All five men were cleared for release from Guantánamo on two or three separate occasions — through Bush-era military review boards, through the deliberations of an interagency Task Force established by President Obama, and, in some cases, through successfully having their habeas corpus petitions granted by a US court. However, difficulties arose when it came to freeing them because they feared torture or other ill-treatment if returned to their home countries, and the US government (first under George W. Bush, and now under Barack Obama) recognized its obligations, under international treaties, not to repatriate them, but to find other countries prepared to take them instead.

The fact that Georgia — the former Soviet satellite in the Caucasus — is the new home of three of these men, and not the US state, demonstrates another obstacle to the men’s release. Had President Obama acted decisively last April, two Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake in December 2001) would have been freed in the US, and others would undoubtedly have followed. However, when the President bowed to pressure from Republican critics, and turned down a plan, put forward by White House Counsel Greg Craig, and backed by defense secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which involved bringing the two men to live in the US, the job of Obama’s Special Envoy, Daniel Fried, who was charged with finding new homes for dozens of cleared prisoners from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, was made considerably more difficult.

America’s allies had to overcome their obvious impulse — refusing to help unless the US also acknowledged its own mistakes by giving new homes to cleared prisoners — and it is a tribute to the governments of Switzerland and Georgia that they felt able to place humanitarian concerns above political pragmatism by accepting the men. Switzerland had already accepted an Uzbek ex-prisoner in January this year, and Georgia now joins Switzerland in a distinguished club that also includes Albania, Belgium, Bermuda, France, Hungary, Ireland, Palau, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain. These countries have all shown up the US (and other European countries, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark), who have turned their backs on the dozens of cleared prisoners who will languish in Guantánamo until new homes can be found for them.

The Uighur brothers released in Switzerland

The two men given new homes in the Swiss canton of Jura are brothers, Arkin Mahmud, 45, and Bahtiyar Mahnut, 34, Two of the 22 Uighurs originally held at Guantánamo (five of whom were released by George W. Bush in Albania in 2006), the men had been living in a small, rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains at the time of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or because they nurtured futile hopes of finding some way to rise up against the Chinese government. They were sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers when their temporary home was destroyed in a US bombing raid and they had crossed the border into Pakistan.

The US government understood almost immediately that they had been seized by mistake, but that did not prevent senior officials from allowing Chinese interrogators to visit them at Guantánamo, and, it seems, securing a guarantee in UN negotiations that China would not oppose the invasion of Iraq by designating a Uighur separatist group as a global terrorist organization.

Attempts to conveniently tie the Guantanamo Uighurs to this group came unstuck in June 2008, when a US court derided the government’s supposed evidence as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it was not until October 2008 that the government finally abandoned all claims that the men were “enemy combatants.” That month, their habeas corpus petition finally reached Judge Ricardo Urbina, in the District Court in Washington D.C., who ordered their release into the United States, pointing out that holding innocent men was unconstitutional.

The Bush administration appealed, and the appeal was approved in February 2009 by the notoriously right-wing Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who ruled (with the blessing, sadly, of President Obama’s Justice Department), that matters of immigration were to be decided by the Executive and not the courts, thereby gutting the men’s habeas victory of any practical meaning.

After Greg Craig’s honorable plan to rehouse two of the men in the US was scrapped, Daniel Fried was obliged to undertake numerous missions to persuade other countries to offer them new homes. Fried eventually persuaded Bermuda and the Pacific island of Palau to take ten of the men, but Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut in particular remained a problem. Palau had refused to offer a new home to Mahmud, who had developed mental health problems in Guantanamo, and, in solidarity, his brother, who had been offered a new home, turned down the offer, preferring to stay with his brother in Guantánamo instead.

An appeal to the government by the Washington Post, asking that the men be allowed into the US, was subsequently ignored, but it seemed that Obama was on a collision course with the Supreme Court, which accepted the men’s case last October, until Switzerland obligingly offered the men a new home in January this year.

As Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut begin their new lives in Switzerland, five Uighurs remain in Guantánamo, but their fate is unknown. The Supreme Court refused to proceed with their case at the start of this month (although they did vacate the terrible Court of Appeals ruling), essentially because the five remaining men had also been offered new homes in Palau, but had turned them down, and it remains to be seen if Palau will renew its offer, if another country will rescue them from their seemingly endless ordeal, or if the lower courts will, once more, attempt to order their release into the United States.

A Libyan refugee released in Georgia

Announcing the release of the other three men from Guantánamo, the Justice Department refused to reveal their identities, but Candace Gorman, the indefatigable attorney representing Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan, revealed that one of the three is her client, and it appears that the second man is also Libyan, and that the third is from an unidentified country in the Middle East (perhaps Libya, again, or Syria or Tunisia).

The release of Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi brings to an end another of Guantánamo’s many particularly bleak stories. A refugee from Libya, al-Ghizzawi had settled in Afghanistan in the 1990s, where he married an Afghan woman and had a child. Together, he and his wife ran a small bakery in Jalalabad, but after the US-led invasion, hearing that Arabs were being targeted, he decided to seek refuge with his in-laws in his wife’s home village. There, however, he was seized by bounty hunters and sold to US forces.

In Guantánamo, al-Ghizzawi suffered horribly. Afflicted with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he nevertheless received little or no treatment, in common with the majority of those with medical problems, whose treatment was dependent on cooperation with their interrogators. In practical terms, what this meant for innocent men like al-Ghizzawi was that they would not be treated unless they provided false confessions to their interrogators, which could be used to justify their own detention, or the detention of others identified in these false confessions.

Al-Ghizzawi’s case is also notorious in terms of the warped review processes masquerading as justice at Guantánamo, as was revealed in 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who had been involved in compiling the information used as evidence in the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo in 2004-05. In an affidavit filed in a case submitted to the Supreme Court, Lt. Col. Abraham explained how the tribunal system, designed to review the prisoners’ cases to ascertain whether they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely, was a sham, and that the information used consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status.”

Lt. Col. Abraham also explained how he had taken part in one of the tribunals, and, with his fellow officers, had concluded that the government had failed to establish that the prisoner before them had any connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda or the Taliban for the very reasons described above. That prisoner was Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, and, as Lt. Col. Abraham added, the authorities refused to accept the tribunal’s decision, dismissing all three officers, and conducting a second tribunal that reached the conclusion the government wanted; namely, that al-Ghizzawi was an “enemy combatant,” and that he could continue to be held indefinitely. This was not the only “do-over” tribunal, but the fact that it happened at all is a disgrace, and the fact that al-Ghizzawi continued to be held for another six years after Lt. Col. Abraham exposed the shortcomings in the government’s so-called evidence is a disturbingly clear example of the complete disregard for any notions of justice or decency in the running of Guantánamo.

It was not until June last year that al-Ghizzawi was finally cleared for release by the interagency Task Force established by President Obama to review all the Guantánamo cases, and even then the Justice Department behaved appallingly, neglecting to inform Candace Gorman of the decision and then gagging her when she tried to inform al-Ghizzawi’s family, and his wife, who, in despair after years of waiting, had decided to seek a divorce.

Unprincipled obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo

I have no idea if the identities of the other two men released in Georgia will be made available, but it is clear that they too have been deprived of their freedom for up to eight years not as a result of any coherent policy, but as a direct result of the Bush administration’s arrogance and incompetence in establishing Guantánamo as a prison outside the law filled largely with men who were seized and sold to US forces by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and who had no connection whatsoever to al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other group involved in international terrorism.

With 183 prisoners still at Guantánamo, and 101 of these cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, in some cases, by the US courts, the shrill rhetoric of those who still insist that the prison is full of terrorists should have been silenced, but as the cynical fearmongering of recent months has shown all too clearly, when it comes to Guantánamo, Republican lawmakers are more than happy to stir up unsubstantiated hysteria about the prison, playing the fear card as the mid-term elections approach, and encouraging Democrats to do the same.

I have my doubts that the other 82 men qualify as terrorists, but presume that the 35 proposed for trials (either in federal courts or in Military Commissions) will one day have their cases considered by a judge and jury, and that the other 47 men, who the Task Force recommended be held indefinitely without charge or trial, will be able to challenge this deeply distressing advice in a US court, before judges reviewing their habeas corpus petitions. As with 34 of the 46 cases so far decided, the judges will, no doubt, conclude that, in many of these cases, the government’s assertions that they are too dangerous to release, despite a lack of usable evidence, will be revealed as distortions based on the kind of false confessions that Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi resisted making in exchange for medical treatment.

For now, however, while readers should bear in mind that only between 5 and 10 percent of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo will, in the end, be judged to have had any connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, the release of these five prisoners to Switzerland and Georgia continues to demonstrate that innocent men are still held at Guantánamo, and that the fearmongering in the US is both unjustifiable and potentially damaging to these men’s prospects of being rehoused elsewhere.

Given these obstacles — and lawmakers’ refusal to accept any cleared prisoners into the US — Daniel Fried is to be congratulated for successfully concluding the complex negotiations leading to the release of these men, and, sometimes single-handedly, it seems, working towards the closure of Guantánamo, which remains a stain on America’s reputation, and a dark symbol of the Bush administration policies that Obama has found himself unwilling, or unable to thoroughly repudiate.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout. Digg the original here.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 52 prisoners released from February 2009 to February 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, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain.

Al-Ghizzawi is clearly an innocent man. Back in 2004, when the Bush administration convened military review boards — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — to review the prisoners’ cases, his panel of three military officers concluded that there was insufficient evidence to declare him an “enemy combatant,” and that he should therefore be released.

We know this because one of the members of this particular tribunal, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who also compiled the information used in the tribunals, and who memorably declared in 2007 that they were severely flawed, relying on intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” wrote about serving on al-Ghizzawi’s tribunal, explaining:

On one occasion, I was assigned to a CSRT panel with two other officers, an Air Force Colonel and an Air Force Major, the latter understood by me to be a judge advocate. We reviewed the evidence presented to us regarding the recommended status of [Mr. al-Ghizzawi]. All of us found the information presented to lack substance.

He added:

On the basis of the paucity and weakness of the information provided both during and after the CSRT hearing, we determined that there was no factual basis for concluding that the individual should be classified as an enemy combatant.

Lt. Col. Abraham also explained — as was backed up in October 2007 by a second whistleblower, an Army Major who had taken part in 49 tribunals — that unfavorable decisions were overruled by those in charge, who then convened a second tribunal to produce the desired result, and added that this is what had happened in the case of Mr. al-Ghizzawi. Lt. Col. Abraham and his fellow tribunal members were prohibited from taking part in any more tribunals, and a second, secret tribunal was held in Washington D.C., at which it was duly decided that Mr. al-Ghizzawi was an “enemy combatant” after all.

In the five years since this shocking demonstration of rigged justice, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi has languished in Guantánamo, plagued with health problems, including, at one point, an apparently mistaken belief that he had been infected with AIDS, while his attorney, H. Candace Gorman, has waged a relentless campaign to try to secure justice for him, which she has chronicled on her website, The Guantánamo Blog, as well as for the Huffington Post and In These Times.

Last Tuesday, November 17, Candace finally had some good news about her client that she could announce to the world: he had finally been cleared for release, and she was at liberty to tell us, five months after first hearing about it, which she did in a blog post entitled, “The Muzzle Is Off.” This is reproduced below, as, for insane reasons described afterwards, the Justice Department has just ordered her to remove it from her blog (she has done so, but a cached copy is retained by Google here — the ironic italics in reference to the justice department are Candace’s):

The Muzzle Is Off
By Candace Gorman

In June of this year I received a call from a foreign reporter who asked if I could give her a profile of my client Al-Ghizzawi as he was on a list of men whom the US was looking for a new home and her country was considering accepting him. This was the first I had learned that Al-Ghizzawi had been “cleared” by the Obama review team for release. I gave her information about my client and for all I know a story was published about the plight of Al-Ghizzawi at Guantánamo, his status as “cleared” and why he needed a country in Europe to take him.

