, in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, based on their own words.

5. Capture Information

This section explains how and where the prisoners were seized, and is followed by a description of their possessions at the time of capture, the date of their transfer to Guantánamo, and, spuriously, “Reasons for Transfer to JTF-GTMO,” which lists alleged reasons for the prisoners’ transfer, such as knowledge of certain topics for exploitation through interrogation. The reason that this is unconvincing is because, as former interrogator Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) explained in his book The Interrogators, the US high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions; in other words, the “Reasons for Transfer” were grafted on afterwards, as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding-up of prisoners.

6. Evaluation of Detainee’s Account

In this section, the Task Force analyzes whether or not they find the prisoners’ accounts convincing.

7. Detainee Threat

This section is the most significant from the point of view of the supposed intelligence used to justify the detention of prisoners. After “Assessment,” which reiterates the conclusion at 3b, the main section, “Reasons for Continued Detention,” may, at first glance, look convincing, but it must be stressed that, for the most part, it consists of little more than unreliable statements made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture and other forms of coercion were widespread, or through more subtle means in Guantánamo, where compliant prisoners who were prepared to make statements about their fellow prisoners were rewarded with better treatment. Some examples are available on the homepage for the release of these documents (cross-posted with links here).

With this in mind, it should be noted that there are good reasons why Obama administration officials, in the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by the President to review the cases of the 241 prisoners still held in Guantánamo when he took office, concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted.

The final part of this section, “Detainee’s Conduct,” analyzes in detail how the prisoners have behaved during their imprisonment, with exact figures cited for examples of “Disciplinary Infraction.”

8. Detainee Intelligence Value Assessment

After reiterating the intelligence assessment at 3b and recapping on the prisoners’ alleged status, this section primarily assesses which areas of intelligence remain to be “exploited,” according to the Task Force.

9. EC Status

The final section notes whether or not the prisoner in question is still regarded as an “enemy combatant,” based on the findings of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2004-05 to ascertain whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly labeled as “enemy combatants.” Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being “no longer enemy combatants,” and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners’ favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.

*****

In addition, please find below the introductions that I wrote to three briefing documents that were put up on WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files page last week, to accompany the release of the prisoner files (which have now almost all been released). I also wrote the introduction to a classification document, whch is not incuded here, because it is probably only of interest those who take a professional interest in the US military’s obsession with classification, but I hope that the three briefing documents provide a fascinating accompaniment to the prisoner files.

Cover Story Assessment

This document, a four-page briefing paper entitled, “Assessment of Afghanistan Travels and Islamic Duties as they Pertain to Interrogation,” was published in August 2004 and provides interrogators with information about the perceived activities of foreigners in Afghanistan, and the types of cover stories that were allegedly used on a regular basis by foreigners who had traveled there for jihad.

While this may well have proved useful in identifying individuals who were attempting to hide their true motives, it also undoubtedly contributed to an atmosphere in which everyone who claimed to be innocent was regarded as having been trained by al-Qaeda to resist interrogation, leading to confirmation bias, even if, as was the case with many of those held, they were indeed innocent.

EC Threat Indicators

This document, a 17-page briefing paper entitled, “JTF-GTMO Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants,” was intended to help interrogators “to determine a detainee‟s capabilities and intentions to pose a terrorist threat if the detainee were given the opportunity,” primarily through the use of three types of indicators: “1) the detainee himself provides acknowledgement of a fact; 2) another detainee, document, government, etc. provides an identification of the detainee; and 3) analysis of the detainee‟s timeline, activities, and associates in context with other known events and individuals.”

The document contains detailed lists of places where prisoners were captured, which are regarded as suspicious, and groupings of prisoners regarded as significant. It also includes signs allegedly indicating military training and fighting, indicators of membership in al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including travel routes and locations allegedly frequented by al-Qaeda members, and an analysis of what are regarded as common cover stories.

Also included are similar analyses regarding the Taliban or “Anti-Coalition Militia,” and a worryingly large list of “Associated Forces,” including relief organizations that were not regarded as a threat outside of Guantánamo, and the huge missionary organization Jama’at Al-Tablighi, which has millions of members worldwide, but which was routinely described in Guantánamo as a front for terrorist activities.

JTF-GTMO Threat Matrix

This two-page document, entitled, “JTF-GTMO Detainee Recommendation and Threat Matrix,” was published in May 2008 and explains the different categories of prisoners at Guantánamo, designated as high-risk, medium-risk and low-risk, and the recommendations for their disposition, which consist of “Continued Detention,” “Transfer Out of DoD Control,” and “Release.”

It should be noted that there is no category for innocent people seized by mistake, even though the documents themselves reveal that many of the prisoners were indeed seized by mistake, and were therefore no risk at all, although two of the definitions of a low-risk prisoner are that they “had little or no terrorist sponsored or related training” and that they “had few, if any, associations with terrorists, terrorist groups, or terrorist support networks.”

The document also includes the following alarming footnote about prisoners facing “Imminent Death”: “Medical prognosis indicating death within 6-12 months may be justification for humanitarian transfer.”

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

Neither was surprising, because the President announced in May 2009, during a major speech on national security at the National Archives, that the Military Commissions were back on the table, joining federal court trials as an option for trying those held at Guantánamo, and in that same speech he also announced that some prisoners would continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The return of the Military Commissions

Since then, Military Commissions already established under President Bush have proceeded to trial — or, in fact, to plea deals instead of a trial — in the cases of three prisoners: Ibrahim al-Qosi in July last year, Omar Khadr in October, and Noor Uthman Muhammed last month, and it seems probable that the trials of three other men recommended for trial by Military Commission in November 2009 and January 2010 by Attorney General Eric Holder will now proceed swiftly.

These men are: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi, and the alleged mastermind of the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000; Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan and accused of involvement in an unrealized plot to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz; and Obaidullah, an Afghan accused of playing a peripheral role in the insurgency against US forces in Afghanistan. All the cases have problems — al-Darbi’s, because of his detailed allegations that he was subjected to torture; Obaidullah’s, because he was a nobody involved in an insurgency, and did nothing that could remotely be described as a war crime; and al-Nashiri’s, in particular, because, after his capture in the UAE in the fall of 2002, he was rendered to secret CIA prisons in Thailand and Poland, where he was subjected to the torture technique known as waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning.

In the case of al-Darbi and Obaidullah, it seems probable that the administration will avoid, in one case, a torture-laced legal minefield, and in the other, a demonstration of how, embarrassingly, to equate the pursuit of terrorists with a legitimate insurgency, by reaching plea deals. However, it seems unlikely that anyone in a position of authority would want to strike plea deal with al-Nashiri, given the severity of his alleged crimes and his alleged role in al-Qaeda, and if this is the case then the authorities will not only be obliged to sidestep any mention of his torture, which may be difficult as it was covered in the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture in 2004, and al-Nashiri has also been granted “victim” status in an ongoing investigation of the CIA’s torture prison in Poland.

Just as significant is the fact that an actual trial — rather than a plea deal — runs the very real risk of exposing that the supposed war crimes included in the Military Commissions — conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism, for example — are not legitimate war crimes at all, but were, instead, invented by Congress in 2006 and maintained, despite high-level criticism by Obama administration officials, when a revived version of the Commissions was approved by Congress in the Military Commissions Act of 2009.

Beyond these difficulties, where Obama’s announcement breaks new ground is in opening up the probability that many of the other 30 prisoners still held who were recommended for trials by the Task Force will also be tried by Military Commission – - perhaps even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. These men were put forward for federal court trials in November 2009, but the plans were shelved in the wake of a backlash by Republicans and members of Obama’s own party.

Personally, I think that the Military Commissions remain illegitimate, but given Congress’s refusal to allow any Guantánamo prisoners to be brought to the US mainland to face trials (which was included in a major military defense spending bill last December, and was a nakedly political move, as well as being blatantly unconstitutional), Military Commissions are, at present, the only option for trials available to the prisoners. Pragmatically, if these continue to involve plea deals in exchange for short sentences — and the administration honors those plea deals — then, despite being fundamentally flawed, they provide what may be the only way in which prisoners can ever leave Guantánamo.

To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to reflect on the fact that 89 of the remaining 172 prisoners were cleared for release by the Task Force, but are going nowhere either because they are Yemenis, and Obama issued a moratorium on the release of any of the 58 cleared Yemenis last January, after it was discovered that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen, or because they cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture of other ill-treatment in their home countries. These 31 men cannot be resettled in the US, because of opposition by the President, by the D.C. Circuit Court, and by Congress, and it is uncertain if third countries will be prepared to offer them new homes. As a result, all 89 prisoners appear to have less chance of leaving Guantánamo than their fellow prisoners who reach plea deals in their trials by Military Commission, and can, as I have been explaining all year, legitimately be described as political prisoners.

The executive order establishing a periodic review of the cases of 47 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial

Also less fortunate than those facing trials by Military Commission are the 47 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial. The executive order formalizing their detention and providing for periodic reviews of their status, which was issued on March 7, was flagged up before Christmas, but was clearly on the cards from January 2010, when the Task Force submitted its report to the President, recommending that 48 of the remaining prisoners — one of the 48 died in Guantánamo last month — should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because “prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission.”

There are several problems with this proposal, of course — beyond their distressing reinforcement of the very basis on which George W. Bush established Guantánamo in the first place — not the least of which concerns the Task Force’s belief that these men can be regarded as dangerous without evidence that can be used to prove their case. As I explained in December:

The Task Force attempted to explain that “the principal obstacles to prosecution in the cases deemed infeasible by the Task Force typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that the evidence against the detainees was tainted,” but its explanations were unconvincing. Behind claims that “the intelligence about them may be accurate and reliable,” even though it was gathered in dubious circumstances, and that, in many cases, “there are no witnesses who are available to testify in any proceedings against them,” lies a blunter truth, as I explained [in an analysis of the Task Force's report in June 2010]: “that the intelligence, and whatever witness availability there might be, are both tainted by the circumstances under which ‘the gathering of intelligence’ took place — the coercive interrogations, and in some cases the torture, of the prisoners themselves, or of their fellow prisoners.”

To demonstrate this, I referred to the 59 habeas petitions examined by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., of which 38 have been won by the prisoners, noting:

[T]hese problems have been highlighted again and again by judges, with an objectivity that eluded the Task Force — as, for example, in the cases of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti put forward by President Bush for a trial by military commission, who was freed after a judge ruled that the entire case against him rested on a false narrative that he had come up with after torture and threats, and, to cite just two more examples, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni seized in a student guest house in Pakistan, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national, who was just 14 when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. In both cases, they were freed after judges ruled that the government’s witnesses — the men’s fellow prisoners — were irredeemably unreliable, and were, if not subjected to violence, then bribed to produce false statements.

It is, therefore, rather disingenuous of the Task Force to claim that “the principal obstacle to prosecution” for these [47] men “typically did not come from … concerns that the evidence against the detainee[s] was tainted,” when, to be frank, the record is replete with examples proving the opposite.

Another problem is that the executive order establishes a review process for the 47 men, consisting of Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), which are remarkably similar to the review process established by the Bush administration — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) — that the Supreme Court found inadequate when it granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008.

As with the CSRTs, the men will be presented with an unclassified summary of the allegations against them, will be represented by a “personal representative” (not a lawyer), will be allowed to refute the charges against them (although without the means to do so), will be able to “call witnesses who are reasonably available,” and will also run up against classified evidence that they will not be allowed to see — although there is a provision for them to “receive a sufficient substitute or summary, rather than the underlying information,” if the government plans to rely on classified evidence (as it undoubtedly will, or trials would be going ahead in these cases).

Although I am reassured that, as the administration describes it, the executive order “is intended solely to establish, as a discretionary matter, a process to review on a periodic basis the executive branch’s continued, discretionary exercise of existing detention authority in individual cases,” and also that it “does not create any additional or separate source of detention authority,” and “does not affect the scope of detention authority under existing law,” it is disingenuous of the administration to follow up by stating, “Detainees at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and nothing in this order is intended to affect the jurisdiction of Federal courts to determine the legality of their detention.”

This is because, despite its reassurances, the administration has always behaved as though the habeas legislation is a distraction, and that it has only ever believed in the Task Force’s findings — hence its decision to pre-judge 48 men whose habeas petitions might have delivered different outcomes, obviating the need for executive review.

In addition, the executive order demonstrates another fundamental problem with the administration’s approach to Guantánamo — and one that has also eluded the District Court dealing with the men’s habeas petitions. This relates to the legislation that underpins the Guantánamo detentions in the  first place — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” or harbored them, but failed to distinguish between al-Qaeda (a terrorist group) and the Taliban (a government, however reviled).

As the habeas legislation has showed, the majority of the men who have lost their petitions are nothing more than foot soldiers for the Taliban, who had no knowledge of al-Qaeda’s international terrorist operations, and who should, as a result, have been held as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Included in the 47 men designated for indefinite detention, these soldiers remain tainted by the administration’s claims that they are “too dangerous to release,” when the truth is that the AUMF remains the flawed foundation document of the “War on Terror,” and those held at Guantánamo should either be released (without delay), charged in connection with terrorist offenses (which are crimes and not “acts of war”), or redesignated as prisoners of war, who can be held until the end of hostilities.

This, however, would involve recognizing them as soldiers, and not as the kind of shadowy, ill-defined terrorist threats that were invoked so successfully by the Bush administration, and that Obama has done nothing to dispel. This refusal to tackle the foundational problems of Guantánamo not only continues to fuel hysteria in the United States about the soldiers held in Guantánamo, but has also led to a shameful indifference towards putting on trial the handful of people genuinely accused of involvement in acts of international terrorism (including the 9/11 attacks), even though bringing these men to justice ought to have been the purpose of the “War on Terror” all along.

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

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

Delayed by a month due to other demands (primarily,

This eighth part tells the stories of 15 prisoners seized in Afghanistan. Following on from those described in Part Two, the prisoners in this article were seized in 2002 or 2003 (when the last of the regular prisoners were sent to Guantánamo from Afghanistan), with the exception of two men described at the end of the article, who were seized in 2007, and are among the six prisoners who were transferred into Guantánamo between March 2007 and March 2008. All but one — the former child prisoner Omar Khadr — are Afghan, and, including Khadr, five have, at various times, been put forward for a trial by Military Commission. In addition, two of the 15 recently lost their habeas corpus petitions, including one who was previously put forward for a trial by Military Commission.

Quite why most of these men are still held remains a mystery — as does the reason for putting any of them forward for trial — because, with one possible exception, they were, at best, minor players in a conflict in Afghanistan that could only have been skewed into a conflict that was legitimate on one side (the US) but illegal on the other by the Bush admininistration, which turned both criminal activities (terrorism) and war into a nebulous global “War on Terror,” in which America’ s enemies — or perceived enemies — were all declared to be “enemy combatants” without rights. Sadly, however, this point of view has, essentially, been preserved by the Obama administration, as the recent trial of Omar Khadr showed.

ISN 753 Zahir, Abdul (Afghanistan)
Zahir, who was captured in July 2002, was accused of being a translator for al-Qaeda member Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (ISN 10026, see Part Nine) and a money courier for members of al-Qaeda and Taliban, and of taking part in a grenade attack on a vehicle carrying Toronto Star journalist Kathleen Kenna, her husband Hadi Dadashian, photographer Bernard Weil, and an Afghan driver in Zormat on March 4, 2002. Zahir was put forward for a trial by Military Commission in January 2006, when he stated that he did not take part in the grenade attack, and was the only one of the ten prisoners charged in the first incarnation of the Commissions who was not charged again after the Commissions were ruled illegal by Congress in June 2006, and were revived by Congress later that year. On December 27, 2009, Kenna, who was seriously injured in the attack, wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star in which she wrote, “For almost eight years, we have all waited for justice. We don’t seek retribution. We’ve made it clear we cannot identify our attackers. We seek real justice, not a contrived justice. My conscience is divided: As a woman committed to social justice in everyday life, I want a public trial at a court where the defendant would enjoy the same rights to which we’re entitled under American and international law. As someone horribly wounded, then disabled, by the explosion, I want as fair a trial as possible at a time of war … We know nothing about Zahir’s arrest, but he was held at Guantánamo without charges for almost four years — far longer than is normally allowed under peacetime law. Unlike those awaiting criminal trials, Zahir was held without access to a lawyer of his choice, without a chance to tell his family his whereabouts. He wasn’t charged with war crimes until Jan. 2006: attacking civilians, aiding the enemy, and conspiracy. I don’t believe in indefinite detention without trial … The Pentagon has assured us, almost annually since his arrest, that this would be the year of Zahir’s trial. My husband and I hoped this meant true justice would be served, and also hoped it brought us all closer to the shutdown of Guantánamo … We’re not lawyers, nor armchair arbiters of how the men of war from Afghanistan should be treated by the United States. After living in a war zone for months in Afghanistan, and closely following the war’s progress since then, we have strong convictions that any prisoner-of-war should be treated with dignity, and afforded all the rights guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions and international human rights laws. It’s what we would demand for any Canadian, American or other citizen — whether combatant or aid worker — captured and held in a country of war. It’s what we want for Zahir and all the Guantánamo detainees.”

