The 226-page report, published on Wednesday in an advance unedited version, is the culmination of a year-long Joint Study by the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. It will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March.

The advance unedited version of the report is available here: UN Secret Detention Report.

In an introduction, the UN experts established that:

a person is kept in secret detention if State authorities acting in their official capacity, or persons acting under the orders thereof, with the authorization, consent, support or acquiescence of the State, or in any other situation where the action or omission of the detaining person is attributable to the State, deprive persons of their liberty; where the person is not permitted any contact with the outside world (“incommunicado detention”); and when the detaining or otherwise competent authority denies, refuses to confirm or deny or actively conceals the fact that the person is deprived of his/her liberty, hidden from the outside world, including, for example, family, independent lawyers or non-governmental organizations, or refuses to provide or actively conceals information about the fate or whereabouts of the detainee.

After running through the historical background to secret detention — both in a legal context, and through numerous examples from the twentieth century — the report focuses primarily on secret detention in the last nine years, providing a detailed account of US policies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and also running through the practice of secret detention in 25 other countries, including Algeria, China, Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

These sections contain valuable summaries, explaining how, in many cases, terrorism is used as a cover for secret detention policies of a political nature. However, the heart of the report is a detailed analysis of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” policies.

Of particular concern to the authors of the Joint Study — beyond the overall illegality of the entire project conceived and executed by the Bush administration — is the fate of dozens of men held in secret prisons run by the CIA, or transferred by the CIA to prisons in other countries. Based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious “torture memos” (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury, the CIA had, by May 2005, “taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and ha[d] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.”

The 28 men subjected to “enhanced techniques” are clearly the “high-value detainees” — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah and twelve others — who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, but no official account has ever explained what happened to the other 14 “high-value detainees,” or, indeed, to the majority of the other 66 men.

The report also establishes that, at a minimum, many dozens of other prisoners were rendered to prisons in other countries.

In tracking these men, the report traces the development of the US secret detention program, drawing on new research into flight records to demonstrate that rendition flights, carefully disguised in the records, flew to Poland, Romania and Lithuania. The report also touches on the existence of a secret facility within Guantánamo, exposed by Scott Horton for Harper’s Magazine last week, which prompted the experts to note that they were “very concerned about the possibility that three Guantánamo detainees (Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani) might have died during interrogations at this facility, instead of in their own cells, on 9 June 2006.”

Also mentioned are two little-reported facilities in the Balkans — Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina — and a claim that Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (a British territory leased to the US) was used in 2005-06 to hold Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a joint Syrian-Spanish national.

Accounting for other prisoners, the report focuses on a number of secret prisons in Afghanistan; in particular, the “Dark Prison,” the “Salt Pit,” and a secret facility within Bagram airbase. Of the 94 men mentioned by Stephen Bradbury — minus the 14 transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 — the report establishes that eight were released, that 23 others were transferred to Guantánamo (mostly in 2004), that four escaped from Bagram in July 2005, that four others are still in Bagram (three of whom are awaiting a US appeals court ruling on their successful habeas corpus petition last March), and that five others were returned to Libya in 2006.

These five include Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” who falsely confessed, under torture in Egypt, that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which were subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq. After multiple renditions to other countries (which I exposed last June), al-Libi’s return to Libya came to a dark end last May, when he died under mysterious circumstances.

Discussing the other prisoners, whose current whereabouts are unexplained, the experts noted, “It is probable that some of these men have been returned to their home countries, and that others are still held in Bagram.” As I explained in an article last week, following the publication of the first ever list of prisoners held in Bagram (PDF), it appears that a handful of these men may indeed be in Bagram, but not all of them, and it is, therefore, imperative that the publication of this list leads to pressure on the Obama administration to reveal details of all the “disappeared” detainees.

The report also examines the cases of 35 men rendered by the CIA to Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Morocco, between 2001 and 2004. As with the “ghost prisoners” in Afghanistan, many of these men later surfaced in Guantánamo, or were freed, but the whereabouts of others — particularly those in Syria, and, probably, other completely unknown men rendered to Egypt — have never been disclosed, even though some of the prisoners rendered to Syria were flown there as long ago as 2002, and, in at least two cases, were only teenagers at the time.

There are also sections on secret detention in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uzbekistan, and the experts also criticized other countries for their involvement in the program, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Kenya and the UK. According to Reuters, throughout the report, 66 countries in total are implicated in one way or another in secret detention practices — either independently, or as part of the US-led “War on Terror.”

In concluding their review of US detention policies since 9/11, the experts welcomed President Obama’s commitment to revoke and repudiate many of the Bush administration’s policies, including the closure of all CIA black sites, but requested clarification “as to whether detainees were held in CIA ‘black sites’ in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time.” They were also “concerned that the Executive Order which instructed the CIA ‘to close any detention facilities that it currently operates’ does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on ‘a short-term transitory basis,’” and, in the light of suggestions by Scott Horton that the secret facility at Guantánamo may have been run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), noted that the order “does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by” JSOC.

These were not their only concerns. Although they welcomed the implementation in August 2009 of a new policy whereby the International Committee of the Red Cross must be notified of all prisoners’ names within two weeks of capture, they noted that “there is no legal justification for this two-week period of secret detention,” because the Geneva Conventions allow only a week, and also because of their fears that some prisoners are being held who were not captured on the battlefield, and who may, as I noted in an article in September, in fact be prisoners who have been rendered to facilities outside of the military’s control (at Bagram in Afghanistan and Camp Nama in Iraq). The experts explained that they had “noted with concern news reports which quoted current government officials saying that ‘the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention.’”

The experts’ final concern was with Bagram’s new review system for prisoners. They noted that the decision to replace the existing system, which the judge in the habeas cases last March described as a process that “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo,” was still inadequate. As they explained:

[T]he new review system fails to address the fact that detainees in an active war zone should be held according to the Geneva Conventions, screened close to the time and place of capture if there is any doubt about their status, and not be subjected to reviews at some point after their capture to determine whether they should continue to be held.

They were also “concerned that the system appears to specifically aim to prevent US courts from having access to foreign detainees captured in other countries and rendered to Bagram,” and, despite welcoming the release of the names of 645 prisoners at Bagram (an annotated version is here), urged the US government “to provide information on the citizenship, length of detention and place of capture of all detainees currently held within Bagram Air Base.”

While the report spreads its net wide, the US administration’s response to its findings about the Bush administration’s legacy of “disappeared” prisoners, and its focus on the gray areas of Obama’s current policies, is particularly anticipated. So far, however, there has been silence from US officials, and only the British, moaning about “unsubstantiated and irresponsible” claims, have dared to challenge their well-chronicled complicity in the secret detention policies underpinning the whole of the “War on Terror, which do not appear to have been thoroughly banished, one year after Barack Obama took office.

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.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (July 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (June 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (Fouad al-Rabiah, September 2009), UK Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In The Case Of Shaker Aamer, The Last British Resident In Guantánamo (December 2009), Shaker Aamer: UK Government Drops Opposition To Release Of Torture Evidence (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Sharifullah, the US ally who had guarded Hamid Karzai

The first of the four Afghans, Sharifullah, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was seized by US forces from an Afghan military compound with another man, Amir Jan Ghorzang (identified by the Pentagon as Said Amir Jan), who was released from Guantánamo in September 2007. Both men were accused of hoarding explosives for the Taliban and being involved in various plots, but insisted that they were loyal government soldiers. In Guantánamo, Sharifullah explained that he was one of the first recruits in the new Afghan army, trained by British officers, and added that he had then spent seven months as part of a group that was responsible for guarding President Karzai. When he was unable to get a promotion, however, he returned to Jalalabad, where he had just taken up a new position as an officer when he was seized.

Amir Jan Ghorzang (photo, left) was the more vociferous of the two in Guantánamo, lamenting the fact that the US soldiers who had seized them had been duped by traitors who were taking money from both the US military and al-Qaeda, and were passing off innocent men as members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I’m here because somebody got paid some dollars,” he explained, adding that he had been imprisoned by the Taliban for five years, because of his opposition to them, and had also worked for Haji Qadir, a commander who fought with the Americans during the battle of Tora Bora, a showdown between al-Qaeda and US-backed Afghan forces in December 2001.