A few days later an attorney from the justice department called to tell me that Al-Ghizzawi was cleared for release and we laughed about the fact that I already knew the information. However the laughing stopped when the attorney told me that the justice department had designated the information as “protected” and I could not tell anyone except my client and those people who had signed on to the protective order (a court document that outlines the procedures for the Guantánamo cases) about his status as “cleared for release.” I told the attorney that he could not declare something “protected” that was already in the public domain. To make a long story short we were not in agreement and the attorney filed an emergency motion with the judge to muzzle me. Despite the fact that the information was in the public domain I was muzzled by the good judge who apparently doesn’t believe that the Constitution applies to me. I couldn’t even tell Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s brother what I thought was good news (I didn’t know then that this was just another stall tactic by the justice department).

Not only was I muzzled but Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s case was put on hold. The habeas hearing that we had been fighting to obtain literally for years was stayed by the judge despite the fact that the US Supreme Court held in June of 2008 that the men were entitled to swift hearings … So much for the Supreme Court! The president asked the judges to stop the hearings for those men who were “cleared” for release and the judges have fallen into lockstep, shamefully abandoning their duties as judges.

A few months later when I visited Al-Ghizzawi (at the end of August) he had just received word from his wife that she could no longer wait for his release and she asked him if she would sign papers for a divorce. Bad news is an everyday occurrence for Al-Ghizzawi and he was holding up well despite this latest blow.

When I returned from the base I asked the justice department to allow me to contact Al-Ghizzawi’s wife and tell her that he had been cleared for release. I hoped that if she knew he was to be released she would hang in there and not go through with the divorce. I was told they would get back to me. When they didn’t I asked again but they still would not give me the OK. In Court papers I pleaded with the judge to let me tell Al-Ghizzawi’s brother and wife, telling the judge about the wife’s request for a divorce, but the judge, the same judge who has apparently decided to ignore the Supreme Court’s directive for quick habeas hearings, ignored this plea as well.

I seriously thought about disobeying the order and trying to get word to Al-Ghizzawi’s wife and then taking whatever lumps were thrown my way … however, despite the fact that the judicial system has failed Al-Ghizzawi and most of the men at Guantánamo I could not bring myself to blatantly disobey a court order. For five months I have kept this information confidential despite the injustice to both my client, Mr. Al-Ghizzawi, and to what was our rule of law … until yesterday, when the muzzle was lifted.

*****

Four days later, and Candace has now reported that “The Muzzle Is Back On,” explaining:

On Tuesday I reported that the Government finally allowed me to discuss matters that had previously been “protected” in regards to my client Al-Ghizzawi. In fact the Government unclassified and allowed for public release a Petition for Original Habeas Corpus that I filed in the US Supreme Court. I released that Petition to the public in accordance with the Government’s designation of “unclassified.” On Friday the Department of Justice (DOJ) told me that it had made a mistake and that it had apparently violated the Protective Order (an Order that sets out the rules for the DOJ and Habeas counsel in regards to the Guantánamo cases) entered in the case when it “unclassified” and allowed for public release information in the Petition that it wanted to “protect” and that therefore I must remove my post of November 17 because of the DOJ’s mistake. I explained to the DOJ attorneys that the Petition and my Post of November 17 were widely distributed and are available at various sites on the web … they do not seem to care about that … they only care that I not report about what they are now trying to declare “protected information” … 5 days after they unclassified the material and made it available for public release.

This is of course outrageous conduct by the DOJ … in trying to declare something as “protected” after being clearly designated and distributed to the public, but what else is new? For those of you who either remember my November 17 post or have it available on your website, I originally learned of the so-called “protected” information from a public source and the judge in Al-Ghizzawi’s case still ruled that I could not discuss it. […]

This is not the end of this story. Under the Protective Order the Government must actually get the judge’s permission to retroactively keep me (and only me) from publishing and discussing the information that the Government now seeks to “protect.” The DOJ will have to file a document with the Court explaining why this now very public information should be “protected.” Ultimately it will be the judge’s decision. If you do not see my post back up that will mean that the judge agreed with the Government, that I alone cannot talk about those things that you are privy to discuss.

So there you have it. As I am not Candace, and am not prohibited from reproducing her words, I thought that this whole depressing saga was worth relating in full. I’d also like to include Candace’s parting words from the post that has been removed at the insistence of the Justice Department, as they shine a light on the Byzantine workings of the Guantánamo litigation. As Candace explained:

[I]f you hear from a habeas attorney that his or her case has been stayed you will know about the injustice that their client is continuing to suffer, you will know that the client has been cleared for release, that the attorney cannot discuss that fact and that the judge in that case has abandoned his or her duty to be a judge. You will also know that being cleared for release is just as meaningless as everything else that has been happening to these unfortunate men … because being cleared for release means nothing.

Or, as my good friend The Talking Dog explained just a few days ago:

For advocates of “hope and change” who foolishly think that with our young and handsome new President everything is somehow “better” now … I just want you to know that while the nomenclature has changed (Al-Ghizzawi is no longer an “enemy combatant” or “unlawful enemy combatant” … he is simply a poor schmuck we’re holding) … and he is “cleared for release” … the same great executive overreach with its very real and very tragic personal consequences just goes on … and on … and on …

Americans should look at Al-Ghizzawi’s story (he was simply a baker in Afghanistan, handed in to American forces for bounty money, and we just can’t bring ourselves to let him go, even as he suffers egregious medical problems) and ask ourselves, “What kind of people are we?” The fact that most of us are probably not capable of that level of introspection probably best answers the question, I’m afraid.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The Public Record.

The irony — that all the prisoners have been enduring a form of “preventive detention” for over seven years — is apparently lost on the government, which has also maintained a resolute silence in response to a handful of habeas corpus cases (in which the prisoners are seeking to have their cases dismissed by the courts, as mandated by the Supreme Court last June) that have resulted in judges pouring scorn on the government’s supposed evidence.

In an article last week, “Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses,” I analyzed a devastating ruling by District Court Judge Gladys Kessler in the habeas corpus hearing of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. A Yemeni, Ali Ahmed has always maintained that he was a student, staying in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and that, when he was seized in a raid on the house, on March 28, 2002, he had no knowledge that the house was, apparently, tangentially connected to the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Furthermore, in response to the government’s other allegations, he has also “denie[d] ever going to Afghanistan, training at an al-Qaeda camp, fighting against anyone, or being a member of a terrorist group.”

Authorizing Ali Ahmed’s habeas claim, Judge Kessler demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a “mosaic” of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

This follow-up article looks in depth at Ali Ahmed’s story, and those of the 15 men seized with him in the “Issa” guest house in Faisalabad, with the aim of encouraging the Justice Department to abandon its cases against these other men, either as part of its secretive Executive review of the prisoners in Guantánamo (with its uncomfortable echoes of the Bush administration’s love of Executive decisions made without consulting Congress or the judiciary) or by refusing to contest their habeas cases in the District Courts.

I propose this course of action because the cases against these other men demonstrate a similar reliance on dubious allegations, and a similar “mosaic” of inferences that will not stand up to outside scrutiny, as was noted by Judge Kessler in her ruling, when she wrote, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed’s testimony at Guantánamo

Ali Ahmed, who was just 17 years old at the time of his capture (although the Pentagon claims that he was 18), repeatedly explained at Guantánamo that he was seized and held by mistake. His statements were made in his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, convened to assess whether, on capture, he had been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant” who could be held without charge or trial, and in the subsequent annual Administrative Review Boards, convened to assess whether he still posed a threat to the US or its allies.

As I have explained at length in my book The Guantánamo Files, and in numerous articles over the last two years, these hearings were monstrously unjust, as they relied on classified evidence that was not disclosed to the prisoners, and also prevented them from having legal representation. In addition, as Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, has explained, based on his involvement in the tribunals in 2004 and 2005, the body responsible for compiling the information to be used as evidence had little or no access to the databases of the relevant intelligence agencies, and, as a result, relied largely on “generic” information that did not specifically relate to the prisoners, and, in most cases, on “information obtained during interrogations of other detainees,” which, as Judge Kessler’s recent ruling confirms, were often made by prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues.

Nevertheless, the transcripts of these hearings are often the only means by which we know anything about the prisoners at Guantánamo, and in his most recent publicly available review (made available by the Pentagon four months ago, and dating from 2007), Ali Ahmed made it clear that, after five years in Guantánamo, he was still struggling to understand why he was being held, as the following exchange makes clear:

Presiding Officer: Can you tell us why you were arrested?
Detainee: I learned about why after I was arrested. They told me that this house is for the al-Qaeda and the Taliban … They told us after we were arrested in the house and in the interrogations.
Presiding Officer: Do you have any idea why they would think that?
Detainee: I do not know.

After refuting the allegations against him, it was unsurprising that, when Ali Ahmed was given the opportunity to make a statement, he delivered the following plea:

Detainee: What is the main accusation against me that kept me here for five years? What is the main accusation? Is it my travel to Pakistan? Is that an accusation? True, I went during a very difficult situation, but is that an accusation that would keep me here for five years?

The following exchange then took place:

Presiding Officer: The purpose of this board is for an administrative review. To determine whether you should be released, transferred, or continue to be detained. Your status as an enemy combatant has already been determined.
Detainee: I don’t even know why they made that decision when I don’t have a problem with Americans. I’ve never fought Americans, I’ve never fought anybody. I’ve never ever participated in any wars, any, anything else. Why would I be an enemy combatant?
Presiding Officer: We understand and take your statements on board and will consider those in our decision.
Detainee: I know an enemy combatant is someone who participates in the war and helps the war, or someone who is a threat and dangerous to the United States, but I was 17 years old, I’ve never done anything. [W]hat makes me dangerous to the United States at that time?

Although the review board had no response to Ahmed’s questions, the officers involved refused to approve his release from Guantánamo, and it has taken another two years, and the Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to the prisoners last June, for him to be able to test the government’s allegations against him in a court of law, and to secure the resounding legal victory that was delivered by Judge Kessler last week.

Even so, it should be noted that judges do not actually have the power to order the government to release prisoners, even if, as in Ali Ahmed’s case, they have established, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that he should never have been detained in the first place. This is because of a truly disturbing appeals court ruling in the case of 17 Uighurs at Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), which took place in February, after the government dropped its claims that they were “enemy combatants,” and a District Court judge ordered their release into the United States last October. As lawyer Jana Ramsay explained, two judges — although ostensibly dealing with the right of the Uighurs to be admitted into the United States — stated that “the due process clause does not apply to detainees at Guantánamo,” because it is “not sovereign territory of the United States,” and that “the right to be released” was not “a necessary corollary to unlawful detention or compensation for such detention.”

The stories of the other prisoners seized with Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed

Moving beyond Ali Ahmed’s story, an analysis of the stories of the 15 other men seized in the raid on the “Issa” guest house — mostly Yemenis, and mostly aged between 18 and 24 — reveals that the majority of them have also maintained, throughout their long imprisonment, that they never set foot in Afghanistan, never trained or fought with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and had no connection whatsoever with terrorism. This analysis also reveals that the government’s allegations against them rely, for the most part, on similar witnesses and a similar “mosaic” of intelligence as those dismissed so comprehensively by Judge Kessler in Ali Ahmed’s case.