ISN 762 Obaidullah (Afghanistan)
In September 2008, Obaidullah (also identified as Obaydullah) was put forward for a trial by Military Commission, even though, as I explained at the time, he was “charged with ‘conspiracy’ and ‘providing material support to terrorism,’ based on the thinnest set of allegations to date: essentially, a single claim that, ‘[o]n or about 22 July 2002,’ he ‘stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment’; that he ‘concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices’; and that he ‘knew or intended’ that his ‘material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.’” As I also explained, “It doesn’t take much reflection on these charges to realize that it is a depressingly clear example of the US administration’s disturbing, post-9/11 redefinition of ‘war crimes,’ which apparently allows the US authorities to claim that they can equate minor acts of insurgency committed by a citizen of an occupied nation with terrorism.” Although he was charged under the Obama administration, in January 2010, no further developments took place in his case, and it seems that the administration then lost interest, as his habeas corpus petition was allowed to proceed to the the US District Court in Washington D.C. Obaidullah’s case is tied in with that of Bostan Karim (ISN 975, see below), who seems to have been the subject of false allegations made by Obaidullah while he was being abused by US soldiers in Khost and Bagram. As he explained in Guantánamo, “The first time when they [US soldiers] captured me and brought me to Khost they put a knife to my throat and said if you don’t tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you … They tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport … In Bagram they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say.” Despite this, Karim is still held, and, on October 19 this year, Obaidullah lost his habeas petition, when Judge Richard Leon ruled (PDF) that his account was full of evasions and inconsitencies, and that the government had established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that he had been involved with an insurgent cell — wrongly described, it seems to me, as an “al-Qaeda cell” — planning IED attacks on US forces, and had driven some of his colleagues to a hospital after they had been injured in an accidental explosion. As when he was charged in a Military Commission, however, nothing about this story indicates to me that, as an Afghan fighting an insurgency in his own country, he was any kind of terrorist.

ISN 766 Khadr, Omar (Canada)
The most famous child prisoner in Guantánamo (out of at least 22 juveniles held at the prison throughout its history), Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, when he was just 15 years old, and, although severely wounded, was interrogated as soon as he left the hospital at Bagram airbase, and was then threatened with rape and subjected to abuse. He arrived at Guantánamo in October 2002, just after his 16th birthday, where he was also subjected to abuse, through a variety of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” introduced at the time — including prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, and short-shackling for long periods in painful positions, which typically lasted until prisoners were obliged to urinate or defecate on themselves. On one such occasion, he reported that the guards used him as a mop to clean up his own urine. Despite the obligations of both the US and Canadian governments to rehabilitate rather than punish juvenile prisoners, under the terms of the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, the US authorities never treated Khadr with appropriate care, and, in 2006, put him forward for a trial by Military Commission, and the Canadians, ignoring their obligations, sent agents to interrogate him in 2003, and never sought his return to Canada, despite court rulings confirming that his rights had been violated. After the Commissions were ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court in June 2006, and were revived that fall by Congress, Khadr was charged again in 2007, and was charged again in November 2009, after the Obama administration revived the Commissions. In October 2010, he was persuaded to accept a plea deal, giving him an eight-year sentence (one more year in Guantánamo, followed by seven in Canada) in exchange for admitting that he had thrown a grenade on the day of his capture that killed a US soldier (a charge he had previously denied) and also, outrageously, accepting that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who had no right to be in a combat situation at all. After a week of hearings, a military jury delivered its own verdict, giving him a 40-year sentence. This was irrelevant because of the plea deal, but it helped the Obama administration look tough on terrorism, even though the proceedings were a disgrace, as the US was alone in thinking it appropriate to try a former child prisoner for war crimes which are not recognized by the rest of the world, and which were, instead, dreamt up by Congress in 2006, and maintained under President Obama last year.

ISN 782 Gul, Awal (Afghanistan)
A former mujahideen commander against the Soviet Union, and a former military commander for the Afghan warlord Younis Khalis (who had ties with both the Taliban and al-Qaeda), Gul was at one point suspected of providing assistance to Osama bin Laden during his escape from Tora Bora in December 2001 (after a showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces), although it is not known where this allegation came from, and it was denied by Gul himself. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he explained that, after the Taliban took over Jalalabad in 1996, he had worked for them, but had tried to resign on several occasions in the years before the US-led invasion, because he was “unhappy” with their policies. After the US-led invasion, he said, he had begun working with the pro-US warlord Hazrat Ali, one of three Afghan commanders who had fought at Tora Bora on the Americans’ behalf. He said that, on Ali’s advice, he handed himself in to Northern Alliance commanders in Kabul in February 2002, in an attempt to quell rumors about his involvement with the Taliban, but was then handed over to the Americans. From this, it is unclear why he is being held, but what was remarkable about his tribunal was that the Tribunal President failed to recognize Mullah Omar’s name. When Gul stated that he had tried to resign from the Taliban, but that this was something that only Mullah Omar could approve, the Tribunal President asked him, “What was his position?” and Gul was obliged to attempt to explain Omar’s role in the Taliban. “He was just like the King of Afghanistan,” he said, “all of the military was under him.”

ISN 832 Omari, Mohammed Nabi (Afghanistan)
At Guantánamo, Omari refuted allegations that he was involved with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (the militia of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an anti-US warlord who, ironically, had received the lion’s share of US funding as a mujahideen leader favored by Pakistani intelligence during the Soviet occupation). According to the US authorities, he was a Taliban official in Kabul (first as the chief of communications, and then as chief of the border department), and was then “identified as an operative and a sub-commander in a group called the Union of Mujahedin,” which was “supported, guided and funded by al-Qaeda,” and involved the discussion of “operations designed to discredit and undermine the Afghan transitional administration.” It was also alleged that, in meetings with HIG officials, Taliban officials and al-Qaeda members, he was involved in planning attacks in the Khost region on US and coalition forces. In response, Omari told a rambling and incoherent story about working in an office for an American called Mark. He admitted that he had worked for the Taliban and had been “in charge of the border,” but insisted that “that was before the Americans came to Afghanistan.” He also indicated that he had only ended up in Guantánamo because someone had told lies about him to US forces, “There are lots of good people and bad people that are in Khost,” he said. “You asked all of the bad people and did not ask any of the good people in Khost about me.”

ISN 899 Khan, Shawali (Afghanistan)
As I explained in a recent profile of Khan, who lost his habeas petition in September, he was seized on November 13, 2002, while riding his motorcycle from his home in Kandahar to the market, by Afghans working for Gul Agha Sherzai, the US-backed governor of Kandahar, who had assisted US forces in seizing Kandahar from the Taliban in November 2001, but had then established a regime that was noted for its corruption. Described by one of his lawyers, Len Goodman, as “a small man with sad eyes … who comes from a small farming village near Kandahar, Afghanistan,” and is now in his mid-40s, Khan had moved with his father and brother to Kandahar City after a drought afflicted their farm in 2000, and had opened a shop selling petrol products. When US forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he continued to run his oil shop and even worked, for a short time, for the Karzai government as a driver, but after his capture one or more unidentified Afghan informants told US intelligence officials that he was “an active member of a local insurgent group [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin] that was plotting to bomb Americans in and around the Kandahar region.” Even though his defense team “had nine affidavits from his rural village and from Kandahar where he drove for the Karzai government before he supposedly started an HIG cell in an area hundreds of miles from any HIG cells,” the judge in his case — Judge John D. Bates — preferred to rely on classified documents provided by the Justice Department than on the copious evidence demonstrating his innocence, and Khan must now appeal if he is to have any chance of being released from Guantánamo.

ISN 928 Gul, Khi Ali (Afghanistan)
At Guantánamo, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Khi Ali Gul, who was captured in Khost and accused of taking part in a bomb plot and being part of a Taliban assassination team, said that he fought with US forces in Tora Bora, and described one occasion when “the Americans were sleeping and we were guarding them.” He added, “If I were their enemy, I would have killed them all.” He was captured at a checkpoint, where, he said, “there were some people that I had a dispute with,” and he added that they “told the American soldiers a lie,” and he was then arrested.

ISN 934 Ghani, Abdul (Afghanistan)
Ghani was the 23rd prisoner put forward for a trial by Military Commission (after the Commissions were revived by Congress in the fall of 2006), and was charged on July 28, 2008 with conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, and attempted murder in violation of the rules of war. It was alleged that he had “fired rockets at US forces and bases,” had transported and helped plant “land mines and other explosive devices on more than one occasion for use against US and coalition forces,” had “participated in an attack on Afghan soldiers with small arms fire, in which one Afghan soldier was wounded,” and had “accepted monetary payments, including payment from al-Qaeda and others known and unknown, to commit attacks on US forces and bases.” As I explained after he was charged, “Apart from the inclusion of the magic words ‘al-Qaeda,’ there was nothing in Abdul Ghani’s charge sheet to indicate that he should find himself in the same trial system as those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, the African embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, or even, in fact, that he should have been sent to Guantánamo at all. Perhaps, if his case goes to trial, more will be revealed about this alleged al-Qaeda connection (which Ghani denied in his tribunal at Guantánamo), but in the meantime he joins an ever-growing list of, at best, minor Afghan insurgents … who would never, at any other time in American history, have found themselves on trial as terrorists, having already endured four to five years of almost total isolation in an experimental prison half a world away from home.” In December 2008, the charges against him were dropped, and he has not been charged again under President Obama.

ISN 975 Karim, Bostan (Afghanistan)
Karim’s story is intimately tied to that of Obaidullah (see above). A preacher and a shopkeeper, he was seized on a bus that traveled regularly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was reportedly “apprehended because he matched the description of an al-Qaeda bomb cell leader and had a [satellite] phone.” In a demonstration of the thinness of so many of the allegations that make up the “evidence” in Guantánamo, it was also alleged that he was “possibly identified as an al-Qaeda associate, planning landmine attacks in Khost,” and was “possibly identified as a person likely to have communicated with Arab al-Qaeda members operating in Peshawar, Afghanistan [sic], and working directly for Arab al-Qaeda in the Khost province.” However, Karim maintained that the allegations had been made by Obaidullah, who tried to clear his name, explaining in Guantánamo that, although he was a partner in Karim’s shop, and had fallen out with him in a dispute over money, he only made false allegations against him because of the abuse to which he was subjected by US soldiers in Khost and Bagram.

ISN 1008 Sohail, Mohammed Mustafa (Afghanistan)
21 years old at the time of his capture, Sohail was working as a translator and a clerk for DynCorp, an American private contractor in Kabul, and accused Gul Chaman (who was also held at Guantánamo, but was released in December 2007) of stealing a computer from the Americans. Sohail himself was accused of handing information from the computer, regarding Hamid Karzai’s Security Detail, to a member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, but he denied the allegations, and, in Guantánamo, he explained that he accused Chaman and made up false confessions after being interrogated for 68 hours in Kabul, when an interrogator “tortured and threatened me with a gun to my mouth, to try to make me say something.”

ISN 1045 Kamin, Mohammed (Afghanistan)
Kamin is one of 30 prisoners originally put forward for trials by Military Commission under President Bush, even though, like the other Afghans charged, the decision was almost incomprehensible. As I explained after his arraignment in May 2008, he was “accused of ‘providing material support for terrorism,’ specifically by receiving training at ‘an al-Qaeda training camp,’ conducting surveillance on US and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US and coalition forces. He was not charged with harming, let alone killing US forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection — he apparently stated in interrogation that he was ‘recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader’ — it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in ‘terrorism’ at all.” At his arraignment, after he refused to leave his cell and was dragged to the courtroom by guards, he refused to be represented by a US military lawyer, called the charges against him “a lie and a forgery,” and added that he had no connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and that he “did not recognize the court’s legitimacy and would not attend future hearings.” In a brief statement, he said, “My judge is the god that has created the sky and the land. He will be my lawyer and represent me. I wait for his decision. That’s enough.” On October 23, 2008, as I explained in a follow-up article, a pre-trial hearing took place, although Kamin was not present. Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU noted, “The officer who had been responsible for bringing him to court said that when she went to Kamin’s cell to notify him of the hearing, he ripped up the notice, began kicking and hitting the cell door and stated that he was innocent and it was President Bush who should be on trial.” She added that a prosecution motion “to compel Kamin’s presence by ‘forcibly extracting’ him from his cell was denied after defense lawyers objected on the grounds that it would put Kamin and others at risk,” although it was clear that the motion was denied in particular because the judge did not want a repeat of May’s proceedings. In December 2009, the Commissions’ Convening Authority, Susan Crawford, dismissed the charges against Kamin “without prejudice,” meaning that they could be filed again, although, to date, the Obama administration has not done so.

ISN 1103 Zahir, Mohommod (Afghanistan)
Zahir, who was 48 years old at the time of his capture in July 2003, and said that he was sold for just $100, stated in Guantánamo that he taught maths and languages at a secular school in Ghazni set up by the Karzai government, but received threatening night letters from Taliban sympathizers, who arranged for his arrest by telling lies to the US forces. In contrast, however, the US authorities decided that it was significant that he had been employed by the Taliban in the Secret Information Office in Ghazni, and claimed that he “possessed information associated with weapons caches, arms dealings and Taliban personalities.”

ISN 1119 Hamidullah, Haji (Afghanistan)
The son of a Mullah and someone who evidently had some kind of political influence, Hamidullah was accused of having ties to Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, but he explained that he had only been a member of the group 15 years before, during the Russian occupation. He added that, when the Taliban came to power, he cut all ties to the group, but was then imprisoned by the Taliban, for at least a year and a half, until he escaped and went to Pakistan, where he stayed until the US-led invasion. “I was happy to go home when I learned the US was there,” he said. Although he was also accused of controlling a cache of weapons and of leading “a group of 30 men who conspired to attack coalition forces in the vicinity of Kabul,” it appeared that he had been seized by US forces because he had agitated for the return of former King Zahir Shah (who was living in exile in Italy) and had run up against an opponent in the Northern Alliance (the head of the Secret Police in Kabul), who arranged for his capture by Americans. As he explained in his review, “Be careful with Afghani people and their personal disputes. We badly need you, and want you in Afghanistan until we stand on our own feet.” Or, as he also explained, when discussing why he ignored the advice of a friend who warned him to stay away from Kabul because his personal enemy had arranged for him to be taken to Guantánamo, “I heard that American laws and courts want evidence, and follow someone a long time before they arrest them; they will not just arrest people on the street. If I knew what I know now, I would’ve run again from Kabul or Afghanistan to somewhere else. The majority of Afghanistan is happy you are there. It’s OK, and I’m smart enough to understand, but be careful of doing wrong things and not considering evidence seriously, because people will get upset with you and not support you.”

ISN 3148 Al Afghani, Haroon (Afghanistan)
(Note: His ISN number is from Bagram, but he was not given a new number in Guantánamo).
Al-Afghani is one of five prisoners who arrived in Guantánamo between March 2007 and March 2008, none of whom were subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal to ascertain whether they were correctly designated as “enemy combatants.” As a result, little is known of al-Afghani beyond the statements made by the Pentagon on his arrival at Guantánamo in June 2007, when he was described as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan,” and had apparently “admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL).” The Pentagon also reported that there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, and claimed that he “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangarhar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and was ”assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

ISN 10028 Inayatullah (Afghanistan)
Also described as “a dangerous terror suspect,” Inayatullah arrived at Guantánamo in September 2007. Captured, according to the Pentagon, “as a result of ongoing DoD operations in the struggle against violent extremists in Afghanistan,” it was claimed that he had “admitted that he was the al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran, and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” and that he “collaborated with numerous al-Qaeda senior leaders, to include Abu Ubaydah al-Masri and Azzam, executing their instructions and personally supporting global terrorist efforts.” (Al-Masri and Azzam were not identified by the Pentagon but the former is apparently an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, and the latter is probably the American Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American, who produced al-Qaeda propaganda with Ayman al-Zawahiri). In further unwieldy prose, the Pentagon noted, “Inayatullah attests to facilitating the movement of foreign fighters, significantly contributing to trans-national terrorism across multiple borders,” claiming that he “met with local operatives, developed travel routes and coordinated documentation, accommodation and vehicles for smuggling unlawful combatants throughout countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.” In October 2010, Cageprisoners explained that Inayatullah’s full name is Inayatullah Nassim, that he is married with six children, and that before his capture he ran a telephone shop in Zahedan. Cageprisoners also reported that he was concerned about the whereabouts of his brother Hidayatullah, who was apparently seized in Quetta, Pakistan some years ago, and transferred to Bagram.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Uruknet.

This is the fourth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This fourth article tells the stories of 19 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan.  Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Three, where I told 22 more stories. Disturbingly, seven of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and at least five have been cleared for release (or “approved for transfer,” to use the language that the Obama administration learned so carefully from its predecessor).

ISN 249 Al Hamiri, Mohammed (Yemen)
Al-Hamiri, who was 19 when he was seized, claimed that he “left Yemen for medical treatment and was tricked by a British resident into going into Afghanistan where he did nothing for six months.” An unidentified source — or sources — claimed that he had trained at al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) and had spoken to bin Laden at a guest house in Kabul, but al-Hamiri denied the allegations, and only conceded that, in Kabul, he had stayed in the home of someone he “felt may have been associated with the Taliban.” His most critical comments were delivered in a statement that was read out in his absence during his tribunal. All the charges, he said, “were made up in order to keep him and other Muslims at the camp,” because he “never had a weapon, never carried one and never even killed a chicken.” According to weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 122 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, but his weight dropped to just 102 pounds in February 2003, probably during one of the many hunger strikes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s history (PDF).

ISN 251 Bin Salem, Mohammed (Yemen)
In a particularly thin set of allegations, the US authorities claim that bin Salem, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan in July 2001, and received training at al-Farouq. Noticeably, he is not accused of having taken part in combat against the Taliban (let alone US forces), as it is only alleged that he “supported al-Qaeda and Taliban forces by serving as a cook at a rest and relaxation facility for front line troops at Bagram,” and that he was captured by Pakistani forces after retreating directly from Bagram to Pakistan.

