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 5 of the 70-part series.

One of the great publicity coups in WikiLeaks’ recent release of classified military documents relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo, as I explained in the first part of this five-part series, was to shine a light on the stories of the first 201 prisoners to be freed from the prison between its opening, in January 2002, and September 2004, when 35 prisoners were repatriated to Pakistan, and 11 were repatriated to Afghanistan.

A handful of these 46 prisoners were cleared for release as a result of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a one-sided process, which ran from August 2004 to March 2005 and was designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants,” who could continue to be held indefinitely. Information about the 558 prisoners who passed through the CSRT process (PDF) was first made publicly available in 2006, but no records have ever been publicly released by the US government which provide any information whatsoever about the 201 released, or approved for release before the CSRTs began, except for a prisoner list released in May 2006 (PDF), which contains the names, nationalities, and, where known, dates of birth and places of birth for 759 prisoners (all but the 20 who arrived at Guantánamo between September 2006 and March 2008).

In the years since the documents relating to the CSRTs were released (and information relating to their annual follow-ups, the Administrative Review Boards, or ARBs), I attempted to track down the stories of these 201 men, and managed, largely through successful research that led to relevant media reports, interviews and reports compiled by NGOs, to discover information about 114 of these prisoners, but nothing at all was known about 87 others (except for their names, and, in some cases, their date of birth and place of birth). With the release of the WikiLeaks files, all but three of these 87 stories have emerged for the very first time, and in this series of articles, I am transcribing and condensing these stories, and providing them with some necessary context. The first 68 stories were in Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four, and the final instalment is below.

Please note that the overwhelming majority of these 84 prisoners were Afghans or Pakistanis, and that many were assessed by the US military as “being neither affiliated with AI-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” of having “no intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “no threat” or “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” That last reference — to them posing “a low threat” — ought to alert readers to the problems with the classification system at Guantánamo, as many of the cases involve unwilling Taliban conscripts or patently innocent people seized by mistake, who, nevertheless, were referred to as “a low threat” rather than as no threat at all.

On their return, the majority of the Afghans were released outright, whereas the Pakistanis were mostly imprisoned for many months before they too were granted their freedom (see here for an article from Pakistani newspaper the Nation in June 2005 describing the release of 17 prisoners repatriated from Guantánamo in September 2004, some of whom are listed below).

WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo (Part Five of Five)

Azizullah Asekzai (ISN 646, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

Born in 1980, he was assessed on March 8, 2003, when it was stated that he was “a family farmer,” who had been conscripted into Taliban service and taken to the Gereshk district of Helmand province, where Mullah Mir Hamza was the Taliban leader, and where he “was informed by a Taliban guard that he was being held to fight in a jihad.” After five days, he and other conscripts were flown to Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, where they “lived in a vacant building in downtown Kunduz for two months,” and where Asekzai “received one-day weapons instruction on how to operate the AK-47 and other unknown weapons.”

On November 5, 2001, he “escaped and paid for passage on a jeep to Kabul,” but en route Hazara troops ambushed them, killing the driver. The six passengers fled, and Asekzai hid under a truck belonging to the Hazara, but he was caught and subsequently imprisoned in Bamiyan for almost five months before being handed over to US forces.

It was also stated, as a reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, that he was transferred “because of his knowledge of a Taliban draftee holding area in Kunduz and of Mullah Mir Hamza,” but, as I explained in a recent 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 [646] 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, the commander of  Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for  transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Haydar Jabbar Hafez Tamimi (ISN 648, Iraq) Released March 2004

Born in 1973, he was described in his assessment on July 23, 2003 as Haydar Jabbar Hafez Al Tamimi, and it was also stated that, as well as having latent tuberculosis, in common with a great many of the prisoners, he had “Personality Disorder, Alcohol Abuse (resolved), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Depressive Disorder (resolved),” although apparently he was “otherwise in good health.”