The cases of both men — as with many other men who had been working for the Karzai government, but had been betrayed by rivals — revealed how little the US authorities were concerned with establishing the truth about their allegations, as it would have been easy to track down witnesses in Afghanistan who could have verified their stories (as reporters for McClatchy Newspapers did in 2008, when they interviewed Ghorzang). Nevertheless, he was, in the end, more fortunate than Sharifullah, whose continued presence in Guantánamo for two years and three months after his release was, frankly, inexplicable. As Ghorzang explained in the following exchange in Sharifullah’s tribunal, when he was called as a witness:

Sharifullah: Do you know that I was involved to work in the new government? Was I honestly working and working for the new government?
Ghorzang: You were working with the new government and he was involved with the Karzai government, in support of the Karzai government.

Mohammed Hashim: the fantasist put forward for a trial by Military Commission

The story of the second man, Mohammed Hashim, remains as bewildering now as it was when he was put forward for a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo in May 2008, and I wrote an article entitled, “Afghan fantasist to face trial at Guantánamo,” in which I stated that the decision “appear[ed] to plumb new depths of misapplied zeal.” Hashim, who was about 26 years old at the time of his capture, was first seized by Afghan forces after he was found taking measurements near the home of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive leader, and asking locals about security arrangements. Subsequently released, he was then seized again and handed over (or sold) to US forces.

If there was something about the circumstances of his initial capture that should have set alarm bells ringing, regarding his mental health, these were ignored when the US authorities decided to charge him with “conducting reconnaissance missions against US and coalition forces,” and “participating in a rocket attack venture on at least one occasion against US forces for al-Qaeda,” and ignored the fact that, at his tribunal, his testimony revealed that he was (as I described it) “either one of the most fantastically well-connected terrorists in the very small pool of well-connected terrorists at Guantánamo, or, conversely, that he [was] a deranged fantasist. From the resounding silence that greeted his comments at his tribunal, I can only conclude that the tribunal members, like me, concluded that the latter interpretation was the more probable.”

After explaining that he had spent five years with the Taliban, because he needed the money, Hashim proceeded to claim that:

he knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, because a man that he knew, Mohammad Khan, “used to tell me all these stories and all the details about how they were going to fly airplanes into buildings. He didn’t tell me the details, that it was New York, but he said they had 20 pilots and they were going to orchestrate the act.” What rather detracted from the shock value of this comment was Hashim’s absolutely inexplicable claim that his friend Khan, who had told him about the 9/11 plan, was with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s opponents, who were also implacably opposed to al-Qaeda.

Hashim also claimed that he and another man had been responsible for facilitating Osama bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan, and that, afterwards, he had worked as a spy, and had heard about how the Syrian government had been sending weapons to Saddam Hussein, which had then been sent to Afghanistan via Iran. As I explained at the time, the cumulative effect of Hashim’s statements was that it was “impossible not to conclude that [his] story was, if not the testimony of a fantasist, then a shrewd attempt to avoid brutal interrogations by providing his interrogators with whatever he thought they wanted to hear.”

A darker truth, of course, may be that his rambling statement actually revealed the themes pursued relentlessly by the interrogators at Guantánamo: not only “what do you know about the 9/11 attacks?” and “when did you last see bin Laden?” but also, at the insistence of Vice President Dick Cheney, “what was the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?” As we know from the interrogations of the CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner” Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who confessed under torture in Egypt that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which was later used as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, securing this sort of information was regarded as critical in the run-up to the invasion, even though the administration claimed that its embrace of torture (or, rather, the euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques”) was designed to prevent further terrorist attacks.

Abdul Hafiz: the wrong man with a satellite phone

The third man, Abdul Hafiz, who was 42 years old when he was seized in 2003 from his village near Kandahar, was accused in his tribunal of working for a Taliban militia group and of being involved in two killings in Kabul. It was also alleged that he was captured with a satellite phone linked to one of the killings, and that he “attempted to call an al-Qaeda member who is linked to the murder of an ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] worker.”

In response, Hafiz, who described himself as “handicapped” and who repeatedly stated that he has problems with his memory, claimed that his name was Abdul Qawi, and that he had been confused with Abdul Hafiz, because Hafiz, for whom he had been working, had given him the phone at a checkpoint. As he stated, “He told me that he did not have any documents to have the phone with him. So he said, ‘You can have my phone because you are handicapped and I don’t think they will search you.’” He added that he did not even know how to use the phone.

Describing Hafiz as someone who supported the new government of Hamid Karzai and was “preaching in the village to bring the peace,” he said, “I was working for him to bring peace … He gave me the telephone in the morning and told me to keep it in my pocket. He told me to work and preach to the people not to fight. That war is not good. This is the reason that I lost my leg. Fighting is not good. War does not have good consequences.”

He also explained, “I was just in my home when they captured me and brought me here. I didn’t do anything,” and expressed frustration at not being able to see classified documents containing evidence against him, saying, “In our culture, if someone is accused of something, they are shown the evidence.” At his review in 2005, he presented the board with letters from his family — all addressed to Abdul Qari, not Abdul Hafiz — including one from his brother, which read, “My respectful brother, you didn’t have any relationship with any political people. We were hoping that you would get released very, very soon. We do not understand why you’re still detained there without a crime.” He was clearly so desperate to be freed from Guantánamo and not to be “amongst these beasts and these people” (as he described his fellow prisoners at one point), that he even offered to present the board with a letter from his wife, even though “It is a big shame in our culture to read my wife’s letter to you, but now I am in a very tough situation.”

Mohamed Rahim: a spectacular case of mistaken identity

If the continued imprisonment of Abdul Hafiz (or Abdul Qari) appeared to be inexplicable, there was, on the surface at least, more of a case against Mohamed Rahim, the fourth prisoner released at the weekend, but this too collapses spectacularly under scrutiny. A resident of a village near Ghazni, Rahim was accused, in his tribunal, of being the chief of logistics for a company providing support directly to the Taliban government, of working for the Taliban Intelligence Office, and of controlling a large weapons cache for the Taliban. In response, he explained that he had been forced to work for the Taliban, and that, because he “was sick” and unable to fight, he was made to work in an administrative post. He denied the allegation that he worked for the Taliban Intelligence Office, calling it an “outrageous” accusation, and also denied controlling a weapons cache. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “I was captured in my house. I have no information on these weapons.”

By the time of his next review, in 2005, numerous other allegations had been added, including a claim that he was “identifiable as a former companion of bin Laden during the jihad against the Russians,” and another that he “was among a group protecting bin Laden at his last meeting at Tora Bora.” It was also suggested that he “was entrusted by bin Laden to exfiltrate his guard forces from Afghanistan back to their countries of origin,” and that “bin Laden and his companions spent the night in a house belonging to an Afghan acquaintance of the Detainee.”

There was more in this vein, including a claim that he “attempted to export gems from Afghanistan to Germany in order to raise revenue to finance al-Qaeda,” but what was completely overlooked by his review board — and presumably, by those who were supposed to be capable of analyzing the intelligence relating to the Guantánamo prisoners — is that when he stated, “I am a sick poor farmer with enemies,” he was telling the truth for one particularly glaring reason, which only emerged in passing in his review, when his Designated Military Officer (a soldier assigned to him in place of a lawyer) pointed out that he was Hazara.

One of four main population groups in Afghanistan — the others being Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks — the Hazara, Shia Muslims who are at least partly of Mongol origin, were despised by the Sunni Taliban, who slaughtered them in their thousands. As a result, it is not only appropriate to conclude that the allegations against Rahim were invented by his enemies, but also to conclude that his enemies in Guantánamo came up with the outrageous claims that he was intimately associated with Osama bin Laden.

Release or imprisonment in Afghanistan?

With the exception of Mohamed Jawad, who was released in August after he won his habeas corpus petition, these men are the first Afghans released since January 2009, when Haji Bismullah, who worked for the government of Hamid Karzai as the chief of transportation in a region of Helmand province, was released. Of the 219 Afghans once held at Guantánamo, there are now just 21 remaining in the prison, but it is uncertain whether the four men just released will regain their freedom, or whether, in common with all the Afghan releases since August 2007 (except Jawad, whose case attracted international scrutiny), they will be imprisoned on arrival in Kabul, in a wing of the main prison, Pol-i-Charki, which was refurbished by the US military, and which, although nominally under Afghan control, is reportedly overseen by Americans.

After all this time, and with such scandalous stories of ineptitude on the part of the United States, I would say that the least these men deserve is to be freed outright, and allowed to be reunited with their families.

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.

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com and ZNet. Cross-posted on The Public Record and uruknet.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 30 prisoners released from February to early December 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; 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).