ISN 254 Khenaina, Muhammad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Khenaina has stated that he went to Afghanistan in August 2001 “to teach the Koran in Arabic,” although he admitted that he “did not actually teach the Koran.” After staying in a guest house in Kabul, he said that he heard of the 9/11 attacks and was “concerned about retaliation by the Americans and wanted to get out.” He explained that the owner of the house arranged for him to travel to Logar and then Khost, where he stayed with an Afghan, and then traveled through the mountains to Pakistan with five other Arabs and an Afghan guide. After joining up with another group of 19 men who were also fleeing Afghanistan, he reached the border, where he was detained by the authorities. Throughout this story, the only claim of militancy against Khenaina was an allegation that the manager of the guest house “arranged transportation for guests to a Taliban training area 35 minutes north of Kabul,” but Khenaina insisted that “he was not in Afghanistan to participate in jihad,” and that he “did not have a weapon while in Afghanistan.” He also condemned the 9/11 attacks, and explained that, if released, “he would return to Yemen and marry a cousin who has been betrothed to him and never leave again.”

ISN 255 Hatim, Saeed (Yemen)
In December 2009, Hatim won his habeas corpus petition, but it did not lead to his release. In fact, the Obama administration has appealed the ruling, even though the judge in Hatim’s case, Judge Ricardo Urbina, clearly established that the government’s allegations — that he trained at al-Farouq, stayed in al-Qaeda and Taliban guesthouses, “operated under the command of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the battlefront against the Northern Alliance,” and fought at the battle of Tora Bora — “rest[ed] almost entirely upon admissions made by the petitioner himself,” which he made “only because he had previously been tortured while in US custody” in Kandahar. In addition, Judge Urbina discredited the Tora Bora allegation, because it was made by a fellow prisoner who had made false allegations against dozens of other prisoners (first exposed publicly in 2006), and “whose grasp on reality,” as Judge Urbina explained, “appears to have been tenuous at best.” Distressingly, the Obama administration’s appeal has been filed despite knowledge that Hatim has suffered from what Judge Urbina described as “severe psychological problems” in Guantánamo, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions. Indeed, in May 2002, an interrogator stated, “I do not recommend [Hatim] for further exploitation due in part to mental and emotional problems [and] limited knowledgeability.”

ISN 259 Hintif, Fadil (Yemen)
Prior to traveling to Afghanistan, Hintif, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had spent many years working as a farmer on his family’s land, and had then moved to Sana’a to look for work. There he met a man at a mosque who asked him about “going to Afghanistan to help poor Afghans,” and he “felt this would be a chance to do something good in memory of his deceased father, so he thought it was a good idea.” He then apparently sold his car to raise funds for his trip, received some money from his brother and set off for Afghanistan. In Kabul, he “began living with an individual who previously taught the Koran in Afghanistan,” and when he asked him how he could help the Afghans, was told that “he could either work with the Afghani Red Crescent or he could help distribute food supplies.” Having decided to work for the Red Crescent, he said that he traveled with the instructor to Logar province, south of Kabul, but stopped his work after the US-led invasion began, when he was escorted to the Pakistani border. There, he said, he surrendered to the Pakistani police, who took him to a prison in Peshawar. He was then transferred to a larger prison in Kohat, and was eventually turned over to the Americans. Throughout his whole story, Hintif maintained that he “did not receive any training in Afghanistan” and “did not fight in Afghanistan because he was not convinced of the causes that were being fought for.” He explained that he “felt that the groups there were fighting for power, and that there was no reason to fight a jihad.” Disturbingly, apart from vague allegations about the guest houses in which he stayed, the only allegations that the US authorities have been able to come up with are that his name was on a document “recovered from a safe house raid associated with al-Qaeda in Karachi, Pakistan” (which is not necessarily reliable, as it may not have been his name, but a kunya or alias that does not necessarily refer to him) and a much-derided claim that his Casio watch was the same model as one used in improvised explosive devices “in bombings linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorist groups.”

ISN 263 Sultan, Ashraf (Libya)
Sultan, who is accused of being a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (opposed to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi), training at various camps in Afghanistan, and fighting at Tora Bora, has denied the allegations, stating that he left Libya because of religious persecution, and lived with other Libyan refugees in Jalalabad. He has also stated that he was not a member of the LIFG (or of al-Qaeda), and was not at Tora Bora, and has declared that he traveled to the Pakistani border, where he was seized on December 18, 2001, with an Afghan guide, and not with a group of soldiers. His disdain for the betrayal of justice at Guantánamo was revealed in his appearance at his tribunal in 2004, when he stated, “I know my fate is already predetermined and the judgment has been pronounced already. So this Tribunal is just for show and it is not real. Everybody is reading from papers that are already printed and everything is already predetermined. I know for sure my destiny is already predetermined. The judgment against me is already made up. My presence, me defending myself or not defending myself, will have no importance whatsoever.”

ISN 275 Abbas, Yusef (Abdusabar) (China)
Abbas is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. He is one of 17 of the men who were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and who, after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. 21 years old at the time of his capture, Abbas was a farmer, who, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “learned about the oppression of his people as he was growing up, and was determined to leave to find a better life, but could find little information about other countries, except through broadcasts that were made by a covert US radio station. Having finally obtained a passport, he decided to try to get to America. Taking $600 with him, he went first to Kyrgyzstan, where he was warned that the police planted false evidence on Uighurs and handed them over to the Chinese authorities, but where they took $300 from him instead, and laughed at him when he told them that he wanted to go to America. He then went to Pakistan, where a Uighur businessman, who befriended him at the airport, encouraged him to go to an Uzbek house in Jalalabad, where another Uighur took him to the camp in the Tora Bora mountains.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Abbas — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Yusef Abbas and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 280 Khalik, Saidullah (Khalid) (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), little is known of Khalik’s story, as he refused to engage with the tribunal process at Guantánamo. In his absence he was accused of being in Afghanistan during the US bombing campaign, and, in a sign of how information was twisted in a ridiculous manner to come up with anything that officials might find a way of using, of receiving “wounds to his face and arm as well as other flesh wounds” during the bombing. Like the other four remaining Uighurs, he is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 282 Abdulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantánamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), Abdulghupur told his tribunal at Guantánamo, when asked about the “training camp” in the Afghan mountains, where he and 16 others had lived before the bombing raid that destroyed the settlement, “They called this place a camp but that’s way too much of a name for that place we stayed. They did not have enough bathrooms to use or housing or anything. That is way too big of a name for the place where we stayed.” He added, “the conditions were really bad and stressful and there was lots of hard work, [but] I decided to stay there because our goal was to be against the Chinese government and I wouldn’t give up my goal even in the bad conditions to live.” After the bombing raid that completely destroyed the settlement, so that, as Abdulghupur explained, “it looked like no one ever even stayed in that place,” the men’s journey to Pakistan (and their betrayal by Pakistani villagers) was also described by Abdulghupur. “After that there was no stopping,” he said. “There was constantly bombing all the time. In the mountain we stayed in a cave because we didn’t know where to go … We were waiting for our leaders to come and tell us to go to the city or somewhere else but no one showed up and we decided to go to Pakistan. When we got to Pakistan, the local people came to us with tea, bread and meat, really good stuff. In the middle of the night they came to take us to the mosque. We went to the mosque and then they turned us over to the Pakistani authorities … They put us in cars and took us to jail. After that they turned us over to the US.” Like the other four remaining Uighurs, Abdulghupur is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 288 Saib, Motai (Algeria)
One of five Algerian prisoners facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Saib (also identified as Mutaj Sayab), had been living in Jalalabad prior to his capture (like many of the Algerians held at Guantánamo), and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. Throughout nearly nine years of detention, he has only been accused of “receiving small arms training” near Jalalabad. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, his lawyers explained, in a court filing in July 2008, that in February 2008 the Department of Defense notified them that he had been “approved to leave Guantánamo,” but stated obliquely that “such a decision does not equate [to] a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor does is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantánamo as his departure is subject to ongoing discussions.” As his lawyers noted, “Saib has serious concerns that this ambiguous and damaging language will prevent his safe release from Guantánamo” to a third country, and these fears have only heightened after the involuntary repatriation of another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji, in July this year.

ISN 290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria-UK)
Another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Belbacha was cleared for release in March 2007, and has repeatedly appealed to the US courts to prevent his return to Algeria — although in September 2009, the notoriously Conservative D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the lower courts were no longer able to grant injunctions preventing their forcible repatriation. A former footballer in Algeria, Belbacha then worked as an accountant for a government-owned oil company, but after receiving death threats from Islamist militants, fled to the UK in 1999, where he sought asylum and secured work in Bournemouth. During the Labour Party conference in 1999, he received a thank-you letter and a tip from Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott, whose room he was responsible for cleaning. In June 2001, he decided to take a holiday in Pakistan with a friend, and then traveled to Afghanistan to see the country, staying for several months in a guest house in Jalalabad, and then fleeing to Pakistan after the US-led invasion, where he was seized by opportunistic villagers and sold to US forces. Despite being cleared for release in 2007, the British government has persistently refused to accept Belbacha, so that his lawyers at Reprieve, and other organizations, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Cageprisoners, have sought help from the governments of Ireland and Luxembourg as well, although to date all these efforts have been unsuccessful. He has also been offered a home in Amherst, Massachusetts, although a law passed by Congress, banning any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland except to face a trial, has prevented him from taking up this offer. In case any doubt remains about the legitimacy of Belbacha’s fears of repatriation, it should be noted that, in November 2009, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for what his lawyers can only conclude was the crime of speaking out about his fears of being repatriated. As Reprieve explained, “In a disgraceful show trial, the court sentenced Ahmed to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group.’ Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction,’ which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about human rights abuses in Algeria.”

ISN 309 Abd Al Sattar, Muieen (UAE)
One of Guantánamo’s least-known prisoners, al-Satter is ostensibly from the United Arab Emirates, although the UAE claims not to know who he is, and his Unclassified Summary of Evidence also states that he “has a Pakistani passport and originally went to Pakistan on vacation in September 2001.” All that is known of this man — listed by the US authorities as Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd Al Fusal Abd Al Sattar — is contained in this slim document, released in September 2007, but it makes clear that al-Sattar taught at the Private Holy Koran School in Mecca, that he paid for his own travel, that he was “convinced by a friend to go to Afghanistan and teach the Five Pillars of Islam,” and that he “thought if he traveled to Afghanistan that he would get credit from God and that, since the trip was only going to be for a week, there would be no harm in going.” This seems fairly straightforward, and is certainly more comprehensible than other claims from unattributed sources: that he “was identified as a trainer at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan” (which would have been impossible if he arrived in Pakistan in September 2001, as al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks), and that he was “a fighter in Tora Bora who moved around encouraging people to fight and be religious.” Perhaps what actually happened, as was indicated in other passages in the Unclassified Summary, was that the “friend” who convinced him to travel to Afghanistan — a Syrian whom he had met in Karachi — tricked him into traveling to Tora Bora. According to the allegations, al-Sattar “advised that if he saw al-Moaz again, he would be very upset with him and would want to do him physical harm for getting him into so much trouble.”

ISN 310 Ameziane, Djamel (Algeria)
Ameziane, another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, had also been living in Jalalabad. A Berber, he left Algeria in 1992 “in order to escape persecution and make a better life for himself,” and unsuccessfully sought asylum in Austria, where he worked legally for three years, becoming the top chef at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, until a new government clamped down on immigrants, and his work permit was denied without explanation. From there, he moved to Canada, where he obtained a temporary work permit and worked for an office supply company and for various restaurants in Montreal. In 2000, after five years in Canada, his asylum claim was denied, and, as his lawyers explained, “Fearful of being forcibly returned to Algeria, and with few options, [he] went to Afghanistan, where he could live freely without discrimination as a Muslim man, and where he would not fear deportation to Algeria.” Apart from an allegation that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul that was associated with the Taliban, before traveling to Jalalabad, the US authorities failed to come up with a shred of evidence against him, with the exception of an evidently unreliable claim, by an unidentified “source,” who said that he “met the detainee” at al-Farouq. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, Ameziane fears returning to Algeria because of the stigma of Guantánamo and the instability in his hometown of Kabylie, where, as his lawyers have explained, practicing Muslims are “targeted for arrests and detention by the government based solely on their religious practices” and “The stigma of having spent time at Guantánamo would alone be enough to put him at risk of being imprisoned if he is returned.”

ISN 311 Bin Mohammed, Farhi Saeed (Algeria)
Bin Mohammed, who is 50 years old, is one of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. In his case, uniquely, he was also cleared for release by a US judge after winning his habeas corpus petition in November 2009.  A former conscript in the Algerian army, bin Mohammed had traveled around Europe for many years, working as a laborer in the UK, France and Italy, before traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, apparently in search of a wife. Although the US authorities alleged that he had undertaken military training in Afghanistan, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruled that the government’s evidence was unreliable because it came from statements made by Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and torture victim, who had been subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004. In an attempt to prevent his enforced repatriation, and to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Judge Kessler issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria in June this year, following up on his lawyers’ request for her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there.” After protracted wrangling with the notoriously Conservative judges of the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Kessler’s temporary order was overturned, and the Circuit Court’s decision — which drew on previous rulings preventing the lower courts from interfering in the Executive branch’s right to decide how and where to dispose of prisoners — was upheld in July this year, when the US Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court, just a few hours before the Supreme Court also approved the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, who was immediately sent home. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.” Despite the ruling, bin Mohammed remains at Guantánamo, still desperately hoping that a third country will offer him a new home, although he could, of course, be sent back to Algeria any time the Obama administration feels like doing so.

ISN 324 Al Sabri, Mashur (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, al-Sabri traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2000, lived in Jalalabad for a year, and traveled on occasion to the Taliban lines at Bagram and Kabul. Quite what else he did is difficult to ascertain — not because there are no allegations, but because their trustworthiness is hard to gauge. According to various unidentified sources, in May 2001 he was working as a facilitator for new arrivals at two guest houses in Kabul, and was “well known and well respected as an administrator in the guest houses.” It was also noted that he “was said to facilitate the transfer of weapons and other supplies to the front lines,” and, most worryingly (or most outrageously, depending on your point of view), was accused of working for Osama bin Laden. According to the unidentified allegations, he was “believed to have sworn bayat to Osama bin Laden,” because he and others around him knew bin Laden’s travel dates and routes, and another “source” identified him as “a member of al-Qaeda,” because he was “following Osama bin Laden’s orders to keep the guest house up and running.”

ISN 326 Ahjam, Ahmed (Syria)
Ahjam is one of four Syrians who had been living in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border. As one of these men, Maasoum Mouhammed (also known as Bilal Abdah Mohammed), was released in Bulgaria in May this year, despite having been accused of running “a safe house,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, it seems likely that Ahmed Ahjam and the other two men, Ali Husein Shaaban (ISN 327) and Abu Omar al-Hamawe (ISN 329) have also been approved for release. Certainly, there is nothing in the men’s story to indicate that they were connected in any way with al-Qaeda. At Guantánamo, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep,” and, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running.” According to his account in Guantánamo, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and, with a few exceptions (including Ahmed Ahjam), the many dozens of prisoners who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, have all been released.

ISN 327 Shaaban, Ali Husein (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), Shaaban, who was just 19 years old when he was seized, came from a poor family in Syria and had been an ironsmith in his father’s store. He told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there to seek a new life.

ISN 328 Mohamed, Ahmed (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), and also identified as Hammad Mohammed, he is one of an unknown number of prisoners subjected to “do-over” tribunals at Guantánamo, after the military panels responsible for reviewing their cases in 2004 and 2005 concluded that they were not “enemy combatants” and should be released. These “do-over” tribunals were convened in secret in Washington D.C. — often on more than one occasion — until the military officers delivered the desired verdict, and in Mohammed’s case he was not finally vindicated until a subsequent military review board cleared him for release in 2006. In his initial tribunal, he explained why his desire for military training was aimed at China and not America. “The Chinese people have tortured and pressured the Uighur people really bad,” he said. “The Uighur people are trying to go all over the world now. One sixth of the world’s population is in China. They are a threat to the whole world. If I have such a large enemy, why would I go and fight with another enemy?” Throughout his tribunal, the only explanation for the administration’s determination to continue holding him was an allegation that he was a weapons instructor from May to October 2001. In response, he called one of his compatriots as a witness, who explained, “I saw that he was sick during that time. He has a stomach problem and he was helping with the kitchen work and helping the cook. He was also studying the language.” The allegation was then dropped, but in the meantime ludicrous new allegations were added to his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, in which it was claimed that he “was identified as Abdul Jabar, an al-Qaeda member with the Islamic Movement of Turkistan,” and was also “identified as a visitor to known al-Qaeda guest houses.”

ISN 329 Al Hamawe, Abu Omar (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), al-Hamawe, who was just 20 years old when he was seized, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had been working at a store in Kabul, but that he planned to move on to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files. He also stated that the house in Kabul was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

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

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

This is the third part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This third article tells the stories of 22 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Four, where 19 more stories are told. Two of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and three others have lost their petitions (although none could remotely be described as terrorists). As before, the majority of the prisoners are Yemenis, and although many have presumably been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, they are waiting to see if the President will, at any point in the future, lift the unprincipled moratorium on transfers to Yemen that he announced in January.

ISN 152 Al Khalaqi, Asim (Yemen)
As described in The Guantánamo Files, al-Khalaqi stated that he “went to Pakistan with a friend to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, but decided to go to Afghanistan after discovering that there were too many Tablighi representatives in Pakistan. He explained that he and his friend were successful in their mission, but everything changed after 9/11, when his friend ‘went one day to go eat lunch and didn’t return home.’ He then met an Afghan, who advised him to leave because Arabs were being killed, and explained that this man took him in his car to the foothills where he joined a group of Arabs crossing the mountains to Pakistan and handed himself in to the army on arrival.” The US authorities allege that he undertook military training and was on the front lines at Bagram.