In explaining how he ended up in Guantánamo, it was noted that, as a Shia, he was facing religious persecution in Iraq, and so, in October 2000, a man named Ali drove him to Suleimaniya in the Kurdish part of Iraq (the north), where he first joined Dr. Ayad Alawi’s National Wifaq Movement, and then the Iraqi Communist party, which he stayed with until March 2001. He explained that he “did not care for the Communists, but they gave him food, money and health care to be a member,” and so he worked for them as a guard. However, when he “tired of being a Communist,” he fled to Iran, where, seeking UN refugee status, he decided to travel to Pakistan. After visiting the UN office in Quetta, “where he filed for asylum, hoping to get Canada,” he found work in Peshawar with an Afghan named Maashougullah, in a photo studio taking passport photos, where he also worked as an interpreter.

When Maashougullah was seized by Pakistani and Taliban intelligence and taken to Kabul, his mother asked Al-Tamimi to take money and medicine to him, because “no one in her family could because they were known to be Northern Alliance sympathisers.” Seeking Maashougullah, he traveled to Afghanistan and “went to the Taliban Intelligence HQ in Kabul where the Taliban immediately arrested him.” he then spent 30 days in jail until the Taliban fled and he and the rest of the prisoners broke out of the jail. he left with Maashougullah and another man called Mohammed Ishan, who allowed Al-Tamimi to stay at his house, but later “sold him to General Fahim of the Northern Alliance.”

Interestingly, the reasons given for his transfer to Guantánamo, which, as I have explained, were grafted onto the prisoners’ cases after their transfer, dealt only partly with Afghanistan. It was stated that one reason for his transfer was because of his knowledge of the Taliban Intelligence Center in Kabul, but the other reasons were to do with Iraq, and it is known from the sad story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that, from the moment Guantánamo opened, the US authorities were anxious to secure intelligence that might help to justify their plans to invade Iraq. Al-Libi was the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who was rendered to Egypt after his capture, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had met Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi later recanted his false confession (before he was returned to Libya, where he died in prison in May 2009), but his statement was still used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and in Al-Tamimi’s case it was noted that two of the reasons for his transfer to Guantánamo were because of his knowledge of a weapons storage facility in Kirkuk, Iraq, and also of a communications center in Kirkuk.

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 [648] 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 poses a low threat to the US, its interests, or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for  release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

It is, however, not known what happened on his return. He stated that he “would like to get back to his life, earn money, have a normal family life.” It wa salsa noted that he “is resourceful, willing to take any work, [and] just wants to live freely without suffering for his faith,” but it is not known whether that would have happened to a Guantánamo prisoner released just a year after the US-led invasion.

Abdul Baqi (ISN 656, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Born in 1937 and therefore around 65 at the time of his capture, he was assessed on May 3, 2003, when it was stated that he was a farmer, whose “daily routine was to wake at dawn, pray to Allah, eat breakfast and go to the fields. He would work all day except during the morning, noon, afternoon and evening breaks to pray and to eat if there was food available.” In the summer of 2001, he paid the Taliban to avoid conscription, but after the US-led invasion he was “arrested during a raid to find Mullah Popuza,” when his house was raided, and, “while his wife and five children were sleeping in a nearby room … soldiers broke down the door and trained their weapons on him,” blindfolding him and taking him to the US prison at Kandahar airport. According to his assessment, he did not know “how many days he was in captivity before he was flown to Guantánamo Bay but described many days of interrogation.” The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002 was “because of his knowledge of Taliban conscription,” which, if true, could surely have been achieved without either holding him prisoner or transporting him halfway around the world.

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 [656] 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.”

Hezbullah (ISN 666, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Born in 1984 and described in his assessment on July 23, 2003 as a Pakistani national born in Miram Shah, and not an Afghan, his full name was given as Hezbullah Abd Jalil Andar, and it was also noted that he had been described as being an Afghan “because that was where he had been living since 1990 and [he] considered that his home,” and also that he “wishe[d] to be repatriated back to his family in Afghanistan.”

