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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yakub Abahanov (ISN 526, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abdullah Magrupov (ISN 528, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ehsanullah Peerzai (ISN 562, Afghanistan) Released August 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qari Esmhatulla (ISN 591, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Part 19 of the 70-part series. 247 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, WikiLeaks pushed Guantánamo back onto the international media’s agenda by publishing thousands of pages of classified military documents — the Detainee Assessment Briefs — relating to almost all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, which drew on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

As an independent media partner of WikiLeaks, I liaised both before and after the publication of these documents with WikiLeaks’ mainstream media partners (including the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais), and then, after the killing of Osama bin Laden pushed Guantánamo aside once more, and allowed apologists for torture, and those who engineered its use by US forces, to resume their malignant, criminal and deeply mistaken defense of torture, and of the existence of Guantánamo, I began to analyze all of the Detainee Assessment Briefs in depth.

I began, in May and June, with a five-part series, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” telling the stories of 84 prisoners, released between 2002 and 2004, whose stories had never been told before. These men and boys were amongst the first 201 prisoners released, and unlike the other prisoners, for whom information was released to the public from 2006 onwards, as a result of court cases involving Freedom of Information requests, no information had been officially released about the first 201 prisoners.

“WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo” was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” published from June to August, in which I revisited the stories of 114 other prisoners released in this period, adding information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs to what was already known about these men and boys from press reports and other sources.

As a result, of the 201 prisoners released between 2002 and 2004, I have, to date, published the most comprehensive reports available in one place on 198 of the 779 prisoners held, with just three stories currently unknown (of prisoners whose Detainee Assessment Briefs were missing, and whose stories have not surfaced in any other media).

For the next phase of this 70-part project (with 18 parts now complete), I have turned my attention to the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released (see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five). This was the period in which, after the prisoners won a spectacular victory in the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, when the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask an impartial judge why they were being held), lawyers were allowed to meet the prisoners for the first time, and the secrecy that was required for Guantánamo to function as an interrogation center beyond the law was finally broken.

However, although the Bush administration allowed habeas petitions to proceed, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act in 2005, and the administration also responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling with its own inferior version of habeas, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

The tribunals were designed to review the evidence against all the prisoners (which they did from July 2004 to March 2005), to decide whether they had been correctly designated, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held without rights. They were, however, a corrupt and inept process, designed essentially to rubber-stamp the administration’s prior decisions, and not to allow the prisoners to fundamentally challenge the largely flimsy basis of their detention. The prisoners were, for example, not allowed lawyers, and they were not allowed to either see or hear the classified evidence against them, although it was not until 2007 that the extent of the failings of the CSRTs became fully apparent, when their supposed integrity was thoroughly undermined in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham.

A veteran of US intelligence who had worked on the tribunals, Lt. Col. Abraham not only revealed how shambolic the process of compiling the supposed evidence for the tribunals was, but also how, when tribunals such as the one he took part in, disagreed with the authorities’ preconceived notions, by deciding that the man before them was not an “enemy combatant,” the officers were dismissed and “do-over” tribunals were convened until the authorities got the results they desired.

Despite the insuperable problems with the CSRTs, they — and their successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards — often provided the only opportunity for the prisoners to have their own voices heard, and they proved invaluable when I was researching and writing The Guantánamo Files.

Now supplemented with information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks, the 62 stories in this five-part series cover 29 of the 38 prisoners who were the only ones, out of 558 prisoners in total, to succeed in convincing their tribunals, and the authorities overseeing the tribunals, they they were not “enemy combatants” — or, as the administration insisted, that they were “no longer enemy combatants.” The Pentagon’s document listing the 38 (PDF) describes them as “Detainees Found to No Longer Meet the Definition of ‘Enemy Combatant’ during Combatant Status Review Tribunals Held at Guantánamo.” The other nine were not freed because, in all but one case, it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries, and, as a result, they were not released until 2006 and 2009, when third countries were found that were prepared to accept them.

This series also covers the stories of 33 others released between September 2004 and November 2005 who were not cleared for release after the CSRTs, but were released anyway, and readers will, I hope, be able to see how much of the decision-making process involved political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice.

I also hope that readers will bear in the mind the Bush administration’s refusal to concede that it made any mistakes, which is apparent in its refusal to accept that prisoners were “not enemy combatants,” and its decision to described them as being “no longer enemy combatants” instead, and will reflect on the problems of overclassification that have been thoroughly chronicled in the preceding series analyzing the Detainee Assessment Briefs.

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

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part Four of Five)

Adel Al Zamel (ISN 568, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Adel al-Zamel, who was 38 years old at the time, was one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in Al-Qaida, although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Zamel told his tribunal that, in 2001, he became the manager of the Kabul office of the Saudi humanitarian aid charity Al-Wafa, and took his wife and their eight children to Afghanistan, unaware that the humanitarian charity was under suspicion for activities related to terrorism (although noticeably, these were never proved, despite numerous Al-Wafa members, and the organization’s director, being held at Guantánamo).

Al-Zamel also said that he gave up his job in August 2001 after a disagreement with a more senior figure, who, he felt, was arrogant and was squandering money that had been given in good faith for charitable purposes. He then moved his family to Pakistan in September, but returned to help the family of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith move to Pakistan as well. He added that he had met Abu Ghaith on a few occasions in Kuwait, but insisted that he did not know, until after 9/11, “when he appeared on TV,” that he was a spokesman for Al-Qaida. Speaking of his capture, he denied all knowledge that he was staying in a safe house, as alleged, and said that he had been there for 16 weeks awaiting the opportunity to return to Kuwait.

In Chapter 14, I explained that, speaking of his time in Bagram, al-Zamel said, in an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Adil al-Zamil), “While walking to the place of interrogation, the guards would continuously hit me on my head with sticks, and every time I denied their accusations during interrogations (of being tied to Al-Qaida) the guards would hit me even more, hold me high up and then fling me to the floor.” He added that he was hooded and “stripped naked in front of women officers while they clicked photos, laughing all the time,” was intimidated by interrogators placing a gun on the table during interrogations, and was “suspend[ed] with one hand tied to the ceiling during interrogations, making it almost impossible to either sit or stand straight.”

Speaking of his transfer to Cuba, al-Zamel said, “I call the journey to Guantánamo ‘the journey of death.’ I discreetly wished that the plane would fall to end the pain I felt.” He also explained that, in Guantánamo, he was a victim of a monstrous policy whereby medical treatment was dependant on cooperation with the interrogators.

He said he was beaten on the head with handcuffs, but was refused medical treatment for several weeks until his wound became infected. He also said that the guards “used to give me pills which I didn’t know what they were, I think they were drugs because I was sleeping almost all the time.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Zamel maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan purely for humanitarian purposes. “A former employee of the Kuwaiti national housing authority,” he confirmed that he moved to Kabul in August 2000 to head a branch of what McClatchy described as the “the Wafa Humanitarian Works Organization,” left Afghanistan in January 2002, and was seized in Pakistan the next month. Refuting the US authorities’ unsubstantiated claims about Al-Wafa, he said that “his work was solely charitable, distributing food and overseeing small infrastructure projects,” and that he was “merely an employee.”

According to the US military, however, “he was a key organizer and co-founder of its offices in three Afghan cities,” and in his tribunal and review board the authorities claimed that he “had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and knew at least two members of bin Laden’s inner circle,” although this seems particularly suspect, as there are counter-arguments that Al-Wafa and bin Laden did not see eye to eye. Nevertheless, McClatchy noted that, in his interview, he failed to mention Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, although, to be fair, that could be simply because of the negative connotations attached to Abu Ghaith’s name, if al-Zamel’s version of events as explained at Guantánamo was true.

Whatever the truth, the connection haunted him in Guantánamo. He said that, on arrival, when “he was still sore from being punched in the face and kicked in the gut for two and a half months while in US military custody in Afghanistan,” and was being examined by a doctor,  an interpreter “looked at him, grinned and whispered over and over: ‘Do you want to kill yourself? Do you want to kill yourself?’” He was then taken to interrogation, where a soldier “with a tattoo of a dragon stretching down his forearm shoved a piece of paper in Zamel’s face” which featured a simple diagram — the letters “UBL” (for Osama bin Laden, or Usama bin Laden as the US military called him), an arrow to Abu Ghaith, and another arrow to his own name.

A McClatchy reporter spoke to al-Zamel in Kuwait, describing him as “a small, thin man with dark rings under his eyes. When speaking with friends, he jokes often, flashing his teeth in wide grins, and he talks in energetic bursts. When he’s silent, when his face is still, he looks tired and old.” Speaking of Guantánamo, he stressed to the reporter, “You must understand, the psychological torture was much worse than physical torture,” and spoke about the solitary confinement (for a month) to which all new arrivals were subjected.

After the guards took him “to what looked like a small metal box,” he said, “The cell was hot. I couldn’t sleep at night. The pillow was soaked with my sweat. There was a small opening in the cell wall; I used to push my nose to it. I used the bathroom on the floor; there was nothing else to do.” He added, “I thought they were going to kill me, and then I thought they were going to leave me in there until I died. I was losing my mind. I started to think that one day they were going to open the door and let a lion in to eat me. The world was getting smaller and smaller.”

After his introductory month in solitary, he was taken to a regular cell, and “was interrogated every day after that for at least a month, pushed to confess his ties to Al-Qaida and to describe what he knew about bin Laden.” He told the reporter, “They asked me what I thought about the events of Sept. 11, and I did not reply. If I said I denounced those events, they would call me a liar. If I said I supported it, they would call me a terrorist.” When the interrogators “thought he wasn’t telling the truth,” he added, “he was sent back to solitary.”

He also said that, in his last year at Guantánamo, after the torture program had largely been brought to an end, following the arrival of lawyers after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, the interrogators nevertheless “began to threaten to send him to Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan or Morocco, where security agents would torture him in ways that he couldn’t imagine.” He said that he took the threats seriously, and that finally he cracked. “I told them, ‘I am Osama bin Laden. Please kill me,’” he said. “I just wanted it to end.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Zamel was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in August 1963, and the outline of his story — working for al-Wafa as an office manager, and then resigning and being caught in a house raid in Karachi — were repeated, along with a claim that he had been part of a group involved in an assault in Kuwait on a female student.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities and activities associated with upper echelons of the Al-Wafa organisation, Information about Al-Qaida and Taliban associated safe houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” plus “information about the Takfir Al-Hijra movement, [a] Kuwaiti Islamist group who seeks a return to Islam as practiced at the time of Muhammad, [and who] have conducted vigilante activity against young Kuwaitis engaged in what they perceive as immoral behaviour.”

This was a seemingly impressive list of reasons for his transfer, although, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In seeking to justify his detention, the Joint Task Force claimed that details of his timeline had been “conflicting and vague,” and also cited the concerns of the Kuwaiti Security Service (KSS), which, it was alleged, had reported that al-Zamel was a member of Takfir Al-Hijra, described as “an anti-Kuwait government group”), had claimed that Abu Ghaith had “close relationships with members of this group, specifically naming the detainee,” and had also stated that al-Zamel “was convicted and sentenced (in absentia) to one year in prison by the Kuwaiti government,” and was “considered to be a ‘Most Dangerous Extremist.’” If all this was true, it was a wonder that al-Zamel was freed on his return to Kuwait, and, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

In Guantánamo, however, until diplomatic pressure was exerted on behalf of al-Zamel and the other four men, he would not have been released. He was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” as a result of the claims against him, and it was also noted that JTF GTMO regarded him as “a member of the Al-Qaida support network, an Islamic Extremist, and to have traveled to Afghanistan with the intent to evade capture.” It was also suggested that he moved his family and Abu Ghaith’s family to Pakistan prior to 9/11, suggesting he “had knowledge of the attacks prior to their execution,” and it was also stated, with the addition of the information reportedly from the Kuwaiti Security Service, that he had been determined to pose “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” even though, in reporting his behavior, the Task Force failed to portray a man who was a threat.

After noting that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” the Task Force stated that his “only aggressive incident occurred on December 31, 2003, when he kicked dirt and gravel at a military working dog and handler,” adding, “Every other action [he] has completed is minor passive aggressive.”

Sa’ad Al Azmi (ISN 571, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sa’ad al-Azmi, who was 22 years old at the time, was, like Adel al-Zamel (see above), one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in al-Qaeda (and was tortured, as a US judge explained in 2010), although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Azmi said that he was a friend of Adel al-Zamel, and that he spent three weeks with him in Kabul, and then ended up with him in the Karachi house. “The people I was arrested with were civilians,” he said. “They were not wearing uniforms. I did not know anybody there except al-Zamel.”

In Chapter 15, drawing on an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Saad al-Anzi), he spoke about the abuse he suffered at Guantánamo. He stated that, during one interrogation, the guards beat him so hard that they broke his leg, and he also spoke about the abuse he suffered as part of the implementation of specific “enhanced interrogation techniques” between late 2002 and the summer of 2004, which included the exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, through the use of dogs in al-Azmi’s case, as he said he was bitten by dogs while being hooded.