ISN 153 Suleiman, Fayiz (Yemen)
According to a summary of evidence at Guantánamo, Suleiman “identified himself as a trained imam in Jeddah,” and stated that various sheikhs “would frequent his facility to solicit money for other countries and to address jihad.” He added that the majority of the sheikhs’ talks “focused on Chechnya.” Although he was accused by unknown sources of training to make poisons at Kandahar airport and of being in Tora Bora, he maintained that “he had no military service and he had no desire to serve in such a capacity,” stated that he was “never trained on the use of weapons,” and “denied any connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.”

ISN 156 Latif, Adnan Farhan Abdul (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Latif, who was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, stated that he had sustained a serious head injury in an automobile accident in 1994, and had spent years trying to find affordable medical treatment. After being told about the health-care office of a Pakistani aid worker in Afghanistan who would treat him, he said that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, and explained that, when the US-led invasion began, he fled to the border town of Khost and then made his way into Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani forces, along with about 30 other Arabic-looking men. He told his lawyer, Marc Falkoff, that he later learned that each of them had been turned over to the US military for a bounty of $5000. On July 21 this year, Latif won his habeas corpus petition, but he has still not been released. This is partly because of President Obama’s unprincipled moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, even though it has been repeatedly established that Latif is suffering from schizophrenia, and has attempted to commit suicide on numerous occasions, and partly, as Lette Taylor of Human Rights Watch explained in a recent article for Global Post, because the US government “informed the court shortly after the ruling that it [was] giving ‘serious consideration’ to appealing his release.” I need hardly add that, in light of Latif’s serious mental problems, even entertaining an appeal marks out the Obama administration as fully capable of plumbing depths of cruelty that are, essentially, no different from the brutal innovations of the Bush administration.

ISN 163 Al Qadasi, Khalid (Yemen)
Little is known of al-Qadasi, because, as the authorities at Guantánamo have explained, “he claims that he is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison and has emphatically stated that he would rather die than answer questions.” The authorities have apparently ascertained that he served in the Yemeni army as a young man and traveled to Afghanistan in July 2001, and al-Qadasi has apparently stated that he “left Yemen for Pakistan to obtain medical treatment,” and has also said that he “never possessed any weapons in Afghanistan, as he was unable to fight due to his bad back.” The only evidence against him is a claim by an unidentified source that he was a mujahideen fighter who came to Tora Bora, and other claims that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul and traveled on a truck from a guest house in Jalalabad to Tora Bora.

ISN 165 Al Busayss, Said (Yemen)
Al-Busayss, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, apparently “traveled to Afghanistan in late 2000, attended a Taliban training camp and fought on the front lines until his unit withdrew, when he was given the option of staying or escaping. Choosing the latter, he fled to Pakistan, where he ‘surrendered his weapon and was arrested by Pakistani police,’” as I explained in The Guantánamo Files.

ISN 167 Al Raimi, Ali Yahya (Yemen)
Al-Raimi, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, was just 17 at the time of his capture, and has stated that he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan, because he had a job in a restaurant in Yemen, but his parents, who were living in Afghanistan, forced him to visit. He added that, once he was there, his father and brother told him that he could only return to Yemen if he agreed to attend al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) for two months’ training. He said that he got sick at the camp, went to a clinic in Kabul, and then returned to resume training, but added that this was four days before 9/11, after which “the training stopped and the camp was closed down.” After the US-led invasion began, he said that he was unable to contact his family, so he crossed the mountains with some friends, and was in Pakistan for a few days before he was arrested in a car by Pakistani soldiers. In the unclassified summary of evidence, one of the factors justifying his detention was, “The detainee’s country of origin does not participate in joint enforcement of the global war on terrorism.”

ISN 168 Hakimi, Adel (Hakeemy) (Tunisia)
Before traveling to Afghanistan, Hakimi had lived in Belgium, and for eight years in Italy, where, as I explained in an article in 2008, he had worked as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he told Cori Crider of Reprieve (his London-based lawyers) during a visit at Guantánamo in May 2008. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.” According to Reprieve, he traveled to Pakistan to get married and was living in Jalalabad, near his wife’s family, when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and was then seized crossing the border like most of the other men described in this article. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, both the US authorities and investigators in Europe still seem to regard him as a member of a group of Tunisians who joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and who helped recruits cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan, according to a Belgian police report produced at the 2003 trial in Belgium of Sliti’s uncle, Amor Sliti, when he and Hisham Sliti (ISN 174) were sentenced in absentia. His lawyers argue that the allegations are false, and are based on testimony extracted through torture, but since last summer, there have been rumors that he and Sliti might be extradited to Belgium.

ISN 170 Masud, Sharaf (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was reported that Masud traveled to Afghanistan “because he heard that the Afghan leader led by Islamic ways” and that he supported the Taliban, but “did not travel to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban … because it was Muslim versus Muslim.” He stated that he “left Kabul because the Afghans were trying to kill Arabs in the market,” took a taxi back to Jalalabad, and then joined a group of people walking to the border, where he was arrested after asking to be taken to his embassy. There are no allegations that he took part on any kind of combat — only claims that he stayed in guest houses for four months — and a ludicrous allegation by a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” who “noted the detainee looked familiar and that he may be a Tunisian with connections to Italy.”

ISN 171 Alahdal, Abu Bakr (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, Alahdal “served as a fighter for the Taliban Arab forces” at Bagram, but then “contracted malaria and some other unidentified illness” and was sent to a hospital in Kabul, where he spent two months recuperating. He then made his way to Jalalabad, where he “waited to be recalled to the front lines,” but “withdrew to a village on the outskirts of Jalalabad,” from where he made his way to Pakistan, where he was turned in by villagers. In Guantánamo, he has been a long-term hunger striker. Although he only weighed 99 pounds on arrival, his weight dropped at one point to just 81 pounds, and he was force-fed daily from the end of August 2005 until the publicly-released weight records ended in December 2006, when he still weighed only 101 pounds (PDF).

ISN 174 Sliti, Hisham (Tunisia)
In January 2009, Sliti, who had lived in various countries in Europe, including Belgium and Italy, lost his habeas corpus petition, when Judge Richard Leon ruled that he was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” based on claims made by the government that he traveled to Afghanistan as “an al-Qaeda recruit … at the expense of known al-Qaeda associates and on a false passport provided to him by the same,” that he stayed in a guest house and a mosque, and attended a training camp, which also had connections to al-Qaeda, and that he was “instrumental” in “starting a terrorist organization with close ties to al-Qaeda.” As I explained in an article at the time, “The problem with all of these allegations is that Sliti’s story actually suggests that all these conclusions are based on guilt by association. He may well have been connected with others who were involved in or interested in terrorism, but his own trajectory is that of a junkie rather than a jihadist, or, if you prefer, a tourist rather than a terrorist.” Judge Leon disregarded Sliti’s own claim that he went to Afghanistan “to kick a long-standing drug habit and to find a wife,” but it was certainly true that he had been a drug addict in Europe (where he had been imprisoned on several occasions), and he also has a worldly cynicism that is fundamentally at odds with the fanatical rigor of al-Qaeda. In a review board at Guantánamo, he explained that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.” Despite this, he, like Adel Hakimi (ISN 168, above) faces possible extradition to Belgium, where he was sentenced in absentia in 2003.

ISN 178 Baada, Tareq (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was alleged that Baada, who denied being a member of al-Qaeda, trained al-Farouq, and that he and a group of fighters were then assigned to the third line, about 4 km south of the front line near Kabul. It was also alleged that, after the fall of Kabul, he fled to Tora Bora, where he was put on guard duty. One of the most persistent hunger strikers at Guantánamo, he weighed 121 pounds on arrival at the prison, but in January 2006, when he was one of a handful of hunger strikers to continue after the prison-wide strike of 2005 was largely halted, he weighed just 94 pounds (PDF). In March 2007, Sami al-Haj (the al-Jazeera cameraman released in 2008) mentioned that he was one of three prisoners who had been on hunger strike — and force-fed — for the previous year.

ISN 189 Gherebi, Salem (Libya)
Little is known of Gherebi. Initially, it was alleged that he arrived in Afghanistan in 1995, having lost most of the fingers of his right hand in an explosives accident in Tajikistan the year before, and that he was an al-Qaeda operative in Kabul, who had “reportedly” trained at an al-Qaeda training camp in 1996 (an allegation that borders on the implausible, as Osama bin Laden only returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996). By 2006, the US authorities had dropped the claims about losing his fingers and being an al-Qaeda member in exchange for a new set of allegations, most of which centered on his purported links with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Deciding that his name was actually Rafdat Muhammed Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, the authorities alleged that he had lived in Pakistan in the early 1990s and then, fearing that talks between the Libyan and Pakistani governments would lead to the deportation of all Libyans from Pakistan, had moved back to Afghanistan, where he stayed in refugee camps.

ISN 195 Al Shumrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
The US authorities allege that al-Shumrani left Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan in June 2001, because he “wanted to fight in Chechnya, but was told he would need military training that could best be obtained in Afghanistan.” It is also claimed that he “stated he attended a training camp,” and then spent about five months on the front lines. In what seemed to be an attempt to beef up the allegations, it was also claimed that he “stated that while he was fighting in Afghanistan, he tried to see Osama bin Laden,” and that he “operated a hand-held two-way radio, which he used to request additional supplies” in the Tora Bora area.

ISN 197 Chekhouri, Younis (Morocco)
Chekhouri is accused of being a founder member of the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (or GICM, the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), who had a training camp near Kabul, but he has always maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after six years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education, and has stated that they lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. He has also repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and he has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

ISN 200 Al Qahtani, Said (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Qahtani attended a training camp in Pakistan in 2000, when he also spent some time (possibly a day, possibly a week) with Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. However, although the US authorities have steadily distanced themselves from making grand claims about Zubaydah, al-Qahtani’s brief association with him has probably counted against him in Guantanamo. In his tribunal in 2004, he said that he didn’t know that Zubaydah was allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, and asked, “just because somebody stays at someone’s house, who may not be the best person in the world, does that make the people who stayed at that house bad people?” After returning home, he spoke to an imam who explained that he should help the Taliban because, after the Soviet occupation and the civil war, “they brought peace to 95 percent of the country, except the places where the Northern Alliance were at the time. I don’t think there was anything wrong with helping to make peace after 30 years of fighting.” Returning to Afghanistan in April 2001, he served as a guard on the front lines near Kabul before fleeing to Pakistan with around 15 other people, but pointed out that he was in Afghanistan before 9/11, and insisted, “Even if you say I am right or wrong, I don’t think I did anything wrong. At the time I didn’t think I did anything wrong, and I still don’t. I didn’t do anything illegal or bad to anyone. I want you to understand this.”

ISN 219 Razak, Abdul (China)
Razak is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. 17 of the men were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, they made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. In The Guantánamo Files, I described Abdul Razak’s story as follows: “Yusef Abbas, who was injured in the raid, said that one man died and ‘we were covered in half a bucket of his body meat.’ After the bombing, he was taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where Abdul Razak, a Uighur who worked at the hospital and occasionally brought food to the camp, took care of him, until ‘there was a riot in the city’ and he returned to the other Uighurs in the mountains, taking Razak with him.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Razak — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Abdul Razak and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 223 Sulayman, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
On July 21 this year, Sulayman lost his habeas petition. In Guantánamo, he explained that a man identified by the US authorities as a known recruiter for al-Qaeda had facilitated his travel to Afghanistan, although he added that he had been recruited under false pretences and that the man “promised me that I’d be able to get married in Afghanistan. He may have had different intentions for me other than the marriage, but I didn’t know.” This was not the whole story, as Sulayman also conceded that, after arriving in Afghanistan in March 2001, he stayed in Kabul for seven months, and then, when given the opportunity to go to the front lines or the second lines or to return home, he went to the second lines because he didn’t want to fight but he also didn’t want to return home. It was there, he said, that he received some weapons training, and later, after the US-led invasion began, he fled to Pakistan in the company of men that he didn’t know, where he was seized and handed over to US forces. This was enough for him to lose his habeas petition, although it fails to demonstrate that he was a threat to the US, and what his case reveals most of all is how much of the supposed evidence was demonstrably false, and almost certainly produced by unreliable witnesses, either in Guantánamo or in other US-run prisons. These included ludicrous allegations that he was identified as a mortar instructor from a video made in the Tarnak Farms training camp in 2000 (before he arrived in Afghanistan), that he “was identified as an al-Qaeda spokesman and was part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage … during the escape from Tora Bora,” and, most alarmingly, that he was identified as a Taliban prison guard “who used torture techniques on inmates under his control.”

ISN 224 Muhammad, Abd Al Rahman (Yemen)
Muhammad, who was just 19 when he was seized, said that he initially traveled to Karachi to look for work, and stayed for three months with a Yemeni friend. He then visited the Taliban’s office in Quetta, in July or August 2001, “seeking a teaching job in Afghanistan,” but was told that there was “no work in Afghanistan.” After returning to Karachi, he decided to try again, and this time paid for a guide to take him to Kandahar, where he stayed in a madrassa for ten days. After the 9/11 attacks, he said that “the people at the madrassa” sent him to a “known Taliban house” near Kabul, and from there he eventually made his way to the Pakistani border, where he was seized. Although the US authorities came up with an impressive list of documents seized in raids, on which Muhammad’s name and details were allegedly recorded, there is no way of knowing how accurate these records are, as many featured supposed “aliases” that were notoriously generic, and others appear to record the names of prisoners that were leaked to al-Qaeda sympathizers, who duly described them in online postings as al-Qaeda members. For his part, Muhammad “denied that he received any weapons [training] during his one-month stay in Kabul.”

ISN 232 Al Odah, Fawzi (Al Awda) (Kuwait)
Al-Odah, who lost his habeas corpus petition last August, has always claimed that he took a break from work and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and provide humanitarian aid (which he had done previously in other countries), and has also admitted that he established contact with the Taliban, as they were the government at the time, and spent one day at a Taliban-controlled training camp. He has also stated that, after the US-led invasion, he was sent by a Taliban representative to a safer location outside Kabul, and, from there, traveled to Jalalabad, where he stayed with another family, who gave him an AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself. He then joined other people crossing the mountains to Pakistan, where he handed himself in to the border guards, and was subsequently handed over — or sold — to US forces. However, in what I described as “another shallow victory for the government,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied his habeas petition because she agreed with the government that it was “more likely than not” that he “became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan,” basing her ruling, as I described it, “on a dubious assemblage of information that relied more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of his activities than it did on anything resembling concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when she wrote that there were ‘significant reasons why the Government’s proffered evidence may not be accurate or authentic.’” Al-Odah appealed the ruling, but his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year. The result, as I also explained, is that, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, “the United States is still asserting that it has the right to hold a young man who spent just one day at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was given, and no evidence that his training involved anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.”

ISN 233 Salih, Abdul Al Razzaq (Yemen)
Salih is accused of training at al-Farouq, and was also “identified”, by an unknown source, as “a jihadist” in Tora Bora, although he maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks because he “felt compelled to go to Afghanistan to teach the Koran to the Afghanis.” He added that “he was not formally trained in the Koran, but wanted to go just recite what he could.” In reports elsewhere in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, he reported that a particular sheikh had told him that “it was forbidden to fight for the Taliban,” and that “he doesn’t like violence and was not fighting in Afghanistan, but was seeking a job teaching in a mosque.” In Guantánamo, Salih took part in the mass hunger strike in 2005. Although he weighed a comfortable 160 pounds on arrival at the prison, his weight dropped on two occasions, in December 2005 and January 2006, to just 110 pounds (PDF).

ISN 235 Jarabh, Saeed (Yemen)
The story of Saeed Jarabh is particularly unclear. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he stated that he traveled to Afghanistan in August or September 2001 to teach the Koran (and also in the hope of finding gold to trade), and refuted a claim that he trained for a week at a camp identified as Abu Abaida by stating, “This was not military training; it was simply shooting for proficiency with friends.” He also denied allegations that he participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and was present in Tora Bora, stating that he “was not in Tora Bora” and was “captured under false pretences in Pakistan by the Pakistanis.” He added that he “had made a decision to leave Afghanistan long before the war started,” but that “People in Afghanistan lied to him and told him they would help him go home but [instead] turned him over to Americans.” Whether or not this story was true, it was certainly more credible than other, unsubstantiated allegations made by unidentified sources, including a ludicrous claim that he “was a suicide bomber who had sworn bayat (an oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden.”

ISN 238 Hadjarab, Nabil (Algeria-France)
In 2001, Nabil Hadjarab, a 22-year Algerian who had been shuttled between France and Algeria throughout his childhood as his family disintegrated around him, was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan by someone who took advantage of his fears about being caught without papers as he applied for formal French residency. After living in Kabul, he then moved to the eastern city of Jalalabad, but as Afghanistan descended into chaos following the US-led invasion in October 2001 and he tried to flee across the mountains to Pakistan, he was wounded by a bomb and taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where he was sold to US forces. As I explained in a recent article, Hadjarab was cleared for release from Guantánamo under the Bush administration, but was not freed because of long-standing fears about returning him to Algeria, and also because of inertia on the part of the French government, which has refused to offer him a new home, even though he spent much of his childhood in France and has close family there. Now, however, he is at risk of being forcibly repatriated to Algeria after the US Supreme Court refused to intervene to prevent him and four other Algerian prisoners from being transferred against their will, as happened in July with another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji.

Note: See Part Four of this series for the stories of the other four Algerians, who, like Nabil Hadjarab, were also cleared for release under President Bush, and have been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. They are: Motai Saib (ISN 288), Ahmed Belbacha (ISN 290), Djamel Ameziane (ISN 310) and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed (ISN 311), who was also cleared for release by the US District Court in Washington D.C., when he won his habeas corpus petition (in November 2009).