Although one of the 15, Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami, was one of three prisoners who died in Guantánamo in June 2006, apparently by committing suicide, nine of the surviving 14 prisoners have maintained that they were students at Salafia University, run by the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, two have stated that they traveled to receive medical treatment, and another, Fahmi Ahmed, said that he went to Pakistan to buy fabrics, taking money that he had borrowed from his mother, but explained that he actually spent most of his time “like a wild man,” drinking and smoking hashish. Another young man, Mohammed Hassen, was not even living at the house, and was caught up in the raid after visiting for dinner and staying the night, and two others — a Russian and a Yemeni — arrived at the house just two weeks before the raid.

In hearings at Guantánamo, several of the men have pointed out that they were told shortly after their capture that they had been seized by mistake. Mohammed Tahir, one of the Yemeni students, explained,

The army translator and the interrogator from the Pakistani intelligence said, “yes, all of what this man said … about his story in Pakistan is correct, and therefore that is why we are going to give him back his passport that we took” … I was really surprised that the American intelligence refused all of these proofs and they said no. “We still need him,” they said, and then they took me.

Another Yemeni student, Emad Hassan, who stated that he was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the Koran when he was seized, said that, while in Pakistani custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.”

Fayad Ahmed, also a Yemeni student, told his tribunal four years ago that he had recently been told in Guantánamo that he would be released. “The interrogator and the investigator about a month ago that met with me told [me] that there was nothing against me and that I am an innocent man and should [be] released,” he said.

Of the two prisoners who said that they had traveled to Pakistan to receive medical treatment, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi, said that he went to receive treatment for a back problem, and Mohammed Salam, a Yemeni, said that he went for treatment on his nose. After explaining that a “generous person” paid for his trip, the following exchange took place, which demonstrated a cultural gap between the US military and Muslims from the Gulf:

Tribunal Member: I don’t know your culture very well, but … in our culture people just don’t step up and say, “I’ll pay for the trip for you.”
Detainee: In our culture, in Islam, there is such a thing … Indeed, it is an obligation for any Muslim who is rich to pay for someone who is poor.

Despite the protestations of these prisoners, the authorities at Guantánamo have persistently claimed that Jamaat-al-Tablighi was “used to mask travel and activities of terrorists” — even though this allegation has never been regarded as legitimate outside Guantánamo — but what should be troubling the Justice Department right now, after Judge Kessler’s ruling, is the extent to which the cases against these other 15 men rely, as with Ali Ahmed, not on confessions made by the prisoners themselves, but on statements made by other prisoners which appear to be just as dubious as those derided by Judge Kessler.

The weakness of the supposed evidence

To give just a few examples, the transcripts of the most recently publicly available ARBs (from 2007) include the sweeping statement that “Students at Salafia University are encouraged to fight in the Jihad against the West,” and, to cite just one case, Emad Hassan, who denied ever being in Afghanistan or attending a training camp, “was identified as an al-Qaeda recruiter and travel facilitator who helps ‘fund other individuals’ travel’ to Afghanistan,” as “a member of al-Qaeda who swore bayat [an oath of loyalty] to Osama bin Laden,” and as “one of 50 men” at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, who were identified as bin Laden’s bodyguards.

In the case of Mohammed Hassen, who was only visiting the house when he was seized (and who is one of only two of the “Issa” guest house prisoners to be cleared for release after a military review), the allegations in the previous round of ARBs consisted of precisely three allegations: that “An individual who was in Afghanistan identified [him] as a fighter who traveled between Kandahar and Khost, Afghanistan,” that “A student who trained at al-Farouq identified [him] as a Yemeni who trained at al-Farouq,” and that “A senior al-Qaeda operative noted that a photo of the detainee may be a Yemeni and that he may have seen him at one point ‘inside,’ meaning Afghanistan.”

In the case of Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee (also cleared for release after an ARB, but, like Hassen, still held), the only allegations were that “A senior al-Qaeda operative stated that [he] attended the Khaldan camp in approximately 1997,” and that he “was captured with a Casio F-91W watch,” allegedly “used in bombings that have been linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic groups with improvised explosive devices” (and this, believe it or not, is an allegation that has been leveled at dozens of prisoners over the years).

In some of the other cases, no allegations whatsoever have been made publicly available beyond the “guilt by association” of staying in the guest house, and although in a handful of cases the government claims to have secured confessions that the men “admitted to fighting with enemy forces,” doubts about the circumstances in which these confessions were produced indicate that, under scrutiny in a court, even these allegations may be less clear-cut than they appear. As a result, I hope to have demonstrated, as I stated at the start of this article, that the Justice Department would be well advised to abandon its cases against these other men before it suffers similar defeats in future habeas hearings.

The bigger picture regarding false allegations

Moreover, the Justice Department also needs to take a long, hard look at the information it is relying on as evidence in numerous other cases. With one exception, the identities of the four unreliable witnesses in Ali Ahmed’s case were redacted by the government, but enough evidence is publicly available, from the statements of released prisoners, to demonstrate that the coercive techniques that were widely used at Guantánamo between 2002 and 2004 (and derived from the US military’s SERE program) caused numerous prisoners to make false confessions in order to bring an end to their suffering.

In addition, further publicly available information also demonstrates that certain witnesses at Guantánamo — whether through torture-induced fear, in one case, or bribery, in others — made false allegations against dozens of their fellow prisoners, which, crucially, are still used by the government as part of its supposed evidence.

The first example to surface in public — who appears to be one of the men whose testimony was dismissed by Judge Kessler, and by another judge in the case of another prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani — was described by Corine Hegland in February 2006, in an article for the National Journal. Hegland described how, in the tribunal of a Yemeni prisoner, Farouq Ali Ahmed, his personal representative (an officer assigned in place of a lawyer) had discovered, by investigating his case files, that a key allegation against him had been made by a prisoner described in an FBI memo as a notorious liar. In another case, of a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, the personal representative discovered that this same prisoner had made false allegations against 60 of his fellow inmates, placing each of them in Afghanistan before they even arrived in the country.

The prisoner who made all these false allegations is Yasim Basardah, who was cleared for release after a habeas review six weeks ago. Profiled in the Washington Post in February, a disturbing picture emerged of a man who, “with other informers,” lives in a group of cells away from the other prisoners. As the Post described it, “he has received a CD player, chewing tobacco, coffee, library books and other perks, according to court documents,” including a video game console, even though the man described by some officials at Guantánamo as their “star witness” has, in the opinion of other officials, been the subject of “reservations about [his] credibility” since 2004.

As the Post’s article made clear, Basardah is not the only liar whose false confessions have infected the government’s “evidence.” An Iraqi, repatriated in January, was also well-known in Guantánamo, as is Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a Syrian “rescued” by US forces from a Taliban jail. Tortured by al-Qaeda operatives, because they thought he was a spy, al-Ginco suffers from severe mental health problems (and may also be one of the witnesses dismissed by Judge Kessler), but although he has renounced some of his false confessions, others remain, locked forever in the case files of the prisoners, with no way of challenging them except in a court.

Most importantly, however, false allegations are not the exclusive preserve of a handful of industrious informants. As I mentioned above, almost any prisoner could be persuaded to make up false stories when they could no longer bear the grueling interrogations, or the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to wear them down, and, as the few examples of the Faisalabad guest house prisoners cited above also indicate, the case files are also littered with allegations made by “senior al-Qaeda operatives” — individuals like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other “high-value detainees” who were held (and tortured) for years in secret CIA prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, and others, like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who died in a Libyan prison last week, who were held in a network of secret prisons and proxy prisons around the world.

In all these prisons — and in Guantánamo, and in the prisons in Afghanistan — prisoners were shown what Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a senior interrogator in Afghanistan, referred to in his book The Interrogators as the “family album,” which featured photos of other prisoners. And from all these places, therefore, it is difficult to see how much of the “evidence” against the prisoners can be anything other than a tissue of lies, extracted using the same techniques of torture, coercion, bribery, and the exploitation of mental illness that Judge Kessler identified in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch and ZNet. Also cross-posted on Common Dreams.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009). Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009).

I am aware, of course, that the Washington Post compiled a ground-breaking list of prisoners in the four years before the Pentagon was forced to release the names and nationalities of the prisoners, when information was hard to come by, and I am also aware that, last December, the New York Times compiled an online database, The Guantánamo Docket, which features entries for every prisoner held at Guantánamo, including (where available) transcripts of the tribunals and review boards used to ascertain, to the Bush administration’s satisfaction, whether the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” and whether they could be approved for release or transfer.

This was clearly a major undertaking, but I maintain that, without further detailed analysis, it fails to address the bigger picture, which involves establishing a context in which to test the validity of the government’s assertions.

We have, in recent years, accumulated a wealth of evidence establishing why the Bush administration’s unadorned assertions need careful scrutiny. Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the tribunals, has comprehensively demolished the credibility of the material used as evidence to justify holding the majority of the prisoners, as has an Air Force Major who also served on the tribunals. In addition, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commission trial system conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington (the prime architects of the “War on Terror”), has done a similar job on the legitimacy of the Commissions, endorsing the views expressed over the years by numerous military defense lawyers, who, in some cases, have sacrificed their careers to oppose what they regarded as an unprecedented travesty of justice.

Lawyers for the prisoners have also made a significant contribution, revealing the prisoners’ shocking stories to the world after their accounts were, mysteriously, cleared by the Pentagon’s censors, and, in the last eight months, since the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (reiterating an earlier ruling that was, they decided, overridden unconstitutionally by the Executive and Congress), judges have also played a significant role.

Since last June, judges in the Appeals Court and the District Court in Washington D.C. have thrown out the government’s cases against 17 Uighur prisoners (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), five Bosnians of Algerian origin, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident and Chadian national. El-Gharani was just 14 years old when he was seized in a random raid on a mosque in Pakistan, sold to US forces, and then, like the men mentioned above, subjected not only to vile treatment, but also to allegations based on groundless or inadequate intelligence, or on confessions made by other prisoners whose credibility has been challenged by military and intelligence personnel. The allegations against the prisoners are littered with these kinds of dubious claims, and it is exactly for this reason that the available documents need to be examined with a critical eye.

Researchers who have been involved in this kind of detailed analysis include staff and students at the Seton Hall Law School, who have produced several reports based on the Pentagon’s own documents, beginning with a pioneering report in 2006 (PDF), which established that, according to the government’s own evidence against 517 of the prisoners, 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

In a similar vein, my research for The Guantánamo Files, and much of my subsequent reporting, was based on a comprehensive analysis of the Pentagon’s prisoner lists, the allegations against the prisoners, and the transcripts of the hearings, which allowed me to establish an instructive chronology, explaining who was captured where and when: whether in Afghanistan, crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, or in Pakistan, for example, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan. This then allowed me not only to present the prisoners’ stories in their own words, giving voices to the voiceless, but also to establish a necessary context for establishing which side was telling the truth: either the prisoners themselves, or the administration, which, as mentioned above, often mustered an array of transparently coerced or superficial evidence to justify its activities.

In addition, crucial research confirmed that many, if not the majority of the prisoners handed over by US allies were bought for bounty payments averaging $5000 a head, which encouraged a vast and unprincipled trade in Arabs who could be passed off as “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects,” and also established that, in Afghanistan, before the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, the administration had, against the wishes of the military, refused to hold “competent tribunals” — also known as battlefield tribunals — under the Geneva Conventions relating to prisoners of war. Held close to the time and place of capture, and allowing battlefield prisoners the opportunity to call witnesses, these had, previously, been championed by the US military as a just and effective way of separating soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war, and in the first Gulf War, for example, the military held around 1200 battlefield tribunals, and decided, in three-quarters of the cases, that it had detained the wrong men.