Sabir Lahmar, an Algerian freed in France

Sabir Lahmar’s release is long overdue. An Islamic scholar, he was living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and working for a charity, the Saudi High Committee for Relief, when, in October 2001, the US government accused him, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia-Herzegovina as citizens or residents, of plotting to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo. After a three-month investigation, which the Bosnian authorities were forced to undertake by the US government (human rights activist Srdjan Dizdarevic said that “the threats from the Americans were enormous,” and that there “was a hysteria in their behavior”), the men were cleared of all charges. However, on January 18, 2002, as they were released from custody, they were kidnapped by US agents and sent to Guantánamo, where they endured brutal treatment and discovered that the US authorities had no interest in the supposed bomb plot, and were, instead, using them in an attempt to secure intelligence about Arabs who had settled in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the ethnic war of 1992-95.

In November 2008, the six men finally had the opportunity to challenge the basis of their detention in a US court. Their hearing took place five months after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, after ruling that legislation passed by Congress in 2005 and 2006, which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights that the Supreme Court had first granted them in June 2004, was unconstitutional.

District Court Judge Richard Leon, a no-nonsense appointee of President George W. Bush, granted the habeas corpus petitions of five of the six men, including Lahmar, after concluding that the government had provided no credible evidence that, as was alleged in place of the bomb plot, they intended to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against US forces. The sixth man, Belkacem Bansayah, was ruled to be legally detained as an “enemy combatant,” based on the government’s claims that he was “link[ed] to al-Qaeda and, more specifically, to a senior al-Qaeda facilitator,” although he is currently appealing the ruling.

In his ruling, Judge Leon also implored the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies not to appeal his verdict, which would “at a minimum, constitute another 18 months to two years of their lives.” As he explained, “It seems to me that there comes a time when the desire to resolve novel, legal questions and decisions which are not binding on my colleagues pales in comparison to effecting a just result based on the state of the record.”

Nevertheless, although three of the five men — Mustafa Ait Idr, Hadj Boudella and Mohammed Nechla — were released within weeks of the decision, the fourth, Lakhdar Boumediene, had to wait until May to be freed, when he was accepted by the French government, and Lahmar has had to wait for another six months before he too has been given a new home in France.

Speaking to AFP, Rob Kirsch, Lahmar’s attorney, said that his client, who is now 39 years old, will be allowed “to rebuild his life as a free man after nearly eight years of illegal detention. Mr. Lahmar suffered years of inhumane, isolating imprisonment. He was separated from other human contact until one month after Judge Leon ruled that the detention of Mr. Lahmar was illegal.” He also praised French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as “straight shooters throughout this process,” adding, “We appreciate the opportunities they have given to Sabir Lahmar and Lakhdar Boumediene.”

A Palestinian freed in Hungary

Little news has yet emerged about the prisoner released in Hungary. On September 16, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai announced that Hungary “would take in one former prisoner, likely to be a Palestinian national,” and last week Gabor Juhasz, the minister in charge of the civilian secret services, confirmed that the Hungarian government had “given its official consent to the Hungary-US agreement on accepting a detainee from Guantánamo.” He added, however, that, in common with the other releases in Europe in recent months (in Portugal, Ireland and Belgium), the government had decided “not to disclose the identity of the former prisoner, the person’s time of arrival or place of residence.” He also explained that the government would “provide support to the former detainee for settling in the country, including “access to health-care services, language learning opportunities [and] assist[ance] in finding a job.”

From jail to jail: the Tunisians transferred to Italian custody

This is good news for Sabir Lahmar and the unidentified Palestinian, but for Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, the two Tunisians transferred to Italian custody, the future looks as bleak as the last seven years that they have spent in Guantánamo. As the Justice Department explained in a press release announcing their transfer, “Both detainees are the subject of outstanding arrest warrants in Italy and will be prosecuted there … These transfers were carried out pursuant to a Memorandum of Understanding concluded by Attorney General Eric Holder and Italian Justice Minister Angelino Alfano in September. The United States has coordinated with the government of Italy to ensure the transfers take place under appropriate security measures and will continue to consult with the government of Italy regarding these detainees.”

This perhaps sounds relatively innocuous, but as I reported in July, when the rumors first surfaced that Silvio Berlusconi had agreed to take a number of Tunisian prisoners from Guantánamo, there are serious doubts about the circumstances in which the prisoners have been transferred. These are not alleviated by the careful mention of a Memorandum of Understanding, and they hardly warrant the thanks extended by the DoJ — “The United States is grateful to the government of Italy for helping achieve President Obama’s directive to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility” — unless that sentence were to be followed by the words, “by any means necessary.”

As Daniel Gorevan, a spokesman for Amnesty International, noted in March, after EU Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot stated that the US government had raised the possibility of a Memorandum of Understanding between the EU and the US on the protection of detainees in Guantánamo, during a meeting on March 17, “Any memorandum of understanding between the USA and Europe on Guantánamo detainees must take into account this fundamental requirement: all detainees who are not charged and tried fairly in US courts must be released safely.”

This is clearly not the case with the two men who have just arrived in Italy from Guantánamo, as I explained in July, when reports in La Repubblica and information obtained from sources in the United States allowed me to confirm that, after the US government informally asked the Italian government in April to take six or seven prisoners from Guantánamo, the Department of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice compiled a list of Guantánamo prisoners who had criminal proceedings pending against them in Italy, and then focused on three prisoners, including Boughanmi and Nasseri, on the basis that they would be transferred from Guantánamo to Italian jails.

As I also noted:

[La Repubblica] suggested that Roberto Maroni, the Minister of the Interior (and a member of Italy’s notoriously right-wing Northern League), only approved their transfer when he received reassurances that they would not be set free, and this was confirmed in an article in the Christian Science Monitor, in which reporter Anna Momigliano wrote that Maroni, whose party was bluntly described as “oppos[ing] the presence of Muslim immigrants” in Italy, stated, “I oppose taking [the prisoners] in, as long as we are not sure they will be kept behind bars.”

La Repubblica added that the prisoners would not receive “credit” for their seven years in Guantánamo, and noted that, in 2007, the Milanese Public Prosecutor’s office had requested extradition of two of the men, but the Ministry of Justice refused to forward the extradition request to the US government because Guantánamo was “not US territory.” As a result, it is understood that the US government’s transfer of the men to Italian custody will not involve extraditing them, but rather expelling them, and the Italian government can therefore treat them not as prisoners who have already served a jail sentence, but as fugitives who are obliged to serve a full term. As a source in the United States explained, this novel approach to disposing of prisoners in Guantánamo is actually a form of “rendition.”

These fears have not been allayed with the transfer, under the cover of a Memorandum of Understanding, of two of the three men mentioned in July. Both were taken into custody on their arrival in Milan, and are currently being questioned, and no indication has yet been provided as to whether they will face a trial, and whether their lost years in Guantánamo will be taken into account should they be sentenced.

The fog of evidence

In the fog of rumors and allegations surrounding the men, it is difficult to know where the truth lies. According to Italian prosecutors, both were involved with an Islamic center in Milan that had connections with al-Qaeda, and arrest warrants for both men were issued while they were in Guantánamo. In 2005, Boughanmi was accused of “international terrorism, falsification of documents, aiding illegal immigration, theft and drug trafficking,” and in 2007 Nasseri was accused of “organizing in Afghanistan the logistics for fighters coming from Italy ‘where they were trained in the use of weapons and in preparation for suicide attacks,’” and was also described as “the head of the Tunisians in Afghanistan, ‘from where he maintained constant relations with the structures in Italy and Milan.’”

However, Boughanmi, who was 31 years old when he was seized crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, explained to his lawyers that he worked in restaurants in Naples and Rome, and as a barber in Milan, and stated that he traveled to Afghanistan in early 2001, “because I became a Muslim when I was in Europe. My country was very tough on the Muslims. Afghanistan was a country where they were willing to take anybody, you don’t need any money to live there, and they welcome all the Muslims.”

In addition, as I explained in July:

In Guantánamo, he denied an allegation that he was part of a terrorist network in Italy, and that he “possibly” falsified passports “for fleeing al-Qaeda combatants who make it to Europe” (that use of the word “possibly” generally indicating that even the US military regarded the allegation as unreliable). He also refuted allegations that he was an “extremist” in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the civil war, and, to prove it, showed the tribunal the visa stamps in his passport, which he requested as evidence. The information about his purported activities in the former Yugoslavia was apparently provided by the Tunisian government, which had sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison for allegedly being a member of a terrorist organization operating abroad.