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, Uruknet, Blog from Middle East and New Left Project.

As I explained in the first part, I’m delighted to note that, when the audience voted before the debate, 33 percent supported the motion, 32 percent opposed it, and 35 percent were undecided, but that, by the end of the evening, Lt. Col. Frakt and Stephen Jones had swayed a larger number of undecided voters, so that 39 percent supported the motion, 55 percent opposed it, and 6 percent were undecided. If only lawmakers, media pundits and the wider U.S. public could be persuaded in a similar manner …

As I also explained, I have presented the transcript largely as it appears on the Intelligence Squared website, but on occasion I have added my own editorial comments, addressing points that were not picked up on by the speakers, or (largely in Thiessen’s case) comments that were clear distortions of the truth.

“Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals”
An Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate, New York, September 14, 2010

John Donvan: I’d like to go to the audience for your questions now. […]

Male Speaker: Yes, I think that something has been left somewhat clouded in the discussion, and that is that we’ve debated here and heard a lot of pros and cons about the way that they’re treated as criminals versus enemy combatants. What I haven’t heard is a clear definition of what the treatment should be when it is declared that they are enemy combatants. In other words, are we looking at recourse under military commissions? Are we looking at a suspension of some of those concerns because of national security? I think for a lot of people, we’re uneasy as to the definition behind enemy combatant and the set of prerogatives that would set in if that were to prevail, and we are leaving an open mind on that. So perhaps people can clarify that for us?

John Donvan: Thank you. Marc Thiessen, I’d like to go to Marc because you just wrote a whole book about this.

Marc Thiessen: Enemy combatants: When you capture someone who’s a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban or who tries to set his underwear on fire on a Detroit airplane and blow up a plane over Detroit that could’ve killed hundreds of people — our position is that that’s an enemy combatant. And that person, when you take him into custody, the first words out of your mouth are not, you have the right to remain silent. Because this is the problem with the difference between our approaches and practice, is that they believe, because they are lawyers and this is the world they live in, that the purpose of interrogation is to obtain evidence for a criminal trial.

The criminal trial is a third order of interest for those who are involved with protecting the country. The first job is to get intelligence to stop another terrorist attack. So when, for example, the Christmas Day bomber is questioned for 50 minutes and then told he has the right to remain silent, you’re not going to get, even if he’s being incredibly cooperative, in 50 minutes you could not exhaust all the information. But the thing is that if you were trying to — if you take the law enforcement approach to interrogation, patience is a virtue. You are trying to get evidence and you can take as much time as you want, build a relationship with the guy, you try to coerce them in an interview, try to co-opt them into giving you information, fool them into giving information. If you are trying to stop a terrorist attack, patience is deadly.

This guy — when the Christmas Day bomber was captured, he was supposed to be vaporized on that plane. As soon as al-Qaeda found out that he was alive and in U.S. custody, they started covering his tracks. They started shutting down e-mail addresses, they started shutting down camps where he was training, they started hiding operatives who he knows about, they started hiding safe houses and closing them down. So he takes three weeks to do — and he’s even trained in interrogation resistance — to buy time and use the legal system in order to buy his [unintelligible] fellows on the outside time. We need to get that information quickly.

David Frakt: Okay. I’d like to respond to that.

John Donvan: I just wanted David Frakt to respond to this.

Male Speaker: A little bit of an unclarity and that is that even after a lawyer is assigned, I believe that interrogation can proceed. Isn’t that correct?

Marc Thiessen: But he doesn’t have to answer any questions.  Once he has a lawyer, he’s not going to answer any questions.

Male Speaker: I will tell you there were many people who did cooperate –

Marc Thiessen: No, first of all, I will tell you who says this: Eric Holder. Eric Holder, after John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan and brought over here, Eric Holder was being interviewed on CNN in 2002 and they said, can they get tough with him in the interrogation and he said, well he’s not going to tell you anything now that he has a lawyer and is in America.

Stephen Jones: Speaking from experience, people with lawyers confess all the time. They confess even though they’ve been given their Miranda rights. So maybe you think Osama bin Laden, to use the most extreme example, is not familiar with the rule of Miranda? I mean, most of those of us who practice law daily in the courts of law know that many police detectives are just as skilled as the people you want to use enhanced detection, that the purpose of interrogation is not prosecution, it’s to gather evidence frequently on an intelligence basis whether it’s financial crimes or drug crimes, and that many thousands of defendants who are told they have the right to remain silent, spill their guts.

David Frakt: I’d like to get back to the question which was a good one and given that this was a motion that was proposed by our opponents, I thought that they would try to define it. But actually what we’re doing is constantly shifting back and forth because they say, well, we’re at war, so it’s enemy combatants. We acknowledge in the active battlefield and active theater of conflict in Iraq, in Afghanistan, those who are actively fighting against us are enemy combatants and can be treated under the laws of war. Now where it gets murky is when we’re talking about people here in the United States. And the prior administration’s policies were to treat Americans, American citizens as enemy combatants, American citizens were locked up in military prisons for years and before that case could ever go to the Supreme Court, they decided to drop it. So we have to differentiate between an active battlefield and what’s going on domestically.

Now Mr. Thiessen says that membership, if we pick up someone who’s a member of Taliban or al-Qaeda — I mean, these people do not carry membership cards. And we also have to distinguish between al-Qaeda and Taliban. The Taliban is a fighting force in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They just want us to leave. They are not terrorists. They’re not launching international terrorist attacks. Al-Qaeda is. I would argue that the Taliban was essentially the lawful military government and military force of Afghanistan at the time we attacked and therefore was entitled to Geneva Convention status protection as prisoners of war. But we did not afford them that.

Another thing that’s important to talk about is when we say terrorist, what they’re really talking about are suspected terrorists, people that they believe may be terrorists. Now, if someone tries to light their underwear on fire in a plane, yes, you have a pretty good indication that they’re a terrorist. But it’s usually not that clear cut. It’s usually based on some intelligence from some source or method that we’re not allowed to know about that they suspect someone. And in that case, to simply lock that person up, incommunicado potentially for years, if I’m understanding what Marc is proposing, is problematic. And we have gotten a lot of the wrong people.

Now, yes, if we interrogate people — yes, people have information. We may eventually get it.  But why limit it to terrorists? Why don’t we do that to every single person that’s suspected of any crime? Why not drug traffickers because –

John Donvan: We’ll come back to that because we’re going to keep going in circles on the same territory, and I want to move it. And I bet we do come back to it. In uniform, the third row. I believe you’re — are you part of the West Point contingent?

Female Speaker: I am, sir. I’m a judge advocate for the U.S. Army, currently assigned to the United States Military Academy, the department of law. I do teach Constitutional and military law. We have some work that put us here this evening. Let me clarify first: this comes in my personal capacity. I’m asking this question not anything to do with the army or West Point. I clearly acknowledge that you are more intelligent that I, that you have the access to information I never will. My question comes in the fact that I’m assuming, aside from you, sir, that maybe you’ve never been deployed.

Marc Thiessen: No, I have not.

Female Speaker: I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve been to Afghanistan. Without fail, every time I interacted with an Iraqi or an Afghan, their single question to me was this: How do you explain Guantánamo Bay? Let me ask you my question. My question is not whether we should treat them like enemy combatants or criminals, but whichever we decide, there are always consequences to a decision. And if you take it out and extract what — the implication this causes for those of us who are fighting these wars, who do know we are a nation at war, so in the next year as I leave for my third deployment, possibly, when I get out there, or as I’m teaching my cadets, this is the way we do things because we’re America, how do I justify us giving it the moral high ground?

John Donvan: And do you think we are?

Female Speaker: Absolutely. We can’t go around and champion ourselves as the land of the free and the just –

John Donvan: Michael Hayden.

Michael Hayden: Yeah. First of all, captain, thank you for your service. I’m puzzled. I understand the image of Guantánamo. And we had serious questions inside the Bush administration about Guantánamo. As David suggested, we took about two-thirds of the prison population out of Guantánamo, not as David suggested, because we thought they were innocent. We actually transferred them to third countries actually to kind of home of record with the assumption that they would then be held there or watched there so that they would no longer be a danger, all right? I guess if you believe we are at war and that these are enemy combatants, we’ve got to put them somewhere. I’m not wedded to Guantánamo. I understand the image issue.  But our right to detain them, I think, is unarguable under the laws of armed conflict. And –

Female Speaker: — to be held for eight years without trial or with evidence against you?

Michael Hayden: No. Captain, I’m sorry. You’re the lawyer, and I’m not, all right? But nowhere does Geneva require us to try enemy combatants. I sat with — in my last capacity as head of CIA, I had multiple visits from the president of the International Red Cross as we were trying to get closer to some of the things they were suggesting to us. He never suggested we had to try anybody. They did have — as David knows, they have CSRTs, combatant status review tribunals, which is what happens within the military. It is the tradition of the military to ensure through this process, due process, that the individual you have is indeed the individual you believe them to be. I just don’t understand what of this enemy is unlawful. And the unlawful combatant or unprivileged belligerent is the new phraseology. What, does that give them rights that 6 million other prisoners of war we’ve held as a nation have not had? [Editor’s note: Gen. Hayden failed to acknowledge that the Combatant Status review tribunals at Guantánamo were dismissed, in detail, as a sham process designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants,” as Lt. Col.Stephen Abraham, who played a major part in the process, explained in 2007, in two court submissions, and in an interview here in 2008].

John Donvan: Marc Thiessen, do you want to join your partner on this one, because I think –

Marc Thiessen: I do want to, because I — I thank you also for your service, but I think my answer to you is what you say is you should defend the other people in uniform who serve proudly at Guantánamo and keep this country safe. The fact is that most of those people are asking those questions because of misstatements, mistruths and lies that have been spread about Guantánamo Bay.

John Donvan: You mean the Iraqis are misinformed.

Marc Thiessen: Iraqis, people around the world because people in — these allegations go out there and, as my old boss, Donald Rumsfeld used to say, the truth goes around the world 30 times before — lies go around the world 30 times before troops get their boots off. Every investigation into conduct at Guantánamo Bay has found these allegations of widespread abuse are false. Brigadier generals Schmidt and Furlow did a careful investigation [PDF]. No, quote, no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment at JCF Guantánamo. They’ve made the inspector general A.T. Church, who I interviewed for my book, and who said he expected to find widespread abuse at Guantánamo said that when he investigated, conducted hundreds of interviews, interviewed detainees, interviewed everybody who had been there. He said we can confidently state, based upon this investigation [PDF], we found nothing that would any way substantiate detainees’ allegations of torture or violent physical abuse at Guantánamo. Now, I’ll tell you something. We are also hearing from the other side that people there are the poor sheep herders and goat herders who have been wrapped up and taken to Guantánamo. The combat leadership of the Taliban today is made up of Guantánamo alumni. Just last week in Yemen, the Yemenis arrested a Guantánamo alumnus who was joining al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.  And the man who is one of the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who sent the Christmas day bomber is a former Guantánamo inmate [Editor’s note: This man, a Saudi, was released by President Bush as part of a diplomatic deal with the Saudi government, against the advice of his own intelligence services].

These are dangerous, dangerous people. And even the Obama administration’s review found 95 percent of the people who are there right now are either leaders or fighters for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. [Editor’s Note: This description tends to skew the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s findings. What the Task Force stated was that roughly 10 percent of the prisoners (24 in total) were “Leaders, operatives, and facilitators involved in terrorist plots against US targets,” that roughly 20 percent (48 prisoners in total) were identified as “Others with significant organizational roles within al-Qaeda or associated terrorist organizations,” that less than 10 percent were “Taliban leaders and members of anti-Coalition groups,” that 5 percent did not fit into any category, and that the rest -- over 55 percent -- were “Low-level foreign fighters.” I should also add that the Task Force’s analysis does not correspond with rulings made in the District Court in Washington D.C. on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, where, to date, 38 out of 55 cases have been won by the prisoners, on some occasions evidently refuting the Task Force’s findings].

John Donvan: Marc, thank you.

John Donvan: David Frakt, do you want to respond? But I sort of feel the captain did your work for you on that question.

David Frakt: Well, I want to respond to a specific point made by Marc about these reports, investigations into detainee abuse at Guantánamo and the claim that they searched, and they didn’t find anything. He referenced the Church report, the Schmidt-Furlow report.

When I was representing Mohammed Jawad, a teenage boy from Afghanistan at Guantánamo, a prosecutor by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld turned over some discovery materials to me that showed that my then, at that point, 16 or 17-year-old client had been subjected to what was called the frequent flyer sleep deprivation program. And according to the Schmidt-Furlow report, they had discovered that there had been a frequent flyer sleep deprivation program. And during this program, detainees were moved, and in the case of my client, 112 times from cell to cell during a two-week period. He was moved constantly back and forth in an effort to deprive him of sleep.

According to the Schmidt-Furlow report, this program had been stopped after a complaint by the FBI, it had been stopped in March of 2004. The only problem with that was that my client had been subjected to the program in May of 2004. And so I asked Colonel Vandeveld to continue digging, and he found additional records that showed that this program continued for at least another year. And dozens of other people were subjected to it. In fact, we had the person who ran the program. There was a major, who was an intelligence officer in the army, who came to testify at Guantánamo in the hearing in which I was representing a detainee and said this was standard operating procedure. The generals knew about it. Everybody was vetted and approved. So these investigations were whitewashes. They missed widespread abuses. I tried to bring this to the attention of the Department of Defense. I filed a report of a violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, as is my duty to do as a military officer. What did they do? Nothing, no follow-up investigation, I was never contacted.

John Donvan: So we have a very basic disagreement about what we think is happening inside the walls of Guantánamo. You say that basically there have been very few undocumented violations and David is saying that these are whitewashed, that there’s reports that say that.

Marc Thiessen: I think that’s a shocking thing to say about Admiral Church and those people who are — you know, people who wore our uniform with honor. Hold on, no, you talked, now let me — This frequent flier program you referred to, where for someone who’s moved once every four hours roughly, two to four hours, what do you think these detainees in Guantánamo do all day? They’re not busting rocks. They’re not making license plates. They sleep. They read the Koran. They play foosball. They play soccer. They eat whenever they want, sleep whenever they want. This is not torture. There is frequent flier. You may not like it. But I’ll tell you something, people — interrogation, interrogation techniques, even interrogation techniques under the Geneva Convention people would find shocking if you’re not familiar with interrogation — interrogation is not supposed to be pleasant. And you have in the case of some of these people who are at Guantánamo, people who are senior al-Qaeda leaders, senior Taliban leaders who have intelligence about the possibility of planned attacks against the United States and they have the responsibility to get them within the rules of law, and they did it. And these investigations were conducted, they were open, and they found no evidence of widespread abuse.

David Frakt: And that’s because the senior al-Qaeda leaders were locked up in secret CIA ghost prisons in Eastern European countries and in Thailand and places that we were not allowed to know about, that’s where the worst abuses went on, but there were plenty of horrific abuses at Guantánamo –

John Donvan: Michael Hayden.

Michael Hayden: I’ll come back with a debate on interrogation techniques, just sign me up. To summarize the last statement, I believe the American armed forces are competent and capable of holding enemy combatants as prisoners of war consistent with the laws of armed conflict. Discussion about that point or distraction from the basic question we have in front of us today.

John Donvan: Another question from the audience? […]

Male Speaker: Kayvon Afshari, CBS News. I do want to come back to David Frakt’s fundamental point, and I’d like to get a response from Marc in particular. A lot of the guilt or innocence of these suspected enemy combatants is a lot more nebulous than that of Abdulmutallab, so I just want to know on a very practical level if we don’t go through the criminal justice system, how do we know if they are terrorists?

Marc Thiessen: First of all, it’s not about guilt. You don’t have to prove guilt. These are not criminal defendants. You have to have a reasonable belief that these people were captured in the war and that they are members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and were conducting operations against us. The fact is, we have detained in the War on Terror well over 100,000 people. Only 800 made it to Guantánamo. Only 100 made it into the CIA program. So these are — we’re not just picking people up off the street and throwing them in Guantánamo. Were there some people that were sent there by accident, that we made a mistake? Our enemy doesn’t wear uniforms. They don’t follow a chain of command — it’s hard. There’s some mistakes made, absolutely, and we had a process in Guantánamo that was set up to review the evidence against them and to make sure that people who were not — didn’t belong there were sent back. But the reality is that we got — you know, if we — the left always wants to get this debate onto the topic of abuse. This is a debate about keeping this country safe with the exception of one of our debaters.

John Donvan: Michael Hayden.

Michael Hayden: What’s the judicial process you would use for killing the believed enemy combatant as opposed to capturing him?

John Donvan: Stephen Jones.

Stephen Jones: Well, I think, Marc, the problem that I have, and I think David is right, capturing people on the battlefield is different than arresting someone at Detroit Airport for committing or attempting to commit what is clearly a violation of the federal criminal law, when you can take that person consistent with the Constitution of the United States and Title 18, which is the Criminal Code, and try him other than in a federal criminal court according to the federal rules of criminal procedure and the federal rules of evidence, and to maintain that you can –

Marc Thiessen: You’re wrong.

Stephen Jones: Well, you’re wrong.

Marc Thiessen: No.

Stephen Jones: We don’t have a separate criminal justice system for people that commit crimes in the United States. And it isn’t a question mark of politics or the Left or the Right — or Bush versus Obama. It’s a question of the Constitution. It’s not political, it’s Constitutional and there’s one system of law in this country. Now I will concede that in a battlefield situation abroad or outside the United States, the line is blurry. But when you start saying that you’re going to arrest people and try them in a military tribunal for crimes committed in the United States against American citizens, I don’t think the American people will tolerate that.

John Donvan: We are now going to ask Marc Thiessen to respond to the point just made.