My research was not an exact science, of course, but I remain convinced that it was — and is — the only manner in which to make sense of the bigger picture, and I remain disturbed by the fact that I was able to undertake this as a solitary independent journalist, and that no major media outlet devoted the required resources to investigating thoroughly the material that was made publicly available. As we have learned over the years — and are still, in many senses, establishing under a new President — the failure to thoroughly investigate the Bush administration’s supposed evidence against the prisoners in Guantánamo effectively allowed its hollow claims that they were “the worst of the worst” to go unchallenged.

Those interested in the truth should recall, as Jane Mayer explained in her book The Dark Side, that, in the summer of 2002, when John Bellinger, then the National Security Council’s top lawyer, was informed by a senior CIA analyst and by Guantánamo’s commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, that at least half the prisoners were there by mistake, his attempts to inform the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and to seek a review of the prisoners’ cases were thwarted when a scheduled meeting was hijacked by David Addington, who declared, imperiously, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”

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

A version of this article was published on the Huffington Post and ZNet.

The most thoroughly discredited department in the Bush administration, the Justice Department is clearly in line for a major shake-up, as the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, explained in his acceptance speech on February 3, when he proclaimed his commitment to “remake the Department of Justice into what it was and what it must always be,” and explained, “This may be a break from the immediate past but it is consistent with the long history of the Department of Justice. I call on every employee of this Department — from this moment on — to return to the practices that are the foundation of this entity. It is time once again to base our actions on policies that are rooted in fairness and in a desire to ensure a more just America.”

Propaganda regarding the Guantánamo evidence

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, the Guantánamo review, led by Holder and the Justice Department, has now begun. “The review team is in the process of identifying all the information,” a senior official in the Obama administration said. As the article explained, the process would “not be simple,” as information on the prisoners is “scattered in multiple locations,” and the administration official admitted that “there is not, and may never be, a single file for each detainee.”

The Los Angeles Times article was clearly following up on an article published by the Washington Post on January 25, “Guantánamo Files in Disarray,” which first suggested that, when it came to reviewing the cases of the Guantánamo prisoners, “incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.”

According to the Post’s article, “a senior administration official” stated that information on individual prisoners was “scattered throughout the executive branch.” The article’s authors, Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn, also spoke to several former Bush administration officials, who agreed with this analysis, explaining that the files were “incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts” regarding each prisoner,” pointing out that “the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information,” and adding that “the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.” As a result, the journalists speculated that the review board charged with reviewing the cases “will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.”

Although the former Bush administration officials were correct to highlight major problems with the CIA’s reluctance to share information, and the administration’s general lack of interest in prosecutions — as opposed to the “arbitrary detention” identified by Barack Obama, with its focus on endless isolation and interrogation — it was not strictly accurate to describe the “disarray” as something for which the incoming administration was unprepared. The very word “disarray” had been used by Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor in the Military Commissions, who resigned last September, to describe the state of the prosecutors’ department in the Office of Military Commissions. In a detailed and highly critical declaration a month ago in the habeas corpus review of the Afghan prisoner Mohamed Jawad, Lt. Col Vandeveld not only condemned the entire system for its in-built bias in favor of prosecutions (which involved suppressing evidence vital to the defense), but also explained how

the evidence, such as it was, remained scattered throughout an incomprehensible labyrinth of databases … or strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks vacated by prosecutors who had departed the Commissions for other assignments. I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty.

The damning evidence of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham

Moreover, Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s opinions echo those of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, who worked in 2004-05 on the tribunals at Guantánamo — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — which were responsible for compiling the material that was used to establish that the prisoners were “enemy combatants.”

Lt. Col. Abraham’s experiences demonstrated two uncomfortable truths: firstly, he explained that, because the body responsible for compiling the material — the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) — was not empowered to demand information from the intelligence agencies, “Most of the information collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees” (and was often produced in circumstances that were not conducive to voluntary confessions). He also pointed out that other material consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.”

This explanation alone was, of course, insufficient to establish that the whole of the evidence was worthless, as it did not necessarily include classified evidence that was also used to determine the prisoners’ status, but Lt. Col. Abraham was just as scathing about the quality of the classified evidence, explaining in July 2007 that there was, essentially, no difference between either types of evidence. “The classified evidence,” he told the New York Times, “was stripped down, watered down, removed of context, incomplete, and missing essential information.” He also reiterated his complaints about evidence obtained from other prisoners, stating, “Many detainees implicated other detainees, and there was often no way to test whether they had provided false information to win favor with interrogators.”

In addition, Lt. Col. Abraham had direct experience of the classified evidence, when he served on one of the tribunals — that of a Libyan, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, who had settled in Afghanistan, where he ran a shop and had a wife and child, but who was captured by bounty hunters and sold to US forces.

After reviewing all the evidence, Lt. Abraham and his colleagues “found the information presented to lack substance,” noting that supposedly specific factual statements “lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” that statements made by alleged witnesses “lacked detail,” and that generalized statements were presented “in indirect and passive forms without stating the source of the information or providing a basis for establishing the reliability or the credibility of the source.”

However, although they concluded that there was “no factual basis” for holding al-Ghizzawi as an “enemy combatant,” the Defense Department attempted to bully them into changing their mind, and, when they refused, prevented them for taking part in any more tribunals, and duly held another tribunal — in secret — which reversed their opinion and concluded that al-Ghizzawi was indeed an “enemy combatant.”

Al-Ghizzawi remains in Guantánamo to this day, and when I interviewed Lt. Col. Abraham recently, and asked him to talk about the quality of the evidence against him, he gave me an analogy which captured perfectly the problems with a system in which rumor, innuendo and false confessions masquerade as evidence. Speaking of an allegation that al-Ghizzawi was involved with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization opposed to the dictatorship of Colonel Gaddafi, Lt. Col. Abraham explained, “There was absolutely nothing in the information to suggest that he had in any way been closely associated with, or had acted in any way that facilitated or contributed to terrorist activities. Nor was there any information that was linked to him directly, or that linked him to al-Qaeda, to the Taliban, or to anything else.” When I pressed him further, to confirm that there was no hint of a connection, he said, “Let me give you an extraordinary connection, the very nature of which I think is irrefutable. I was in Paris in 1975. So was Ayatollah Khomeini. Do I need to go any further?”

Dismissing the propaganda

The problem, therefore, is not so much that “the complexity and dangers of the issue” of reviewing the prisoners’ cases have emerged — as the Post described the opinion of several “former officials” — but rather, as the Conservative judge and George W. Bush appointee Richard Leon discovered in the habeas corpus reviews of five Bosnian Algerians (last November) and Chadian national Mohammed El-Gharani (last month), in many cases “the complexity and dangers” are nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors, and the evidence itself cannot be substantiated.

With this in mind, it was, frankly, negligent of the Washington Post to cite the opinion of a “former senior official,” who accused the Obama administration of “backpedaling and trying to buy time,” and who claimed, “All but about 60 who have been approved for release are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people.”

The problem with this official’s statement is that it is demonstrably false. Of the 182 other prisoners tarred as terrorists by the official, it has long been established that only between 35 and 50 are regarded by intelligence officials as connected in any meaningful way with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

A startling example of a prisoner who does not correspond to the opinion of the “former senior official” was revealed just three days after the article was published in the Post, when Judge Leon ruled that a Yemeni prisoner, Ghaleb al-Bihani, could continue to be held as an “enemy combatant,” not because he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or a high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitator or money person, but because he had been an assistant cook for the Taliban and the Arab recruits serving alongside them in the Taliban’s long-running war with the Northern Alliance.

Judge Leon’s ruling raises some other uncomfortable questions, of course; primarily, if it is at all reasonable for men involved in a conflict that preceded the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 to be held as “enemy combatants” because they were still there when that conflict morphed into a war against the United States, but what it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is that you do not necessarily have to be a terrorist to be imprisoned as an “enemy combatant” in Guantánamo.

The Post, of course, did not know that Judge Leon would make this ruling when the article was published, but his previous rulings should have set off some alarms, as should another statement by the “former senior official,” who “acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.”

The cause of justice, which has been suspended in Guantánamo for seven long years, is not served by allowing unsubstantiated rumors by former Bush administration officials to disguise the fact that the main reason that the evidence against the prisoners is “in disarray” is not because it is scattered to the four winds, but because it either doesn’t exist at all, or because it was extracted from other prisoners under duress, or because it serves only to prove that the prisoners in question had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance in a long-running civil war that, in most cases, had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other form of terrorist activity.

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

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part One) (December 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part Two) (December 2008).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009). Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009).

A veteran of US Army intelligence, Lt. Col. Abraham worked for OARDEC (the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants), which was responsible for conducting the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) at Guantánamo, from September 2004 to March 2005. The tribunals, which were tasked with determining whether the prisoners at Guantánamo had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial, have been widely criticized for preventing the prisoners from having legal representation and for relying on secret evidence that was withheld from the prisoners.

However, it was not until last June, when Lt. Col. Abraham filed a statement in connection with one of the Guantánamo cases, that a former insider confirmed that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

As I mentioned in Part One, Lt. Col. Abraham’s analysis of the failures of the tribunal process has recently assumed renewed significance, as a number of commentators — including reporters at the Weekly Standard, and researchers at the Brookings Institution (PDF) — have made the mistake of taking the government’s allegations at face value, and have stepped forward to warn Barack Obama that his promise to close Guantánamo will be difficult to fulfill, because, according to the government’s allegations against the remaining 252 prisoners, a significant number of them are connected with al-Qaeda, or were otherwise involved in militant activity.

In the second part of the interview, Lt. Col. Abraham continues to demonstrate — on many different levels — why the government’s apologists are misguided.

Andy Worthington: Moving on the judicial decisions in the last six months, I wondered if you could talk a little about the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners had constitutional habeas corpus rights, and another important ruling in the same month, when, in Parhat v. Gates, an appeals court ruled that the evidence against Huzaifa Parhat, one of 17 Uighurs at Guantánamo (Muslims who had traveled to Afghanistan to escape Chinese oppression in their home province, had been caught up in the chaos of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and had then been sold to US forces) was inadequate, and that the government had failed to establish that he was an “enemy combatant.”

Stephen Abraham: These two decisions represent a remarkable moment in our history, not merely for what they have to say about the rights of a few detainees, but, instead, because of what they say about us, individually and as a nation. In Boumediene, the Supreme Court upheld the habeas rights of the detainees. But what was implied in the opinion is the notion that such a right can be denied no one, if not a detainee. Importantly, from this emerges the principle that certain rights really are inalienable, that they are not created by governments, that they are not indulgences to be dispensed and easily withdrawn, and that they may be abridged only under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Parhat represents, perhaps, an even more extraordinary moment, because of the judges’ comment that the government was not to be taken at its word. That is, just because it was said does not make it so. This statement resonated strongly with me because of the presumptions that overshadowed everything done at OARDEC. The tribunals were conducted in the shadow of irrebuttable presumptions, rules of play that could not be challenged. We were to presume the information we were given to be complete, accurate, uncontestable, and applicable. With that as the starting ground for the tribunals — or, for that matter, any administrative or judicial hearing — how could you possibly have an outcome other than was dictated by the convening authority, in this case the very government intent on keeping the detainees indefinitely?

If you’re engaging in a criticism of the administration, the CSRTs are such a small thing that they’re barely noticeable, but if you talk about Parhat as the clearest demonstration of hubris, of indifference to the Constitution, of antagonism towards constant principles, it is perhaps, in the eight years of this administration, the best example you will ever find, and probably the best example in the history of our nation.

These two decisions, separately and together, represent an incredible moment in our history, a moment when our government was reminded of the fact that it was and is not an institution above the laws by which we all exist and not an institution beyond the limits that we as citizens granted.