Less is known publicly about Nasseri, who was 35 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan, because he refused to take part in any of the military review processes at Guantánamo (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and the annual Administrative Review Boards), although it was noted that he refuted all the allegations against him. Some of these related to the Italian arrest warrant mentioned above, a claim that he fought in Bosnia may have come from the Tunisian government (which gave him a ten-year sentence in absentia for being a member of a terrorist organization operating abroad), and no clue whatsoever was provided to back up an allegation that he “led a band of thieves in Italy and Spain who cooperated with Algerian terrorists.”

Most worrying is the claim that he was “the head of the Tunisians in Afghanistan,” which may, of course, be true, but what makes it suspicious in the context of the intelligence-gathering at Guantánamo is that it comes from an allegation that he was “identified by a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant as having trained at the Khaldan camp and that he eventually took over as the Emir of the Tunisian Group in Afghanistan.”

References to “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” in proceedings at Guantánamo invariably refer to “high-value detainees,” who, at the time, were held in secret CIA prisons where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; in other words, where they were tortured.

There is, of course, no indication as to who this particular “high-value detainee” was, but as the reference is to the Khaldan training camp, it seems likely that the allegation was made either by Abu Zubaydah (the gatekeeper of the camp, and the CIA’s most well-known torture victim, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) or by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner.” Tortured in Egypt in 2002, al-Libi made a false confession about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Rendered to various other prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA in the four years that followed, he was returned to Libya in 2006, where he died in May this year, reportedly by committing suicide.

With al-Libi conveniently out of the picture, and Abu Zubaydah psychologically destroyed (in April this year, one of his attorneys, Joe Margulies, wrote that he “has permanent brain damage,” and that, “In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures”), it seems unlikely that any of these doubts about Nasseri will ever be addressed.

For their part, the Italian authorities seem to be relying heavily on an informer, Lazhar Ben Mohamed Tlil, a Tunisian who traveled to Afghanistan to undertake military training, and who is now the main source of information — for US officials as well as the Italian authorities — on the movements of Tunisians and others in Afghanistan and Europe. Three weeks ago, Italian prosecutor Elio Ramondini told the Associated Press that, without Tlil, the prosecution of the Guantánamo suspects in Italy “is not difficult, it is impossible.”

Whether Tlil deserves this star billing is unknown. His testimony may, for example, be unreliable, but perhaps a court can sort that out if he remains cooperative. For now, his lawyer has explained that he is “unhappy with Italy’s witness protection program,” and feels “abandoned,” and that, as a result, he is “threatening to withhold testimony,” both from the Americans, who want him to testify in the United States, and also from the Italian prosecutors.

Just as troubling, given the lack of information about the circumstances of the men’s transfer to Italy, is the fact that the Italian government announced on Tuesday that it was still looking at a number of other cases of prisoners in Guantánamo. Franco Frattini, the Foreign Minister, said that Italy has agreed “to take in others,” but added, “we haven’t pinpointed yet” which prisoners to take.

If trials are justified on the basis of genuine evidence of wrongdoing, then it will presumably be acceptable that extraditions, expulsions or “renditions to justice” are a new tool for a President who has allowed so many doors to shut on his plans to close Guantánamo, but without transparent and reliable assurances that trials will be fair, and that the men will receive credit for their lost years in Guantánamo, I fail to see how this deal between Barack Obama and Silvio Berlusconi can be regarded as a valid step forward in bringing to an end the injustices of Guantánamo and the “War on Terror.”

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.

As published exclusively on Truthout. Cross-posted on Common Dreams and AlterNet.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 25 prisoners released from February to October 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; 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.

Despite the fact that the “War on Terror” was launched over eight years ago to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder noted, in a statement announcing the trial, that the opportunity for the relatives of the 9/11 victims “to see the alleged plotters of those attacks held accountable in court” had been “too long delayed,” Republican critics immediately leapt on the announcement, with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell describing it as “a step backwards for the security of our country” that “puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

McConnell, former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who have spent most of the year shamelessly playing the fear card about bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland to face trials ought to be ashamed of themselves, as there is no reason to delay justice any longer in the case of these men, and every reason to decry the fact that, instead of being prosecuted shortly after their capture, they were diverted into a lawless program of incommunicado detention and torture that threatened to derail the possibility that they could be brought to justice at all.

In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, the decision to prosecute him in a federal court comes over six years late. Despite having confessed to his involvement in the 9/11 attacks to an al-Jazeera reporter before his capture by US forces in March 2003, he was held for three and a half years in secret prisons run by the CIA, where he was subjected to torture (including waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning), in a violent and misguided attempt to secure “actionable intelligence.” Instead of achieving its desired result, this vile program appears to have prevented no actual planned terrorist attack, and led only to the generation of countless false leads, which wasted the resources of the intelligence services, and also, of course, led to the creation of a global network of secret prisons in which, distressingly, torture only begat more torture.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the most notorious of the five men, but the others — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash — were also tortured in secret CIA prisons for up to four years, and, as with KSM, the decision to try them in federal courts is most noteworthy for finally bringing to an end the scandalous flight from justice and the law that led to their secret detention and torture.

The problems with the Military Commissions

However dismal and compromised this story is, it at least has more to recommend it than the simultaneous announcement that five other prisoners will not face federal court trials, but will, instead, face trials by Military Commission. This alternative judicial system — for “terror suspects” only — was set up by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001, and struggled to establish anything resembling legitimacy throughout its seven-year existence, securing only three dubious verdicts, and attracting ferocious opposition from its own government-appointed military defense attorneys, and also from a number of prosecutors who resigned, including Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and the former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who all recognized that it was rigged to disguise the use of torture and to secure convictions.

Amended by the Obama administration and by Congress, the Commissions still lack legitimacy, with gray areas involving the admissibility of coerced confessions and hearsay evidence, and a widespread conviction amongst legal experts that federal courts have a proven track record in dealing with terrorism cases that the Commissions can never hope to emulate.

Moreover, although Eric Holder claimed on Friday that the revised Commission process “will be fair and that convictions obtained will be secure,” he neglected to mention that, this summer, senior administration officials conceded that the proposed charge of material support for terrorism — a longtime mainstay of the Commissions from 2006 onwards, when they were revived by Congress after being ruled illegal by the Supreme Court — may well be subject to successful court appeals. What makes the decision to proceed with the Commissions even more ludicrous is that the government also admits that no such problems exist with prosecuting material support for terrorism in federal courts.

In addition, the very existence of a two-tier judicial system should be enough to set alarm bells ringing, as it suggests — quite correctly, I believe — that the government is hedging its bets when it comes to justice, proceeding with federal court trials when it believes that it will secure successful prosecutions, and reserving the Commissions for other cases in which it fears that it may fail, because the evidence is not only contaminated by the use of torture, but is also weak.

In his announcement about the trials, Eric Holder stated that the “decision as to whether to proceed in federal courts or military commissions was based on a protocol that the Departments of Justice and Defense developed and that was announced in July,” adding that the protocol “sets forth a number of factors — including the nature of the offense, the location in which the offense occurred, the identity of the victims, and the manner in which the case was investigated — that must be considered.” The process has therefore been presented as being based on clear-cut decisions — whether the alleged offenses took place on the US mainland (federal court trials) or elsewhere (Military Commissions) — but in reality Holder let slip that the decisions would be based on whether or not the government thinks it will secure victory. The key is that phrase, “the manner in which the case was investigated”; in other words, how the supposed evidence was gathered.

I’ve been railing against the proposed revival of the Commissions since May, when President Obama first announced it in a major speech on national security, and I remain as confused and depressed about the proposals as I did back then. Glenn Greenwald has also been implacably opposed to the proposals, and on Friday he succinctly summed up the significance of the government’s failure to hold only federal court trials as follows: “A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you’ll get just enough to be convicted isn’t a justice system at all. It’s a rigged game of show trials.”

The government has not yet announced how many of the remaining 215 Guantánamo prisoners will be put forward for trials — either in federal court or by Military Commission — but ProPublica reported on Friday that, although “Justice Department officials said the cases of 40 detainees have been referred to government prosecutors for possible prosecution,” another administration official conceded that “it was unlikely that charges would be brought against more than 30.” This figure of a maximum of 40 prisoners is somewhat encouraging, as it corresponds with the numbers quoted in intelligence reports over the years, but the government is not off to an encouraging start, because, beyond the five men put forward for the 9/11 trial, the choice of the five other men put forward for trials by Military Commission — all of whom were previously charged under the Bush administration — is disheartening, to say the least.