Marc Thiessen: First of all, Ex parte Quirin 1942, this is the Supreme Court: one who takes up arms against the United States in a foreign theater of war regardless of his position shall be regarded properly as an enemy combatant and treated as such. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a citizen or not. I would now assume that you now consider Franklin Roosevelt was a war criminal because the military commissions for the saboteurs who were captured here are unconstitutional as well. And on top of that, military commissions that have been held outside of the Article Three court going back to George Washington. I assume he’s not a war criminal either. But again, you’re completely focused on the criminal justice system. I don’t care if we put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial or not when we capture him. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is captured, I want to know what his plans for the next attack are. My question to you is you’re focused on where he’s going to be tried. I want to find out what he knows. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured, if you were the one who was responsible for getting the information, in the case he’s captured, he’s killed 3000 people just down the street from here. He admits to you that he has plans for new attacks in motion. Does Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have the right to remain silent?

Stephen Jones: Well of course he has the right to remain silent. The only difference between your position and mine is that you don’t think that he should be told he has the right to remain silent and I think it’s beside the point because of course he knows he has the right to remain silent.

Marc Thiessen: So you’re saying — let’s say we captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before the 9/11 attacks. Put aside the litany of attacks that he had in play. You would have allowed 9/11 to go on rather that to get him to give the information that he had.

Stephen Jones: Now Marc, let’s don’t defend the indefensible here.

Marc Thiessen: It’s not the indefensible. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed 3000 people in this country. He had information, a plot to blow up the Library Tower in Los Angeles, blow up a marine camp in Djibouti, to blow up the consulate in Karachi. These are real attacks. To commit, repeat 9/11 in London.

Stephen Jones: Well that may be true but I don’t want to take The Weekly Standard’s word for it or frankly your book. If all of that is true, then it can be presented to an American jury. An American jury will convict him and give him the death penalty.

John Donvan: What if the clock is ticking in the situation that Marc’s just described? You believe he knows about something that’s about to happen and we’re five minutes away. Would it make a difference?

Stephen Jones: There’s a movie about that and I think that’s an over-dramatization of the issue. Those who look for a way to shortcut the system always first bring forward the most extreme example of what could happen. But the truth of the matter is those extreme examples rarely exist. Where they do exist, I believe the intelligence community and the law enforcement community have on numerous occasions shown the ability much better than politicians to protect individual security or, for that matter, national security.

John Donvan: David Frakt, you wanted –

David Frakt: Yes. I mean the whole ticking time bomb scenario is really a red herring. First of all, police, in the situation where there is an urgent public safety emergency, are not required to give the Miranda warning. So — but if your question is, should we use torture in that situation? And that’s essentially what Marc is saying is that, you know, in order to prevent an attack, you have to be willing to do anything, whatever it takes. And that’s where we have a fundamental disagreement. If we captured Osama Bin Laden, I would not torture him. Is that possibly going to lead to an attack that might have been prevented? It might.

John Donvan: Are you okay with that?

David Frakt: I am okay with it because it would be a great tragedy. But it would be a greater tragedy to go down the road which we already went down of torturing, because that one attack may not be averted, but you are going to multiply the attacks for years to come because of the torture. And that is what we have done.

Michael Hayden: Again, I’ll come back and walk, if you like, a debate on a different subject but as the only one on stage who has actually had the question in front of him as to whether or not it –

John Donvan: Except, Michael, that your partner brought these issues to the table himself in his opening remarks in talk — in justifying and laying out several scenarios in which the actual methods did do it. I think they’re relevant. I don’t think it’s — it’s not a vote on that, but I think it’s germane to understanding what the motion means. And I’d like to see if Marc could respond to what was just said because this is where the rubber hit the road.

Michael Hayden: Well, actually, no. Let me finish, because the rubber hit the road on my car, all right? I’m the one who has to make the decision, okay? These are not easy decisions.  There are conflicting values. There are moral responsibilities galore, okay? No one should trivialize it, and no one should throw bumper stickers at the difficulty of the decision people like me, people like Leon Panetta, have to make, all right?

But I come back to the fundamental question: the American armed forces, the American intelligence community are capable of holding people, consistent with the laws of armed conflict. I feel as if we have gone through the looking glass in the last 30 to 40 minutes as we try to take people who are armed enemy combatants — and David did not make the straw man that Iraq is okay to capture, it’s not okay to capture and keep enemy combatants in Brooklyn, okay? What about Mali? What about Djibouti, what about Yemen? What about the Horn of Africa? What about Pakistan? That is where the enemy is. That is where the enemy is mounting an attack against our citizens. They are enemy combatants. And as God is my judge, I will use the full authority that the law of armed conflict gives me as long as my president and my Congress has given me that authorization.

John Donvan: And your partner, Marc Thiessen.

Marc Thiessen: I would add to that to complete. We’re not going to have time to debate all of the interrogation techniques. They were not torture. And I can walk you through it if you really want to.

David Frakt: I’d rather not.

Marc Thiessen: Well, I’ll tell you something. You said something, and this is — you’re sort of dismissive of the threat in a very sort of disturbing way. You said well, yeah, I’ve let the — you basically admitted you had let the attack happen and treat him as a criminal rather than an enemy combatant. You know, you said earlier, when — about my introductory remark, two little terrorist networks. Well, you know what? One of those two little terrorist networks killed 3,000 people down the street from here, 19 men with box cutters. This is a real threat. These people are out there every day trying to kill us. And I think it’s really shameful to dismiss them as two little terrorist networks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan. You said unless he’s in Iraq or Afghanistan, he’s not an enemy combatant. So do you consider Khalid Sheikh Mohammed an enemy combatant, the mastermind of 9/11, the man who commanded the operation, the operational commander of al-Qaeda? Is he an enemy combatant, yes or no?

David Frakt: How do you know that he is the mastermind of 9/11? What –

Marc Thiessen: Oh, my God.

David Frakt: He has not been put on trial. And you don’t want to put him on trial. And you are denying those 3,000 victims –

Marc Thiessen: I’m not denying them anything.

David Frakt: You are denying — you say it’s not important to have a trial. I say it is important to have a trial.

Marc Thiessen: It’s not the first priority.

David Frakt: It is important to establish the truth of what happened and for people to get some closure. And it’s important for these people to be punished. I do not in any way diminish the seriousness of 9/11. And I agree with General Hayden that these are difficult decisions. And I am not sure that I would want to be in the position he was in of having to make those.

But what I will tell you is that the oath that we take, that we both took as officers in the United States military, is to defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not to defend the people of the United States. Because what we are defending are our values and our history. And sometimes, yes, it may cost lives. But you cannot achieve perfect security. And when you try to, by making shortcuts, you ultimately diminish us as a country. And it does not serve us in the long run.

John Donvan: Yes from the — the blue jacket and white — blue shirt and dark blue Blazer. Yep. Your colleague is tapping you on the shoulder.

Male Speaker: My name is Les Shelton, and my question is that — comes from the fact that it seems that what was really most difficult is — what is the definition, operationally, of a person who is a terrorist? […] How can we be sure that a terrorist on a bus in Pakistan and the whole bus is grabbed because they know a terrorist is on the bus — And how do we understand, as people listening to all this, how we can feel comfortable with the shortcut because nobody wants their ass burned? And the fact of the matter is we need to feel a bit more — I need to feel a bit more comfortable about the selection process for applying these definitions is somehow rational. And I have to say that our legal system is one of the ways those things are done. But again, we have a group of people who say they’re experts. And they know these people are. But we have a bad history. That isn’t always the case.

John Donvan: Sir, can you cut to your question?

Male Speaker: The question is, how do we make this distinction so that all of us can feel more comfortable with what our government may be doing?

John Donvan: You mean the distinction: who are the terrorists and who is not?

Male Speaker: Yeah. You know, how to get the innocents off the bus.

John Donvan: How and who? I mean, there is also the question of who makes the distinction as well. Let’s take that to the side for the motion. Mike, go ahead.

Michael Hayden: It’s a process. It’s a rigorous process. I governed it while I was the director of CIA with regard to that portion of the war that CIA had responsibility for. To be clear, just being a terrorist doesn’t get much interest from us. The authorization we have from the Congress, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, is against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. So it’s not a global terrorist issue. We are at war with a select group of terrorists. President Obama has made that clear. The Congress has made that clear. President Bush has made that clear. We used the same criteria to capture an individual as a terrorist that we use on the battlefield to kill. It is visual: who is a terrorist? I am responding to the political processes of the American state. All three branches of government have said we are at war. I’m using the full authority given to me. I use it in the clearest conscience I have.

Are mistakes made on the battlefield? Killing, capturing? Of course, they are. What — you have very good men and women working very hard to apply absolute precision to their task. Now, I will admit that the processes of intelligence are a bit different than the processes of the judicial system. Again, as I mentioned in the one habeas case, we had to fold our tent and admit defeat because I could not, in conscience, tell the enemy combatant who the source of our information was. If I did that, I would quickly not have sources of information anywhere in the world. And so we had to make a serious tradeoff. That’s what I mean by putting this into a law enforcement template, rather than using a vigorous and consistent with the rule of law, law of armed conflict.

John Donvan: Thank you, Michael Hayden. Go ahead and take one more question. There is — on the far aisle, almost near the top. Yes. Up seven steps.

Female Speaker: Thank you. I think my question is for General Hayden. You and your partner have admitted that mistakes are sometimes made as to who does get picked up as a terrorist. In the civilian justice system, we say it’s something of a cliché, that it’s better for 100 guilty men to walk free than to convict an innocent man unjustly. What’s your calculation in the war on terror? How many non-terrorists can be rendered off the streets of Toronto or Amsterdam to make it okay?

Michael Hayden: Obviously there’s no precise answer to the question. We do the very best we can. And we review our data constantly. As I mentioned, to David’s point — and he’s nodding in agreement because he’s familiar with the process — we have combatant status review teams even before we had the habeas process at Guantánamo. You go over the evidence routinely. It’s required by our regulations. It’s required by the regime that’s in place at Guantánamo. I hope the audience is not demanding 100 percent certitude and 100 percent perfection before your intelligence services or your military services can act in your defense.

John Donvan: And that concludes round two of our debate. We are about to hear closing statements from each debater. There will be two minutes, each. This is their last chance to change your mind. You will be asked to vote once again immediately after they speak and to pick the winner in this debate just a few minutes from now. Our motion is: “Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals.” And first, to summarize his position against the motion, Stephen Jones […]

Stephen Jones: As we have listened to the debate tonight, I think two or three issues have emerged sharply. The issue is not just about the treatment of individuals at Guantánamo Bay. The issue is larger and that is, what is the system we will use to adjudicate the guilt of those persons charged with crimes against the United States? And I say that the line is indivisible.  By that I mean you cannot say, “We have one set of justice over here for these categories of crimes, that one rule of evidence, one rule of procedure, one rule of appellate practice, and over here we have an entirely different rule of evidence and a different procedure.” First, that leaves the intelligence community who are largely anonymous and many law enforcement officers and prosecutors unaccountable in the final analysis for the decision made. General Hayden has been very correct in telling you that there is not 100 percent perfection and there isn’t. After all, the 9/11 Commission in its report talked about the system was blinking red, so our intelligence and many of our law enforcement officials and indeed political leaders knew of the risks and did nothing.

In the final analysis, accountability for responsible decisions has to be made somewhere, political process, the legal process, something done openly, but that is not what the argument is made by our colleagues to our right. Their argument is trust us, trust us, we’ll get it right this time. Unfortunately history shows too many examples of not getting it right. That’s why we have the rule of law.

John Donvan: Thank you, Stephen Jones. […] Summarizing his position for this motion, Marc Thiessen […]

Marc Thiessen: We did get it right. In the period in the eight years before September 11th, 2001, al-Qaeda killed roughly 3,500 people in a series of attacks starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, followed by the attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by the attack on the USS Cole and culminating in September 11th, 2001. That was when we followed the law enforcement approach to interrogation. During that period of time, we prosecuted 29 people in connection with those attacks. If you think that is an approach — and we didn’t get the intelligence we needed to stop the September 11th terrorist attacks, in the period that followed we have not been hit again.

So it’s a very stark question; do you want to go back to the approach when al-Qaeda was mounting attacks of increasingly lethality, or do you want to follow the approach that we took which has kept this country safe for almost a decade? Our opponents are trying to wiggle out of it. They want you to focus you on waterboarding and the interrogation techniques. If they don’t like the techniques we used, there’s a wide line between waterboarding on one hand and “You have the right to remain silent,” lawful techniques that can be used short of that.

Choose other techniques, but what their position holds, if you hold that a terrorist is a criminal and not an enemy combatant, we cannot kill them using predator drones outside of the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. We cannot kill them in Pakistan. We cannot kill them in Yemen. We cannot kill them in East Africa. There are terrorists plotting to attack us right now that Barack Obama would not be allowed to kill. And second, we will not be able to interrogate them effectively as we found out after the Christmas Day bomber, as we found out with the Times Square bomber. So this is a very stark question. Do you want to go back to the approach that led to 3,500 American people getting killed and we were not able to get the intelligence to stop the attack? Or do you want to follow the approach that kept our country safe for almost a decade?

John Donvan: Thank you, Marc Thiessen. […] Summarizing his position against this motion, David Frakt […]

David Frakt: Our opponents seem to have valued American lives more than the lives of anybody else. They seem to forget about Madrid, about London, about Bali. The terrorists have not stopped. But simply because we’ve tightened security domestically and presented easy targets overseas, the action is moved overseas. We are not safer today than we were on September 12th, 2001. We are in a worse position because of our actions in the war on terror, our lawlessness and our abandonment of the rule of law. General Hayden talks a lot about the rule of law and serving it but that was not really our experience under the prior administration. Let me tell you about my personal experience. I was assigned to represent two detainees in Guantánamo.

Both had been determined to be enemy combatants in the combatant status tribunals that you heard about. But in fact, neither was an enemy combatant. One, Mr. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, was, in fact, a terrorist. He was an al-Qaeda insider. He was a media advisor and created propaganda for al-Qaeda. He should have been tried in federal court for material support to terrorism. He was not an operational terrorist. He did not kill any Americans. He did not plot any attacks on Americans. The other [Mohamed Jawad] was neither an enemy combatant nor a terrorist and, in fact, he was a child who had been tortured into confessing to something he didn’t do. A lot of mistakes were made. The rule of law was not observed.

Over time, with the intervention of the Supreme Court, we gradually brought the pendulum back to something approaching equilibrium. But they’re advocating going back. I’m advocating going forward. So we urge you to vote against the proposition. Thank you.

John Donvan: Thank you, David Frakt. […] To summarize for the motion, our final speaker, Michael Hayden […]

Michael Hayden: As I predicted and somewhat feared, we’ve sidled into a discussion as to whether or not you are for or against the rule of law. I warned you that that was not the issue here, that there is plenty of law with the laws of conflict to govern our behavior and the American armed forces, the American intelligence community are quite capable and competent to function within that framework. I was taken aback a little bit by saying that the intelligence community is not accountable. Clearly Stephen has never been in front of the Senate Select Committee or the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and to go through the openness that we share within the confines of those committees.

I was struck as Stephen said the system was blinking red and I think he was alleging some sort of incompetence. The attack still happened in the summer — in September of 2001. The attack still happened not because the intelligence was wanting — although certainly you can always use better intelligence. The act took place because the model we were using, the model in which we placed the intelligence which was a law enforcement model. [Editor’s Note: I don’t think anyone would agree with this statement who has read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, with its vivid explanation of how turf wars between the CIA -- in particular -- and the FBI prevented both sides from putting together the jigsaw pieces both possessed, which, if both sides had cooperated, would probably have prevented the 9/11 attacks].

The difference between now and 9/11 is that we are a nation at war and we are taking the fight to the enemy. There’s an office in CIA, the most operational office that we have on our Langley campus, responsible for many of the things the current administration is taking credit for. You walk into that office, you hit a bulkhead, a wall, and there’s a sign there saying today’s date and you walk by it, very often don’t recognize it but every now and again you catch it. It actually says today’s date is September 12th, 2001. It’s been up there for over eight years.  When I was director and got in a car and drove down G.W. Parkway to my home, it didn’t feel like September 12th. It felt a lot like September 10th. That’s an attitude that we adopt at our peril. Thank you.

John Donvan: Thank you, Michael. That concludes our closing statements. And now it’s time to learn which side argued best. I’m going to ask you, once again, to vote. […]

All right. I now have the final results. We had you vote twice, one before the debate and once again at the conclusion. We asked you where you stood on our motion, which is: “Treat terrorists like enemy combatants, not criminals.” The team that has changed the most minds, that has moved the most percentage points will be declared our winner. Here is how it went.

Before the debate, 33 percent of you were for the motion, 32 percent were against, 35 percent were undecided. After the debate, 39 percent for, 55 percent against, 6 percent undecided. The side against the motion wins.

Our congratulations to them. Thank you from me, John Donvan and Intelligence Squared U.S.

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

This second article tells the stories of 32 prisoners seized in Afghanistan, mostly in December 2001. A handful are reportedly significant figures in the Taliban, and most of the rest were either transferred to US custody after a massacre in a fort in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, or were seized after the Battle of Tora Bora, a showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in the mountains near Jalalabad. Noticeably, only a few are accused of any serious involvement with al-Qaeda or terrorist activities (although these claims are themselves dubious), and four others have lost their habeas corpus petitions. It is also worth remarking that the majority of the men discussed in this chapter are Yemenis, and that many have presumably been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but are waiting to see if the President will, at any point the future, lift the unprincipled moratorium on transfers to Yemen that he announced in January.