He was also subjected to levels of treatment introduced under the watch of Maj. Gen. Miller, which were entirely dependent on the prisoners’ cooperation with the interrogators. The most compliant, in Level 1, kept all their “comfort items” and also received a bottle of water a week, and the levels were graded down to Level 4, which involved prolonged isolation, in which the supposedly uncooperative prisoners were held completely naked, or were allowed just a pair of shorts, and all other “comfort items” were removed. Sa’ad al-Azmi was one of those who experienced Level 4 deprivation when he was held naked for two months.

Al-Azmi also spoke about medical mistreatment at Guantánamo, saying that he was “sprayed by a mysterious ‘red solution’ causing a burning sensation to his skin,” and, in response to claims that female interrogators were “sexually provocative” as “a way to break down devout Muslims,” he “confirmed that those incidents occurred to him too during his interrogations at Guantánamo.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Azmi maintained that he was an innocent man, detained for no apparent reason, although the McClatchy team was clearly alarmed by the many holes in his story. For example, he told the reporter that he’d never been to Afghanistan, contradicting what he said in Guantánamo, and failed to mentioned Al-Wafa or his connection with Adel al-Zamel, claiming instead to have been seized in a hotel room in Peshawar “during a routine police check of guests’ passports” in August 2001.

While this section of his story did not make sense, given what is known of the circumstances of his capture, it is probable that what he told the reporter about his experiences in Pakistani and US custody was more accurate. In Karachi, he said, “he was put into a dimly lit cell with about two dozen other men,” and “they were taken out one by one to an interrogation room where two American men — one tall and thin, one short and stocky with glasses — sat behind a table” and “introduced themselves as CIA officers.” They asked him about Al-Qaida, refusing to believe his story about being a businessman.

Al-Azmi added that “he spent about a month in that jail and was interrogated three or four more times,” and was then flown to Kandahar, where after two weeks, in which “American troops punched, kicked and humiliated him,” he was flown to Bagram, where he was held for a month and a half, and was then flown back to Kandahar for about three months before being sent to Guantánamo.

In the Documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Azml was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in May 1979, and the Task Force established a narrative based on a variety of “claims” he had apparently made: that “he worked for Al-Wafa in Kabul,” that “one month after the ’9/11′ attacks (approximately October 2001), he moved to Peshawar,” and that, “in December 2001,he went to Karachi, PK, and stayed with Aziz from the Al-Wafa Organization,” and was captured in Karachi in February 2002.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, The Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” The Al-Wafa Organization stationed in the Wazir Akhbar Khan Area of Kabul, The Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO located in Wazir Akbar Khan Area of Kabul, [and] Aziz (LNU) who provided Arabs fleeing Pakistan with a means to leave the country.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida who has traveled extensively in the West, including travels to countries such as Switzerland, Germany and Bosnia,” although, with the exception of Bosnia, these claims seem more to mark him out as a Kuwaiti from a reasonably well-off family than as some sort of Al-Qaida scout, and Bosnia, of course, was a prime destination for the support of the Muslim population during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

It was also reported that, like Adel al-Zamel, he was involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, an extremist group that had attacked a female student in Kuwait, and that he was “wanted by the Kuwaiti government for crimes he committed while affiliated with several terrorist groups,” which was very vague. It was also stated, again in a very vague manner, that he “likely ha[d] knowledge of the Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO,” which was regarded as a front for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization opposed to the rule of Col. Gaddafi in Libya. The LIFG was also regarded by US authorities as being intimately involved with Al-Qaida, although that remains largely disputed.

As a result of the claims against him, al-Azmi was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and as “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its worldwide network,” who had “numerous close associations with known members of Al-Qaida or Al-Qaida associated organizations,” and “may have connections with European-based Al-Qaida members,” including an alleged “Spanish Cell” that later came to nothing when subjected to scrutiny. It was also assessed that his “travels to Bosnia were likely to obtain military training and participate in Jihad,” and as it was also claimed that he was “part of a large Al-Qaida contingent in Pakistan at the time of his capture, where he was living in an Al-Qaida safehouse with a key Al-Qaida facilitator,” and that he was a convicted Islamic extremist with known terrorist associations in Kuwait and he remains committed to Jihad.” As he was also allegedly “still wanted by the Kuwaiti movement for crimes he committed under Kuwaiti law,” the Task Force assessed him as “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.”

It was, however, noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, although, “in the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” CITF was obliged to “defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] poses a high risk.” Even so, on his return to Kuwait, he, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

Saeed Abdur Rahman (ISN 581, Pakistan) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Saeed Abdur Rahman is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Saeed Abdur Rahman, who was 36 years old at the time of his capture, was, as I described it, an “unfortunate victim of Pakistani zeal (or opportunism).” In Guantánamo (where, absurdly, he was identified as Shed Abdur Rahman), he said that he was at home in his village, scraping a living as a poor chicken farmer, when the police raided his house in January 2002, arresting him and telling him that he could not bribe his way to freedom.

Delivered to the Americans, he was accused of being Abdur Rahman Zahid, one of the Taliban’s deputy ministers of foreign affairs, and was later accused of having been a Taliban military judge and a prison guard in Kandahar, who “tortured, maimed and murdered” Afghan prisoners, even though Rahman said that, after he was handed over to the US forces, “An American told me I was wrongfully taken and that in a couple of days I’d be freed.”

What made these allegations all the more incomprehensible was that, in December 2001, Mullah Khaksar, a former Taliban minister who had actually been working as a spy for the Northern Alliance since 1997, said that Abdur Rahman Zahid “had deliberately created the impression that he entered Pakistan, but had in fact returned to his home village in Logar province.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mollah Shed Abdul Rehman, born in 1965, it was also noted that, as well as being diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), he had also been diagnosed with “Chronic Acute Hepatitis B,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force first acknowledged that he had been identified as an Afghan, but that a request had been sent to the relevant department to change his nationality to Pakistani, and then ran through the sad account of his capture, noting that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities while in his home in the fall of 2001,” when he “was arrested and charged with the theft of antiquities even though [he] state[d] that they had no proof.” After being imprisoned in Quetta for 36 days, he was, by his own account, then “sold” to the US authorities in Kandahar.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of his knowledge of the Sorkhab refugee camp, and information on fighting with the Mujahideen forces against the Russians.” These alleged reasons for his transfer expose clearly how desperate were the attempts to make sense of the process of sending prisoners to be the victims of an experimental offshore interrogation camp, when the very fact of detention — and some crazed ideas about creating a global “mosaic” of intelligence, no matter how small and seemingly irrelevant the components — was much more significant than whether there was any rational basis for the exploitation of the prisoners.

In his letters home, it was noted that he “wanted his family to keep up the chicken farm and to inquire about his ‘amanita’ which is translated as something precious or valuable that is given to someone else for safekeeping.” The confusion regarding his identity was also raised, with the Task Force noting that a name “very similar to the detainee’s” (Abdul Rehman, which is a very common name indeed) “was found in sensitive reporting identifying Taliban plans to send 39 individuals to Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union to carry out unspecified terrorist acts.” Refusing to acknowledge that there was no reason to link this individual to the chicken farmer in their custody, the Task Force added, “There was a passport number associated with the document, however the US does not have a copy of detainee’s passport to match the passport numbers.”

In conclusion, the Task Force stated, “Based on current information, detainee [581] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee pose a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Karama Khamisan (ISN 586, Yemen) Released August 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Karama Khamisan is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the extraordinary story of how Karama Khamisan (also identified as Karam Khamis Sayd Khamsan), a former Yemeni soldier who went to Afghanistan as part of a drug smuggling ring, and was held as a human guarantor until the deal was completed. was seized at the same time as two other men who also ended up at Guantánamo — Brahim Benchekroun, a Moroccan (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Seven of Ten)“), who said after his release that he was “rounded up by the Pakistani security forces at the end of 2001″ near Lahore, “at the time of the first round-ups of Arabs in the Koranic schools,” and Ahmed Errachidi (ISN 590, released in March 2007), a Moroccan chef, who had been living in the UK for 18 years, and who was seized in Islamabad, where he had been working in a jewelry store after visiting Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the US-led invasion. Khamisan explained that, following the US-led invasion, the drug dealers fled, leaving him near the border with Pakistan, where he was captured by Pakistani villagers.

Benchekroun described what happened to the three men once they were in Pakistani custody. “We were looking through the makeshift blindfolds that the Pakistanis had put on us,” he said, adding that Errachidi spoke English and was following the negotiations, when “people showed up with black suitcases and started bargaining with the Pakistanis over the price for handing us over.” When they agreed on a price of $5,000 a head, Benchekroun explained, they all applauded. He also said that Khamisan was singled out for unusual treatment: “The Pakistanis made him grow a beard and learn to pray. I taught him the basics about washing myself. We didn’t understand that it was so that they could sell him to the Americans, too.”

In Chapter 14, drawing on an interview conducted after his release (in “Guantánamo: Lives Torn Apart — The Impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families,” an Amnesty International report from February 2006), I explained how Khamisan had a tough time in the US prison at Bagram airbase. Kicked and beaten while hooded, stripped naked and beaten with batons, he was then transferred to Kandahar, where he was “threatened with electric shocks,” and where, in a sign that Abu Ghraib-style abuse was already being practiced, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped and piled on top of each other naked, whilst the US officials, in full military uniform, laughed at them and took photographs of the pile of naked bodies.”

In Chapter 15, I explained how Khamisan also suffered in Guantánamo, ending up in isolation after being sexually threatened. He explained that on one occasion he was “taken to the shower room where guards attempted to sexually abuse him. As he pushed them away, ten guards entered the room and beat him before transferring him to a solitary cell where he was held for 25 days, naked. He said that he was only taken to use the toilet and shower once in this entire period and that he ate no solid food in order to avoid having to defecate in his cell.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Khamisan was an “Update of Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated December 6, 2003, in which it was noted that he was born in 1970, and had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (along with many other prisoners), and had been “treated for Gum Disease,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

The information about the circumstances of his detention were not included with this document (they were “Same as previously stated” in an earlier assessment), but reasons for his continued detention were given, including a far-fetched sounding claim that he was “a criminal who was jailed in Yemen for attempting to kill the governor of his province, which he stated he did ‘just for the heck of it.’” He also claimed he “escaped prison while being transferred to a minimum-security facility, and he may still be wanted in Yemen for this crime.”

It was also claimed that he “was asked a series of questions concerning his attitude toward the US during which [he] stated that he speculated that Osama bin Laden attacked the US because the US was killing Palestinians,” which he further explained by stating that Israel and the US were “exactly the same,” and adding that “any Arab would say the same thing abut the relationship between Israel and the US.” The oppression of the Palestinian people was indeed a major motivation behind bin Laden’s jihad against the US (along with the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia), but it was inadvisable to say that in Guantánamo, or, I suspect, to criticise Israel either.

Nevertheless, although he was described, unconvincingly, as someone who “continues to express his commitment to Jihad during interrogations” (as he was not in Afghanistan for jihad), it was clear that, as he said, he was a member — whether willingly or not — of a drug-dealing group, which made the Task Force’s claim that his associate, “Mohammed,” had been “identified through reporting as being a supporter of the Taliban” rather dubious, despite the further information that “Mohammed and his criminal group ha[d] reportedly provided transportation, equipment and funding for the Taliban, who in turn protected him and supported his narcotics business.”

However, the most alarming part of the document relating to Khamisan was the reference to an allegation against him that was taken seriously by the authorities, even though, to skeptical eyes, it was nonsense, made by Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as the most notorious liar in Guantánamo, who told interrogators that Khamisan was “a trainee at the Al-Farouq training camp and part of an Arab group fighting the Northern Alliance where his alias was ‘The Murderer.’” As was conceded, however, “After further investigation it has been determined that this was a misidentification [a polite term for an outrageous lie] and in fact the detainee is known as ‘Karama the Hashish dealer,’ which substantiates other reporting concerning this detainee and some of [his] statements.”

In conclusion, he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” although he was also assessed as being “of intelligence value to the United States, and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result of Basardah’s allegations being discredited, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

On his return from Guantánamo, as the human rights NGO Al-Karama for Human Rights explained in April 2009, Khamisan (identified as Karama Khamis Said Khamisan) was held incommunicado for several months before being acquitted by the State Security court, on March 13, 2006, “on charges of trafficking narcotic.” An appeal was dismissed on April 30, 2006, and he was freed on May 10.

Al-Karama noted that he suffered from “a serious stomach ulcer that he contracted as a result of the torture he had suffered at Guantánamo,” for which he received medical treatment, but also explained that, on March 16, 2009, almost three years to the day after his acquittal, he disappeared while making his usual visit to his doctor. As Al-Karama also stated, “His family remained without news of him for over a week. Finally they learned that he was arrested while leaving a mosque by an officer of political security services and taken to its headquarters at Al-Ghaida in Al-Mahra governorate. Having found out this information, his family was able to receive confirmation of his detention and was even allowed to visit him. They later learned that no case had been filed against him. Since this single visit and despite many attempts by his family, the security policy refuse give any further concerning his future, to the point that he is now completely cut off from the outside world.”

Al-Karama appealed to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, asking it to urgently intervene with the Yemeni authorities, and Khamisan was finally freed August 16, 2009, after five months in secret detention. “Throughout this whole period,” as Al-Karama noted, “he was never brought before a judge nor were any charges brought against him.”