It was also stated that, sometime in April 2002, when he may only have been 17 years old (hence his inclusion in my recent article, WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo), he “was cutting alfalfa on his farm” in Afghanistan, when “Coalition forces appeared in his village, searching the area.” He was asked if he knew Saifullah Rahman Mansoor, and when he said that he did, he showed the soldiers the way to Mansoor’s house, and, with his cousin, “helped the soldiers move objects from the house, after it was searched, and load them on a truck.” The soldiers then asked Hezbullah and his cousin to accompany them, and US Military Police took them to Gardez, “where they underwent biographical data interrogations.” They were then taken to Bagram, “where they stayed for approximately 40 days undergoing two full interrogations,” and “were then transported to Kandahar for 20-25 days.” He was then transferred to Guantánamo, on June 13, 2002, and the spurious reason that was given for his transfer was “because of his knowledge of the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

It seems that hIs cousin is probably Abdul Al Hameed Andarr (ISN 668, see below), who was assessed as being a “low-level Taliban member,” although no such claim was made for Hezbullah. 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 [666] 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 poses a low threat to the US, its interests, or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Kari Mohammed Sarwar (ISN 667, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

Born in 1978, he was described in his assessment on March 8, 2003 as having been “diagnosed with chronic hepatitas B [sic] and photophobia,” although it was also stated that he was “otherwise in good health.”

When it came to the allegations against him, it was apparent that he was nothing mow than a religious scholar, seized by mistake (or for opportunistic reasons). After studying religion for three years in Khost province, he had then spent another two years “teaching children about the Koran and about purification rituals,” although he “did not receive any money or support from the mosque during this time [and] was supported entirely by his family.” At the end of February 2002, he “was offered a paid position at the mosque in Dap Kali, a small village near Khost,” where he “was paid a salary of 1,100 Pakistani Rupees to teach.”

Three weeks after taking this job, on March 21, 2002, he traveled to another village to visit his aunt, and there, while he was “preparing for prayer time, some unknown men approached him,” who “wanted to know if [he] was a Taliban [sic].” He “replied that he was not,” but the men sized him anyway and “turned him over to the United States ” — almost certainly, I would suggest, for money. The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002 was “because of his knowledge of Taliban operations in Khost.”

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 [667] 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 for release [sic] to the control of another government.”

Abdul Al Hameed Andarr (ISN 668, Afghanistan)  Released March 2004

Born in 1968, he was seized with his younger cousin, Hezbullah (ISN 666, see above), and in his assessment on October 21, 2003 it was stated that US and Afghan soldiers had searched his house and his village “because of his relationship to his first cousin, a senor Taliban leader and the Taliban’s former Eighth Division Commander,” identified as Saifullah Rahman Mansour. It was “also determined that [he] had brothers that were members of the Taliban government,’ albeit ones who were not named and were described as being of “undetermined seniority.”

Questioned and “suspected of then continued involvement [sic] with the Taliban,” he was taken into custody with Hezbullah, undergoing the process his cousin described: preliminary detention in Gardez, followed by 40 days in Bagram, and approximately a month in Kandahar. Despite attempting to ramp up his significance, however, the Task Force’s spurious reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002 was ambivalent, noting only that he had been transferred “because of his possible knowledge concerning senior Taliban members.”

In its reasons for detaining Andarr, the Task Force stated that Mansour was “reported to be directing hit-and-run attacks on US and Coalition forces in AF, as well as reportedly planning suicide-bombing attacks against senior Afghan Transitional Authority (ATA) members.” It was alleged that Andarr was captured at a compound controlled by Mansour (although his cousin’s account suggested that he had voluntarily taken US forces to the compound) “and was living [sic] and working for Mansour,” and although it was assessed that much of the information he was presumed to possess was “considered dated and would be of marginal use, that information he could still possess might lead to a greater understanding of the persons involved in insurgent operations.” It was also noted that information about is brothers might also be useful, as “his family’s affiliations pose a continuing threat to the ATA.”