ISN 004 Wasiq, Abdul-Haq (Afghanistan)
Reportedly the Taliban’s deputy minister of intelligence, he was seized in a Special Forces operation in Ghazni in December 2001, with Gholam Ruhani (released in December 2007). However, in his review board at Guantánamo in 2005, he claimed that “he was attempting to assist the US in capturing Mullah Mohammed Omar.”

ISN 006 Noori, Mullah Norullah (Afghanistan)
Noori was reportedly the governor of Balkh province under the Taliban, and according to press reports at the time, helped Mullah Mohammed Fazil (see ISN 007, below) negotiate the surrender of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in the north of Afghanistan, with General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance in November 2001. In Guantánamo, he played down his role, describing himself not as “a member of the Taliban,” but as a “soldier with them,” who had joined them in 1999. However, in a summary of evidence in January 2007, the US authorities clearly identified him as a significant figure in the Taliban.

ISN 007 Fazil, Mullah Mohammed (Afghanistan)
Reportedly the Taliban’s deputy defense minister, press reports in November 2001 stated he led the negotiations with General Dostum for the surrender of Kunduz. Both he and Noori surrendered to Dostum and were then kept under informal house arrest until they were handed over to US forces. In other reports at the time, Mohammed Muhaqiq, a leader of the Hazara, the ethnic group most persecuted by the Taliban, suggested that a number of Taliban leaders, including Noori and Fazil, should be prosecuted for war crimes, including ethnic cleansing. Like Noori, he tried to play down his role, but in a summary of evidence in October 2007 it was stated that approximately 3000 Taliban troops were under his control in October 2001.

ISN 088 Awad, Adham Ali (Yemen)
Seized after a group of al-Qaeda soldiers besieged in a hospital surrendered him to the Afghan authorities in December 2001, Awad, who was just 19 years old at the time, stated that he had been wounded in a bombing raid while walking through a market in Kandahar, but lost his habeas corpus petition in August 2009, when Judge James Robertson accepted what he described as a “gossamer thin” case put forward by the government. In June 2009, his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court.

ISN 239 Aamer, Shaker (UK-Saudi Arabia)
Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, was born in Saudi Arabia and, in 1996, moved to the UK after traveling in the US, Europe and the Middle East. He has a British wife, and four British children, the youngest of whom he has never seen. Aamer’s road to Guantánamo began when he, along with Moazzam Begg, took his family to live in Kabul, in June 2001, to work for a charity involved in humanitarian aid projects, including a girls’ school and various well-digging projects. After the US-led invasion in October 2001, Aamer arranged for the evacuation of his family from Afghanistan, but was thwarted in his own attempts to leave. He was taken in by an Afghan family, but was then seized by Afghan soldiers, who held him and abused him for several weeks before handing him over — or, more probably, selling him — to US forces. After horrendous abuse in US custody in Afghanistan, including prolonged sleep deprivation and starvation, so that he lost 60 pounds in weight, he apparently made a number of false confessions used by the US to justify his detention, and was then transferred to Guantánamo, where he became one of the most significant prisoners, attracting the support of his fellow inmates, and the fear and suspicion of the authorities, because of his relentless advocacy on behalf of those held without rights in the “War on Terror.” Charismatic and eloquent, he brokered a deal that brought a halt to the prison-wide hunger strike in the summer of 2005, but when the authorities reneged on their promise to make the prison more compliant with the Geneva Conventions, he was then imprisoned in solitary confinement for at least 18 months, and, ever since, has been held in a block reserved for prisoners regarded by the authorities as non-compliant or particularly influential. Despite being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in March 2007, the British government claims that negotiations for his release to the UK have stalled because of security concerns on the part of the US authorities, but this seems implausible, as any security concerns could easily be addressed in the UK. Instead, it appears that Aamer is still held because of what he knows, including knowledge of the terrible events of June 9, 2006, when three prisoners died and, he has stated, he was tortured to within an inch of his life. His presence in the UK is vital to the inquiry into British complicity in torture announced by Prime Minister David Cameron in July, in part because he won a court case in the UK in December 2009, to secure information relating to his allegations that British agents were in the room when he was tortured by US forces, and the campaign to free him from Guantánamo continues.

ISN 240 Al Shabli, Abdullah (Saudi Arabia)
The US authorities allege that al-Shabli was “recruited to go to al-Farouq camp by a mujahideen fighter who had fought in Afghanistan,” that he was “supplied with a false Yemeni passport, travel funds, tickets and the locations of guest houses in Afghanistan,” and that he trained at al-Farouq, and at another camp in Kabul, although he was not at either camp for long, as he only arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks. The authorities also made an attempt to link him with Osama bin Laden, but it was not entirely convincing. It was alleged that he stated that he “saw Osama bin Laden passing by in the Tora Bora mountains,” but it not clear that he was ever in Tora Bora, because, elsewhere in the government’s evidence, it was stated that, after fleeing Kabul, he stayed in a house in Jalalabad for three weeks, and then traveled in a convoy towards the Pakistani border. When the convoy came under fire, he and others were taken in by Afghan locals, who then arranged for them to be seized by Northern Alliance soldiers. At no point in this story, therefore, was there any suggestion that he engaged in combat, or had even been in a position where he might have engaged in combat, and it is surprising that he was not released in 2006 0r 2007, when dozens of Saudi prisoners were released.

The following seven prisoners survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in November 2001, which followed the surrender of the northern city of Kunduz, when several hundred Taliban foot soldiers, who had been told that they would be allowed to return home if they surrendered — and, it seems, a number of civilians — were taken to a fortress run by General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance. Fearing that they were about to be killed, a number of the men started an uprising, which was suppressed by the Northern Alliance, acting with support from US and British Special Forces, and US bombers. Hundreds of the prisoners died, but around 80 survived being bombed and flooded in the basement of the fort, and around 50 of these men ended up at Guantánamo. All but these seven have been released.

ISN 091 Al Saleh, Abdul (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Saleh said that he had answered a fatwa calling for young men to travel to Afghanistan, but felt that “the Taliban cheated him because he was fighting the Northern Alliance, which was not a cause that he believed in; therefore, it was not really a jihad for him.” He also denied knowing any members of al-Qaeda, and stated that, if returned to Yemen, he would “get married” and would “disregard anyone who suggests that he fight jihad.”

ISN 115 Naser, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
Naser was accused of arriving in Afghanistan in January 2001 and fighting on the Taliban front lines for six months at Khawaja Ghar, prior to his capture. It was also stated that, in Guantánamo, he had been “cited for numerous incidents of failure to comply, guard harassment, assault, and inciting of disturbances during his detention.” However, it was also noted that he “denie[d] seeing Osama Bin Laden while in Afghanistan,” and “stated that if he were released, he would return home to the family farm and get married.”

ISN 117 Al Warafi, Mukhtar (Yemen)
Al-Warafi had his habeas corpus petition denied in March 2010 by Judge Royce C. Lamberth. Al-Warafi claimed that he had traveled to Afghanistan to work as a medic, and had tended wounded Taliban fighters at a clinic in Kunduz, but Judge Lamberth denied his habeas petition not only because he believed that he had been acting as part of the Taliban’s “command structure,” but also because Congress had removed the Geneva Conventions’ requirement not to imprison medics when passing the Military Commissions Act in 2006, which cynically stated, “No person may invoke the Geneva Conventions … in any habeas corpus proceeding … as a source of rights in any court of the United States.”

ISN 128 Al Bihani, Ghaleb (Yemen)
Al-Bihani had his habeas corpus petition denied in January 2009 by Judge Richard Leon. He had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and Judge Leon concluded that this met the definition of “support” for al-Qaeda or the Taliban that justified his detention. He explained that “faithfully serving in an al-Qaeda-affiliated fighting unit that is directly supporting the Taliban by helping prepare the meals of its entire fighting force is more than sufficient to meet this Court’s definition of ‘support,’” and added, “After all, as Napoleon was fond of pointing out, ‘An army marches on its stomach.’” Al-Bihani appealed, but his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in January 2010, in a ruling in which the court claimed that his argument that “the war powers granted [to the President] by the AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force] and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war” was “mistaken.”

ISN 131 Ben Kend, Salem (Yemen)
Ben Kend (also identified as Salem Ahmed Hadi) reportedly fought on the Taliban front lines for six months, prior to his capture. However, in a statement prepared for a review board in 2006, he stated that he was “shocked” to see an allegation that he had “fought with the Taliban in Kabul and in Kandahar from July 2001 to December 2001.” Leaving aside the fact that he was seized in November 2001, he “responded that he did not fight in Kandahar, although he was in the area.”

ISN 202 Bin Atef, Mahmoud (Yemen)
Bin Atef is accused of arriving in Afghanistan for jihad in June 2001, training at al-Farouq, and fighting on the Taliban front lines. In an interrogation, he apparently stated that “his enemies were the Northern Alliance,” and also stated that “he never shot at or killed anyone,” and that, although he “was asked to take an oath to Osama bin Laden, [he] did not take one since he might have been obligated to do things that he might not want to do.”

ISN 434 Al Shamyri, Mustafa (Yemen)
He reportedly fought with the Taliban for ten months after answering a fatwa. One unidentified source claimed that he was “a trainer at al-Farouq,” and another allegation stated, implausibly, “Indications are that the detainee was a commander of troops at Tora Bora” (this was impossible, as he was captured before the battle of Tora Bora). One other allegation in particular — that “A detained al Qaida official identified [him] as a Yemeni national who participated in the Bosnian Jihad” — is unlikely, as he would have been only 15 or 16 years old at the time. It was also claimed that, in Guantánamo, he “was cited for harassing guards, inciting disturbances and several hostile acts.”

ISN 440 Bawazir, Mohammed (Yemen)
Bawazir may have been present at Qala-i-Janghi, but he denied it. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, he also denied claims that he trained at al-Farouq and fought with the Taliban, stating that he traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, and also spent time visiting the front lines with a religious figure who used to ask the soldiers if the knew why they were fighting, stating, “Religion is not all about fighting.” He claimed that all the allegations against him — including a claim that he attended Osama bin Laden’s daughter’s wedding in Kandahar — came about because he was tortured. “When I came to Mazar-e-Sharif they questioned me [and asked] me if I was from al-Qaeda,” he said. “They used to hit me physically until they broke my skull … Then I had to say yes I had met Osama bin Laden, that I talked with the Taliban, that I knew about nuclear rockets, and that I know everything about what al-Qaeda is up to.” In 2005, Bawazir embarked on a hunger strike (the largest of many throughout the prison’s history), which involved painful force-feeding, and at one point his weight dropped to just 100 pounds. In November 2009, he petitioned the D.C. District Court to declare that force-feeding was “tantamount to torture,” but Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that she did not have the “appropriate expertise” to decide whether that was true.

ISN 441 Al Zahri, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
In statements at Guantánamo, al-Zahri apparently admitted traveling to Afghanistan in the hope of fighting in Chechnya, but ended up fighting against the Northern Alliance, when he was wounded and subsequently seized by US forces. He may have been at Qala-i-Janghi, although this is not clear, and he has also provided conflicting accounts of his allegiances, on occasions mentioning his admiration for al-Qaeda and claims that he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions, and on one other occasion denouncing bin Laden “as a heretic, who attacked civilians — in violation of the laws of Islam.”

ISN 461 Al Qyati, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
Al-Qyati, who was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush, reportedly traveled to Afghanistan in May 2001, trained at al-Farouq, and was a guard “for 39 high-level Taliban personnel” at Kandahar airport, where he was seized in November 2001. According to his habeas corpus petition, submitted in December 2008, although listed as a Yemeni, he was “born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has never lived in, or even traveled to Yemen.”

The following 16 prisoners were mostly captured around the Tora Bora region in December 2001, following a showdown between al-Qaeda (and Taliban forces supporting them), and the US, which provided bombers to back up a military campaign that was primarily conducted by Afghan forces. Notoriously, the US allowed Osama bin Laden and other senior leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban to escape from Tora Bora. Around 50 men seized at this time ended up in Guantánamo, although it is by no means certain that all of them had been involved in the conflict. Around three dozen of these prisoners have already been released.

ISN 242 Qasim, Khaled (Yemen)
In his tribunal at Guantánamo, Qasim stated that he had traveled to Afghanistan in late 1999, but denied undertaking any military training, and claimed that he had sat around in guest houses for two years. He did, however, admit that he was in the Tora Bora mountains in November 2001, and said that, after hiding in caves for several weeks, he and his companions descended from the mountains when one of them was injured, which was when they were arrested. The US authorities allege that he traveled to Afghanistan after responding to a fatwa, that he stated that he “originally wanted to fight in Kashmir, because Muslims were being killed there,” that he attended al-Farouq on two occasions, and spent some time on the Taliban front lines before traveling to Tora Bora. It is not known whether the authorities have also been relying on other allegations, which seem less reliable: that he “has been identified as an al-Qaeda instructor,” who trained fighters at “an unidentified location” near Bagram airbase, that he “was in charge of a group at Tora Bora,” and that he “has been identified as somebody who is experienced in explosives and was an instructor at al-Farouq.”

ISN 244 Nasir, Abdul Latif (Morocco)
Nasir, also identified as Abdullatif Nasser, is, according to the US authorities, a veteran fighter who had spent three years fighting with the Taliban, had attended three or four training camps, and was seized in Tora Bora. The authorities also allege that he was “a member of the al-Qaeda Explosives Committee and an explosives instructor,” although it is unclear how much of this is truth, and how much is fiction. Nasir himself has stated that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, and that he “disagreed with what bin Laden and al-Qaeda were doing outside of Afghanistan.” He has also stated that “he did not think Osama bin Laden was in a position to issue a fatwa because he is not an Islamic scholar,” and condemned the 9/11 attacks because it was “against Islamic principles to attack innocent people.” According to his lawyers, he had worked as a small-scale businessman in Libya and Sudan, and had also spent time in Yemen and Pakistan. In Guantánamo, he has experienced particularly harsh treatment, because he has stood up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, and has refused to stay silent in the face of injustice.

ISN 321 Kuman, Ahmed Yaslam Said (Yemen)
Kuman, who was 20 years old when seized, was initially accused of traveling to Afghanistan in response to a fatwa, training at several camps including al-Farouq, and fighting against the US-led coalition in Bagram and Tora Bora. He was reportedly captured during Ramadan by the Northern Alliance. By 2006, the US authorities had built up a more detailed profile of his supposed activities, but it is unclear whether the allegations are necessarily reliable. Apparently identified “at a guest house on the Taliban front lines in Kabul” in late 1999, he was also “identified as the bus driver for a guest house in Kandahar,” was “seen in Tora Bora,” where he “was a fighter,” was “identified as suspected al-Qaeda due to his association with the Kandahar Airport group,” and was identified “as having been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.” While some of these claims sound unnervingly like “confessions” produced under dubious circumstances by Kuman’s fellow detainees (and the Kandahar airport allegation is particularly associated with a notoriously unreliable witness), it was also alleged that he “claimed he was personal friends with Osama bin Laden’s son,” that bin Laden “was like a father to him,” and that he claimed he had access to bin Laden “at any time because of this relationship.” Although there have been no reports about how Kuman has been treated in Guantanamo, it appears that he has been a consistent hunger striker. He weighed just 115 pounds on arrival, in May 2002, and at one point, in January 2004, his weight dropped to just 91 pounds (PDF).

ISN 498 Haidel, Mohammed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Haidel stated that he traveled to Afghanistan “to get married and for a change of environment.” The US authorities alleged that he trained at al-Farouq, was sent to the front lines in Kabul, and was then driven with other fighters, to Tora Bora, where, he said, “he sat in a cave for fifteen days,” and was then injured by a bomb blast, captured by the Northern Alliance and taken to a prison in Kabul, before being handed over to the Americans. In response to an allegation that he received mortar training, Haidel said, “When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars. As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, ‘No, I didn’t receive training.’ I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain, so I said I had the training. At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.” A long-term hunger striker at Guantánamo, Haidel weighed just 105 pounds on arrival in May 2002. In November 2002, his weight dropped to just 90 pounds, and at the time that the Pentagon’s declassified weight records came to an end, in November 2006, he weighed just 102 pounds.

ISN 502 Bin Ourgy, Abdul Bin Mohammed (Tunisia)
Formerly an Italian resident, bin Ourgy, who was cleared for release from Guantanamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, stated that he traveled to a training camp in Afghanistan in 1997 that was unconnected to al-Qaeda, and that he married an Afghan woman in 2000. A “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” accused him of being an explosives expert, who was at Tora Bora, and was also involved in the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001, but these allegations are, of course, untrustworthy, as they may have been extracted through the use of torture. In July 2009, it was suggested that he might be transferred to Italian custody, to face a trial. The Italian media reported that he was “suspected of having had links in Milan with people who sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with Islamic insurgents,” but in December 2009, when two other Tunisians were transferred to Italian custody, he remained in Guantánamo.

ISN 506 Al Dhuby, Khalid (Yemen)
Allegedly recruited for military training in Afghanistan after being shown videos of atrocities in Chechnya, al-Dhuby reportedly arrived at al-Farouq in late July 2001, and trained for a month and a half until the camp closed. He was then taken to Tora Bora, where he “stayed in one of several caves large enough to fit three or four people,” and then left the area with a group of other men. He said that as they passed through a valley he “saw planes dropping bombs on their location and stated the bombing went on for one night,” and added that he “hid from the bombs until the next morning,” but that many of the men traveling with him “were killed and injured by the bombing.” After the bombing, he was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and held in an Afghan prison in Kabul before being handed over — or sold — to US forces. At Guantánamo, he maintained that he had never fired a shot at anyone, that he “was not a fighter or a killer,” and that he only “wanted to train to protect himself and his family as well as defend his country.”