Khalid Al Asmar (ISN 589, Jordan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Khalid al-Asmar is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Khalid al-Asmar, who was 38 yeas old at the time of his capture, drawing on statements he made in Guantánamo (where he was described as Khalid al-Asmr), and in “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” an article by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, for Index on Censorship in 2005, based on interviews with former Jordanian prisoners after their release. The section on al-Asmar is cross-posted here.

Al-Asmar explained how he had been captured by the Pakistani police. A former mujahideen fighter against the Soviet Union, he married an Afghan woman, Fatima, whose parents and sister had been killed in a Soviet bombing raid in 1984, and moved to Pakistan, where he supported Fatima and their seven children by selling herbs and honey. In 2000, they returned to Afghanistan, settling in Kabul, which, at the time, was relatively safe, but when the war came to the city in November 2001 and US bombers planes destroyed a warehouse behind their home, they bundled the children into their white Toyota Corolla and set off for Pakistan once more.

Unfortunately, the US military associated white Toyotas with the Taliban, and, on the way to Pakistan, they were targeted twice by US bombers, narrowly avoiding death on both occasions when the Americans’ rockets failed to hit their target. When they reached Islamabad, al-Asmar found work and also contacted a Libyan charity that arranged flights to Jordan, where his parents still lived, but the day before their proposed departure he called his wife to say that he had been detained by the Pakistani police, and told her to leave without him. “I wasn’t worried,” Fatima said, “because I knew Khalid had done nothing wrong,” but seven months later she heard that he was in Guantánamo. Acknowledging that her husband may have aroused suspicion because he fought with the mujahideen, she said that he saw the Taliban’s role as different to that of the mujahideen. “This was a war for power,” she said. “Khalid wanted nothing to do with it. He said it was not for God.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released  Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, in which he was identified as Khaled al-Asmr, he explained how, in the three and a half years he was held in US custody, he persistently “told American interrogators that he hadn’t known bin Laden in the 1980s, when both of them were in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet army.” In his tribunal, he said, “The interrogators, every time they ask me, ‘Have you met Osama bin Laden?’ my response is that I’ve never met Osama bin Laden. What I told them is that I have seen Osama bin Laden from a distance for a period of maybe a few minutes.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he explained that he had, in fact, met bin Laden in the 1980s, and had “spent many hours chatting” with him, although he “didn’t remain in contact” with him afterwards. Primarily, at that time, he had worked with the “Services Office” (Maktab al-Khadamat), headed by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of bin Laden, who was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in November 1989. In some ways, Assam’s organisation was the precursor to al-Qaeda (literally, “the base”), but it was dedicated to tracking, recording and providing money for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was not, as Al-Qaida’s “base” of contacts later became, an organization dedicated to terrorist attacks on the US and its interests. Al-Asmar admitted knowing Abdullah Azzam, but “said his relationship with Azzam had been indirect, that he’d worked with Azzam’s wife in an offshoot group.”

In Guantánamo, he was also accused of working for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, tarred as a front for terrorism, despite being a vast charity involved in important humanitarian operations around the world. He “denied that he was a member of Al-Haramain, but said that he dealt with the group occasionally through his food-trading business.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he reportedly “admitted to a long-standing relationship with Al-Hamarain and Azzam,” and told the reporter that, although he knew nothing about Al-Qaida’s operations, “he could have provided a thorough sketch of bin Laden and those around him,” which, McClatchy editorialized, was “possibly crucial information that might have helped the Americans better understand the terrorist mastermind in the early days of 2002.”

As it was, the Americans’ treatment of him meant that cooperation was out of the question. Describing his trip from Pakistan to Bagram he said that he and others picked up in Islamabad “sat on the ground of an airstrip, shackled, with hoods over their heads, and listened as someone walked passed them and counted out loud the number of prisoners. When the counting stopped, a man speaking English with an American accent said to the Pakistanis, ‘You’ve got seven of them here. We’ll give you $5,000 for each one.’”

He added, “Then they (US soldiers) started hitting and kicking me. They lifted me up to take me to the plane, still hitting me in the back and hitting me on my face, saying, ‘Taliban, huh?’” As a result, he said, “he decided to tell the Americans as little as possible,” although the reporter added, “It’s hard to know whether he’d have spoken more freely had he been treated better.”

After three weeks at Bagram, he was sent to the US prison at Kandahar airport, where he stayed for about three and a half months, and “faced harassment,” including “alleged fondling of his sex organs, which he said unsettled him more than rough treatment did.” As he explained, “Once they said, ‘We will conduct a medical checkup.’ They took me to a clinic, but instead of doing a checkup, a female soldier played with my sexual organs. When she was doing this, I prayed to God to help me, and my penis did not move.” He said the soldier in question “had brown hair and looked to be in her 40s,” and “didn’t do anything else during the exam but stroke his penis, wearing latex gloves.” He added, “There were male soldiers watching it happen. They were laughing and making jokes.” After this, he said, he was taken to interrogation. The interrogator “didn’t mention the episode in the clinic, Asmr said, but grinned, asked how his day was going and wondered aloud whether he might be ready to talk.” “No,” was his reply.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Asmar was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Khalid al-Asmr or Khalid al-Asmr Wahad, born in December 1963. In running through his story, the Task Force stated that in 1985 he traveled to Pakistan to work with the vast missionary organisation Jamaat al-Tablighi, which, outrageously, the authorities at Guantánamo claimed was a front for terrorism, and confirmed that he then worked with Sheikh Abdullah Azzam coordinating aid to various groups involved with the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who was funded by the US in the 1980s, but is now an implacable enemy of the US). Despite his evasiveness, the Task Force also recognized that, “In late 1987/early 1988, [he] met UBL [bin Laden] in the company of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.”

Moving to the events preceding his capture, it was noted that, in June 2000, he traveled to Kabul, where he was “an ‘unofficial’ employee of Al-Haramayn Islamic Foundation” (aka Al-Haramain), which, despite being a huge charity with a global reach, was described as “a Tier 1 NGO; which is defined as having demonstrated sustained and active support for terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests, according to the Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism CounterTerrorism Tiers, dated 10 December 2003.”

In late September 2001, he and his family fled to Peshawar, and “applied to the Qadafi Foundation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation] for assistance in returning home,” but “was arrested by Pakistani police in Islamabad, PK, and was subsequently turned over to US Forces.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that he “may be able to provide general or specific information on: Maktib Al-Kadmat [aka  Maktab al-Khadamat, Abdullah Azzam's "Services Office" for mujahideen in Afghanistan] and Al-Haramayn, [and the] Al-Khadafi Committee for Repatriation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation].”

In its assessment, the Task Force was deeply suspicious of his connections, noting that “he denie[d] having belonged to Al-Qaida or any other terrorist organization irrespective of the fact that JT [Jamaat al-Tablighi] and Al-Haramayn have been associated with Al-Qaida (which was not necessarily true, of course), and also drawing on a claim that he “spent a number of years associating with such individuals as Azzam and UBL,” which was true with reference to Azzam, but not bin Laden, and which, in addition, completely overlooks the fact that, in the 1980s in Afghanistan, he (and Azzam and bin Laden) were allies of the US (whether financially supported or not) and not enemies.

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of  posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its allies and interests,”  in particular because his connections suggested to the US authorities that he had “more ties to Al-Qaida than he claim[ed],” even though he was extremely well-behaved in Guantánamo, and was described as being “on the best behaviour level and liv[ing] with detainees who [we]re equally cooperative and non-aggressive.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained in DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with the Task Force’s assessment, because, “in the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] poses a high risk.”

Padsha Wazir (ISN 631, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Padsha Wazir is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I told the story of Padsha Wazir, a shopkeeper from a village near Khost, Wazir, who was married with three children and was 29 years old at the time of his capture. In Guantánamo, he told his tribunal that the allegations against him — that he was involved with the renegade warlord Pacha Khan Zadran in a military capacity, and that he was responsible for  “securing” a village for him — were a pack of lies. The baleful influence of Zadran (one of the most dubious US allies in the years following the US-led invasion) permeates many of the Afghan stories in Guantánamo, and Wazir was clearly another victim.

Wazir added that he had only ever seen Zadran “for five minutes and that was after the Taliban left and the Americans came. He was with the Americans.” He explained that he was actually working with the local commander, Mohammed Yousef, helping to secure the area for the Americans, and also stated that he was arrested at a checkpoint, with his brother and two friends, while traveling to Miram Shah in Pakistan to see members of his family. He pointed out that, although the other three were released on the spot, the commander at the checkpoint (one of Zadran’s men), told lies about him to an American soldier after he refused to hand over his gun, for which he had a permit, which led to his capture and transfer to Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Wazir was an “Updated Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated November 22, 2003, in which he was identified as Bacha Wazir, born in 1972. In this document, the circumstances of his capture were not discussed, but the Task Force was deeply suspicious abut him although not necessarily with any reason. It was claimed that he “ha[d] not been forthright in his interviews.” He “claims to be a ‘simple shopkeeper,’” the Task Force noted, but “[t]his claim remains unverified.” The Task Force also speculated that he “may have connections to various persons affiliated with the former Taliban regime,” and that he “may be a Mid to High-level Taliban supporter and may have facilitated hostile actions against US interests.” It was also stated that he “need[ed] to be fully exploited concerning his suspected involvement with the local HiG insurgent movement [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the organization headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar].”

As a result of these doubts, he was “assessed as being a probable Taliban leader however not a member of Al-Qaida,” and as being “of intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “[r]etain[ed] under DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force did not agree with this assessment. On November 6, 2003, CITF “categorized [him] as a Low Threat,” but CITF’s Behavioral Sciences Consultation Team was asked to “reevaluate their threat assessment.” The result of this is not known, but 17 months later he was finally freed.

Mushtaq Ali Patel (ISN 649, France) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Mushtaq Ali Patel is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Mushtaq Ali Patel, born in India but a French national through his marriage to a Creole woman from Réunion, who was 39 years old at the time of his capture. Patel explained at Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel), and after his release in an article in Libération (translated for Cageprisoners) that, although his wife and child were living in France, he had been working in Iran, where he taught at an Islamic school and traded in clothes and jewelry.

After setting out for Pakistan, via Afghanistan, in October 2001, he was abducted, in the countryside near Herat, by three Afghans, including a policeman, who stole his passport and his money, beat him with their fists and with electric cables, and took him to a police station in Ghazni, where he was forced to say that he was a Saudi, born in Medina, and that his name was Haji Mohammed. After several months, he was taken to Kabul to “some kind of a house that was like a prison,” where he was sold to the Americans for $5,000. He said that the Americans threatened him with death “and to cause problems to my family,” and then transferred him to Bagram, where they had “very hard attitudes,” and Kandahar, where he was “badly mistreated, interrogated in bad ways.”

Alarmingly, Patel’s weight in Guantánamo was disturbingly low throughout his detention, as was apparent from the weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, which I analysed for a short report for Cageprisoners in June 2009, entitled, “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” (introduction here, report here). In that report, I noted how he had been chronically underweight throughout his detention, weighing just 89 pounds on arrival, and dropping to 76 pounds in November 2002, which was more or less where his weight remained for an alarmingly long period of his imprisonment. In his Libération interview, it became apparent that he had been very ill at Guantánamo, as he explained:

I became sick at Guantánamo. They took me to the health clinic. I stayed in hospital for 4 to 5 months the first time. I had chest and throat problems, and headaches. They gave me medication. I don’t know what it was. I slept sometimes, but not all the time. I was in bed. I had one foot and one hand enchained. I never got out, ever. I wanted to leave, but they did not let me. I was anguished being restrained all the time. They forced me to take medication, pills. I said “no,” but they forced me. That was the hardest time at Guantánamo. Some of the medicines had an effect on my sleep, kept me from sleeping and created respiratory problems. I could have refused to take them, but it was difficult as they forced me to swallow them in front of them. Sometimes there was the same medication for everyone, and you had to swallow it immediately.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Patel was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 27, 2004, in which he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel and Mohammed Ibn Ismael al-Akram (as well as Mohammed Haji and Haji Muhammed), born in January 1961, and his health issues were described in depth. The Task Force noted that he had “multiple psychiatric diagnoses, including depression and schizotlpal personality disorder, but [wa]s otherwise in good physical health.” It was also noted that his medications included “synthroid, celexa, zprexa, zantac, a multivitamin, and simethicone.” The Task Force added, “Schizotypal personality disorder is often characterized as having a belief in clairvoyance or telepathy, the use of metaphorical speech, paranoid ideations, and severe mood disorders. It is likely a genetic relation to schizophrenia, but the two should not be confused with each other.”

Because of his severe mental health problems, he told different stories about himself. In one version, he “claimed he was born in Medina, Saudi Arabia and claimed to be an ‘orphan,’ only to acknowledge later that his parents [we]re citizens of India and currently alive,” that they lived in India, and “were previously employed as foreign laborers in Saudi Arabia,” where, “[b]ecause they are not Saudi, the Saudi government will not grant citizenship to a non-Arab, regardless of birthplace.” In another version (the true one), he said that he was born in Shepura, India,  and was a French citizen by marriage (on Réunion), which the French government confirmed.