Andy Worthington: As you and I know, Parhat was one of the hollowest stories of the lot, but in general I know that the whole saga of the “classified evidence” is also hollow in so many cases, and that the vast majority of the prisoners were either completely innocent men caught in the wrong place at the wrong time or a bunch of Taliban foot soldiers who knew nothing about al-Qaeda.

Stephen Abraham: OK, but if what you want to do is make the story of Guantánamo about people wrongfully held, then to my mind it is not only ultimately not a compelling story, it’s not a very significant story. By that I mean, this world has seen millions of injustices. Even now, we could limit it to a day and find a million injustices. What is so amazing about this story is that a President, an administration — with the complicity of every citizen — was allowed to absolutely shred the limitations on executive power, and in doing so show a flagrant disregard for fundamental human liberties. Not just rights, but the very essence of what entitles a human being to be respected as such.

Think of Guantánamo as the first experiment in a much larger experiment, in which the ultimate conclusion that the administration hoped to reach was that human beings are little more than vassals, that they exist, they stand on the earth, only as the result of a royal indulgence. I mean, that’s really the issue. And as Parhat demonstrated, the presumptions of the validity of the evidence melted away. Finally, here was a court that got it. Just because the government says it’s so doesn’t make it so.

Andy Worthington: Well, exactly, but also because it took so long to get to point where a court was enabled to review the evidence.

Stephen Abraham: What we ultimately need to get to, where you have an adversarial process, is a declaration by a court that there are, firstly, no irrebuttable presumptions, that irrebuttable presumptions are an anathema in a system that, at its core, relies on, and claims to give regard to due process. You can’t have due process and irrebuttable presumptions, which lead to the certainty of a conviction, or a designation [as an “enemy combatant”]. Secondly, with respect to rebuttable presumptions, there must be certain limitations: they cannot relate to the weight of the evidence, to the quality of the evidence. You can’t say, “I presume this evidence to be valid, I presume the source to be beyond reproach,” because in that regard all you’ve done is give another name to an irrebuttable presumption.

And this is what OARDEC did. You can say anything you want as a detainee, but you may not contradict any of our “facts.” Why participate? That was the truly offensive element of what was going on. It wasn’t that we were told to reach a decision; rather it was that we were told to reach a decision based on a one-sided presentation of evidence that we were not allowed to question. And our tribunal — the tribunal I served on — said no.

Andy Worthington: Could you explain just a little bit about the tribunal that you served on, in which you and your fellow tribunal members decided that the prisoner in question was not an “enemy combatant”? This is another extremely important aspect of the rigged nature of the tribunals, of course, because you were then asked to change your opinion, and when you refused, you were never asked to serve on a tribunal again, and a new tribunal was convened which reversed your decision.

Stephen Abraham: Deciding the fate — what we thought would be deciding the fate of a Libyan of no particular significance [Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, still imprisoned at Guantánamo]. We were given information relating to, or what I presumed would be relating to the individual that was the subject of our tribunal. The information related in very few respects to his pre-detention history. It spoke in very general terms of the organization of which he was said to be a member [the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group]. The information on the organization was extremely generic. It related to an organization that was antithetical to the interests of the standing government of Libya, a rather curious situation, in that I always thought that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And yet, for whatever reason, it had been listed as an organization associated with terrorist activities. There was absolutely nothing in the information to suggest that he had in any way been closely associated with, or had acted in any way that facilitated or contributed to terrorist activities. Nor was there any information that was linked to him directly, or that linked him to al-Qaeda, to the Taliban, or to anything else.

Andy Worthington: So there was not even any kind of thread drawn to any terrorist organization?

Stephen Abraham: No, it was absurd. Six Degrees of Separation.

Andy Worthington: But with Huzaifa Parhat, for example, the allegation was that the Uighur resistance group (the East Turkistan Independence Movement) was associated with al-Qaeda by two degrees of separation, even though there was no evidence linking Parhat or any of the other Uighurs to the group itself. Was it not the same with the LIFG?

Stephen Abraham: Let me give you an extraordinary connection, the very nature of which I think is irrefutable. I was in Paris in 1975. So was Ayatollah Khomeini. Do I need to go any further?

Andy Worthington: But this is interesting as well, Stephen. Just to digress for a moment, the study of the prisoners that the Seton Hall Law School undertook (PDF) — and I also covered this topic in The Guantánamo Files — established that prisoners were accused of associations with supposed terrorist groups that weren’t on any official terrorist exclusion lists.

Stephen Abraham: OK, but I have to say this: We need to be very careful, because, in having tallied the indicators of criteria that were set forth within the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence that were presumed to form part of the basis for the determination of whether somebody was or was not an “enemy combatant,” what people need to understand is that many of the criteria that were used came from a static checklist. So in terms of a more refined narrative, there in fact might have been no indicators that the criteria used were most appropriate. The problem was that they were the only criteria that were available, so they essentially were checked off. They were close enough.

So we have to be very careful not so much for the individuals for whom there was an absence of the criteria, but those for whom there is alleged to have been a presence of the criteria, because to say that somebody is associated with the Taliban is fine as a checklist response, but the problem is that, unless you know what the evidence is that led to that conclusion you really can’t even decide from the presence of the checkmark in that box that it is a valid assessment. And the problem is that for most of the detainees, even the criteria by which they were ultimately concluded to be “enemy combatants” are, I think, based on incomplete information — on information that doesn’t rise to the level of probative, competent, material evidence — and a lot of false syllogisms.

Andy Worthington: And you know, presumably, about the “low evidentiary hurdle” that was established as part of the tribunals.

Stephen Abraham: The evidence — you know, I wish that we would stop using the word “evidence” because we give to the material that presented the imprimatur of validity. Most of the information, most of the material didn’t rise — in terms of a lawyer’s perspective, a litigator’s perspective — to the level of evidence, either qualitatively or quantitatively.

I think if we want to describe what OARDEC did, first it’s OK to call it a tribunal, but I think there are other words that should not be used. I think “findings” should not be used. For example, you can reach a conclusion on fundamentally or inherently unreliable information, but I wouldn’t call it a finding of fact. I wouldn’t call what was done a legal process. I would avoid using words that really are terms of art within the legal community, because they give a false sense of comfort: “They received evidence, so it must have been OK.” No, they didn’t receive evidence; they received material, the quality of which was never competently vetted. Nobody could speak for any of the necessary elements of information before it would be admitted in any court, and it’s fine to say, “well, this isn’t a court of law,” but at the very least it was a body — presumably of sound reason and of judgment well exercised — and if that was going to be the case you would certainly not have expected that what would be accepted would be the word of anybody who could just walk off the street and say, “That man’s guilty.” What is this, the Queen of Hearts?

Andy Worthington: That’s a very good point. And given that this was not supposed to be a legal process, but was supposed to be an administrative process that would stand up to outside scrutiny and that would justify itself, the important thing that you did, as somebody who had taken part in the process, was to say, “this does not stand up to any outside scrutiny whatsoever, so how could this possibly be any substitute for a valid legal process?”

Stephen Abraham: And really, in your last comment, you make the point. Let’s get rid of the notion of an administrative board, because, you know, it’s terms of art again. It’s a board that’s going to reach a decision based upon the presentation of factual matters. At the end of the day it has to be only one thing: fair. It only has to be fair. The problem was, these hearings were never set up to be fair, and when there is the risk that a hearing will not be fair, it is important that it be transparent, it is important that it be capable of review, it is important that the processes can be evaluated for the degree to which they comport with clearly defined procedures established before the hearings begin. You can’t take a person and say, “I will now give you the kind of proceeding to which you’re entitled based on what I’ve already decided about you.”

Andy Worthington: Moving on, I wanted to ask if you thought that your statement about the tribunals, which was included as a submission to the Supreme Court, made a difference to what the judges decided about the rights of the prisoners in Boumediene.

Stephen Abraham: I don’t know. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court didn’t decide that the tribunal proceedings — which were the subject of its review — were a sham. The judges didn’t argue the quality of the evidence. If they had, I would have said, “My God, I guess my submission made a difference, because I said the stuff was a joke.” All I can say is that the Supreme Court had denied the petition for review, had denied the petition for writ for certoriori, then there was the request to reconsider. Now these are always denied, but in this case it wasn’t.

My declaration was not on the first brief. It was on the last brief. It was after the government had responded. You know, you look to what is unique about this, that in some way affected the minds of two justices — or at least one — and you know the declaration was unique, but it spoke to facts, and I know, as somebody who’s practiced before the Supreme Court, that they rarely listen to the factual pleas. They want to know something broader, they want to know something that relates to legal issues, constitutional issues, and here’s this crazy brief that’s arguing facts. Certainly, it’s different, and I wonder how many petitioners are now going to submit declarations with their petitions for reconsideration, but the fact is that I don’t know if it had any influence. What I do think is that the justices looked at all of the briefs together, with all the materials that were submitted, and they said, “Enough is enough.”

Andy Worthington: Excellent. I really wanted to ask about that, because it was my understanding that you came from a slightly different field from the habeas lawyers, and you were somebody who had been there — inside the tribunal process — who said, “By the way, while you’re thinking about this, you might want to read my dozens of reasons that I’m going to put before you explaining why the whole tribunal process was a sham.”

I think we’re going to have to wind up soon, Stephen, so thank you very much indeed for your time. Before we finish, however, is there anything we haven’t touched upon that you wanted to mention?

Stephen Abraham: I was thinking about habeas corpus, and I was thinking that when we say habeas corpus, we understand it to be inseparable from notions of fundamental human rights, and when the Supreme Court was discussing this, a year ago, six months before they delivered their verdict in Boumediene, I couldn’t understand how they were having a debate for a half-hour about what I think was, by the nature of their discussion, a profound limitation of that right. To ask what the statutory basis is, or what the common law basis is, for the notion that a person is not born free, and does not have an immutable right to dignity and liberty (absent the legitimate exercise of the powers of state) was, I thought, a confession of the absence of the appreciation of that right.

Andy Worthington: Do you not think that Justice Scalia was playing into the hands of Dick Cheney and David Addington, and their desire to institute unfettered executive power? What struck me most about some of the exchanges in the oral hearing last December was that to varying degrees some of the justices were perturbed or outraged about the fact that they understood that that’s what the executive was trying to do, that the executive branch was trying to eliminate their part in the balance of powers in the United States.

Stephen Abraham: And that was really the funniest thing. If you look at what the Supreme Court did, 50 years from now people are going to wonder how this case should be characterized. And it will not be a fundamental liberties case; it will be a separation of powers case. And that’s the problem with it, because what gave rise to Boumediene was an administration that was turning an immutable right into a conferred right. That is the danger of the exercise of power, manifested by Guantánamo. Guantánamo’s merely an example of it, but the fact is that the moment you make liberty a conferred right you can eliminate it, you can suspend it, you can terminate it, but more importantly you can identify the moment of its creation.

That’s the worst part about it, because our government exists not by right but by consent, and it never had the power to create the right of liberty and of due process. Those are constraints on its exercise of power, and what the administration did was it reversed that, it said we have due process because we give it to you, because we created it and we can take it away. You have liberty, not because it is an immutable, fundamental right, but because we created it, and we gave it to you and we can take it away. And I hope that the five justices understood that to be the linchpin, the core, the thrust of the decision, and not a separation of powers issue.

The administration will change. Change is inevitable. But like a stream, the passage of water alone does nothing to change the nature of the water itself. If we make the issues of the last eight years the fault of particular men in a particular time and at a particular location, we will have missed an important lesson of what happened.

The rights of individuals were denied, the essence of those rights disparaged. This happened not because men made it happen, but because we let it happen. It happened not because we surrendered our rights but because we allowed others to redefine them in a way that foreclosed their exercise by others. It happened not because Guantánamo existed but because we allowed such institutions to be created. Closing Guantánamo is a symbolic act that will do nothing to eliminate the ground on which tyranny gains its foothold.