The five prisoners put forward for trial by Military Commission

One is Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. Khadr should have been treated as a juvenile prisoner, and rehabilitated rather than punished, but he was subjected to appalling brutality, even though, to this day, the evidence suggests that he was not responsible for the crime for which he will be charged — the killing of a US soldier with a grenade — as, at the time, he was face down and unconscious under a pile of rubble. In addition, it remains as doubtful as it always has that there was anything extraordinary about the context of his capture (as part of a group of men engaged in combat in a war zone), and that attempts to imbue it with anything related to terrorism are simply misguided.

Khadr’s case is undoubtedly the most disappointing of the five, but the other four cases are also troubling, firstly because there appears to be no justifiable basis for not pursuing them in federal courts, and, in some cases, because the very basis for prosecution seems to be in doubt.

In the case of Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, a “high-value detainee” seized in the United Arab Emirates in November 2002, and held in secret CIA prisons for nearly four years, the main problem is that he, along with KSM and Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded in US custody, and claimed, in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, that he had made false allegations because he was tortured. He said that he made up stories tying him to the bombing of the USS Cole and confessed to involvement in several other plots — the attack on the USS Limburg, other plans to bomb American ships in the Gulf, a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship, and claims that Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb — in order to get his captors to stop torturing him. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

Moreover, as his attorney, Nancy Hollander, explained on Friday (as reported on Daily Kos), “his case was first investigated as a criminal case, and the only reason to try him in a military commission is that they do not have the evidence to go to a legitimate court.”

The other three are not even accused of involvement in specific attacks. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who was charged in the Commissions’ first incarnation in 2004, and again in 2007, was only finally arraigned on November 19, 2008, when the major claim against him — that he was responsible for al-Qaeda’s payroll in Khartoum, before Osama bin Laden and his entourage moved back to Afghanistan in 1996 — was dropped by the government, and all that remained were claims that he worked at an al-Qaeda compound from 1996 to 1998, that he fought “as an al-Qaeda mortar man near Kabul from 1998 to 2001,” and that he sometimes worked as a driver and bodyguard for bin Laden.

At the arraignment, al-Qosi’s civilian lawyer, Lawrence Martin, declared that his client, “far from being a war criminal, was a cook,” adding, “He was not even a cook for bin Laden, but a cook for a compound where bin Laden was sometimes a visitor.” This position is also maintained by his military defense lawyers, including Maj. Todd Pierce, who visited Sudan over the summer to meet al-Qosi’s family, and it seems, therefore, to cast al-Qosi in a similar role to that of Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one of bin Laden’s drivers in Afghanistan. Hamdan received a meager sentence after his trial by Military Commission in August 2008, when the military jury threw out the conspiracy charge against him, accepting that he knew nothing about the workings of al-Qaeda.

Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi who was seized on arrival in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and “rendered” to US custody in Afghanistan two months later, is accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait Of Hormuz, meeting Osama bin Laden and attending a training camp in Afghanistan, but in September, at one of the last pre-trial Military Commission hearings before Friday’s announcement, his civilian lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, urged that all of the 119 statements that al-Darbi made to interrogators should be ruled out, because they were obtained through the use of torture and abuse, including beatings, threats of rape, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation, both at Bagram, where al-Darbi was held for eight months, and at Guantánamo (a full statement by al-Darbi is available here). At the time, the judge in his case, Army Col. James Pohl, reserved judgement on Kassem’s request, but it is clear that these unresolved issues will surface at al-Darbi’s trial, and it is difficult to see how they can easily be brushed aside.

The last man to be put forward to face a trial by Military Commission is Noor Uthman Muhammed, also from Sudan. On May 23, 2008, Muhammed was charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism, based on allegations that he served as the deputy emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed, that he served as an instructor at the camp, and that he delivered a fax machine to Osama bin Laden at a training camp in 1999.

Noticeably, in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed did not deny that he was sometimes involved in the administration of the camp, but he insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business.

Behind the façade

This may appear to have been an evasive explanation on Muhammed’s part, but in fact the whole story of Khaldan is dangerously complicated for the government, not merely because these claims have been aired before, and because it appears that the camp was closed in 2000 because its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to cooperate with bin Laden, but also because both al-Libi and Khaldan’s gatekeeper, Abu Zubaydah, are people that the government want to keep quiet about.

Al-Libi, perhaps the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” was rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he produced a false confession about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Returned to Libya in 2006, after spending over four years in a series of proxy prisons or prisons run by the CIA, he died in mysterious circumstances in May this year. Zubaydah, who is still in Guantánamo, but has not been put forward for a trial, was the first prisoner to be subjected to the torture techniques — including waterboarding — that were developed for use on the “high-value detainees,” and the problem for the government is not that officials have to build a case against him while avoiding all mention of the use of torture, but that his role was massively overstated, and he appears to be too psychologically damaged to be put on trial.

It is, therefore, difficult to see how Noor Uthman Muhammed’s trial by Military Commission can proceed without focusing on the stories of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah, but even if it does prove possible, the very mention of these men points to some dark truths that lie behind Friday’s announcement: that other supposedly “high-value detainees,” in addition to Abu Zubaydah, have not been put forward for trial, that the question of what to do with Zubaydah, a Palestinian, appears to present an insoluble problem, and that the murky world of proxy prisons and CIA prisons, and the torture regime that involved at least 150 prisoners (and maybe many more) is barely hidden behind Eric Holder’s decision to announce the trials of the ten men mentioned above. Even on this limited basis, the pursuit of justice is contaminated, and the question of accountability — deliberately ducked by the Obama administration — seems unlikely to go away.

Perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, the Bush administration will be under the spotlight as much as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the forthcoming trials, and it seems probable, therefore, that questions about the Bush administration’s responsibility for torture and abuse will also leak out in the trials by Military Commission, and will remain, like a guilty secret waiting to be revealed, in the cases of many of the other men at Guantánamo whose fates have yet to be decided.

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 my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

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

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009),
9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009).

The show is available here (as Podcast #10), or via the front page, by clicking on “Get Podcast,” and over the space of an hour, we had what Peter described as a “wide ranging conversation,” in which he inquired about the origins of US detention and torture policies, asked how it is that the vast majority of prisoners were innocent of any terrorism crimes, and talked about his “crazy Mofo” theory that drove Cheney to the “Dark Side.” As Peter described it, I debunked the claims that Gitmo prisoners were released and, according to the Pentagon, “returned to the battlefield,” and also detailed the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who, as Peter put it, “was tortured into false claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.” During the discussion, we also discussed al-Libi’s recent death by “suicide” in a Libyan prison.

I’d like to thank Peter for providing the time to discuss Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” in the kind of detail that is not often available, which, in addition to the topics mentioned above, also provided an opportunity for me to talk about the taint of Guantánamo, and how distressing it is that prisoners held outside the law, in a peculiarly aberrant project initiated by the Bush administration, are likely to be regarded as “terrorists” for the rest of their lives, despite never having been charged or tried. I also spoke about how prisoners, for the most part, survived their ordeal through their faith, and were therefore extremely unlikely to embrace terrorism on their release, and was very pleased to be given the time to elaborate on the critically important story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s torture and death.

I was also pleased that Peter started a discussion about the mainstream media’s general lack of interest in the story of the secret prisons, and the prisons in Afghanistan — particularly Bagram — which provided me with an opportunity to express my dismay about the Obama administration’s obstruction of habeas corpus rights for foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram, and my doubts about whether the US military is now holding prisoners according to the Geneva Conventions (as discussed in the following article, “Judge Rules That Afghan ‘Rendered’ To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights”).

And if you make it to the end, you’ll discover that Peter kept recording after the conclusion of the interview, when we had a frank discussion about the new media and the traditional media, the possibilities of cyberspace, and the steady migration of readers to the Internet.

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.

The timing of this story allowed me to talk more about how President Obama has failed to seize the initiative on Guantánamo, despite sweeping into office and promising to close the prison within a year, and it would, indeed, be hard to find a story that demonstrated the Bush administration’s ineptitude — and Obama’s inability to deal decisively with the mess he has inherited — than the story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, and the refusal of anyone overseeing the case to realize that it should never have been put before a judge in the first place.

Touching on these and other issues, Amy also asked me about the case of the Uighurs from Guantánamo who were recently released in Bermuda, about the three Saudis who were also released (and especially Ahmed Zuhair, Guantánamo’s longest-term hunger striker), and about my world exclusive published last week, “New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,” in which I presented new information about the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” who died in a Libyan jail last month, but who, in 2002, while being tortured in Egypt, produced a false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

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.