Clearly bewildered by him, and unprepared for what to think when confronted by someone with such severe mental health issues, the Task Force noted that, during interrogation on March 23, 2004, he admitted that his stories about the orphanage, about living in Saudi Arabia, and about selling fruit were lies, and that he traveled to France when he was 22 or 23, sold radios for a living, “had $10,000 USD on his person when captured,” and had lived briefly in Germany and Turkey, but had been living in Mashad, Iran, for 15 years before his capture in Afghanistan.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide general-to-specific information on Taliban and Al-Qaida forces operating in Kunduz and Takhar provinces as well as various illegal activities taking place in Afghanistan.”

In assessing him, however, the Task Force described him, without mentioning any mitigating factors, as someone who had “never been cooperative or forthright during his detention” and had “not revealed his true name or any of his affiliations.” He was also described as “a possible Al-Qaida operative based on his circumstance of travels and his suspected affiliations.”

Assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” he was also assessed as being “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its allies, and interests until his true identity is known.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention until his true name and extremist affiliations have been determined,” although it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with JTF GTMO on the assessment of Patel as “a high risk,” which, presumably, helped lead to his release a year later.

Mamdouh Habib (ISN 661, Australia) Released January 2005

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing mainly on an article published after his release (and not on the unsubstantiated allegations for his tribunal at Guantánamo), I explained how Mamdouh Habib, who was 47 years old at the time of his capture, was one of several dozen prisoners at Guantánamo who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” and were transferred to other prisons for torture, before their transfer to Guantánamo.

Habib, seized in November 2001, was traveling on a bus from Quetta to Karachi when it was stopped by Pakistani soldiers. Plucked from his seat as a suspected militant, he was moved from jail to jail for three weeks, interrogated by US agents and “repeatedly tortured” by the Pakistani authorities.

Born in Egypt, he left at the age of 18, drifted to Europe and settled in Australia in 1980, where he became a citizen, married a Lebanese woman, had four children, and ran a cleaning business. He later opened a coffee shop in a suburb of Sydney, but became “chronically depressed” and ended up on a disability benefit. In summer 2001, seeking “a purer Islamic lifestyle,” he set off for Pakistan to look for work so that he could bring his family over to join him, but when he was captured it became apparent to the Americans that they had caught someone with a radical history.

Habib admitted that one of his reasons for leaving Australia was because he was “caught between police who suspected him of terror links and an often hostile Muslim community that was sometimes suspicious of his activities,” and these suspicions were triggered after a visit to the US, when he met followers of the Egyptian-born cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. Also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” Abdel-Rahman was a major source of inspiration for Osama bin Laden, and was serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to blow up several New York landmarks.

Habib’s troubles began when he stayed in touch with Abdul Rahman’s associates in New York on his return to Sydney, and spoke out in his defense, but although there was nothing in his activities to suggest that he was actually involved in any kind of terrorist activity, as soon as the Americans found out about his history they rendered him to Egypt. For six months, he was “suspended from hooks on the walls while his feet rested on a rotating metal drum that delivered electric shocks,” “kicked, punched, beaten with a stick and rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod,” and handcuffed and left in a room that gradually filled with water until it was just beneath his chin. “Broken” by the Egyptians, he made a number of false confessions — in particular, that he “trained several of the September 11 hijackers in martial arts and had planned to hijack a plane himself” — which were then used against him after he was transferred to Guantánamo, via Afghanistan, in June 2002.

In Guantánamo, he continued to be treated brutally, and several prisoners reported his suffering. The British prisoners Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Two of Ten)“) said that he was “in catastrophic shape, mental and physical,” and that, as a result of his torture, “he used to bleed from his nose, mouth and ears when he was asleep.” Habib also made allegations about his treatment in Guantánamo — in particular that he was “smeared with the menstrual blood of a prostitute” during an interrogation — and complained vociferously about being kept in solitary confinement in Camp Echo: “They use every possible [way] to make me crazy. They put me in isolation all the time. I never see the sun. I never have shower like a human being. I never have soap. I never have cup to drink. I never treated like a human being.”

Habib was also one of the many prisoners for whom it was made clear that medical treatment was dependent on cooperation, as he was told by medics that he would only be given treatment for the internal bleeding he suffered in Egypt if he cooperated with his interrogators.

Given this catalogue of abuse, and the allegations against him, it came as a surprise to everyone — including the Australian authorities — when he was released from Guantánamo in January 2005, and returned to Australia as a free man, but for those watching closely, it was engineered by the Bush administration in the hope that his story would then disappear, as it had been acutely embarrassing when details of Habib’s rendition and torture were included in a US court filing and exposed in the Washington Post on January 6, 2005, just three weeks before his release.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Habib was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated August 6, 2004, in which Habib, described as being born in June 1955, was diagnosed as having “a history of depression and behavioral disorders, benign prostatic hypertrophy, hungerstriking, and had a knee surgery performed.” It was also noted that he “carries the Hepatitis B virus.”

In telling Habib’s story, the Task Force described how he had served in the Egyptian army from 1975 to 1978, and then moved to Australia in 1980, where he initially lived with his sister. Other key events mentioned were his visit to New York in December 1992, to visit another two of his sisters, a brief visit to Afghanistan in 1999, and the last fateful journey in 2001, which allegedly involved him attending “a military training base,” where he stayed for “only 3 to 4 days,” before returning to Kandahar, where “he was told to leave because the US had began [sic] its bombing campaign.”

It was then noted that, when Pakistani forces seized him on a bus from Quetta to Karachi in October 2001, it was reportedly “with two Germans who were suspected Al-Qaida members from Hamburg, Germany” (about whom, to the best of my knowledge, nothing further has been heard, although they were identified as “Tier III personalities in the Hamburg 9/11 cell”). He was then “held at a Pakistan military base in Quetta, PK, and was subsequently transferred to Egyptian control” — a careful reference to his rendition to torture, which was followed up with the breezy-sounding statement that he “spent six months with Egyptian interrogators” before being transferred back to US custody.

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “may be able to provide specific information on the students, staff, and curriculum of the Al-Qaida intelligence and operations course,” because “he may also be able to provide general information on key Al-Qaida support network figures with whom he had personal contact,” and because he “may be able to provide specific information on the support network of Lashkar-e-Tayiba in Kashmir.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force drew also on the details of his US visit in 192 and the lies about him training the 9/11 hijackers that were extracted under torture, claiming that he had been “linked to the 11 Sept 2001 hijackers, Al-Qaida, Lashkar-e-Tayiba of Pakistan, Al Gamma Al Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] of Australia, German 9/11 cell and conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” and noting that he was “suspected of being a money courier and a terrorist operations facilitator, due to his extensive international travels.”

Analyzing Habib’s purported connection with terrorists in the US, the Task Force claimed that, as well as visiting in 1992, when he “allegedly befriended” Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, who was later convicted for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he had made a previous visit (or perhaps more than one). It was claimed, for example, that he attended the trial of the Egyptian-born US citizen El-Sayyid Nosair, for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, but this took place in 1991.

El-Gabrowny was Nosair’s cousin, and the Task Force claimed that, in discussions with Habib, he told him “he desired to move away from the US,” and Habib suggested that he  move to Australia “because it was a quiet place to live for Muslims.” An analyst also noted that “Immigration records and external investigations show that [Habib] was also in New York during 1988/89.”

These alleged connections may not prove anything more than that Habib moved in circles where he met Egyptian-born US citizens while in America, as might be expected, but the US authorities were desperate to tie him to terrorism, claiming that, because he had a cleaning business involving the Australian military, which collapsed, leaving him in debt after a court case, that was a reason for him to have possibly been a courier or “financial operator” for Al-Qaida.

The most shocking information in Habib’s file, however, concerns the false statements that he made while being tortured in Egypt. As the Task Force explained, coyly:

While in the custody of the Egyptian Government, under extreme duress, [he] alleged that he made the following admissions of guilt, which he now denies:

• He trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in the use of martial arts
• He also taught them how to use a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter He was en route to hijack a Qantas flight with his friend Jamal (LNU)
• His friend Rakim (LNU) was going to conduct a simultaneous operation from Thailand
• He had information on his home computer to be used to poison an unidentified river in the United States
• He fought in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan

Habib “retracted all the above statements during an interrogation in Jan 2003. He claimed he lied to Egyptian authorities when he admitted to the above statements.”

Despite this, the US authorities (obviously drawing heavily on the co-operation of the Australian government) followed up on the fact that a member of a mosque in the town where Habib lived in Australia was arrested in connection with a terrorist plot (and another was “implicated’ in it), to throw further innuendo his way, claiming that these two men were connected to the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and that Habib was too. This was designed to appear significant, even though it was conceded that Habib had “a hostile relationship” with the mosque.

Another dubious claim came from one of Habib’s fellow prisoners at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), who stated that he “ha[d] ‘strong knowledge’ of the Egyptian Islamic extremist group, Al-Gamma Al-Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] in Australia,” and an analyst noted, “Al-Gamma Al-Islamia has a strong following in Germany. This may explain why the detainee was captured with the two Germans, who also may be members of Al-Gamma Al-Islamia.” This was tenuous, to say the least, partly because it has not been established that Habib was with the two Germans whose whereabouts are unknown, other than being on the same bus as them, but also because Slahi is one of the most well-known torture victims at Guantánamo, whose testimony is therefore untrustworthy, and there is no evidence that he ever met Habib.

In conclusion, the Task Force described Habib as being “of high intelligence value,” and “a high risk,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, in a recap of reasons he was regarded as threat, in which it was noted that there were “serious intelligence gaps” regarding his activities, the most telling phrase concerned the results of his interrogation and torture in Egypt, which prompted the Task Force to ask, “Was any of the information that he provided to the Egyptians valid?”

Since his release, Habib has campaigned against both the US and Australian governments for their roles in his detention, rendition and torture. He has undertaken numerous interviews, and also, with Julia Collingwood, wrote a book, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, which was published in November 2008, and in February 2011, as the Mubarak regime fell in Egypt, and, briefly, it looked as if Omar Suleiman would take over, Habib told the Australian (as I reported here) that this would be unforgivable because, after he was rendered to Egypt, “Mr. Suleiman helped torture him.”

The Australian also explained that, in his book, Habib “wrote that Mr. Suleiman had often been present during his interrogations,” and also noted:

“I was sitting in a chair, hooded, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. He came up to me. His voice was deep and rough. He spoke to me in Egyptian and English,” Mr. Habib writes. “He said, ‘Listen, you don’t know who I am, but I am the one who has your life in his hands’.”

Mr. Habib writes that Mr. Suleiman had told him that he wanted him to die a slow death: “No, I don’t want you to die now. I want you to die slowly. I can’t stay with you; my time is too valuable to stay here. You only have me to save you. I’m your saviour. You have to tell me everything if you want to be saved. What do you say?”

When Mr. Habib said he had nothing to tell him, he says Mr. Suleiman had said: “You think I can’t destroy you just like that?”

They had taken Mr. Habib to another room and then Mr. Suleiman had said: “Now you are going to tell me that you planned a terrorist attack. I give you my word you will be a rich man if you tell me you have been planning attacks. Don’t you trust me?” Mr. Habib had replied that he did not trust anyone. “Immediately he slapped me hard across the face and knocked off the blindfold; I clearly saw his face,” Mr. Habib writes.

Mr. Habib alleges Mr. Suleiman said: “That’s it. That’s it. I don’t want to see this man again until he co-operates and tells me he’s been planning a terrorist attack.”

Mohammed Anwarkurd (ISN 676, Iran) Released August 2005

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I explained how Mohammed Anwarkurd, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mohamed Anwar Kurd) that he went to Afghanistan on a shopping expedition. He said that he had gone to buy electronic equipment for his brother, because it was cheaper than in Iran and could be sold for a profit, but was seized by the Taliban, who stole his money and conscripted him. He added that he “did not want to tell them that he was from Iran as he had heard that they killed Iranian diplomats.” Presumably captured by anti-Taliban forces at a later date, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan to buy a pistol to kill three people who had destroyed his mosque, or, alternately, of planning to assassinate two key Shia leaders in Zahedan, his home city.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mohammed Anwar Kurd, born in 1979, it was also stated that, as well as having latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, he had also been diagnosed with h. pylori (the bacteria responsible for most ulcers and many cases of stomach inflammation) and “adjustment disorder,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force drew on his own accounts of his activities, essentially covering the same ground that was later covered his tribunal: that he had traveled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan, to “purchase electronic devices for his brother’s electrical store in Zahedan, Iran,” ending up in Spin Boldak, where he traveled to “inspect some heavy machinery,” and that, as he tried to return, he was stopped by Taliban soldiers, who “asked for his identification card.” He said he “did not possess an identification card and claimed that he was from Nimroz, Afghanistan, because of an incident that occurred with ten Iranian diplomats who were accused of espionage and were summarily executed.”

The Taliban, he said, then conscripted him into service, “because they believed him to be an Afghan citizen.” As training, he reported that he “observed one Kalishnakov [sic] assault rifle and approximately six RPGs.” He was then taken, via a Taliban base in Kandahar, to Talogan, in Takhar province, where, he said, “the majority of the conscripts were taken to the frontlines to fight against Massoud’s forces” (the forces of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated on September 9, 2001), although Anwarkurd “convinced the Taliban leaders at the guesthouse that he was unfit for the frontlines.” He added that he “spent approximately two months at the guesthouse before the Taliban fled to Kunduz to regroup when Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance,” when he “and the other inhabitants of the guesthouse traveled to a military base in Kunduz,” and, soon after, surrendered to General Dostum, a prominent Northern Alliance commander. As a result, he was probably part of “the convoy of death,” when many prisoners (probably numbering in the thousands) died en route to Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan while being transported in containers, although this was not mentioned by the Task Force.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban safe houses in Kabul and Takhar, Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [676] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government.”