As we are reminded in the words of Martin Niemöller, each of us has the duty to speak for those for whom no one else has spoken. Where silence reigned, injustice found foothold. It is up to each of us to speak. It is up to us to ensure that institutions beyond the reach of laws exist nowhere on this earth. But more importantly than the bricks and mortar by which we build prisons, it is up to us to demand respect of law by all who govern and the dignity of all humans by all who are governed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

This interview was published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

In recent weeks, however, a number of commentators — including reporters at the Weekly Standard, and researchers at the Brookings Institution (PDF) — have stepped forward to warn the President-Elect that his promise will be difficult to fulfill, because, according to the government’s allegations against the remaining 252 prisoners, a significant number of them are connected with al-Qaeda, or were otherwise involved in militant activity.

The problem with all these reports is that those responsible for compiling them have taken the government’s allegations at face value, and have not investigated the many reasons for concluding instead that the government’s evidence is unreliable. In an attempt to encourage a much-needed scepticism regarding the government’s claims, Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, recently conducted the following interview by phone with Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a man who knows more than most about why the allegations against the prisoners are fundamentally unreliable.

A veteran of US Army intelligence, Lt. Col. Abraham served from September 2004 to March 2005 as part of OARDEC (the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants), the organization responsible for conducting the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) at Guantánamo, as well as compiling the information used by those tribunals. The CSRTs, which began shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, that the prisoners at Guantánamo had statutory habeas corpus rights, were introduced as a deliberate attempt to subvert the Supreme Court ruling, and were widely criticized for preventing the prisoners from having legal representation and for relying on secret evidence that was withheld from the prisoners.

However, it was not until Lt. Col. Abraham filed a statement in connection with one of the Guantánamo cases that a former insider confirmed that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” In a subsequent statement, Abraham also pointed out that, because the tribunals had little or no access to the intelligence agencies, “Most of the information collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees” (and may, therefore, have been made through the use of torture, coercion or bribery).

Andy Worthington: Good day, Stephen. It’s a pleasure for me to conduct this interview with you, as I have been following your story since it first broke last June. To begin, I was hoping that you could briefly describe your background.

Stephen Abraham: I’m 47 years old, and I was commissioned in the US Army as a second lieutenant in 1981, just after my 21st birthday. I was a reserve officer on active duty for the first six years, and I was an intelligence officer the entire time. I spent some time in Europe, as a HUMINT [human intelligence] officer working on issues involving terrorism, sabotage, treason and espionage. From this we may presume that I am not altogether unfamiliar with the composition of the respective intelligence services and other organizational interrelationships of relevance to the present subject.

I then planned to attend law school, but I was mobilized in support of “Operation Desert Storm,” and spent the time in Washington, working closely with different national intelligence components. I then went to law school, remained in the reserves, thought everything was going along fine, and then someone collapsed two buildings and the “War on Terrorism” began in earnest.

Andy Worthington: And how did you come to be involved in the tribunals at Guantánamo?

Stephen Abraham: Shortly after September 2001, I was mobilized for one year to the Joint Intelligence Center in the Pacific, where I served as lead terrorism analyst. I then returned to my family, my home and my livelihood [as a civilian attorney] until I was asked if I would consider working at OARDEC for six months. I said yes, viewing the offer, as the organization was described to me, as an opportunity of historic dimensions.

I was communicating back and forth with the individual who invited me, and during that time I was conducting a great deal of research regarding what I anticipated would be the scope of my duties. It was an expectation that fell short, and an enthusiasm that was dampened within a short time of my arrival.

Andy Worthington: I’ve read a lot about your experiences, but I’ve never heard you say before that it took such a short amount of time to become disillusioned. Can you explain more?

Stephen Abraham: Let’s begin by understanding very clearly the context in which I was to perform whatever duties would subsequently be assigned. OARDEC is an organization under the Secretary of the Navy, but which was mobilized very quickly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s two decisions in June 2004 [Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld]. OARDEC had been set up to conduct annual review boards, and was dealing with what I call aspects of detention preliminary to war crimes tribunals — or, as we know them, the Military Commissions — but there was no institutionalising of the process used to determine whether individuals were “enemy combatants.” Until the Supreme Court made its ruling, there was no reason for them to do it.

Very quickly, in July 2004, the authorities realized that they now needed to hold what we refer to in shorthand as tribunals — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). So they took the preexisting organization and said, we will have it do the CSRT process. At that point OARDEC became responsible for conducting tribunals. Slight problem: OARDEC had never conducted a tribunal, didn’t know how to conduct a tribunal, and was woefully understaffed to be able to do all of the things necessary to conduct a tribunal.

So whereas before you might have had officers determining whether someone is now a “nice guy” — by taking current information, contemporaneously collected; that is, information relating to their detention, and trying to make subjective decisions abut it — now suddenly you’re having to collect information that relates to periods of time perhaps years before the board is convening. The board was now going to have to consider information that might be collected from host nations, from other agencies, that might speak to moments years in the past. So OARDEC had to be able to collect information, process it, assimilate it, evaluate it and ultimately make decisions based on it.

The problem was that the organization only had a few individuals who were actively engaged in the information gathering functions of OARDEC and now they were handed a Herculean task. They very quickly increased the numbers of individuals that were assigned to the unit, but all the while the reserve components were stretched intolerably thin, which means essentially that the authorities were putting out calls not for the most qualified individuals, but for anybody who could spare six months of their lives. What this also means, with no disrespect intended towards any of the individuals who volunteered, is that they had whoever was available, whenever they could be available, and no matter what their skill set. So they got merchants, they got non-intelligence professionals, they got accountants, they got postal workers, they got anybody who was available. The organization got individuals with incredible military skill sets, but, unfortunately, skills geared towards conventional military tasks, not the legal tasks thrust upon the organization.

Andy Worthington: This sounds very much like what I’ve heard about the recruitment of personnel elsewhere in the “War on Terror.” In 2003, in a report produced for the Pentagon by the Center for Army Lessons Learned (PDF), the Center’s director, Lt. Col. Bob Chamberlin, concluded that the lack of competent interpreters “impeded operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Laugh if you will,” he wrote, “but many of the linguists with which I conversed were convenience store workers and cab drivers, mostly over the age of 40. None had any previous military experience.” Most of the linguists, he insisted, only had “the ability to tell the difference between a burro and a burrito.” This, I think, is an example of a situation similar to what you were talking about at OARDEC, and, like your experiences, it demonstrates that whether or not there was any intention of establishing a high ideal, what was actually involved was simply making the most of whoever was available.

Stephen Abraham: Exactly. I should not have been surprised that there simply wasn’t going to be a readily available pool of skilled intelligence professionals, and if they had made the decision to create an organization, rather than to assign the task to an already existing organization, it might have been different. But as it was, the people with the skill sets required to jump right in and perform the function to the degree suggested by the Supreme Court were not available. So essentially what OARDEC did was the equivalent of insisting that an all-volunteer staff with limited relevant experience run before they walk or even crawl.

They were going to take people who for the most part, with few exceptions, had no experience reading and applying Supreme Court decisions. And to these people what they attempted to do was to give a layer of insulation. They said, “You don’t need to understand the legal nuances of what the Court was addressing. We’re going to give you implementing guidelines and regulations and that will be good enough. And then you will be able to perform all the functions of OARDEC.”

The problem is: if, as Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England said, at the very outset, they didn’t have the facilities, they didn’t have the resources, they didn’t have the budget, they didn’t have the manpower to do all these things, and they didn’t have the authority to task agencies to provide information, something was going to have to yield, and in this case it was, at its simplest level, any regard or any respect for the Supreme Court decision. So they could create an organization, they could give it a task, they could tell it, as if these were autonomic functions, what it would do, how it would wave its hands, how it would move paper from the left side to the right, but they couldn’t expect an independent, fact-finding and decision-making body. For it to do anything that reached the level of a competent tribunal, it wasn’t possessed of the ability to do that.

Andy Worthington: OK, so there’s a couple of fundamental problems here with the set-up, one of which is that you’re explaining that the personnel recruited were not able, in general, to do the job, but the other is to do with the information you were allowed, or not allowed access to –

Stephen Abraham: Absolutely. Bear in mind, in our discussion at this point, we have only touched upon general aspects of the organization. We haven’t even gotten to what are some of the more profound and serious issues that plagued the organization and in fact rendered its ability to perform its duties impossible. The best way, perhaps, to leap forward and describe that is to describe the environment in which most of the intelligence organizations work, and by this what I’m referring to are the organizations that, by necessity or function, would have dealt with the kind of information that, in all likelihood, would have related to the detainees or the environment, context or setting in which they presumably operated.

Most of that information — timely, raw information collected by a myriad of sources relating to their activities, at a human level — would have been some of the most classified pieces of information that you would expect to see. Not finished products, not analysis, but raw reports, highly classified and fairly sensitive. Now if I were to ask you, what did so-and-so do or what were the conversations he had on a particular day or at a particular location, or what corroborative information do you have relating to these activities, it might involve the use of very sensitive sources. Right away, the question is: what did OARDEC have access to? Directly, OARDEC had access to none of that information. Put a big zero there. Couldn’t have gotten it, couldn’t have seen it, couldn’t have had direct access to it, couldn’t in all likelihood have even requested it.

Andy Worthington: Because you weren’t allowed access to the agencies that had this information?

Stephen Abraham: What we didn’t have was the architectural capability to directly access the information. Now the argument might be made that very few people would have access to this type of information, but that’s rubbish, because, in the year that I was in the Pacific Theater, I had access that was appropriate to respond to the tasks assigned to me, and the fact is, if I was told to do something, I had access to the information needed to perform those tasks.

However, at OARDEC, for the vast majority of the people there, they were largely unaware of the sort of sources of information that should have been made available for them to be able to competently perform their tasks. They didn’t even know that many of these organizations existed, and even if they did they had no ability to get the information.

Andy Worthington: Do you think that this was deliberate on the part of the administration, that they weren’t actually seeking any quality of review of any information?

Stephen Abraham: There are two ways of looking at it, the result of which, from either perspective, is exactly the same. One, as you say, is that they always understood that, in some twisted Machiavellian way, if they gave the job to a non-functional organization, which, by any number of criteria, was incapable of performing its work as described, this would further a particular agenda.

The other way of looking at it is that they are blazingly incompetent. You know, if I tell you that you need to write a top secret report, but I don’t give you access to top secret information, or systems, or to an architecture that allows you to have access to that information, we can say, “I intended for you to fail,” just as we can also say that the deprivation of resources would render the task impossible. In either case, the end result is the same: you can’t do what I’ve asked you to do.

Andy Worthington: So do you think it was bit of both, if that’s possible?

Stephen Abraham: I think that either one is certainly plausible. If anyone who was responsible for setting up the organization insists that they had the knowledge to appreciate and understand fully what would have been required to perform the duties, then I have to ascribe to them a more sinister motive. On the other hand, if you take a less intellectually invested approach to it, and say, “Gosh, all I knew is that I had to run these tribunals,” then perhaps we can ascribe to them a degree of incompetence — or a failure to appreciate the degree of sophistication that needed to be incorporated into the construction of the organization. You can’t seriously believe that you can take a hundred people off the street, not vest them with the authority to request or to collect information — essentially, put them at the mercy of providers of information who, without any suggestion of common courtesy, need not respond to those requests — and expect them to be able to do their job.

If I task you with conducting a tribunal, but you have no experience conducting tribunals, you’ve never worked with intelligence organizations, you’ve never worked with this kind of information before — in other words, this is in every way alien to you — and I say, “Go search on the system for information relating to the detainees,” you don’t even know how to begin the search, and you ultimately come to the conclusion that there’s no information on the detainee within your system, so that there’s nothing you can physically do by yourself.