Since the story first emerged last month that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (whose real name was Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri) had died in a Libyan prison, speculation has been rife that the Libyan newspaper Oea, which claimed that he had died by committing suicide, was covering up the fact that he had actually been murdered.

Once the Bush administration’s most famous “ghost prisoner,” al-Libi had been the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, but his notoriety stemmed not from his own activities, but from the fact that, after his capture in December 2001, he was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he made a false confession that two al-Qaeda operatives had been receiving information from Saddam Hussein about the use of chemical and biological weapons, which was subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

There were several signs to indicate that the story of al-Libi’s death was suspicious. Oea is owned by one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons, and, as Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, “This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya.” He added that, throughout Gaddafi’s 40-year rule, there had been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that “then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death.”

In addition, two Human Rights Watch researchers had briefly met al-Libi in the courtyard of Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison just two weeks before his death, and, although he refused to talk to them, they said that he “looked well,” and it was also revealed in the days after his death that lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, another former “ghost prisoner,” who was sent to Guantánamo in September 2006, had been attempting to make contact with al-Libi as a possible witness in any forthcoming trial involving their client.

A week after the death, Newsweek reported that US officials “are skeptical about the supposed suicide,” and that the Obama administration “is pressing the Libyan government to explain” al-Libi’s death. Speaking anonymously, an administration official “familiar with the case” told Newsweek, “We want answers. We want to know what really happened here.”

The Newsweek article also explained that US officials feared that al-Libi’s death “could reopen questions about the [CIA]’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program and further complicate the president’s plans to shut down the Guantánamo Bay detention center.” I have no idea how al-Libi’s death could possibly impact on President Obama’s plans to close Guantánamo, but when it comes to asking uncomfortable questions about the Bush administration’s program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, involving secret prisons run by the CIA, and other prisons in third countries, the Newsweek article was certainly accurate.

New revelations about al-Libi’s torture

Following al-Libi’s death, disturbing details of his detention in at least seven different locations around the world have emerged in statements made by a source inside Libya. This source, who wishes to remain anonymous for his own safety and for the safety of his family, has stated that he met al-Libi at the prison before his death, and that al-Libi explained to him what had happened to him in the four years and three months between his capture and his rendition to Libya in the spring of 2006.

The story that al-Libi told to this source in Abu Salim prison was related to me by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who was just a teenager when he arrived in the UK in the 1980s from Libya, where his father, a lawyer and trade union activist, had been murdered by the Gaddafi regime. I cannot, of course, verify the details of the story Deghayes told me via the source in Libya, as al-Libi’s death brought to an end any possibility that he would one day be able to explain what happened to him at the hands of US forces, the Libyan authorities and others involved in his rendition and torture, but so many of the details correspond with facts that have already been established through other research, that it seems certain to me that the story is true.

According to Deghayes, the Libyan source explained that al-Libi told him that, after his capture, when he was held briefly in Afghanistan (in the US prison at Kandahar airport, and on the USS Bataan, according to a previous report – PDF), he was rendered to Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Jordan, and was then rendered back to Afghanistan, where he was held in three separate prisons run by, or under the control of the CIA. He also explained that he was subjected to torture in all these locations, and provided disturbing details of how he was manipulated by his interrogators.

Torture in Egypt and Mauritania

These countries have all been mentioned in previous reports, but some of the details are new. Al-Libi’s time in Egypt, of course, is where the notorious lie about al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was extracted, which, incidentally, should be hurled in the face of former Vice President Cheney, every time he is invited onto a TV show to repeat his claims that torture saved the US from further terrorist attacks — and to ignore the crucial role he played in actually using torture to launch an illegal war.

From Egypt, according to the Libyan source, al-Libi was rendered to a prison in Mauritania. This too has been mentioned before, in an article in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh in June 2007, which followed revelations in the Washington Post in November 2005 that the CIA had used a secret prison in Poland to hold “high-value detainees” (and, apparently, another in Rumania for “lower-level prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq”). In December 2005, ABC News reported that eleven “high-value detainees” — including al-Libi — had been held in Poland (a list is here), and in the New Yorker Hersh explained how he had been told that Mauritania was chosen as a new location when the existence of the Polish prison was revealed:

I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant that after the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe was revealed, in the Washington Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the US took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in August 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret flights there.

The problem with this story for the chronology that al-Libi told the Libyan source is that he did not mention being held in Poland at all, and indicated that he had been moved to Mauritania after being held in Egypt, presumably sometime in 2002 or 2003. It may be that the source was mistaken, although it is also possible that the US administration arranged a deal at this time, as officials were working closely with the Mauritanian government after the 9/11 attacks. Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian national who lived in Germany and had been in contact with the 9/11 attackers, was handed over to US agents in November 2001, prompting him to state, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, “My country turned me over, shortcutting all kinds of due process of law, like a candy bar to the United States.” Slahi also stated that US agents had interrogated him in Mauritania a month before, when one of them threatened to bring in “black people” to torture him.

Torture in Morocco and Jordan

From Mauritania, al-Libi said that he was taken to Morocco. Little has emerged about this claim previously, although the author and journalist Peter Bergen noted in a major survey of “extraordinary rendition” last year that Morocco was one of the countries in which al-Libi was held, and if he was indeed rendered there in late 2002 or sometime in 2003, it would have corresponded with the time that the British resident Binyam Mohamed was held (between July 2002 and January 2004), when there was clearly an active relationship involving the use of torture that was negotiated between the US and Moroccan governments.

From there, al-Libi said, he was rendered to Jordan, to a detention facility run by the notorious GID (General Intelligence Department). In a report in April 2008, entitled “Double Jeopardy,” Human Rights Watch found that at least 14 non-Jordanian prisoners had been rendered by the CIA to Jordanian custody between 2001 and 2004, and a former prisoner held in 2004-05 told a researcher that “a guard spoke of a Libyan prisoner who had been rendered by the Americans,” and that he “thought the prisoner’s name was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, but he was not certain.” The ex-prisoner also explained that this Libyan prisoner was “held on the very top floor of the GID facility, away from all the other prisoners,” and that a guard had told him,

They were hiding some Libyan guy who had been handed over by the Americans to be interrogated. They didn’t want the ICRC to know about him. And they didn’t want the Libyan to know where he was. So they chose dark-skinned guards, and they put the guards in green trousers and yellow shirts, so the Libyan thought he was in Africa.

Human Rights Watch also noted that another source, who had had contact with al-Libi, said that he believed that he was held in Jordan “for a couple of months,” and I find this mention of “a couple of months” particularly interesting, because it fits with the Libyan source’s proposal that al-Libi was not held for up to two years in Egypt, as previous reports have tended to suggest, but was in fact moved over a two-year period between Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Jordan until, if the author and journalist Stephen Grey is correct, he was rendered back to Bagram on November 22, 2003, to a secret part of the prison, run by the CIA, that was known as “The Hangar.”

Identifying other prisoners through the use of torture

What makes this scenario even more compelling, however, is the Libyan source’s comment — never previously reported — that, in each prison, other “terror suspects” were brought before al-Libi, and he was required to identify those that he knew — or, under torture, those that he didn’t know.

This partly ties in with the report of his death in the Oea newspaper, which noted that “he had left Libya in 1986 to travel to Morocco, Mauritania and then to Saudi Arabia where he was recruited in 1990 to join Islamist militants in Afghanistan” (in other words, that he spent time in two countries where he was later rendered by the CIA), and also indicates that he was, essentially, taken on a torture tour of prisons in Africa and the Middle East to identify those who had trained at Khaldan — or, again, those who hadn’t, but who were implicated through the use of torture.

Under non-coercive conditions, with skilled interrogators like the FBI operatives who initially interrogated al-Libi after his capture (before CIA agents took over, sealed him in a tiny box and sent him to Egypt, while one agent told him, “You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to f*** her”), it’s possible that this approach would have yielded genuine intelligence, but in the circumstances that actually prevailed — in which waterboarding produced the false confession about the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — the picture conjured up is of a terrifying kind of international witch hunt, about as far removed from notions of justice, the pursuit of truth and government accountability as is imaginable.