Hammad Gadallah (ISN 712, Sudan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Hammad Gadallah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files” (describing the 14 files missing from the documents released by WikiLeaks in April), Hammad Gadallah (whose full name is Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah and who was was 32 years old at the time of his capture) was one of five prisoners working for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, who were seized in 2002 after the Pakistani and Afghan branches of RHS were blacklisted by the US government.

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how he told the most complete story of the organization’s activities, and obviously managed to impress upon the Americans that not everyone who worked for the charity was siphoning off money for al-Qaeda. Arrested at his home on May 27, 2002, by two Americans and representatives of Pakistani intelligence and the police, he explained that he had been working for the Central Bank in Sudan, when his brother, who worked for a bank in Bangladesh, told him that the RIHS in Peshawar had a vacancy for an accountant. He took leave from his job to investigate the organization in January 2001, and, after seeing that they were “all good people, with high standards, [who] love their work, and … perform their work faithfully,” and that there were “no problems with the accountancy programme,” he handed in his notice at the bank and began working for the RIHS in March.

Refuting allegations about the organization’s inclusion in a US guide to terrorist organizations, he said, “I say that not every organization or person that is within that guide can be accused of being a terrorist. That requires a lot of evidence and proof … I’m sure that the year that I was working for the RIHS in 2001, it had nothing to do with any terrorist acts.” He added that the organization had an income of around two and a half million dollars in 2001, which came from mosques in Kuwait, and described it as a “huge organization” with one branch in Pakistan. He also explained the significance of his role and, crucially, how there were no underhand financial transactions during his time there:

Q: If your organization were transferring money to another organization, you would be aware of it?
A: That never happened.
Q: But if it had, you would know that?
A: Yes I would. Because I record everything that comes in and everything that goes out.

Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730, Maldives) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Ibrahim Fauzee is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In a footnote to Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ibrahim Fauzee, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, was one of a number of prisoners seized in Pakistan, mostly in April and May 2002, and largely because they were working for Gulf-based charities that had come under suspicion for alleged links with terrorist funding, like Hammad Gadallah, above. Fauzee was a student of Islam, according to an account published by Cageprisoners, which explained more than the ludicrously thin set of allegations for Fauzee’s tribunal, in which it was mainly alleged that his telephone number was discovered in another suspect’s pocket, and was associated with “a Sudanese teacher who assisted Arabs traveling to training camps in Afghanistan.” According to the Cageprisoners account, Fauzee was living in a house in which one of the other occupants was reportedly the father of an Al-Qaida suspect. A witness reported that on May 19, 2002, US agents came to the house in Karachi, and arrested Fauzee and the other man, whose whereabouts are unknown.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April, the file relating to Ibrahim Fauzee was a “Reassessment of Recommendation to Retain in DoD Control,” dated November 11, 2003, in which he was identified as Ibrahim Fouwzy, born in November 1978, and it was stated that he had been diagnosed with asthma (and had been “given an albuterol inhaler”) and had also been “treated for strep throat,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force partly reiterated the Cageprisoners account, but failed to reach the conclusion of Fauzee’s tribunal, which recognized that he was not an “enemy combatant.” The Task Force noted that Fauzee had stated that he had first traveled to Pakistan to studying 1995 (in Karachi), and that, in March 2000 he had “traveled to Maldives to wed his fiancee, and then returned with her to Karachi.” However, it is not clear from this account if it is meant to indicate that he had been living in Pakistan from 1995 to 2000.

Prior to his capture, however, the Task Force stated that he “lived in several apartments, and last resided in a home owned by Mohammed Afzal,” where, he said, he lived “for approximately 11 days before being arrested by the Pakistani police,” who “told him that he was arrested because of his knowledge and association with his landlord (Afzal).” He was then “taken to a police station and questioned,” and was “later taken to a military facility, and then returned to jail.” Soon after, he was transferred to US custody, even though he “stated he never learned why Afzal was arrested but opined that it may have had something to do with his work.”

It is not known what happened to Mohammed Afzal, as he was never transferred to Guantánamo, but Fauzee was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. No reason was given for his transfer, but it was clear that his connection with Mohammed Afzal was the only significant thing about him, and it is therefore worth asking what happened to Afzal, and whether he was ever held in US custody. In providing reasons for Fauzee’s detention, the Task Force stated that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities under suspicion of being an Al-Qaida member after a raid on his residence, that just missed a group of Al-Qaida members who had gathered at the home for a meeting.”

Without further information about Mohammed Afzai it is impossible to know whether there was any truth in this, or, indeed, if there was any truth in the additional claims that he was “a known Al-Qaida facilitator,” and was also “the person who sponsored the detainee at the madrassa [where he was studying, presumably] and whom [sic] was allowing the detainee to live in an apartment attached to his home.”

Ramping up his purported significance, the Task Force added that Fauzee had “traveled extensively in spite of his limited income and ha[d] failed to explain adequately the source(s) of the funds he used for travel.” The Task Force also claimed that the madrassa was “fundamentalist” and that it was “administered” by Mohammed Afzai, but this serves only to make me think that Afzai’s role may have been overplayed, and that Fauzee might have been nothing more than a student paying board and lodging in the apartment next to Afzai’s house, which he rented out.

Nevertheless, the Task Force noted that he was “suspected of being an Al-Qaida recruit and courier, however the complete extent of his association within the organization is not completely known because of his refusals to be forthright.” As a result, he was assessed as posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and it was noted that he “require[d] further exploitation … before being submitted for further transfer consideration.” Maj. Gen. Miller therefore recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” although the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, as it was noted that, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF deferred to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [Fauzee] pose[d] a medium threat.” However, it took another 16 months for a military tribunal to agree with CITF that he was not a threat, and for Fauzee to finally be freed.

In the classified US diplomatic cables secured by WikILeaks (and in the full version recently made available), Maldivian Permanent Secretary Ahmed Shaheed first asked the US to “share any intelligence it had gained from Fauzee” on November 5, 2002, as Minivan News reported. “Shaheed specifically asked for any information on ties Fauzee may have with other Maldivian nationals,” the cable read. “In this regard, Shaheed also requested that the Maldivian government be permitted to conduct its own intelligence interview of Fauzee.”

On November 23, 2002, Shaheed wrote to US officials requesting Fauzee’s release, but he was not, of course, freed for another 28 months. In August 2003, Maldivian government officials were allowed to visit Fauzee, although they found him to be “an unlikely threat,” and after “further investigation,” requested his release again, on November 5, 2003.

Another request was made on May 11, 2004, and in a cable dated July 20, 2004, as Haveeru Online stated, Maldivian Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Shihab assured the then US Ambassador Jeffrey Lunstead that “a travel ban would be imposed on Ibrahim Fauzy” (as he was identified), because “the Maldives understood the need to clear up the detainee’s story.”

It was also stated that “Shihab told Lunstead, who ‘had concerns about some aspects of the detainee’s history,’ that the Maldives government would place Fauzy under close surveillance and would put him on a watch list to ensure that he could not leave the country. Shihab was quoted in the diplomatic memo … as saying that the measures would be ‘effective in preventing him [Fauzy] from traveling’ unless ‘he is very good at rowing.’”

By the end of 2004, the US government finally “agreed to return Fauzee to the Maldives under certain conditions,” as Minivan News explained. A cable dated December 13, 2004 “showed the Maldivian Foreign Ministry was interested in cooperating with these conditions, which included humane treatment upon release.”

Qalandar Shah (ISN 812, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Qalandar Shah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, between April and December 2002, at least 50 Afghans were sent to Guantánamo from Bagram, and how, in his book The Interrogators, Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of a former senior interrogator in Afghanistan) reported that the screening for Afghan prisoners was made more flexible in June 2002, when, instead of sending every single prisoner in their custody to Guantánamo (as stipulated by those directing operations from Camp Doha in Kuwait), the prison’s commanders finally worked out how to release “worthless prisoners back to their farms and families.” The process involved creating a new category of prisoner — “persons under US control” — who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number that entered the system overseen by the overall commanders in Kuwait and the Pentagon, because once a prisoner was officially assigned a number, it was almost impossible for the interrogators to let them go.

One of the 50, whose story only demonstrates that, even with these changes, many Afghans were still pointlessly sent to Guantánamo, was Qalander Shah, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, when he was seized in a house raid in Bermel, in Paktika province, along with his uncle and a cousin. Accused of having a weapons cache and a false Pakistani ID card, he explained that the weapons were for protection and that he had the false ID because “the Taliban were running the government and we were in conflict with them.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Khan Shah Qalandar, born in 1973, the Task Force provided a more detailed explanation of his story, in which the key elements remained the same. Shah, described as a veterinarian for the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan from 1993 to 1996, and a self-employed teacher from 1996 to 2000, teaching Pashtu, English, math and painting, stated that he also supported his family “through construction, tailoring, and farming his land.”

Speaking about the circumstances of his capture, he “stated that he was asleep when Americans raided the compound where he and his family lived.” He was seized with his uncle, Pacha Gul, and his cousin, Abdul Adin. Providing further information, he “stated that he was awoken by gunfire and he later learned that as the Americans approached they were shot at by unknown persons and those people fled the compound.” He added that “he had nothing to fear from the Americans so when he was told to surrender, he did so.” It was also noted that he admitted that the area he lived in was “known to have been an egress route for Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters fleeing into Pakistan,” but obviously had nothing to do with either the Taliban or Al-Qaida, and, although weapons were found in the compound, he said he knew nothing about them. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his suspected involvement with subversive elements.”

In conclusion, the Joint Task Force assessed him “as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, however because of his subversive activities and affiliations in Afghanistan, he is assessed to pose a medium threat to the Afghan government.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” 20 months later, he was finally freed.

Richard Belmar (ISN 817, UK) Released January 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained, drawing on information from Guantánamo, and in an article published after his release (“Beatings, sex abuse and torture: how MI5 left me to rot in US jail,” by David Rose, in the Observer), how Richard Belmar, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born and brought up in Marylebone, in central London. After training as a mechanic, he worked for the Post Office, and converted to Islam in 1999. In July 2001, after spending some time in Pakistan, he traveled to Afghanistan to study at a religious school in Kandahar.

Trapped in the city after the US-led invasion began, he made several unsuccessful attempts to leave the country — on one occasion wearing a burka, but still failing to escape because the driver of his car thought that it was too dangerous — before managing to cross the border in December 2001 by walking across the mountains. “I didn’t want to be part of any war,” he said. “I wanted to get out. I was seeing people who’d been bombed, pieces of them everywhere.” In Karachi, he stayed in a hotel for a while, but was running out of money and had lost his passport, and was afraid of contacting the British consulate because he knew that “anyone who had been in Afghanistan was at risk of arrest.” He then met an Arab who “promised to sort me out,” and arranged for him to stay in “a large house,” where he was captured.

He was then taken to the ISI headquarters in Karachi (the HQ of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s largest intelligence service), along with the other prisoners, where he was interviewed by American intelligence operatives, whose superiors, finding his story credible, recommended his repatriation to the UK and asked MI5 to send some agents to see if they wanted to recruit him. Turned down by MI5, for reasons that were never explained, he was sent to Bagram instead.

In Chapter 14, I explained how Belmar said that on the plane to Bagram he received a huge blow to the back of his head from a rifle butt, which gave him headaches “for a long, long time,” and how, in Bagram, where he spent more than six months and was interrogated repeatedly, he was sexually taunted by a woman interrogator, who fondled his genitals. “I told her she was ugly, cheap and I spat in her face,” he said. “There were two guys in the room and I was shackled. They got me on the floor and started kicking me up, in the back, in the stomach, they gave me a real beating.”

In another interrogation, a pistol was forced into his mouth: “It tasted cold, bitter. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is getting serious, there’s a good chance they will pull the trigger.’” Eventually, he said, he gave the interrogators the confession they wanted, even though it was all lies. He told them he had listened to Osama bin Laden making a speech, but pointed out after his release, “How could I have done that? I didn’t know a word of Arabic,” and added that the interrogators “tried to make me confess to being at a training camp in 1998 — when I never left Britain, and wasn’t even a Muslim.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Belmar was a “Recommendation to Retain Under DoD Control,” dated November 15, 2003, in which his full name was given as Richard Dean Belmar, and it was noted that he was born in October 1979. The Joint Task Force claimed that Belmar and a friend had been arrested at Heathrow in June 2001 for “assaulting two individuals,” and then decided to go to Afghanistan rather than appear in court. A contact, Abu Mohammed, then apparently raised money for them to travel, and to attend the Al-Farouq training camp, where Belmar allegedly received basic training.

What happened to Belmar’s friend was not related, but after the 9/11 attacks, Belmar reportedly “traveled with Taliban forces throughout Afghanistan” and then, in November 2001, “fled Afghanistan after bribing a guard,” and traveling to Karachi, where he was seized three months later. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Al-Farouq training camp, Al-Qaida safehouses in Kandahar, AF, Kabul, AF and Karachi, PK, of Al-Qaida recruiter Abu Mohammed, Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and other Al-Qaida members.”