But then I say, “Don’t worry, we’ll request information from the other intelligence agencies,” but they have no obligation to respond to the requests, and you have no ability to confirm the diligence of their searches, and so, as you assess your ability to succeed at this mission, to what conclusions do you come? I would be fairly quick in saying, “I hope I’m not being paid or rated based on substantive performance markers, because this is a mission doomed to failure.”

I hate to say it, but within a very short period of time, as I spoke with one of the civilians who was there, and who was responsible for also engaging in this liaison function — you know, asking him, “Have you talked with this agency, with that agency? Where are the terminals that will allow access to particular categories of information?” — I was told, “We don’t have them.”

Of course, I could tell from the building itself, and its setting — I knew that they would have no access to that sort of information. When I asked what invested liaison officers there were from these other organizations, the answer was, “none.” When I asked what the timeline was for the collecting of information for requests and responses, it was woefully short and inadequate. There was no hammer, so to speak, if an agency decided not to participate.

Andy Worthington: But this, surely, was part of the process in which everything was expedited, whereby all 558 tribunals were supposed to take place in as short an amount of time as possible?

Stephen Abraham: Yes, but whether they had said three days, 30 days or 300 days, the bottom line is, if you had no ability to assess the completeness of information, then when you started the tribunal — in terms of your assessment of the quality of the record with which you’d be going forward — it was largely a futile exercise. After all, no matter how much time you spent developing a record, to what extent could you say that it was complete, that it was accurate, comprehensive, that it tended to draw an accurate picture of the detainee who was facing the tribunal? You just simply couldn’t. It was a random collection of information in almost every instance.

Andy Worthington: So what you have expressed in the past, about how generic information was put into the pot, because there was very little specific information relating to the prisoners in question, you’ve expressed this very well. Moreover, I understand from my sustained study of the prisoners’ stories for The Guantánamo Files that it is valid to look at the tribunals as a pale and mocking echo of the Article 5 battlefield tribunals that are supposed to take place close to the time and place of capture, according to the Geneva Conventions, so that people who know whether those captured are farmers or soldiers can come and give evidence, and say, “This is a farmer, you’ve got the wrong man.” This, of course, is what happened in all US wars since the Second World War, including “Operation Desert Storm.”

So the tribunals are a horribly dysfunctional echo of the battlefield tribunals, in which everything was expedited, and requests for outside witnesses, which were supposed to be part of the architecture of the tribunals, were never fulfilled — not a single outside witness was called — and my feeling is that no depth was really required in the tribunals because, as you’ve said, the impression that you came away with, having undergone this six-month experience, was that it was designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Stephen Abraham: What it was designed to do — and in that regard, let’s be clear, it succeeded beyond most people’s wildest expectations — was to get the outside lawyers off the administration’s asses. Let me explain what I mean by that. You had two Supreme Court decisions in 2004, saying — first O’Connor, then Stevens — you have to have some kind of a hearing that comports with notions of due process, and it’s not just limited to American citizens.

So the administration then very quickly had to create this tribunal process. What they had to be able to do was to represent to the world that the process exists, and that they were capable of performing the functions described within the context of the organization committed to that process. Now what I just said is utterly meaningless. It’s like a ne’er-do-well saying, “I have this capability of working.” The fact is, he sits on his ass doing nothing. So the administration had an organization that was capable of conducting a hearing — not particularly well, but it could certainly conduct a hearing — and, as you and many others have seen, it had the capability of conducting hundreds of hearings.

The problem was that, if you take the moment that the organization decides to have a hearing — Day One — and it sends out notices to the countries [with which the prisoners may, in some way, be involved], saying, “We’re going to hold a hearing,” the country itself has no duty, obligation or even a motive to respond. Essentially, their reaction to the letter is, “So what?” You also send the letter to different organizations outside of your own — outside of the Department of the Navy, in many instances outside of the Department of Defense — and you say, “We’re going to hold a hearing in 30 days,” to which they respond, “So?”

But you go further. You ask for information. And let’s keep this real, pragmatic. Let’s talk about what motivates responses. In a theoretical sense, you might expect the answer to be, “We’re all on the same side, we’ll get you what you need.” But that’s not a response that was received by OARDEC. Responses, though not always expressed openly, were motivated by a number of primary questions: “Who’s paying for this? What assets do I have available? What are you asking me to do? What’s your authority for asking me to do it? Have I programmed your request into my annual resource budget? Is this something I have that’s available because somebody else has already asked for it, so I can give you a copy, or are you asking me to do new work? How long is it going to take me to do it, and how will that interfere with other missions for which I have organizational or even statutory obligations?”

Andy Worthington: I understand that, and it’s very interesting on the level of, “Where’s the budget for my responsibility?”

Stephen Abraham: But not just, “Where’s the budget?” but, “Where’s my ability to do it?” And that then leads to the other organizations looking at OARDEC and saying, in essence, “Why do you think that I’m forced to respond to you?”

Andy Worthington: I’d like to ask you one more specific question about the gathering of information for the tribunals. In your declaration last November, you explained that, because OARDEC had little or no access to the intelligence agencies, “Most of the information collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees.” This is a point that I think is particularly relevant as the moment, as various pundits begin looking at the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence and raising alarms about how dangerous the remaining prisoners are, and how very carefully Barack Obama should tread. Now I know, from my own study of the documents and from my knowledge of Guantánamo’s history, that the many allegations made by unattributed “al-Qaeda lieutenants” and “al-Qaeda operatives,” and other unidentified “sources,” are unreliable because they may have been made through the use of torture, coercion of bribery (the promise of better treatment in exchange for “confessions”), but I wondered if you could elaborate a little on your experiences of the information obtained from other prisoners.

Stephen Abraham: Though it would be wrong to characterize all of the information obtained from detainees as being the product of “torture, coercion or bribery,” it is important to consider the information both discretely and in the aggregate. What I mean by that is to look at the totality of the information on the one hand. How was it obtained? What were the motivations of the sources? What issues might have colored the testimony, such as fading memories over time, bias on the part of the witness, or promises of favors? Also, to what degree would comparisons of different pieces of evidence tend to belie assurances of legitimacy where the claims of a detainee against one particular detainee mirrored other claims against other detainees?

The problem is not just the issues we easily raise now, years after the tribunals were held, but the fact that the tribunal members never knew of these issues and never considered them in weighing the information presented at the hearings. Simply put, tribunal members were told to trust all of the information presented against the detainee without hesitation or question, and to distrust any inconsistent testimony or other information. That is not the hallmark of a fair hearing and not a hearing in which we, citizens of a nation of laws, should put any faith.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

This interview was published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

In Part Two of this interview, Stephen Abraham and Andy Worthington discuss the significance of two cases in June: Boumediene v. Bush, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Guantánamo prisoners had constitutional habeas corpus rights, and Parhat v. Gates, in which a court first ruled that the government’s evidence against a prisoner was inadequate. Lt. Col. Abraham also discusses the tribunal on which he served at Guantánamo, explains more about the inbuilt inadequacies of the tribunal process, and delivers an impassioned criticism of the administration’s motives for holding prisoners without charge or trial.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

In August, Hamdan became the first prisoner of the United States to face a war crimes trial since the Second World War, and although opponents of the system of trials by Military Commission (dreamt up by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001) maintained their disdain for the entire system, pointing out that, amongst other defects, it allowed the judge to withhold all mention of evidence obtained through coercion, the verdict in the trial was a bitter blow for the government.

Prosecutors had hoped to secure a 30-year sentence for Hamdan, who was accused of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, but the military jury dismissed the conspiracy charge, accepting Hamdan’s claim that he was merely a $200-a-month employee, with no inside knowledge of the workings of al-Qaeda, and sentenced him to serve just five and a half years for providing material support for terrorism. When the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, allowed for time served since Hamdan was first charged, it meant that he would be free by the end of the year.

The sentence infuriated the Pentagon, which refused to rule out the possibility that it would continue to hold Hamdan as an “enemy combatant” after his sentence was served, even though this was a concept that most dictatorships would blanch at pursuing. Unwilling to acknowledge that tampering with the results of a military system of its own devising would resemble the tantrum of a small child, the Pentagon then attempted to put pressure on Capt. Allred to reconvene the jury for a new sentence, arguing that he had no right to reduce Hamdan’s sentence for time served, but on October 30, in a terse response, Allred refused to be swayed, and declared, “The prosecution motion to reconsider, reassemble, reinstruct and re-announce a sentence is denied.”

Beyond demonstrating, however belatedly, that the Bush administration is actually capable of playing by its own rules, Hamdan’s release is also enormously significant for around half the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo. Regarded, as CBS News explained on November 14, as “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute,” these prisoners — approximately 125 in total — are caught between the 50 or so prisoners who have been cleared for release but cannot be freed because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture, and the 80 or so regarded as significant enough to face a trial by Military Commission.

However, although CBS News alleged that they could not be put forward for prosecution “because the evidence against them can not be used in court,” the reality is that these are prisoners against whom suspicions of militant activity or of sympathy for militant activity are largely unjustifiable because they are derived from the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, or from the torture and coercion of the prisoners themselves.

The history of Guantánamo is permeated with dubious information, masquerading as evidence, which has been used by the administration to justify holding these men, but as is evident from the verifiable stories of numerous released prisoners, from investigations by their lawyers, from explosive statements made by military officers who worked on the tribunals at Guantánamo that were responsible for presenting the information that was used as evidence, from a study of Pentagon documents by the Seton Law School (PDF), and in my own research for my book The Guantánamo Files, the reason that much of this information is inadmissible is not just because of the manner in which it was gathered, but also because so much of it would not stand up to independent scrutiny, as has been demonstrated in the only two cases that have been reviewed by a US court: those of Huzaifa Parhat, cleared of being an “enemy combatant” in June, and five Bosnian Algerians, cleared of the charges against them in a District Court last week.

The conclusion is stark, but as true as it has ever been: hearsay evidence — whether obtained through kindness (better living conditions) or cruelty (the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”) — is fundamentally unreliable, and at Guantánamo the liberal, even credulous acceptance of hearsay evidence has produced a catalog of farcical allegations that are simply untrue.

What this means, when the window dressing is removed, is that these 125 prisoners are regarded as less significant than Salim Hamdan, who was specifically chosen for a flagship trial because of his known proximity to Osama bin Laden. As a result, when Hamdan’s sentence comes to an end, one month from now, and he is a free man once more, reunited with his wife and children, it will, I believe, be impossible for the administration to justify holding these men any longer, and Barack Obama will, if he wishes, be able to highlight the absurdity of this situation to justify a speedy review leading to their release.

Significantly, over half of these prisoners are also from Yemen. A mixture of innocent men, seized and sold for bounty payments, and lowly foot soldiers for the Taliban, who were recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks, they are among the 100 or so Yemenis at Guantánamo who have watched, over the years, as hundreds of prisoners from other nations were released, and the majority of the 130 Saudis were also repatriated, to be put through a bold rehabilitation program, involving religious reprogramming and psychological and financial support, that met with the approval of the US authorities. With the government of Yemen — a poorer and more fractured country than Saudi Arabia — unable to guarantee that returned prisoners would be put through a similar program, the Yemenis have languished at Guantánamo, despite the similarities, for the most part, between their stories and those of the Saudis.

Hamdan’s release indicates that negotiations between the Yemeni and US governments are now proceeding more fruitfully than before, and suggests that their repatriation — until now a major stumbling block to the closure of Guantánamo — may be only a matter of time.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on Antiwar.com, Global Research, ZNet and AlterNet.