In his assessment, it was noted that he was “assessed as being a low-level Taliban member,” who was “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and was “a low threat risk to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Mohammed Haji Yousef (ISN 820, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Born in 1967, he was described in his assessment on August 30, 2003 as Mohammed Yusef, and it was stated that he “owned a Public Call Office (PCO) and two other shops in the local bazaar in Bermal,” in Paktia province, where he had worked “for approximately 21 years.” He was seized during a raid on his store “for [sic] suspicion of being an Al-Qaida facilitator,” apparently because “[s]everal calls to incriminating numbers were reportedly made from the PCO.” The Task Force noted that he “maintained throughout the course of interrogations that he did not make the calls and was not aware of any suspicious activity going on in his store,” although it was also claimed that he “did have little knowledge [sic] on [sic] Al-Qaida financial operations” involving the hawala system, even though he “was not directly involved in the financial operations.”

When it came to the spurious reason for his transfer to Guantánamo, on October 28, 2002, it was stated that he was transferred “because of his knowledge of the financial network used to finance Taliban and Al-Qaida activities from abroad, and the means of communication utilized by the Al-Qaida and Taliban forces,” even though that was not a fair reflection of what had been presented as the reasons for his detention.

In its assessment, the Task Force stated that he was “assessed as not being affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” and that, in addition, he was “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “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.”

Tila Mohammed Khan (ISN 830, Pakistan) Released November 2003

He was born in 1980, and it was stated, in his assessment on August 9, 2003, that he had “a history of depression and anxiety,” but was “otherwise in good health.” In describing the reasons for his detention, the Task Force stated that he lived in Waziristan, and had attended “a pro-jihad demonstration,” which, according to the memo’s author, was “presumably sponsored by the Taliban,” even though there was no reason for presuming this, as it may well have been sponsored by a Pakistani militant group.

As a result of attending this demonstration he apparently “decided to support the Taliban against Americans because he was promised food and a weapon.” He then “departed with 35-40 individuals to Kabul,” where “he served as a gate guard and a cook near the Kabul airport.” Having at some point deserted, or been told to flee after the US-led invasion, he was seized “while traveling from Kabul to his uncle’s home” (in Amana, in Paktika province), and was then held in Bagram for two months before being transferred to Guantánamo. The spurious reason for his undated transfer to Guantánamo was “because of his support for the Taliban and for his serving in a combatant role.”

In its assessment, the Task Force stated that he was “assessed as being a very low-level member of the Taliban,” and that, in addition, he was “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a low threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he “be considered for release and repatriation to his country of origin.”

Sultan Ahmad (ISN 842, Pakistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1984 and very possibly a juvenile when seized, as I explained in my articles The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo, and WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo, he was assessed on November 24, 2003, when it was stated that he had been “deceptive during interrogations,” claiming that he had wanted to travel to Turkey for jihad, and then claiming that he had wanted to travel to Turkey to find work, but “was robbed, which forced him to travel through Afghanistan.” There, he said, while attempting to cross the border back into Pakistan, he was “arrested by Afghan border troops and turned over to US personnel.” The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on February 7, 2003 was “because he may provide information regarding Jihad recruitment.”

The Task Force assessed him as being “maybe a member of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba,” the Pakistani militant group that is primarily devoted to the struggle in Kashmir, and noted that he “may also be a member of  Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI),” which is actually a political party,albeit one committed to a Conservative, Deobandi interpretation of Islam. However, it was not certain that there was any truth to these assessments. As the Task Force also noted, Ahmad had confused the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), whose Behavioral Science Consultation Team(BSCT), had “completed a behavioural review on 15 September 2003 and was unable to assign a risk category.”

Nevertheless, the Task Force concluded that he was “assessed as an extremist recruit,” who was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and who, above all, posed “a High Threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Milller recommended that he “be retained under DoD control,” but in fact he was released 10 months later.

Saghir Ahmed (ISN 843, Pakistan) Released September 2004

He was born in 1975, and it was stated, in his assessment on November 11, 2003, that he “claimed that he was recruited in Pakistan to fight Jihad” by a member of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and that he “understood that he would be fighting Americans” and “decided to participate anyway.” He apparently signed a pledge to this effect, which “was to be used as a letter of introduction when he arrived in Afghanistan,” but which, instead, was found in his possession when he tried to enter Afghanistan, and was stopped by Afghan troops, and subsequently handed over to US forces.