In seeking to justify Belmar’s detention, the Task Force claimed that he had sworn bayat (a pledge of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden, which seems highly unlikely, and that, for some reason, he had “unexploited information” about Ghassan al-Sharbi (ISN 682), a Saudi and a self-confessed al-Qaida member who was seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan, two months after Belmar was seized in Karachi. It was also claimed that he had “knowledge of Jaish-e-Mohammed [a Pakistani militant group] and how they aided Arabs in Afghanistan,” and, in a particularly weak claim, it was alleged that an alias attributed to him, Abdul Rahim (an exceedingly common name), had been “referenced by several detainees possibly indicating that [Belmar] played a more important role in Al-Qaida while traveling around Afghanistan.”

Belmar was “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and it was also stated that he was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a high risk to the US, its interests, or its allies.” In addition, it was noted that he had been identified as a candidate for a trial by Military Commission, and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, 14 months later, and without being put forward for trial, he was freed, flown back to the UK, and released without charge.

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five of this series.

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

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

This is Part 12 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the seventh part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Seven of Ten)

Abdul Rahman Noorani (ISN 582, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In Chapter 15 of The Guantánamo Files, I discussed the most intense period of torture at Guantánamo (from the fall of 2002 until the summer of 2004), when over a hundred prisoners were subjected to an array of “enhanced interrogation techniques” including the use of prolonged isolation, extreme heat and cold, forced nudity, the use of extremely loud music and noise, and short-shackling in painful stress positions (often until prisoners soiled themselves). One apparently insignificant prisoner who was subjected to techniques that seemed, in general, to have been reserved for prisoners regarded as significant or uncooperative was Abdel Rahman Noorani, 29 years old at the time of his capture, who said on his release that he was “badly punished 107 times,” and added that “during his 20 months at Guantánamo, his captors had chained his hands and feet and had beaten him with a metal rod on his legs and back.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 18, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was stated that he was born in 1973, it was noted that he lived in the Saranan refugee camp in Balochistan for 18 years (because of the Soviet occupation), and told his interrogators that he and his brother opened an Afghan restaurant in Quetta, Pakistan, in July 2001, where, in late January 2002, he was seized by the Pakistani authorities, “who demanded that he pay an exorbitant fine immediately or go to jail.” Noorani claimed that, because he did not have enough money, he was jailed, and later transferred to US control, and explained that he thought the reason was because, the day before, he had “argued with a customer, Mullah Basir, a Taliban official who refused to pay for his meal.” He was apparently “convinced that Pakistani Police arrested him as a direct result of this altercation.”

He was sent to Guantánamo, on or around June 25, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of Afghans living in the Saranan Refugee Camp in Pakistan and of Mullah Basir, a Taliban and al-Qaeda leader from Kandahar, Afghanistan.”  However, as I explained in my article, “How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files” (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [582] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

In a fact sheet issued by the Pentagon in June 2008, entitled, “Former GTMO Detainee Terrorism Trends,” a contradictory account of Noorani (described as Abdul Rahman Noor) was released by the Pentagon. In this document, he was described as one of 13 former prisoners accused of “Reengaging in Terrorism.” The fact sheet stated, “Noor was released in July of 2003, and has since participated in fighting against US forces near Kandahar. After his release, Noor was identified as the person in an October 7, 2001, video interview with al-Jazeerah [sic] TV network, wherein he [was] identified as the ‘deputy defense minister of the Taliban.’ In this interview, he described the defensive position of the mujahideen and claimed they had recently downed an airplane.”

It is not known if there is any credibility to the Pentagon’s claim that Abdul Rahman Noorani was actually Abdul Rahman Noor, the deputy defense minister of the Taliban, although it seems unlikely, if Noorani was indeed seized in Pakistan at his restaurant, and was not identified on capture as someone of significance.

Brahim Benchekroun (ISN 587, Morocco) Released July 2004

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Brahim Benchekroun, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said after his release that he was “rounded up by the Pakistani security forces at the end of 2001″ near Lahore, “at the time of the first round-ups of Arabs in the Koranic schools.” He was taken into custody with Ahmed Errachidi (ISN 590, released in March 2007), a Moroccan chef, who had been living in the UK for 18 years, and Karama Khamisan (ISN 586), a Yemeni soldier (transferred to Yemeni custody in August 2005), who went to Afghanistan as part of a drug smuggling ring, and was held as a human guarantor until the deal was completed. Errachidi was captured in Islamabad, where, he said, he had been working in a jewelry store after visiting Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the US-led invasion, and Khamisan explained that, after the US-led invasion began, the drug dealers fled, leaving him near the border with Pakistan, where he was captured by Pakistani villagers.

Benchekroun described what happened to the three men once they were in Pakistani custody. “We were looking through the makeshift blindfolds that the Pakistanis had put on us,” he said, adding that Errachidi spoke English and was following the negotiations, when “people showed up with black suitcases and started bargaining with the Pakistanis over the price for handing us over.” When they agreed on a price of $5,000 a head, Benchekroun explained, they all applauded. He also said that Khamisan was singled out for unusual treatment: “The Pakistanis made him grow a beard and learn to pray. I taught him the basics about washing myself. We didn’t understand that it was so that they could sell him to the Americans, too.”

In Chapter 14, I related how Brahim Benchekroun described harassment at the US prison at Bagram airbase. “The soldiers came out of nowhere, sometimes several times in the same night, screaming bloody murder, throwing everything around on the pretext that there was a search, and rarely forgetting to throw the Koran on the ground, if they didn’t tear it up,” he said. He also said that, when the Red Cross visited, “The ones who were the most bashed up were hidden in a storage room over the interrogation chamber.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 13, 2003, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” in which he was described as Ibrahim Bin Shakaran, born in August 1979, the Task Force provided a contradictory account, claiming that he traveled to Afghanistan in November 2000, after “hearing about the Afghan situation” in a mosque in Casablanca, and that he then undertook military training at the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar (associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) from January to May 2001. According to this account, in October 2001 he “rotated to the front lines near Kabul, AF, where he manned an observation post.” After the bombing that followed the US-led invasion began, he reportedly left for Logar province in a truck containing Afghan Taliban and Arabs, and then crossed into Pakistan in Waziristan, “where he surrendered his weapon to a Taliban soldier,” and then traveled on to Bannu, in  the North West Frontier Province, where he sought refuge at an Islamic centre “with several others.” From there, he “traveled to Lahore, PK in a car with two Pakistanis, three Arabs and a Turkmenistani,” but they were involved in an accident, after which the Pakistani police “arrested everyone except the two Pakistanis.” It is not known how truthful (if at all) this account is.

Benchekroun was sent to Guantánamo, on May 2, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Libyan training camp near Kabul, AF, a travel facilitator named Abu Mussab [in Casablanca], and of an Arab safehouse/guesthouse located in the Kartiyah Barwan [probably Karte Parwan] region of Kabul, AF.”

In its assessment, the Task Force concluded that he had been “deceptive, and uncooperative during interrogations.” and had been “identified as a high-ranking member of the Theological Commission of the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group,” with “sensitive reporting” suggesting a connection with ISN 270 (Mosa Zi Zemmori, a Belgian citizen released in April 2005), who, it was claimed, was also a member of the MIFG. This latter claim seems particularly untrustworthy, as Zemmori (aka Moussa Zemmouri) was freed on his release in 2005, and was allowed to travel to the UK in 2009 to take part in a Cageprisoners event.

Unable to come up with anything else resembling evidence, however dubious, the Task Force then noted that Benchekroun had made verbal threats against the US, which always strikes me as a particularly weak argument for establishing proof of militancy, as anyone held in the horrendously experimental conditions at Guantánamo might be expected, at some point, to have lashed out verbally against his captors. Nevertheless, the Task Force concluded that he was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and that he posed “a high risk as he [was] likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “[r]etain[ed] under DOD control.”

After his release from Guantánamo, just eight months later, Benchekroun was freed on bail in Morocco in March 2005, but both he and another Moroccan ex-prisoner, Mohammed Mazouz (see Part Four), were rearrested in November 2005 and accused of planning to join a new terrorist cell. According to a Department of Defense fact sheet, entitled, “Former GTMO Detainee Terrorism Trends,” which was published in June 2008, the two men were convicted in September 2007 “for their post-release involvement in a terrorist network recruiting Moroccans to fight for Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI).” According to testimony presented at the trial, whose reliability is unknown, Benchekroun (described as Ibrahim Bin Shakaran) “had already recruited other jihadists when Moroccan authorities broke up the plot in November 2005,” and he received a 10-year sentence, whereas Mazouz was sentenced to just two years.

Bakhtiar Bameri (ISN 623, Iran) Released March 2004

Briefly mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, based on a short Cageprisoners report, Bameri had reportedly “traveled to Afghanistan to buy stereo parts,” although the US military claimed that he was “captured in Afghanistan during fighting with the Taliban in 2002.” It was also noted that, on his return to Iran, he “was accompanied by a doctor and a representative of the Red Cross,” as “he was said to be in poor health.”

In the files leaked to WikiLeaks and released in April, Bameri’s file, dated January 31, 2004, was an “Annual Enemy Combatant Review.” This type of document was evidently used to assess the status of all the prisoners as “enemy combatants,” although it is not one that I had seen before its appearance in the documents released by WikiLeaks.

In the memo relating to Bameri, in which he was described as Baktian Bamari, it was noted that he was transferred to Guantánamo from Afghanistan on June 17, 2002. It was also noted, crucially, that, “Although he was assessed as an enemy combatant at the time of his transfer to GTMO, on-going assessment and determination of his status as an EC is required by the Implementing Guidance for Release or Transfer of Detainees under US Department of Defense Control to Foreign government Control, dated 11 December 2002 and approved by the Secretary of Defense on 26 December 2002.” This is the first reference I have seen to this document, although a version of it, relating to Bagram and issued on December 10, 2002, is available here. In it, as Bameri’s memo explained:

Enemy combatant is defined by the above guidance as “any person that US or allied forces could properly detain under laws and customs of war.” For purposes of this conflict, an enemy combatant includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a member or agent of al-Qaida, the Taliban, or another international terrorist organization against which the United States is engaged in armed conflict.

In describing how he ended up in US custody, the Task Force admitted that he “approached the guards at the American airbase in Kandahar, where he offered his services as a translator and guide,” but where, instead, he was arrested “while attempting to gain access to the airbase in order to talk to the US forces.” Following his arrival at Guantánamo, it was noted that he “admitted” — as though there was some reason for his transfer to Guantánamo, even though there was none — “to a long history (since age 11) of theft, drug use, drug and weapons smuggling across the Iranian/Afghan border,” and “one incident of attempted murder in Iran.” However, it was also noted that the authorities had determined that he was “not a member of Al-Qaida or the Taliban.”

The Task Force added, “Furthermore, no information has developed to support his determination as an EC under any other aspect of the EC definition above. Therefore, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO’s assessment that [he] is not an enemy combatant.” The memo concluded by noting that his case was being “processed by the Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team for release.” This is notable for two reasons: firstly, because it is the first mention I have seen of the existence of a Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team responsible for processing the prisoners for release; and secondly, because it is almost unprecedented for a prisoner to be designated as “not an enemy combatant.” The terminology, when the Combatant Status Review Tribunals began in the summer of 2004, was that those whose release was recommended (38 out of 558 prisoners whose cases were reviewed) were not judged as “not an enemy combatant,” but as being “no longer an enemy combatant.”

Majid Mehmood (ISN 624, Pakistan) Released November 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” I told the story of Majid Mehmood, a stray Pakistani, who was 22 years old when he was seized, which was unknown until 2008, when he was interviewed by Tom Lasseter, for a major McClatchy Newspapers series focusing on 66 released prisoners, while he was working as a delivery man in Karachi. After explaining that his name was actually Abdul Majid Mahmoud, he told Lasseter that he, like Noor Habib (ISN 626, see below), had been seized in Bamiyan, where, he said, he had traveled “to attend a friend’s wedding when he was caught in the fighting between US-backed Northern Alliance forces and the Taliban.”

As Lasseter explained, when Mahmoud was “tied up in a kitchen” at the Alliance checkpoint, with “shrapnel wounds to his knees, shoulders and head, no one was buying his tale of being an unlucky wedding guest.” “Sometimes they hit me. Sometimes they kicked me. Sometimes they hit me with sticks,” Mahmoud explained. After about four days, he said, he was “taken to a house that the Northern Alliance was using as a jail, where he was trussed up with a rope and thrown into a storage room.” “They beat me with belts, with the butts of their guns and a few times with sticks,” he said. “When they beat me up they would cuss at me. They would say that I was there to kill them, that I was there to fight them. I said, ‘No, I came here for a friend’s wedding. I’m a tailor.’”

Four months later, US forces arrived at the impromptu jail, and that night, Mahmoud said, “the man who brought his dinner said the Americans had agreed to pay a $5,000 bounty” for him. Flown to Bagram, he then came clean, and admitted that he had been recruited by the Taliban at an office that had been established in Karachi. He added, however, that telling the truth made no difference. He was transferred to Kandahar, where he spent about five months, and was then flown to Guantánamo, where he fell into a pattern of regular conflict with the guards. “The riot guards would come in, five to seven of them, and try to pin me down,” he said. “In that struggle I would punch whatever I could … this used to happen all the time.”