Moreover, the story becomes even more chilling with the realization that prisoners were also repeatedly shown photographs of other “terror suspects” to identify. No reports confirm that this also happened to al-Libi, but it is inconceivable that it did not take place, and on a regular basis, because it happened to every other prisoner regarded as having intelligence value. One was Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi (also identified as Abdu Ali Sharqawi), a Yemeni seized in Karachi in February 2002. Rendered by the CIA to Jordan, where he was held for two years before being rendered to Afghanistan and then Guantánamo, where he is still held, al-Sharqawi explained, in a note written while in GID detention in 2002, which was later smuggled out of the prison,

I was being interrogated all the time, in the evening and in the day. I was shown thousands of photos, and I really mean thousands, I am not exaggerating … And in between all this you have the torture, the abuse, the cursing, humiliation. They had threatened me with being sexually abused and electrocuted. I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged. They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything.

Al-Sharqawi also explained, as Human Rights Watch described it, that “GID interrogators were extremely eager to provide information to the CIA.” In his prison note, he stated,

Every time that the interrogator asks me about a certain piece of information, and I talk, he asks me if I told this to the Americans. And if I say no he jumps for joy, and he leaves me and goes to report it to his superiors, and they rejoice.

Human Rights Watch also stated that al-Sharqawi “later told his lawyers that one of his Jordanian interrogators acknowledged that he was asking questions that the Americans had provided.”

Another detailed account was provided by Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi national, seized in Karachi, Pakistan, in late 2001 and returned to Saudi Arabia in late 2002 or early 2003 (and later released), who wrote an account of his experiences that was made available to Human Rights Watch by a former prisoner who had been held with him.

As Human Rights Watch explained in its report, “Al-Tabuki claimed that the point of the abuse was to obtain information, even false information” and in his account he wrote,

The questions focused on Osama bin Laden and his wives and children, his location, and on members of al-Qaeda. I was shown pictures of bearded and non-bearded Yemeni, Saudi, Jordanian, and Egyptian individuals. I was asked the names of these individuals, and forced to identify them even if I didn’t know them. Many times, I even made up names for them because I did not know who they were and was forced under physical duress to identify them.

They tortured me a great deal in order to make me confess to them about the American targets that al-Qaeda was planning to hit, even though I had no knowledge about that. They even forced me, through torture, to make up fictitious targets, about which they could report to the Americans. Their [American] masters would later discover that these were empty threats, and that such targets were made up under torture.

Torture in Afghanistan

According to the Libyan source, after his imprisonment in Jordan, al-Libi was rendered to Afghanistan, where he spent time in three prisons run by the CIA: “The Hangar” inside Bagram airbase, the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, where dozens of prisoners were held, and another prison in the Panjshir valley, in the mountains north of Kabul, which was the home of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was assassinated just two days before the 9/11 attacks.

Few researchers have come across the use of the Panjshir prison as part of a network of secret prisons used by the CIA in Afghanistan, but it was mentioned briefly last summer in the trial by Military Commission of Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, when the judge in the case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, ruled out the use of any testimony obtained when he was held in the Panjshir prison shortly after his capture — and where, according to Hamdan, CIA agents “repeatedly tied him up, put a bag over his head and knocked him to the ground” — because of the “highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made.”

Furthermore, Omar Deghayes told me that, in Guantánamo, another prisoner had spoken about being held with al-Libi in the Panjshir prison. That prisoner — who is still held — is Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni seized in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003, who was then rendered to secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan — including the “Dark Prison” — where he was tortured for a year and eight months before being transferred to Guantánamo.

In my book The Guantánamo Files, I also discussed the Panjshir prison, as it was mentioned by Abu Yahya al-Libi, one of four prisoners who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, in a post on an obscure French language website, which has since disappeared from the Internet. Abu Yahya al-Libi described 12 prisoners who were held with him in Bagram (only some of whom were subsequently transferred to Guantánamo), and explained how they had passed through a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, including Panjshir, where they had all endured “hard torture.” He did not mention Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, but he did provide the most extraordinary insight into the location of the prison, explaining that, in February 2004, he and an Algerian prisoner called Abdul Haq (whose current whereabouts are unknown) had actually escaped from the Panjshir prison for a day and a half, before being recaptured in the “driving snow and freezing cold” of the mountains.

A disturbing conclusion

As with many of the details of al-Libi’s story, it is difficult to know how accurate is the chronology proposed by the Libyan source. It seems plausible to me that, after 22 months in Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco and Jordan, he arrived at Bagram on November 22, 2003, as Stephen Grey stated, and was then held in Afghanistan for approximately two years and four months before his return to Libya.

However, it’s also possible that he was held in Poland, but did not know where he was (as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross that he only worked out that he was held in Poland when he saw a label in Polish on a bottle of mineral water), and it’s also worth noting that what is also missing from the Libyan account is any mention of Guantánamo, even though it has long been suspected that the CIA ran a secret prison within the grounds of the naval base, but separate from the other prison blocks.

This was first reported in the Washington Post in December 2004, when Dana Priest wrote that, inside the naval base, “the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al-Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.” Priest also noted that the secret prison “housed detainees from Pakistan, West Africa, Yemen and other countries under the strictest secrecy,” according to her sources, and that a US official who had recently visited the base told her, “People are constantly leaving and coming.”

At the time, Priest noted, “It is unclear whether the facility is still in operation today,” but the widespread presumption is that it closed down sometime after June 2004, after the Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights, paving the way for lawyers to visit the prisoners, and thereby breaking the shroud of secrecy, which, until that point, had successfully covered the prison and its workings. Perhaps even more significantly, however, Omar Deghayes told me that rumors of the secret prison’s existence — and of the presence of “high-value detainees,” including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — were also widespread within Guantánamo.

In the end, though, what is most significant about al-Libi’s torture tour through US proxy prisons and prisons run by the CIA is the realization that, throughout his long ordeal, US interrogators or their proxies were persistently using torture to secure information from him about other prisoners and other suspects — either in the presence of these men, or through the use of photographs — that was just as unreliable as his “confession” about the connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that these other “confessions” must, in turn, have led to further arrests and further torture, with a cumulative effect that is truly mind-boggling in its scale.

A corollary about Khaldan

As if this were not disturbing enough, what no one wants to talk about is the fact that, throughout his years as the emir of the Khaldan training camp, al-Libi was not connected to al-Qaeda. An independent operator, and a veteran of the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, al-Libi was committed to providing military training to mujahideen from around the world, including those who wanted to continue the struggle against the Soviet Union in Chechnya.

This does not, of course, mean that he was not a dangerous figure, as alumni of his camp apparently included Zacarias Moussaoui, a failed 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and the failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid (both of whom are serving life sentences in the US), and the interest of others who attended the camp was focused on terrorist operations in North Africa and Europe, but it does indicate that the Bush administration’s insistence on relating all mujahideen activity to al-Qaeda was severely misplaced, and also demonstrates that “terrorist training” — or “preparation for jihad” — was a broad field that included training in self-defense and preparation for military activity on behalf of other Muslims, as well as what we generally understand as terrorism.

In the case of the Khaldan camp, for example, it is rarely, if ever mentioned that al-Libi’s refusal to cooperate with Osama bin Laden led to the Taliban closing the camp in 2000, even though this story emerged at Guantánamo on two separate occasions, and has ramifications not only for al-Libi’s case, but also for that of Abu Zubaydah. A supposed “high-value detainee,” Zubaydah is routinely described as a “senior al-Qaeda operative,” even though, according to Dan Coleman of the FBI, an old-school interrogator who was involved in his case before the CIA took over, and who was implacably opposed to the use of torture, he was nothing more than “a ‘safehouse keeper’ with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.”

Coleman’s view was reinforced at Guantánamo by Khalid al-Hubayshi, a Saudi who was subsequently released from Guantánamo, who explained in his tribunal that, far from being a mastermind, Abu Zubaydah was responsible for “receiving people and financing the camp [Khaldan],” that he once bought him travel tickets, and that he was the man he went to when he needed a replacement passport. Al-Hubayshi also noted that Zubaydah did not have a long-standing relationship with bin Laden. When asked, “When you were with Abu Zubaydah, did you ever see Osama bin Laden?” he replied, “In 1998, Abu Zubaydah and Osama bin Laden didn’t like each other,” and adding, “In 2001, I think the relationship was okay.” Although al-Hubayshi did not mention al-Libi, he also explained that bin Laden put pressure on Zubaydah to close Khaldan, essentially because he wanted to run more camps himself.