In its assessment, the Task Force concluded that he had been “deceptive during his interrogations and refuse[d] to be forthright,” and was “suspected of being much more than a ‘recruit’” — in other words, he was “suspected of being a full member of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam,” and was regarded as being an “extremist Jihadist.” This was reflected in the spurious reasons given for his transfer to Guantánamo on November 11, 2003, when it was stated that he was being transferred “because [of] his knowledge of personnel recruiting for the Jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir.” It was also stated that he was “assessed as being a probable member of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam,” but not as “a member of Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” that he was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and that he posed “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he “be retained under DoD control,” although, like Sultan Ahmad, he was released 10 months later.

Barak (ISN 856, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1972 in Paktia province, it was stated in his assessment on November 20, 2003 that he was seized “during a raid on a compound, which contained rockets and other weapons.” Initially, he “denied knowledge of the weapons but later admitted that the rockets belonged to his brother, Rafig,” who had reportedly “received them from Jalaluddin Haqqani (former Taliban commander)of the Zadran Tribe and stored them at the compound.” The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on March 1, 2003 was “because of this involvement with weapons trafficking and his possible membership in the Taliban,” although it seemed clear from his assessment that these suspicions had come to nothing.

Although it was stated that he had been “evasive in interrogations” and “was tentatively identified as a supporter of the former Taliban commander Khalifa,” and it was also claimed that he and his brother may have been “involved in attacks against Coalition forces,” the notion that he was a worthwhile prisoner largely collapsed when he “was polygraphed in November 2002, regarding his knowledge of the purchase of the weapons and his assistance in the purchase of these weapons,” and “[t]he results of the polygraph indicated no deception.”

As  a result, he was “assessed as being neither affiliated with AI-Qaida nor a Taliban leader.” It was also stated that he was “of no intelligence value to the United States,”and that he posed “a Low Threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” Maj. Gen. Miller therefore recommended his release or transfer to the control of another government, but the Criminal Investigative Task Force “indicated that more investigation was needed to complete a threat assessment,” so it was decided that, “Until further law enforcement investigation is conducted by CITF and an assessment is made, JTF GTMO and CITF cannot agree on this particular detainee.” That investigation must have taken place swiftly, because Barak was released four months later.

Mohammed Khan (ISN 910, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1982, he was seized, in a compound near Gardez that was owned by a local warlord named Samoud Khan, with seven others who ended up in Guantanamo. Notoriously, three or four of these prisoners were juveniles at the time of their capture, including (as I explained in my articles, The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo and WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo), two boys who were just 13 or 14 years old at the time.

Like many of the prisoners, he was diagnosed, in his assessment on August 23, 2003, with latent tuberculosis, and also with “an Adjustment Disorder,” although he was also described as being “otherwise in good health.” When it came to the allegations against him, he stated that, on the day in December 2002 when he was seized, “he recalls returning to the compound after doing errands when he and others were told the Americans were coming. Several persons departed the compound while [he] and several others stayed behind, believing they had nothing to fear from the Americans.” Instead, however, “after the Americans arrived they took everyone’s weapons, and arrested and handcuffed everyone.” Khan specifically “advised that  no one resisted the Americans but they were arrested anyway.” The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003 was “because of his knowledge of routes of travel used by Samoud Khan and his associates, facilities used by Samoud Khan, and egress routes from Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Task Force stated that Khan was “assessed as being neither affiliated with aI-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 poses a low threat risk to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Bismaullah (ISN 960, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1948, he was described in his assessment on August 30, 2003 as Bismulla. He is one of at least ten prisoners seized in February 2003 “under suspicion of involvement in an ambush of American and Coalition Forces, while they were traveling along a road north of Lejay,” in Helmand province. Like others seized after this alleged attack, Bismaullah “was arrested because he was ‘wearing OD green military jacket at a checkpoint after a firefight’ which was the uniform of others involved with the attack.” The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on May 9, 2003 was “because of his suspected involvement in the ambush and his knowledge of general order of battle information regarding the anti-coalition militia forces in the Lejay area.”