He then joined one of the many hunger strikes that have taken place in the prison, and explained that it started “when a guard knocked a Koran on the floor and left it there.” He also said that, along with dozens of other prisoners, he was taken to the hospital, “where medics forced his mouth open with a metal clamp and poured in liquid meals.”

On his release, he was imprisoned for a year in Pakistan, but was then fortunate to find work, although he told Lasseter that he “has to report to the police station once a week to describe his recent activities,” and that “an intelligence officer comes to the stand where he parks his truck almost daily to be sure that he hasn’t left Karachi.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Mahjid Mahmood, born in 1980, much of what he later told Tom Lasseter was confirmed. He apparently “stated that before becoming involved with the Taliban, he worked in several different career fields, including being a tailor, automobile mechanic, store clerk, bus conductor, and a truck driver,” and he also “stated that he had not had any military or paramilitary training before joining the Taliban,” which happened after he traveled to Karachi to look for work, taking his wife with him, and, as he later confirmed, “saw a fatwa inviting ‘all brothers of Islam’ to fight in the Jihad in Afghanistan.” He then “sent his wife back home to live with her parents while he went to join the Taliban,” because “he admired the ‘pure Islamic state’ touted by the Taliban, and felt that it was his duty as a Muslim to defend it with Jihad.”

After visiting a Taliban recruitment office and setting off for Afghanistan on October 28, 2001, he was injured in a bombing raid in Darah Sof, in Samangan province in northern Afghanistan, and “spent time in Taliban hospitals,” before being seized by men serving the governor of Bamiyan province and imprisoned on January 30, 2002. According to this account, he was held for two days in a storeroom in a large house in the city of Bamiyan, until Americans then came and photographed him, although he was not transferred to US custody for approximately two months, being held both in the storeroom (for another month) and also in Bamiyan city jail (for 20 days). He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his affiliation with the Taliban as a foreign fighter.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that, “Based on current information, detainee [624] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of no intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Noor Habib Ullah (ISN 626, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” I explained how, in November 2003, Noor Habib (identified by the Pentagon as Noor Habib Ullah), who was 21 when he was seized, spoke briefly to the BBC, asking, with regard to his detention in Guantánamo, “Is this what they call human rights?”

Nothing more was known of him until 2008, when Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers tracked him down for a major report on 66 released prisoners, but Lasseter conceded that he was unable to work out exactly why he had been captured. “Habib,” he wrote, “might have been a Taliban foot soldier or he might have been what he said he was, a truck driver who was picked up by US-backed Northern Alliance troops who were shooting or arresting anyone who appeared to be an Islamic militant.” He added, “Afghan officials familiar with Habib’s home village and the militant networks there said they had no idea who he was. They guessed that he was either a Taliban grunt who’d have had no information to offer American interrogators or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

What is clear, however, is that Habib was seized in Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, in November 2001. According to his own account, he was “helping to transport a load of goats to Kabul,” when he “came to a checkpoint manned by Northern Alliance soldiers, who opened fire at the truck.” He told Lasseter, “They thought we were Taliban. I jumped out of the truck and ran as fast as I could, but they caught me.” He added that he was “thrown into an old Russian transport truck and beaten with rifle butts the whole way back to the city. It was a long ride, he said, as the Northern Alliance troops stopped every few minutes to haul in another suspected batch of Taliban.”

Habib then spent four months in a local jail, where, he explained, “They said I had connections with the Taliban. At the time, I had a long beard. They began beating me — kicking and punching me — saying that I had to confess.” He was then transferred to Kandahar, where, while being taken to interrogation, the guards “pushed me to the ground and jumped on my back. One time they did this, a rock got stuck in my chest. It stayed there, and sank in lower and lower into my flesh, and the skin around it got swollen, with pus coming out.”

Habib explained that he had to wait until he was sent to Guantánamo for a doctor to remove the stone. Apart from this, his time in Guantánamo was clearly uneventful. He told Lasseter that he “spent a year in Cuba, rarely being interrogated and not doing much of anything other than praying and wondering why he was there.” When he was interrogated, he said, they “wanted to know about the top guys from al-Qaeda; they wanted to know if they lived in Jalalabad. I told them that I am just a laborer, that I had no idea. I asked them, ‘Why do you keep asking me the same questions?’ They did not answer.” On his release, the reason for his transfer to Guantánamo was finally revealed, when two interrogators “told him that he’d been sent to Guantánamo because he was suspected of being a senior Taliban commander.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated March 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that he was born in 1980, and another version of his story emerged, which may well have been the truth — that he was an unwilling Taliban conscript, seized by coalition forces almost as soon as he was forced into service. In the account prepared by the Task Force, he “worked as a farmer on his family’s two-acre farm” near Jalalabad, but was conscripted after district representatives came to his local mosque, “accompanied by Taliban military members,” and “advised the town that each family had to pay money or have one family member conscripted into Taliban service for an unspecified length of time.”

Over the next two days, the Taliban apparently collected money and nine conscripts, including Noor Habib Ullah, who was taken to Bamiyan province on November 12, 2001, “where he worked as a cook for two days until Hazara soldiers [opponents of the Taliban] occupied the village.” He then fled, but “Hazara soldiers captured [him] and returned [him] to Bamiyan to be imprisoned for his Taliban affiliation.” After being “incarcerated for almost five months,” he was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of: Taliban operations in the vicinity of Bamiyan prior to the Taliban surrender [in] November 2001, treatment of prisoners while in custody of Haji Jowari’s Hazara forces, and of a prison facility in Bamiyan.” There was no mention of the allegation that he was “suspected of being a senior Taliban commander,” as he told Tom Lasseter, indicating, perhaps, that the guards who told him this were trying to cover their backs, and to make out that there had been some reason for his thoroughly pointless brutalization, transportation to Cuba and detention at great expense.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [626] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Rostum Shah (ISN 632, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how 21-year old Rostum Shah and 26-year old Mohammed Tahir (who were both released in May 2003) were Taliban conscripts from Helmand who had been sent to fight in Bamiyan province, where they were captured by Hazara soldiers of Hezb-e-Wahdat, one of Afghanistan’s two main Shia Muslim factions, who were implacably opposed to the Taliban. Imprisoned for four months, they were then handed over to the Americans.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated February 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Rostum Akhtar Mohammed, born in 1980, his story was largely endorsed by the Task Force, which noted that he “was a farmer on his family’s land in Musa Qala [in Helmand province] when he made arrangements on 9 November 2001 with a Taliban leader, Abdul Khaliq, to prevent his father’s conscription by substituting himself.” He was then taken in “a three-vehicle convoy” to “an old base in Kunduz with approximately thirty-four other conscripts.” From there, he apparently deserted, and, with three other men, “escaped to a nearby hotel where they stayed two nights before catching a ride in a vehicle bound for Kabul.” En route, however, “Hazarists [sic] attacked the vehicle with small arms, killing the driver, taking the passengers prisoner, and transporting the prisoners to a Hazarists [sic] camp in Bamiyan,” where he was held for four months and then transferred to US forces and taken to Bagram. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 22, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Abdul Khaliq, Taliban conscription methods, Taliban leaders, and their chain of command.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [632] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Mohammed Naim Farouq (ISN 633, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” I told the story of Mohammed Naim Farouq, a tribal leader in Zormat, in eastern Afghanistan, who was 42 years old at the time of his capture. Speaking to the BBC after his release, he said, “We were in prison only because we are Muslims,” and added that two men who had attempted suicide had been punished with solitary confinement. He also spoke to Amnesty International in August 2003, when he stated, “We were without hope because we were innocent. I was very sad because I could not see my children, family and friends. But what could we do? Yes, we got enough food but what does this mean? My mother lost her eyesight while I was there.”

In 2008, he spoke to Tom Lasseter for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released prisoners, explaining that he “had several run-ins with the Taliban during the 1990s, and that his brother was exiled from Afghanistan.” Eventually, he said, “the Taliban relented because its leaders ‘realized that I am from a big tribe … so we came to an agreement.’ Each side agreed to let the other alone.” After the fall of the Taliban, he said that he became the security commander of Zormat district, near the restive city of Gardez, but was arrested by US forces — and sent to Guantánamo, via Bagram and Kandahar — after chasing and threatening a group of US soldiers who had detained some of his police officers.

Farouq explained to Lasseter that he was not subjected to physical violence by the Americans, but described a series of humiliating experiences, which, to a Pashtun, are far worse. After he was first seized, the US soldiers took him to their base, where, he said, “They stripped me naked, out in the open, where everybody could see. I was thinking that these are infidels who have come to a Muslim country to imprison us, just like the Russians.” After 40 days in Bagram, this experience was repeated in Kandahar, where, on the day of his arrival, “they took me into interrogation completely naked. They asked me if I knew Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘Fuck bin Laden and fuck your wife, too. Bin Laden came and destroyed our nation, and you came and destroyed our nation. But at least bin Laden was a Muslim and did not humiliate us like this.’”

Like many other prisoners, Farouq also said that, in Kandahar, he saw a US soldier drop a Koran in a barrel that was being used as a toilet, and declared, “If I had a gun I would have shot that soldier. We began shouting and beating ourselves and asking God to punish this man.” His final humiliation took place in Guantánamo, where he was stripped naked again. As Lasseter described it, “he and a large group of men were stripped naked, then put in a line — blindfolded, he said — and marched to a station where they were issued new clothes. Along the way, he said, soldiers were yelling and laughing at them, and putting cameras up close to their body parts and snapping pictures.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 18, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Mohammed Nayim Farouq, born in 1960 (he was also identified by the US authorities as Muhammed Naim Farooq), it was noted that he had latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, and also “chronic shoulder and lower back pain,” but was “otherwise in good health.” When it came to the reasons for his detention, the story he told Tom Lasseter about being seized “after chasing and threatening a group of US soldiers who had detained some of his police officers” was not repeated (perhaps because it reflected so badly on the US military), but it was clear that the Task Force found no reason to detain him, and conceded that he was an ally, and not an enemy.

According to the Task Force’s account, in early December 2001 he “was appointed as the commander for security forces for the Zormat region in Paktia province by the interim Afghani government.” Soon after, US forces detained four of his “security force members” at a checkpoint. Farouq traveled to Gardez “to secure their release,” but “was stopped en route by Afghani and US officials,” who seized him after he stated that he was in charge of the checkpoint where his men had been detained. Farouq told his interrogators that he “suspected that Mullah Kacem, an individual who once worked for the Taliban Investigation Activities Office, denounced him as a Taliban supporter in order to eliminate him as the security forces commander in the region,” and also that he did the same in the cases of other rivals, “provid[ing] US forces in Afghanistan with erroneous information on his personal enemies in an attempt to have them eliminated or detained.” Farouq was sent to Guantánamo on June 18, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of security services, political personnel, and Mullah Kacem in Paktia Province, Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [633] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Further information about Farouq, and his allegiances, was provided in Tom Lasseter’s article in 2008. According to Afghan Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit, who interviewed Farouq in Guantánamo, although he was part of “a criminal group” involved in kidnapping and extortion, he “was a rural gangster, not a terrorist,” and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Lasseter also spoke to a senior UN official in eastern Afghanistan, who was “familiar with Farouq” and “said it was a mistake to detain him.” Speaking anonymously, the official said, “It’s crazy to arrest people who can help bring about stability when there are very few people in these fragile areas who can do that. It’s obviously not constructive to detain people who are not enemies of the state.”

Ironically, as Tom Lasseter noted in his interview, it was unclear in Farouq’s case “whether US troops had captured a Taliban operative or created one.” After his release, according to a Department of Defense fact sheet, entitled, “Former GTMO Detainee Terrorism Trends,” which was published in June 2008, he “quickly renewed his association with Taliban and al-Qaida members and has since become re-involved in anti-coalition militant activity.” This may not be true, as the Pentagon’s claims have been challenged , but Tom Lasseter explained that an Afghan intelligence official told him that Farouq “now met with Taliban leaders every two weeks to discuss operations,” and added, “Farouq has met several times with the top Taliban commander in this area, but he denies it.” Given his feelings about the humiliation he endured at the hands of US forces, this would not be altogether surprising, and in May 2009, McClatchy Newspapers published an article reiterating that Farouq “told McClatchy that he was a local security leader in Afghanistan when he was arrested and became a radical Islamist only during his detention.”

Please also see here for a short video of Mohammed Naim Farouq speaking to McClatchy Newspapers.