Note: Hamdan’s prisoner number is ISN 149.

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

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

And see the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, 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; 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

Under the guise of waging a “War on Terror,” those in charge of America’s post-9/11 policies — primarily Vice President Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers — set an arrogant new course into uncharted waters. Determined that those they seized would not be protected as Enemy Prisoners of War, they discarded the Geneva Conventions, with their prohibition on “cruel and inhumane treatment” and coercive interrogations.

Less remarked upon, though no less significant, was their dismissal of the battlefield tribunals established under the Geneva Conventions. Held during every conflict in modern American history, including Vietnam and the first Gulf War, these tribunals enabled the military to call witnesses close to the time and place of capture, to separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war.

Instead of prosecuting “terror suspects” as criminals, however, the administration also turned its back on the US court system, introducing a dystopian parody of the law, in which prisoners were held without charge or trial as “illegal enemy combatants.” Based on the presumption of guilt, this new system presented those detained with little or no opportunity to ever establish their innocence.

This was revealed explicitly last June, when Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, blew the lid on the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), Guantánamo’s version of the battlefield tribunals. Introduced after the US Supreme Court ruled, in June 2004, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to challenge the basis of their imprisonment in a courtroom), the tribunals were a deliberate snub to the Supreme Court, and were also a mockery of their battlefield predecessors, primarily because none of the prisoners was ever allowed to call an outside witness to testify on their behalf.

Adding insult to injury, the prisoners were not allowed legal representation, and were prevented from either seeing or hearing the classified evidence against them, which often consisted of confessions extracted from other prisoners under unknown circumstances. In addition, as Lt. Col. Abraham explained, the information compiled for the tribunals frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and was, essentially, designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Further proof of the administration’s disregard for justice was provided by one of Lt. Col. Abraham’s former colleagues at the Office of Administrative Review for the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC), who sent him an email supporting his actions, and also observed that, “after several detainees were found to be ‘not an enemy combatant,’ DoD took away that option and we had to start using the term ‘no longer an enemy combatant’ for those held for no apparent reason.” This was indeed the case. Anxious not to admit that a single prisoner was innocent — partly to protect itself from lawsuits, but primarily, I suspect, because those in charge maintained, as they do to this day, that they were incapable of making mistakes — the administration cleared just 38 prisoners for release through the CSRT process, and made sure that all of them were labeled as “no longer enemy combatants.”

By the time of the CSRT’s successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), whose stated aim was to determine whether the prisoners still constituted a threat to the United States, the authorities rapidly dispensed with the claim that prisoners were “no longer enemy combatants.” Although 14 prisoners were labeled as such, the rest of those approved to leave Guantánamo (119 in total) were still explicitly regarded as “enemy combatants,” and were only approved for transfer from Guantánamo (to the custody of their home country, or a third country). By the time that decisions were announced for the second and third rounds of the ARBs, in February 2007 and February 2008, all of those cleared to leave (55 and 33 prisoners, respectively) were still regarded as “enemy combatants.”

Aside from the inconvenient fact that a great many of these men are, in fact, innocent men swept up in raids based on poor intelligence or sold to US forces by bounty hunters, who should not be saddled for the rest of their lives with the label of “enemy combatant,” I raise these issues at this particular time for one pressing reason, which brings us back to “innocence,” that troublesome concept that has been banished by the current administration.

Of all the men held at Guantánamo, only seventeen have persuaded the government to drop its claims that they are “enemy combatants.” These men, who are all still in Guantánamo, are Uyghurs, Chinese Muslims who had fled government oppression in their homeland (East Turkestan, known to the Chinese as Xinjiang province) for the sanctuary of a run-down hamlet in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains. When the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, US forces bombed the settlement, thinking that it belonged to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Several of the men died, but the others fled into the mountains, hiding from the relentless bombing in a cave and eventually making their way to Pakistan, where they were sold to US forces by opportunistic locals.

Throughout their time in US custody, the Uyghurs have put up with many humiliations. Anxious to secure a lack of Chinese opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the US administration invited Chinese interrogators to visit the prisoners in Guantánamo. The authorities also designated a Uyghur separatist group, the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), as a terrorist organization, claimed that it was linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and then claimed that the Uyghurs in Guantánamo were all somehow connected to the group.

Nevertheless, several of the military tribunals were unconvinced. Seven of the Uyghurs were declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their CSRTs, although in two of these cases the Pentagon dismissed the original tribunal members and ordered second tribunals that confirmed the men as “enemy combatants.” Unwilling to return the five cleared Uyghurs to China, the administration eventually persuaded Albania to accept them in May 2006, but since then, despite being cleared for release through the ARB process, the remaining Uyghurs have been stuck in Guantánamo, as Albania’s largesse dried up, and no other country could be found that was prepared to take them.

In July this year, after a further ruling in the Supreme Court reversed legislation that had stripped the prisoners of their habeas rights in the intervening four years, the case of one of the Uyghurs, Huzaifa Parhat, was finally reviewed by a US court. Stunned by the lack of evidence linking ETIM to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Uyghurs to ETIM, the judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. “held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal” that Parhat was an “enemy combatant,” and in the following months what was left of the cases against the rest of the Uyghurs crumbled, as the government admitted that it would “serve no purpose” to continue trying to prove that Parhat was an “enemy combatant,” and then did the same for the other 16 Uyghurs.

As a result, when Judge Ricardo Urbina of the US District Court in Washington D.C. was required to make a decision about the Uyghurs’ fate three weeks ago, he had no hesitation in declaring, “Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful.” Furthermore, because no third country had been found that would accept the Uyghurs, he ordered that they be released to the care of communities in the Washington D.C. area, and Tallahassee, Florida, who had put together detailed plans for their resettlement in the United States.

The core of Judge Urbina’s ruling was his understanding that the Uyghurs — to use those words dreaded by the administration — were innocent men, and had been imprisoned by mistake. Predictably, of course, the administration appealed, but all they had in their arsenal were recycled and thoroughly discredited claims that the Uyghurs were “a danger to the public,” who had “admitted receiving weapons training at a military training camp.”

Sadly, however, the sheer hypocrisy of the government’s position was overlooked by the judges in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who granted the government a temporary stay, and on October 21 the court reiterated its position, ruling, by two votes to one, to extend the stay, and scheduling oral arguments for November 24.

In the meantime, nearly seven years after the Uyghurs were seized and sold to US forces in Pakistan, they remain imprisoned in Guantánamo, where they must, indeed, be wondering if innocence is a concept that the Bush administration has irrevocably destroyed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

That this decision was required at all was remarkable, as it was almost four years ago, on 29 June 2004, that the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, that Guantánamo — chosen as a base for the prison because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts — was “in every practical respect a United States territory,” and that the prisoners therefore had habeas corpus rights, enabling the prisoners to challenge the basis of their detention.

The difference between then and now is that, in Rasul v.Bush, the Supreme Court ruled only that the prisoners had statutory habeas rights, and, following the ruling, the executive responded in two ways that completely undermined the Supreme Court’s verdict.

The first of these — as lawyers began applying to visit prisoners to establish habeas cases — was the establishment of Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) at Guantánamo, which were set up, ostensibly, to review the prisoners’ designation as “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial. In reality, they were a lamentable replacement for a valid judicial challenge. Although the prisoners were allowed to present their own version of the events that led up to their capture, they were not allowed legal representation, and were subjected to secret evidence that they were unable to see or challenge.

Last June, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, who worked on the CSRTs, delivered a damning verdict on their legitimacy, condemning them as the administrative equivalent of show trials, reliant upon generalized and often “generic” evidence, and designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.” Filed as an affidavit in Al Odah v. United States, one of the cases consolidated with Boumediene, Lt. Col. Abraham’s testimony was regarded, by legal experts, as the trigger that spurred the Supreme Court, which had rejected an appeal on behalf of the prisoners in April 2007, to reverse its decision and to agree to hear the cases. The reversal was so rare that it had last taken place 60 years before.

The executive’s second response to Rasul was to remove the prisoners’ statutory rights, persuading the third strand of the American power base — the politicians in Congress — to pass two hideously flawed pieces of legislation: the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which originated as an anti-torture bill conceived by Senator John McCain, was hijacked by the executive, who managed to get an amendment passed that removed the prisoners’ habeas rights, although the legislation was so shoddy that it was not entirely clear whether the prisoners had been stripped of their rights entirely, or whether pending cases would still be considered. What was clear, however, was that the DTA limited any review of the prisoners’ cases to the DC Circuit Court (rather than the Supreme Court), preventing any independent fact-finding to challenge the substance of the administration’s allegations, and mandating the judges to rule only on whether or not the CSRTs had followed their own rules, and whether or not those rules were valid.

In the fall of 2006, following a second momentous decision in the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the justices ruled that the proposed trials by Military Commission for those held at Guantánamo (which also relied on the use of secret evidence) were illegal under domestic and international law, the executive persuaded Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which reinstated the Military Commissions and also removed any lingering doubts about the prisoners’ habeas rights, stating, explicitly, “No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.” In a further attempt to stifle dissent, the MCA defined an “enemy combatant” as someone who has either engaged in or supported hostilities against the US, or “has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the secretary of defense.”

The wheels of justice revolve so slowly that it has taken over a year and a half since the passing of the MCA for the Supreme Court to stamp its authority on the conceits of both the executive and Congress, and cynics can argue that all of this could have been avoided if the Supreme Court had insisted on the prisoners’ Constitutional habeas rights in June 2004. Nevertheless, Thursday’s ruling — however belatedly — comprehensively demolishes the habeas-stripping provisions of both the DTA and the MCA.

In no uncertain terms, Justice Anthony Kennedy, delivering the Court’s majority opinion, ruled that the “procedures for review of the detainees’ status” in the DTA “are not an adequate and effective substitute for habeas corpus,” and that therefore the habeas-stripping component of the MCA “operates as an unconstitutional suspension of the writ.” These judgments, which should soundly embarrass the nations’ politicians, could hardly be more clear, and although it is uncertain how the administration will respond in its dying days, it seems unlikely that the executive will be able to prevent a slew of habeas cases, which have, effectively, been held in a kind of legal gridlock for years, from progressing to court.

The only other obvious recourse, which will also help the prisoners to escape from the intolerable legal limbo in which they have been held for up to six and a half years, is that the administration will suddenly develop a previously undreamt-of diplomatic dexterity, and will make arrangements for the release of a large number of the 273 remaining prisoners without having to endure the acute embarrassment of justifying, in a proper courtroom, the hearsay, the innuendo, the generic information masquerading as evidence, and the fruits of torture, coercion and bribery that it has used to imprison these men for so many years.

Since 9/11, sadly, justice in the US has moved so slowly that on occasion it has appeared to be dead, but Thursday’s verdict is a resounding triumph for the importance of the law as a check on unfettered executive power and the caprice of politicians. As Justice Kennedy stated in his opinion, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” He added, “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is,’” a quote from an 1803 ruling, in which the Supreme Court explained its right to review acts of Congress, which, of course, reinforces the supremacy of the separation of powers that lies at the heart of the United States Constitution.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on AlterNet, the Huffington Post, CounterPunch and Antiwar.com.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the crucial testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham and other Guantánamo whistleblowers: Guantánamo whistleblowers: Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the first insider to condemn the kangaroo courts (July 2007), The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo: more whistleblowers condemn the tribunals (August 2007), A New Guantánamo Whistleblower Steps Forward to Criticize the Tribunal Process (October 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower launches new attack on rigged tribunals (November 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history (December 2007), Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (December 2007), Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham addresses European Parliament (March 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part One) (December 2008), An interview with Guantánamo whistleblower Stephen Abraham (Part Two) (December 2008), Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009). Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009).