Bismaullah stated that “he was not involved in the attack and he was in a local mosque for morning prayer when he heard the gunfire and dismissed it as possibly ‘celebratory’ gunfire.” He also stated that, “after prayer, he was riding with a friend, Said Ali, on a motorcycle in route [sic] to a funeral of a relative when he was stopped at a checkpoint and arrested, under suspicion of his possible involvement.”

As with most, if not all of the other men seized, the Task Force conceded that “little hard fact” [sic] was “evident to directly link [him] to the ambush as a participant,” although it was noted that his “creditability” [sic] was “assessed as poor and he [had] not been candid or forthcoming in his interviews,” and that he had “refused to fully explain his actions on that day,” and that this made him “a continuing threat” to the US and its allies. Nevertheless, he was “assessed as being neither a member of Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” and as being “of low intelligence value to the United States.” Defining his threat level, the Task Force called him “a low threat to the US, [but] a medium threat to the current government of Afghanistan because of his possible affiliation with local subversive elements.” 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,” although it was also noted that, at the time, CITF had not approved his transfer because their investigation “was incomplete.”

Akhtar Mohammed (ISN 969, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1983, he was a farmer and taxi driver, described, in his assessment on August 2, 2003, as being “uneducated” and with “no record of travel outside of his home region” in Helmand province. He was seized at a checkpoint in Lejay in February 2003 following an attack on US Special Forces (see Bismaullah, ISN 960, above) “while driving his taxicab to a local bazaar in Baghran.” Those who detained him “suspected that the taxi contained personnel that were responsible for the attack. Upon investigation, the passengers were released; however, detainee was not due to his name being synonymous with Taliban leader Abdul Wahid’s driver.” He was sent to Guantánamo in March 2003.

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 [969] 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 for release [sic] to the control of another government.”

Amanullah (ISN 970, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

No Detainee Assessment Brief exists for Amanullah, but he was included in a separate Task Force assessment on “Afghanistan/Pakistan Detainee’s” [sic], dated March 29, 2004, in which it was noted that he had “a history of the excision of a right ankle ganglion cyst, and mild intermittent asthma,” although he was “currently in good health.”

It was also stated that he was seized outside his house in a village in Helmand province on February 11, 2003. This was probably near Lejay, where there had been an attack (see Bismaullah, ISN 960, and Akhtar Mohammed, ISN 969, above) which was probably what was being referred to in Amanullah’s file, when it was noted, “According to reports, there was a 48-hour firefight between US Forces and Taliban right before detainee was captured.”

Amanullah stated that he “heard an explosion near his house and went to look for his son who was tending to livestock,” that “his son was injured from the bombs,” and that, when he “was walking his son back home to take care of his wounds US forces detained him.” He added that a Hazara linguist, who was translating for the US forces, “threatened his son to say that the detainee had hidden an AK-47 and was hiding 20-armed men with AK-47’s and rockets in a cave near his village,” and that “his son told the US patrol what the linguist had said out of fear for his father’s safety and that led to detainee’s arrest.” Transported to Bagram on February 12, 2003, he arrived in Guantánamo on March 25, 2003.

Under the heading, “Exploitation Requirements,” it was stated that Amanullah had “[p]ossible information on Taliban and Al-Qaida operations, leadership structure, locations of proposed targets in the Helmand Province, AF, and possible enemy weapons caches,” but he was assessed as a low risk, and as being of low intelligence value, and the Task Force also noted, “It appears that the detainee has not participated in hostilities and possesses a low threat to the US, its allies and interests.” As a result, he was recommended for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.

Mohammed Akbar (ISN 1011, Pakistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1973 and described in his assessment on December 30, 2003 as an Afghan national called Akbar Mohammed, he was “diagnosed with latent Tuberculosis and as being in the early stages of Schizophreniform,” but it was claimed that he was “otherwise in good health.”