ISN 508 Al Rabie, Salman (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, the authorities could not initially decide whether they thought al-Rabie (also identified as Salman Rabeii), who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, had been seized in Tora Bora, or in Jalalabad, as he claimed. By 2006, they decided that he had attended al-Farouq in August 2001, and that he was captured “coming out of the Tora Bora mountains” on December 16, 2001 “after surrendering to Afghan forces.” In October 2006, however, his father told Gulf News that Salman had only traveled to Afghanistan in search of his brother, Fawaz. “I sent Salman to look for his brother and bring him back from Afghanistan, but the war broke out and he could not come back. He was detained and put in Guantánamo,” he said.

ISN 509 Khusruf, Mohammed (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Khusruf, who was seized after a bombing raid in the Tora Bora region, said that he went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran, and asked, “Is it really reasonable that al-Qaeda or the Taliban, in bad need of men to fight, have to go to Yemen to find men at 60 years old to fight? Is this logical?” (according to US records, he was actually 51 years old at the time of his capture). He admitted training at al-Farouq, but said that he only did so because the man who arranged his travel told him he needed to be able to defend himself. He also explained that, after his arrest, he was moved from a jail in Jalalabad to “an underground prison” in Kabul — possibly the CIA’s “Dark Prison,” or else an Afghan jail — where “they would interrogate and beat us.” He added that those who were wounded “were also there” — presumably some of the other men rounded up in the Tora Bora region, who also ended up in Guantánamo.

ISN 511 Al Nahdi, Sulaiman (Yemen)
Cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, al-Nahdi lost his habeas petition in February 2010, when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that he had “entered into the ‘command structure’ of al-Qaeda during his travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, during his attendance at al-Farouq, and through his role as a guard at Tora Bora, even though these demonstrations of his involvement in the “command structure” actually demonstrated how generally insignificant he was. As I explained at the time, “In a review board at Guantánamo, he explained that the leaders of al-Farouq ‘ordered us to move from one place to another. They told us to go to Tora Bora so that is where we went.’ Judge Kessler also noted that al-Nahdi had stated that ‘[a]t the time, you could not ask them why and where you were going. You cannot refute them. You had to do what they told you to do.’”

ISN 522 Ismail, Yasin (Yemen)
In April 2010, Ismail, who may have been just 19 when he was seized, lost his habeas petition when Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. refused to accept his claim that he had been kidnapped in Kabul by Afghans and taken to Tora Bora, where he was sold to US forces, and concluded instead that he had trained at al-Farouq and had traveled to Tora Bora as a fighter, like Sulaiman al-Nahdi. Nevertheless, it is far from reassuring that, throughout his time in US custody, he has alleged that he was tortured and subjected to sexual humiliation, and that he has been subjected to regular assaults by the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF), teams of five soldiers who respond to the most minor infractions of the rules with brutality.

ISN 535 El Sawah, Tariq (Egypt-Bosnia)
The last prisoner put forward for a trial by Military Commission under President Bush, El-Sawah, now 52 years old, is a veteran of the Bosnian conflict, who had married a local woman and had then traveled to Afghanistan, where he became an explosives expert at al-Farouq. Ferociously opposed to the Northern Alliance, but not to the US, he apparently became one of the most useful informers within Guantánamo, according to an article in the Washington Post in March 2010, which explained that, according to a former military intelligence official, “He was an old-soldier type who’d just had a bellyful. Right after he got to Guantánamo, he told the interrogators he’d had it,” and he became “the source of 150 first-rate information reports.” Former prisoners dispute this account, questioning El-Sawah’s mental health, and the quality of his information, but it has led to a strange situation for El-Sawah and Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), who, unlike El-Sawah, was tortured until he decided to start talking (and whose value as an informer is therefore suspicious as well). As “two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo,” in the Post’s words, they live in “a little fenced-in compound,” allowed to write, in Slahi’s case, and to paint, in El-Sawah’s case. As the Post also explained, “Each has a modular unit outfitted with a television. Each has a well-stocked refrigerator. They share a garden, where they grow mint for tea.” However, notwithstanding doubts about the quality of their evidence as informers, the Post article pertinently pointed out how shabbily informers are treated in the post-9/11 world, explaining, “Some military officials believe the United States should let them go — and put them into a witness protection program, in conjunction with allies, in a bid to cultivate more informants,” and quoting W. Patrick Lang, a retired senior military intelligence officer, who said, “I don’t see why they aren’t given asylum. If we don’t do this right, it will be that much harder to get other people to cooperate with us. And if I was still in the business, I’d want it known we protected them. It’s good advertising.”

ISN 549 Al Dayi, Omar (Yemen)
Al-Dayi, who weighed just 98 pounds when he arrived in Guantánamo, is accused of traveling to Afghanistan in August 2001. It is also alleged that he stayed at a safe house in Kandahar, but became ill with malaria after one day, and “had trouble standing and walking,” and that, after six weeks at the safe house, he and others in the house were told to go to Jalalabad, where they stayed in another safe house for a few weeks before leaving for Tora Bora. In the mountains, it was alleged that al-Dayi “was shown to his position,” with 10-12 other Arabs, but that his group, though armed, “spent most of its time hiding in one of the three caves located close to its position.” Wounded in the leg by a missile, he was then “evacuated by an Afghan on a donkey to a nearby village,” and driven to the hospital in Jalalabad, where he stayed for two months “before being taken by Americans to a prison in Kabul” — presumably the “Dark Prison” — before his transfer to Guantánamo.

ISN 550 Zaid, Walid (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Zaid, who was wounded in the left foot in an air raid in the Tora Bora region, and was then hospitalized in Jalalabad before being handed over — or sold — to US forces, denied that he went to Afghanistan for “Jihad readiness military training,” as alleged, and said that he had just finished his final year studying Arabic literature at college, and went to Afghanistan a fortnight before 9/11 because he hoped to teach Arabic in an Afghan school. He admitted attending al-Farouq, but said that he had only done so because some Afghan acquaintances said that Afghanistan “was a country with a great deal of fighting,” and suggested that he should get some training in self-defence. At other times, he appears to have conceded that he traveled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, but he has maintained that he “harbors no ill will towards the United States” and “only wishes to return home and put this part of his life behind him.”

ISN 552 Al Kandari, Fayiz (Kuwait)
A Kuwaiti from a wealthy family, with a history of humanitarian work, al-Kandari has always maintained that he was a humanitarian aid worker who arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, was caught up in the chaos following the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of October 2001, and was seized by Afghan forces and sold to the US military in December 2001, as he tried to cross the mountains to Pakistan. Despite this, the US authorities allege that between August and December 2001, he somehow managed to attend al-Farouq, “provided instruction to al-Qaeda members and trainees,” “served as an adviser to Osama bin Laden,” and “produced recruitment audio and video tapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad.” The authorities took these allegations so seriously that, in November 2008, he was put forward for a trial by Military Commission, although the charges have not been revived under President Obama. Sadly, the US authorities seem to have encouraged themselves to believe that al-Kandari is significant because he has been particularly resistant to the pressure to cooperate and has steadfastly refused to make false statements about himself or about anybody else. Over the years, he has been subjected to a vast array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, as his military defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard described them, “have included but are not limited to sleep deprivation, physical and verbal assaults, attempts at sexual humiliation through the use of female interrogators, the ‘frequent flier program,’ the prolonged use of stress positions, the use of dogs, the use of loud music and strobe lights, and the use of extreme heat and cold.” On September 17, 2010, Fayiz al-Kandari lost his habeas corpus petition.

ISN 553 Al Baidhani, Abdul Khaliq (Saudi Arabia)
Also identified as Abdul Khaled al-Bedani, he was just 18 at the time of his capture, and, by his own account, arrived in Afghanistan with particularly unfortunate timing. He admitted that he was recruited to receive military training, but said that he was in a guest house in Kabul, awaiting training, when he heard about 9/11 and decided to leave Afghanistan immediately. As this was an impossible task for a teenager without a passport (like all other recruits, he was obliged to hand in his passport “for safekeeping” when he arrived), he ended up fleeing with other recruits to Tora Bora, where he shared a bunker with a number of armed men and was provided with a gun. Wounded during a bombing raid, he was “then picked up by local Afghans who turned him over to the Northern Alliance.” Although he had received no military training and insisted that he never fired a shot, his admission that he was “provided with a weapon” was sufficient for his tribunal at Guantanamo to decide that he had “participated in military operations against the coalition.”

ISN 554 Al Assani, Fehmi (Yemen)
Cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, al-Assani, like Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511), lost his habeas petition in February 2010, when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that he had “entered into the ‘command structure’ of al-Qaeda during his travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, during his attendance at al-Farouq, and through his presence at Tora Bora, even though these demonstrations of his involvement in the “command structure” actually demonstrated how generally insignificant he was. As I explained at the time, there there was “something rather pathetic about al-Nahdi’s claim that many of the men at Tora Bora, ‘including himself, were scared, and only wanted to go home after the fighting began,’ and the report of his attempt to leave (which, Judge Kessler noted, demonstrated only that he “acted in proper ‘command mode’”), when he ‘asked his commander … if he could leave, and after being rebuked did not attempt to do so.’”

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, Uruknet and New Left Project.

With Abdul Aziz Naji now apparently home with his family (also see this interview here), valid concerns still remain about whether he is safe from extremists, about whether the Algerian government can be trusted, and about whether the Obama administration has been sufficiently stung by international criticism to call off its planned repatriation of other Algerians in Guantánamo who fear returning home. These are questions that I discussed in a recent article, and I’d like now to run through the stories of the other men released last week, which, yet again, demonstrate that those who insist on flagging up all the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo as terrorists are either cynical opportunists, preying on the message of permanent fear that was promoted by the Bush administration, or blinkered ideologues, incapable of separating fact from fiction.

Abdul Nasser Khantumani: A 50-year old economic migrant from Syria, resettled in Cape Verde

Abdul Nasser Khantumani (identified on his release as Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, and also known in Guantánamo as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani), a 50-year old Syrian, was released at the same time as Abdul Aziz Naji, but, given undisputed fears about what would await him if he was repatriated to Syria, he was, instead, given a new home on the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an archipelago of islands off the west coast of Africa.

Well respected as a stable democracy, Cape Verde has a population of 500,000, but only a very small Muslim population, so it will be difficult for him to adjust to his new life, especially as he is alone, with no members of his family or fellow ex-prisoners to provide any support. What is unusual about this arrangement is that his son, Muhammed, who was seized with him in Pakistan in December 2001, was given a new home in Portugal last August, and it would, therefore, have made sense for him to have been rehoused in Portugal as well.

As economic migrants to Afghanistan, the Khantumanis never posed a threat to anyone, and it is distressing that it took so long for both men to be released. In my book The Guantánamo Files, I discussed their story, based on accounts that they gave in their military review boards at Guantánamo (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) in 2004-05:

The father had traveled to Afghanistan in 1999 in search of work, finding a job in a restaurant in Kabul and bringing ten members of his family over in June 2001, including Muhammed, his grandmother and an eight-month old baby. Another six family members — [Muhammed]’s uncle’s family — arrived a week before 9/11, but after hearing about the attack on America the family fled to Jalalabad, where they stayed for a month, and then made their way on foot to Pakistan. On the way, their guide advised [Abdul Nasser] to let the women and children travel by car, to make them less of a target for highway robbers, but when he and his son arrived in Pakistan the local villagers handed them over to the Pakistani army.

In his tribunal, Abdul Nasser also spoke about his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan, stating, “I was always looking for an alternative country that I could immigrate to and live with my family. I thought about going to the free world, which is the Western world, especially after I heard a lot about freedom, stability and justice in these countries, but all the doors were closed.”

Unfortunately, both father and son experienced brutal treatment after their capture, both in Pakistani and US custody. Muhammed explained that, while in Pakistani custody, in three separate prisons, he and his father were “subjected to beatings and harsh torture,” and his nose was broken. He added that throughout this ordeal “there were Americans present,” and this account was echoed by his father, who said that the Pakistanis “were torturing us really hard,” and the Americans “were looking and standing right there. The Americans were present. I am sure about that because they were the ones who interrogated us.”

In addition, Muhammed explained that, in the US prison at Kandahar airport (where the prisoners were processed for Guantánamo), his father’s forehead was fractured “and the Red Cross saw this and wrote a report,” and he added that he received a fracture to his left hand, as well as suffering “many diseases” and “other methods of psychological torture,” including sleep deprivation.

He also explained that, during interrogation at Camp X-Ray (the rudimentary first prison at Guantánamo), “one of the interrogators brought two wires connected to electricity and said that if you do not say that you and your father are from al-Qaeda or Taliban, I will place these in your neck,’” and that the abuse continued in Camp Delta (Camp X-Ray’s more permanent replacement), where he said that he was “threatened with violence,” and that “an interrogator threatened to send him to torture in a foreign country.”

Muhammed’s story is also notable for a number of false allegations made by one of his fellow prisoners, which were exposed by his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to him in place of a lawyer) during his tribunal. As I explained in an article in 2007, based on a series of ground-breaking stories by Corine Hegland for the National Journal:

In his tribunal, [Muhammed Khantumani] denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq training camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11] with such vigor that his Personal Representative decided to investigate the matter further. When he looked at the classified evidence, however, he found that only one man … claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and had identified him as being there three months before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine Hegland described it, “The curious US officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.”

Even so, the Personal Representative’s protestations were in vain, because, as I explained on Muhammed Khantumani’s release, he was “judged to be an ‘enemy combatant,’ and had to wait for nearly five years before President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force finally conducted a comprehensive review of his case, and … established that the evidence against him was unreliable.”

The same conclusion, it should be noted, was also reached by the Task Force in Abdul Nasser’s case. As the Center for Constitutional Rights explained to me, although his habeas corpus petition had not been heard by the time of his release, he was “cleared to leave Guantánamo on the basis of a unanimous determination” by the Task Force, which suggests that the lurid allegations against him that can be found in publicly available documents — including claims that he “was identified by a senior al-Qaeda operative as reportedly being part of a terrorist group,” and that he was “commonly known as an explosives expert” — were conjured up either by the same prisoner who caused his son such problems, or by other patently unreliable witnesses whose lies have been regularly exposed by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., in their rulings on the prisoners’ habeas petitions.

With Abdul Nasser’s release, the long years of torture, lies and brutality are now behind him, but as CCR also noted, “father and son’s profound hope now is for the day when they may finally be reunited as a family.”

An Uzbek resettled in Latvia

Last Thursday, following the release of Abdul Aziz Naji and Abdul Nasser Khantumani, the Pentagon announced that two more prisoners had been released, in Latvia and Spain, bringing the prison’s population to 176. Neither was publicly identified, but in February this year RFE/RL reported that Latvia had “agreed to accept an Uzbek citizen currently held at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay.” The report added, “The name of the Uzbek citizen was not disclosed, although it was reported that he speaks fluent Russian, is single, has relatives in Uzbekistan, and is prepared to learn the Latvian language.” In addition, Latvian Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins told journalists at the time that the government “will provide the man with refugee status, a monthly allowance, and an apartment.” It was also reported that the Latvian security service would “monitor” the ex-prisoner.

Given that, at the start of the year, just two Uzbeks remained at Guantánamo, and that one of these men, Ali Sher Hamidullah, was reportedly the Uzbek rehoused in Switzerland on January 26, it seems likely that the man given a new home in Latvia is Kamalludin Kasimbekov, who was cleared for release in 2006 by a military review board under the Bush administration, but who continued to be held because of well-founded fears that he would be tortured if returned to his homeland.

24 years old at the time of his capture, Kasimbekov told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he and a friend had fled Uzbekistan after his friend accidentally killed a policeman while driving his car, and had ended up in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group aligned with the Taliban, where, he said, those in charge of the camp took away his military ID, which he needed to go home, and flew him and five or six others to Kabul, where he worked in an auto shop.

He went on to explain that in 2001 he requested to go home, and asked for money and his military ID, but that when he received no response he decided to run away, only to be captured while traveling from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in a minivan taxi, imprisoned by the IMU for six months and then released on September 16, 2001 “with agreement that I will help in a battle.” Sent to the front lines in Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, he explained that he was “helping with all kinds of household work for about a month or so,” but that, after the aerial bombardment of Kunduz by US forces, when there were “lots of dead bodies” and a surrender was negotiated between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, he refused to retreat with the IMU and instead went to Abdul Mumin, a Northern Alliance commander, and handed himself in with his gun. He added, “There were no bullets shot from my weapon.”

An Afghan resettled in Spain

For now, the remaining mystery regarding the prisoners released last week concerns the man released in Spain. In February this year, the Spanish government agreed to accept five men from Guantánamo. On the basis that none of them must have criminal record, the government pledged to give them a residence permit and the right to work, and also pledged that they would have freedom of movement within Spain, but would not be allowed to leave the country.

The first of these men, Walid Hijazi, a Palestinian, arrived in February, the second, Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni, arrived in May, and the third, who arrived last week, has, to date, only been identified as an Afghan. With no clues as to his identity, it is difficult to speculate as to why he was not released in Afghanistan, but as a website, The Americas Post, explained this week, confirming his arrival at the military base of Torrejón de Ardoz, the Spanish government’s arrangement with the US “has not been easy for the hosting country, because most of the former prisoners have deep psychological problems and their insertion into society is difficult,” and, perhaps as a result, “no more arrivals are expected at least until after the summer.”

Updating the story of Walid Hijazi, which I reported in May, the blog explained that he arrived with “serious psychological” problems as a result of his detention, “and lived [for] several months in a room [in] a small family hotel in a city in northern Spain. He was offered a transfer to a flat, but the NGO in charge [was] unable to reach an agreement with him. Finally, the city government moved him and brought him to live in a residence of the same NGO.” The blog added that Hijazi is having problems learning Spanish, a “fundamental issue that can truly integrate him in Spain and get a job.”

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

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

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