Mohammed Akhber (ISN 635, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” I explained how, in November 2003, Mohammed Akhber, who was 46 years old at the time of his capture, spoke briefly to the BBC, and, although the circumstances of his capture were not discussed, was clearly nonplussed as to why he had been seized. “Why did they take me to Cuba?” he asked. “My young wife was left with no one to look after her. Who was to feed everyone? Who was to give clothes for God’s sake to my children?”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated February 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Mohammed Akhbar, born in 1956, it was stated that he was conscripted by the Taliban in mid-August 2001, because he “was unable to pay the Taliban 5,000,000 Afghanis (around 1,000 USD) to avoid being conscripted.” He and “other local conscripts” were then taken to Bamiyan province, “where they were given weapons to perform guard duty,” and “lived in a modified cave, which contained a stove with a ventilation pipe to keep the conscripts warm.” After three weeks, they were attacked by the Hazara (described as “Hazarists”), and fled to some hills where other Hazara soldiers seized them and took them to a local jail. He was later transferred to US custody and was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, on the spurious bias that it was “because of his knowledge on [sic] forces operating in the Bamiyan region.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [635] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Nathi Gul (ISN 636, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” I explained how Nathi Gul, described as Nate Gul, who was 22 years old when he was seized in unknown circumstances, was one of a group of 16 Afghans released in July 2003. Most complained about their treatment, but Gul, from Khost province, told a reporter from the Associated Press that he was “treated well.” “They didn’t beat us during the interrogation,” he said. “They wrote down anything we said. They interrogated me about 30 to 40 times.” He explained, as the AP described it, that “he was held in a small room that looked like a cage,” but that he “had towels, shampoo, a toothbrush, blankets, three meals a day and time for prayer.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was noted that he was born in 1980 and “resided in Khost with five brothers, his mother, his wife, and his son,” it was also noted that he had been working for the Karzai government at the time he was seized. This may explain why he did not complain about his treatment, if interrogators rapidly discovered that he had been seized by mistake. It was stated that he “worked for the Intelligence Department as an Intelligence Commander for 3 months prior to his arrest,” and that “his duties included guarding repossessed items taken from the Afghan government during the Taliban regime for return under the current Karzai presidency.” It was also noted that the majority of the repossessed weapons and ammunition was controlled by Pacha Khan (aka Pacha Khan Zabran), a US-allied warlord of dubious integrity, who was responsible for the unnecessary capture and imprisonment of other men in Guantánamo.

In Gul’s case, however, his journey to Guantánamo took place because he was stopped at a checkpoint while traveling to work with four other men in his boss’s vehicle by forces serving a rival warlord, Sardar, who seized him and held him for 24 hours, and then summoned US forces — probably Special Forces — who arrived by helicopter, and, evidently without making any attempt to ascertain who he was or who he was working for, transferred all five men to Bagram. Gul’s companions were probably released, but Gul himself was sent to Guantánamo on April 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Intelligence department in Afghanistan and Sardar, an Afghan warlord.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [636] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government.”

Badshah Wali (ISN 638, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how two brothers from Khost — 39-year old Niaz Wali, a cobbler, and 24-year old Badshah Wali, a taxi driver — were “targeted for arrest by local people, who were their enemies from another Pashtun tribe.” On their release in March 2003, they were “too scared to talk about their experiences.” The quotes above are from an article, “A Tough Homecoming,” published in the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s “Afghan Recovery Report,” shortly after their release.

In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Badshah Wali’s was one of 14 missing files, as I explained in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files,” although his brother’s file was included (see Niaz Wali, ISN 640, below). In this document, it was revealed that Badshah Wali (identified as Patcha Walijan) was seized after his brother’s arrest in connection with an unidentified book found during a search of his home in a village near Khost airport, when he traveled to ask US forces why they had seized his brother. It is clear that the Task Force subsequently found no reason to hold him, leading to his release at the same time as his brother.

Niaz Wali (ISN 640, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

As I explained in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files,”  it was revealed for the first time In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks that Niaz Wali (identified as Neyaz Walijan), whose file, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” was dated January 11, 2003, was seized during “a routine search” of his home because “local security forces” “discovered a large, thick hard cover book.” When “questioned about the nature of the book,” Niaz Wali “was unaware of its existence.” On the basis of this book, he was taken into US custody, and when his brother, Badshah Wali (identified as Patcha Walijan) “freely visited” him at his place of detention “to inquire about the book,” he was “told to mind his own business.” “Shortly thereafter,” he too was seized.

As the Task Force conceded, Wali was nothing more than a shoe repairman, who worked in the Khost bazaar near the Spin Jemahat mosque, and had lived in a village near Khost airport for seven years with his brother. However, he was sent to Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (on the day the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Spin Jemahat Mosque used by the Taliban in Khost, Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [636] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

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

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

With just one more online chapter to complete, the mission I set myself three years ago — to record the stories of all the prisoners in Guantánamo — is now close to completion, and will be followed by the first definitive prisoner list, identifying not only those who are still held, and those who have been released (and the dates they were released), but also those who have been cleared for release, whose plight is one of the major stumbling blocks to Barack Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year, as the majority of these prisoners cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

Of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, the stories of around 10 percent are unknown, because they were released in 2003 or 2004, and the Pentagon has not been obliged to release and information relating to these prisoners, but the rest will be sourced and referenced in the definitive list. Links will be provided to the stories of half of these prisoners, and references will be provided for the other half, identifying where their stories can be found in The Guantánamo Files. The list will, I hope, be a useful research tool, not just in identifying the stories of those who have been released, but also as an aid to analyzing the stories of those who are still held, to compare the Bush administration’s long-standing assertions that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore” with a more objective view, which, in the majority of cases, questions the quality of the so-called evidence against them.

This eleventh online chapter features the stories of 17 of the 220 or so Afghan prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, revealing, as I also discussed at length in The Guantánamo Files, how the majority of the Afghans were seized not because they were a threat to the US or its allies, but largely because they were sold to US forces by their Afghan allies or were seized in raids based on dubious intelligence. Three of those discussed — including Mohamed Jawad, put forward for trial by Military Commission — were juveniles at the time of their capture. The chapter also includes the stories of half-a-dozen stray foreigners. In addition, I look at the stories of six of the 50 or so Guantánamo prisoners who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and detention in secret prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo, and cast an objective eye on the supposed evidence used to justify their extraordinarily brutal treatment.

Note: See the column on the left for the first ten online chapters, and the last.

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In one of his cases — that of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan alleged to have thrown as grenade at a jeep containing two US soldiers and an Afghan translator — he discovered that the defendant was just 16 or 17 years old at the time of the attack, and, moreover, that evidence indicating that he was drugged before the attack, and that two other men confessed to the crime, had been deliberately suppressed. As the Los Angeles Times explained, it encouraged a radical shift in his views, as he had initially been convinced that Jawad was “a war criminal who had been taught by an al-Qaeda-linked group to kill American troops and, if caught, to make up claims he had been tortured and was underage.”

Doubting his job, the officer — Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld — turned to a priest for advice. “I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country,” he explained in an email to Father John Dear, a Jesuit peace activist. “I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends.” Dear encouraged him to act, saying he might “save lives and change the direction of the entire policy.”

Fortified by the priest’s advice, Vandeveld resigned his post, denouncing the trial system — the Military Commissions — as a rigged system in which “potentially exculpatory evidence” was “not provided” to the defense teams. In a statement, he explained how the Commissions’ Convening Authority (Susan Crawford, a protégée of Dick Cheney and the Pentagon-appointed supervisor of the trials) and her legal adviser (Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, who was recently removed from his post after three judges ruled that he had demonstrated pro-prosecution bias) conspired to prevent the disclosure of evidence. “I have observed,” he wrote, “that a number of defense requests which I considered to be reasonable and in some cases indicated support for were nevertheless rejected by the Convening Authority, presumably on the advice of the Legal Adviser.”

He also explained that, although his own practice “has been to relinquish immediately any piece of evidence I have come across to the defense,” this was “not universally practiced at OMC-P [the Prosecutors’ Office of the Military Commissions],” and provided an almost casual example of the suppression of evidence, which served to indicate how routine it was:

To take the Jawad case as only one example — a case where no intelligence agency had any significant involvement — I discovered just yesterday that something as basic as agents’ interrogation notes had been entered into a database, to which I do not have personal access … These and other examples too legion to list are not only appalling, they deprive the accused of basic due process and subject the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.

After explaining that his view of Jawad’s case had “evolved over time,” as he had learnt more about it, he declared, “One of my motivations in seeking a reasonable resolution of the case is that, as a juvenile at the time of capture, Jawad should have been segregated from the adult detainees, and some serious attempt made to rehabilitate him. I am bothered by the fact that this was not done.” And then, reaching deep into the heart of his faith, he delivered an extraordinary example of Christian compassion: “I am a resolute Catholic and take as an article of faith that justice is defined as reparative and restorative, and that Christ’s most radical pronouncement — command, if you will — is to love one’s enemies.”

His former masters — at the Pentagon, and in the Office of the Vice President, whose views of the Bible are based almost exclusively on their relish for smiting their enemies — were so disturbed by Vandeveld’s conversion, and mindful of the damage caused by previous prosecutors who resigned, that, according to Maj. David Frakt, Jawad’s military defense lawyer, the chief prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, sought to subject Vandeveld to a “psychological exam.”

When that failed to silence him, and after he had reiterated his complaints in testimony for Jawad’s defense, explaining that he “reached a turning point” when he chanced upon “key evidence among material scattered throughout the prosecutors’ office,” which “helped convert him from a ‘true believer to someone who felt truly deceived,’” they issued dark warnings when he subsequently conducted an email exchange with the Los Angeles Times, reminding him that he “could not talk to the press until his release from active duty is final.”

Nevertheless, his final words to the Los Angeles Times were even more damaging to the administration. He wrote that anyone who knows him “will probably tell you that I’ve been a conformist my entire life, and [that] to speak out against the injustice wrought upon our worst enemies entailed a weather shift in my worldview,” and delivered a final observation about the Commissions that managed to combine his Christian beliefs with his patriotic feelings. “I don’t know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight,” he explained, adding, “I care not for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, I hope we can rediscover some of our American values.”

Despite the administration’s attempts to silence and belittle him, Vandeveld succeeded in exposing the Commissions’ corrupt processes to the “curative powers of the sunlight.” Although his masters refused to drop the charges against Mohamed Jawad, they were so concerned that he would again testify for the defense in five other cases for which he was responsible — revealing, quite possibly, more extraordinary tales of suppressed evidence and incriminating documents stumbled upon by mistake — that they dropped all the charges against these prisoners on October 21.

The five men in question are loosely related. Ghassan al-Sharbi and Jabran al-Qahtani (both Saudis), Sufyian Barhoumi (an Algerian) and Noor Uthman Muhammed (from Sudan) were captured with Abu Zubaydah (photo, left), a training camp facilitator regarded by the US administration as a senior al-Qaeda operative, in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. 13 days later, Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, was seized at an airport in Pakistan, and was subsequently accused of having a connection with Abu Zubaydah and other senior figures in al-Qaeda.

As I have explained in previous articles, the extent of the first four men’s involvement with terrorism is largely unknown, as, with the exception of al-Sharbi, who has openly declared his membership of al-Qaeda, they have either spoken little (al-Qahtani), refuted all the allegations against them (Barhoumi) or claimed that Abu Zubaydah and the training camp had nothing to do with al-Qaeda (Muhammed).

Binyam Mohamed’s case is more extreme — and more worrying for the administration — as courts in both the UK and the US have been circling ever closer to demanding evidence of his rendition by the CIA to 18 months of torture in Morocco, and his subsequent rendition to a CIA torture prison near Kabul. Such is the government’s concern about this evidence being revealed that last week the Justice Department dropped its long-standing claim that Mohamed was involved in a plot to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city (a claim which Mohamed says was based on a false confession extracted from him through torture), but although it’s tempting to conclude that this was the reason that the charges against him were subsequently dropped in his proposed trial by Military Commission, it is, on its own, insufficient to explain why the charges in Vandeveld’s other cases were also abandoned.

The key to this whole story, therefore, is Lt. Col. Vandeveld, even though the Pentagon denied yesterday that his testimony ”had anything to do with the charges being dropped,” and the Associated Press noted that the Pentagon reports “recommending dismissal said only that the new prosecution teams taking over the cases needed more time to evaluate them.” Although the AP also quoted comments made by the Commissions’ new legal adviser, Michael Chapman, in two reports seen by the AP, in which he stated, “I find the prosecution has been unable to complete its preparation for this case,” it’s difficult not to conclude that the Pentagon is terrified that Vandeveld knows something profoundly disturbing about the cases — perhaps to do with the FBI’s long-standing claim that Zubaydah, who was waterboarded in a secret CIA prison, was a minor logistician with a personality disorder, and not an al-Qaeda mastermind, or perhaps to do with suppressed evidence about these men’s actual role, or lack of it, in the “War on Terror.”

We have clearly not heard the end of this story, but although Binyam Mohamed’s civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of the legal action charity Reprieve, explained that “Military prosecutors have told us that they are going to refile charges in about 30 days,” I cannot understand how the Pentagon proposes to silence Lt. Col. Vandeveld if the cases are revived. Unless, of course, the authorities intend to send him to Guantánamo, to replace the prison’s only other known Christian detainee, a young Iranian named Abdul Majid Mohammed, who was released in October 2006.

As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Mohammed, who was a dirt-poor well-digger, admitted that he occasionally dealt in opium and hashish, and said that he went to Afghanistan in December 2001 to make money out of drugs in order to bribe the Iranian military so that he would not be punished for desertion. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he denied an allegation that he served as a watchman for the Taliban, explaining that the Taliban had been known to kill Iranians, and that he was particularly at risk because he was a Catholic, and said that he was captured by Northern Alliance soldiers, who decided they could sell him to US forces by pretending he was an Arab.

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

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

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