In 2007, after Abu Zubaydah and 13 other “high-value detainees” had been transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons, Zubaydah was finally allowed to speak in his tribunal, when he explained that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.” He also explained that his only role was to operate a guest house used by those who were training at Khaldan, and confirmed al-Hubayshi’s analysis of his relationship with bin Laden, saying, “Bin Laden wanted al-Qaeda to have control of Khaldan, but we refused since we had different ideas.”

His comments took on even more significance this week, when the ACLU, having managed, through a Freedom of Information lawsuit, to force the CIA to review passages in his testimony that had been censored in 2007, released a new version of the tribunal transcript (PDF), which included Zubaydah stating that, after CIA operatives tortured him to admit that he was bin Laden’s partner and the number three in al-Qaeda, “They told me sorry we discover that you are not number three, not a partner even not a fighter.”

Moreover, Abu Zubaydah explained that he opposed attacks on civilian targets, which brought him into conflict with bin Laden, and although he admitted that he had been an enemy of the United States since childhood, because of its support for Israel, pointed out that his enmity was towards the government and the military, and not the American people. The same may have been true of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose motivation appears to have focused more on providing training for Muslims to overcome oppression in their homelands, and in countries where Muslims were being oppressed, than on signing up for bin Laden’s global jihad against the United States. However, unless documents ever come to light providing details of his interrogations, his death last month — in circumstances that seem to have benefited both the Libyan and American governments, as the US flag was raised over the American embassy in Tripoli for the first time in 30 years, just three days after his death — means that we will never know for certain.

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.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009) and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Of particular interest are new comments by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, who wrote an excellent blog post last week in which he stated that the Bush administration’s “principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the US but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.” In an email exchange with McGovern, Col. Wilkerson explained exactly what happened in the days before the Secretary of State’s notorious UN Security Council presentation on February 5, 2003, in which he attempted to drum up support for the impending invasion of Iraq by presenting examples of the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. These included a claim that al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting the Iraqi leader to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons, which, as we now know, was a lie produced by al-Libi in a torture dungeon in Egypt, where he had been sent by the CIA.

Col. Wilkerson expands on the CIA’s crucial “torture” briefing

Describing what happened on February 1, 2003, four days before the presentation, McGovern writes that Col. Wilkerson explained to him,

Powell and I had a one-on-one — no one else even in the room — about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about al-Qaeda-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech]. I agreed with him that what we had was bulls*it, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad. Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the [CIA] Director’s Conference Room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Col. Wilkerson explained that Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn’t give Powell the identity of the source (and added that he only later learned that it was al-Libi, that the information had been extracted through the use of torture, that it had first been extracted over a year before, and that it had been disputed at the time by a Defense Intelligence Agency report), but he went on to note that Powell, who did not know that the new intelligence was tainted, “changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with some more general information … about Baghdad’s terrorist tendencies.”

He added,

As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet’s breathtaking delivery). And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) … All of this was hidden from us — the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service … As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi’s recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair’s probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication — to at least a certain extent — only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the “fabrication” theme from other examples.

Powell and Wilkerson are isolated by Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA

To establish more information about the context in which George Tenet and John McLaughlin delivered the “bombshell” to Colin Powell, McGovern asked him, “Were there no others from the State Department with you at CIA headquarters on Feb. 1, 2003? Was INR [The Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the State Department’s very professional, incorruptible intelligence unit] not represented?”

This was Col. Wilkerson’s response:

When I gathered “my team” — some were selected for me, such as Will Toby from Bob Joseph’s NSC [National Security Council] staff and John Hanna from the VP’s office — in my office at State to give them an initial briefing and marching orders, I asked Carl [Ford, head of INR] to attend. I wanted Carl — or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar — to be on “my team.” Carl stayed after the meeting and I asked him straightforwardly to come with me or to send someone from INR. Carl said that he did not need to come nor to send anyone because he had the Secretary’s ear (he was right on that) and could weigh in at any time he wanted to. Moreover, he told me, the Secretary knew very well where INR stood, as did I myself (he was right on that too). As I look back, I believe one of my gravest errors was in not insisting that INR send someone with me.

Fascinating and completely puzzling at first was the total absence of a Department of Defense representative on my team; however, after 3-4 days and nights I figured out … DoD was covering its own butt, to an extent, by having no direct fingerprints on the affair — and being directly wired into Cheney’s office, Rumsfeld’s folks knew they were protected by Toby and Hanna.

When we all arrived at CIA, we were given the NIC [National Intelligence Council] spaces and staff. [But] I could not even get on a computer! Protests to Tenet and McLaughlin got me perfunctory CIA-blah blah about security clearances, etc. — and me with 7 days and nights to prepare a monumentally important presentation! … [It took] 24 hours before George or John acknowledged I could be on a computer … From there on, it was a madhouse. But at the end of the day, had I had an INR rep, had I had better support, had I been more concerned with WHAT I was assembling rather than HOW on earth I would assemble it and present it on time, I’m not sure at all it would have made any difference in the march to war.

This is valuable material, shedding new light on how George Tenet and John McLaughlin, the CIA’s Director and Deputy Director, manipulated and isolated Colin Powell and Col. Wilkerson in the run-up to the invasion, and I find it particularly interesting how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld maintained a deliberate distance from the whole affair, with Cheney hidden behind his representative John Hanna, and Rumsfeld not even represented at all, hiding behind Cheney, and “covering [the Defense Department’s] butt.”

Other lies

McGovern and Wilkerson are also good on other examples of false intelligence used to justify the invasion. Expanding on the “other examples” that persuaded him that “the entire affair” was probably “a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication — to at least a certain extent,” Wilkerson mentioned Curveball, the supposed Iraqi “defector,” who supplied false intelligence about mobile labs for making biological and chemical weapons, “and various Iraqi walk-ins who spun bogus stories about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program,” also certainly “after being recruited by the pro-invasion exiles of the Iraqi National Congress.”

McGovern goes on to note,

Mention of Carl Ford and Tenet and McLaughlin reminds me of another episode that has gone down in the annals of intelligence as almost equally contemptible. This one had to do with CIA’s furious attempt to prove there were mobile biological weapons labs of the kind Curveball had described. Remember, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

But the amateur attempts at deception did not stop there. After the war began, CIA intrepid analysts, still “leaning forward,” misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof they had been right about Iraq’s “bio-weapons labs.” They then performed what could be called a “night-time requisition,” getting the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position to provide DIA “coordination,” (which was subsequently withdrawn by DIA).

On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.” When the State Department’s Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they “went ballistic,” according to Carl Ford, who immediately warned Powell there was a problem. Tenet must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, “That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.”

As McGovern also explains, “This vignette — and several like it — are found in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford told the authors: ‘It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the report … It wasn’t just that it was wrong. They lied.’”

He concludes, “Too bad Carl Ford made the incorrect assumption that he could rely on his credibility and entrée with Secretary Powell to thwart the likes of Tenet and McLaughlin, as they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters — with Col. Wilkerson left to twist in the wind, so to speak.”

My thanks to Ray McGovern and Col. Wilkerson for helping to keep alive the most important story of our times — how Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior figures within the Bush administration used torture to justify an illegal war.

Note: For an excellent interview with Ray McGovern on The Real News Network yesterday, see here, and for an analysis of the fraudulent CIA/DIA report about mobile weapons labs, see here.

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.

For an update on the al-Libi story, see: WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

To correct this widespread misunderstanding, here, courtesy of the British human rights group Cageprisoners, is a photograph of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi:

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.

For other recent articles on Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, his torture, Cheney’s lies, and the dubious relationship between Libya and the US and UK governments, see: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq and In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Since breaking al-Libi’s story in the Western media on Sunday evening, I have written several articles examining the story from various angles — in particular, was he killed, or did he commit suicide, and why was the mainstream media so slow to pick up on the story? — but for the Guardian I thought it was significant to focus on how Libyan prisoners seized by the US in the “War on Terror,” or those who fled Libya seeking asylum in the UK, have become pawns in a political game.

This little-noticed story, which I touched on in my article, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence? has manifested itself as both countries have repatriated former prisoners and asylum seekers to face torture and show trials — or have attempted to do so — not because of the threat that they pose to the US and the UK, but as part of a morally bankrupt deal that followed Colonel Gaddafi’s pragmatic renunciation of terrorism in 2003, when he suddenly became a friend of the West, and his opponents were transformed, overnight, from freedom fighters to terrorists.

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.

For other recent articles on Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — and Cheney’s monstrous and unprecedented crime — see: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), linearization transfer characteristic mach-zehnder modulatorSecret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval (all April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (May 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.