When it came to the reason for his detention, the Task Force note that it was “believed” that he “was captured by the iranians at an undetermined location inside of Iran and held for an undetermined amount of time,” before being “turned over to Afghan authorities sometime in March 2003 along with 7 others, all suspected by the Iranians of being Al-Qaida or Taliban operatives.” Those seized with him were mostly Afghans and Yemenis, and most were then subjected to brutal treatment in secret prisons in Afghanistan that were under the control of the CIA, as I explained in a report on secret detention for the United Nations in 2010.

Akbar was evidently more fortunate than most, if not all of these other prisoners, because he was transferred to Guantánamo on May 8, 2003, the spurious reason being that, while held at Bagram, he had admitted to being with a Taliban leader in Pakistan and “volunteering to work for Al-Qaida.” This was of great interest to the Task Force, who noted, “Prior to his arrival at GTMO, [his] interviews indicated he was purposely [sic] concealing information,” and also noted that his claim of being an Afghan was “thought to be part of his cover story, meant to help mitigate his affiliations and importance,” which was inferred because he was “highly educated and speaks at least 5 languages.” However, he had “not explained where he received his education,” had “not explained his position or affiliation with the Taliban,” and had further confused matters by claiming that he was an officer in the Afghan Army, which could not be confirmed. It was also noted that he had “unexplained travels that could possibly indicate a greater involvement with Islamic extremism.”

In conclusion, the Task Force admitted that Akbar “cannot be assessed as whether he was a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader at this time,” although it was noted that he was of intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller that he should be retained under DoD control, which he was for another nine months until his release.

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.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

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 4 of the 70-part series.

One of the great publicity coups in WikiLeaks’ recent release of classified military documents relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo, as I explained in the first part of this five-part series, was to shine a light on the stories of the first 201 prisoners to be freed from the prison between its opening, in January 2002, and September 2004, when 35 prisoners were repatriated to Pakistan, and 11 were repatriated to Afghanistan.

A handful of these 46 prisoners were cleared for release as a result of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, a one-sided process, which ran from August 2004 to March 2005 and was designed to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants,” who could continue to be held indefinitely. Information about the 558 prisoners who passed through the CSRT process (PDF) was first made publicly available in 2006, but no records have ever been publicly released by the US government which provide any information whatsoever about the 201 released, or approved for release before the CSRTs began, except for a prisoner list released in May 2006 (PDF), which contains the names, nationalities, and, where known, dates of birth and places of birth for 759 prisoners (all but the 20 who arrived at Guantánamo between September 2006 and March 2008).

In the years since the documents relating to the CSRTs were released (and information relating to their annual follow-ups, the Administrative Review Boards, or ARBs), I attempted to track down the stories of these 201 men, and managed, largely through successful research that led to relevant media reports, interviews and reports compiled by NGOs, to discover information about 114 of these prisoners, but nothing at all was known about 87 others (except for their names, and, in some cases, their date of birth and place of birth). With the release of the WikiLeaks files, all but three of these 87 stories have emerged for the very first time, and in this series of articles, I am transcribing and condensing these stories, and providing them with some necessary context. The first 51 stories were in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, and the penultimate instalment is below. Also see Part Five.

Please note that the overwhelming majority of these 84 prisoners were Afghans or Pakistanis, and that many were assessed by the US military as “being neither affiliated with AI-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” of having “no intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “no threat” or “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” That last reference — to them posing “a low threat” — ought to alert readers to the problems with the classification system at Guantánamo, as many of the cases involve unwilling Taliban conscripts or patently innocent people seized by mistake, who, nevertheless, were referred to as “a low threat” rather than as no threat at all.

On their return, the majority of the Afghans were released outright, whereas the Pakistanis were mostly imprisoned for many months before they too were granted their freedom (see here for an article from Pakistani newspaper the Nation in June 2005 describing the release of 17 prisoners repatriated from Guantánamo in September 2004, some of whom are listed below).

WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo (Part Four of Five)

Bacha Khan (ISN 529, Pakistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1971, he was described in his assessment on September 13, 2003 as Badcha Khan, and was evidently regarded as troublesome by the Task Force, who described him as “uncooperative and aggressive while in detention.” It was also stated that he “ha[d] been defiant and during interviews ha[d] failed to be forthright or truthful.” It was also stated that he was “dedicated towards Islamic extremism” and was “assessed to have willingly traveled to Afghanistan to participate in the Jihad against the North Alliance [sic] and the US.”

In what was clearly regarded as a false cover story, Khan apparently claimed that he had traveled to Afghanistan in early November 2001 “to buy kitchen supplies for his home and to visit religious sites and visit graveyards.” Having allegedly traveled alone from Karachi to Quetta, and then to Spin Boldak and Kabul, he said that he stayed in Kabul “for 10-15 days at the home of an unknown Afghan ‘around government buildings,’” and then, after the US-led invasion, “tried to evacuate to the other side of Kabul ‘where the industrial companies were located,’” and where he was captured by a Northern Alliance commander while apparently carrying stolen Pakistani currency. He was then “held in a building called ‘the company’ near a bazaar with many others before he was turned over to the Americans.”

It was also stated, as a reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 16, 2002, that he was transferred “because of his affiliation with the Taliban as a foreign fighter,” but, as I explained in a recent 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 Khan was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida, or a Taliban leader,” and was “of no intelligence value to the United States,” although he was assessed as posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests and its allies,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Amanullah Alikozi (ISN 538, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1973, and described in his assessment on November 12, 2003 as Aman Ullah, he was also described as “the first cousin of Mullah Abdul Bari, the governor of Helmand province, when the Taliban were in power.” Bari was also described as “a senior Taliban official,” who “reportedly communicated on a regular basis with Mullah Mohammed Omar using radios from Bari’s home and vehicle.”

Amanullah himself was described as having “owned and managed a shop selling excess farm goods” in Uruzgan province for eight years before his capture, and seemingly had little to do with his cousin’s activities. It was noted, for example, that in January 2002, when “Bari and an unidentified individual came to [his] home, and stayed for three days,” he moved his entire family to another village “[d]ue to the danger of housing a high-profile member of the Taliban.” Moreover, it does not seem that he was seized because of anything he had done. Instead, the new mayor of Uruzgan after the fall of the Taliban, Mohammed Jan, “arrested the detainee, confiscated his vehicle, and took 200,000 Pakistani Rupees” before handing him over — or selling him — to US forces.

He was flown to Guantánamo on June 10, 2002, on the spurious basis that his transfer was “because of his knowledge of information on local Taliban government personalities, and safehouses in Deh Rawood,” where he took his family when Bari came to stay in January 2002.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that Amanullah was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida, or a Taliban leader,” and was “of no intelligence value to the United States,” and he was also assessed as posing “a low threat to the US, its interests and its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Noor Allah (ISN 539, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1971 in Deh Rawood, he was assessed on September 13, 2003 as suffering from “an Anxiety disorder” as well as the “latent tuberculosis” that is familiar from a large number of the prisoners’ files. It was also stated that he claimed that he was a farmer who was seized in Deh Rawood by forces loyal to Mohammed Nabi Khan, evidently a local commander. Noor Allah “stated that he  felt his capture was the result of a long-standing dispute between [him] and Mullah Khudai Nazar,” who “reportedly killed [his] cousin sometime around 1991 because [he] refused to give supplies and money to Mujahideen forces that were in control of Afghanistan under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” According to Noor Allah, he “was in the process of trying to settle the dispute with the Karzai government when Nazar reportedly set [him] up to be arrested as a member of the Taliban.”

He was flown to Guantánamo on May 4, 2002, on the spurious basis that his transfer was “because of his knowledge of the town of Deh Rawood,” where, it was stated, “Mullah Mohammad Omar is from,” and “specific family issues surrounding Mullah Mohammad Omar, Taliban activities in Uruzgan Province and information on foreign extremists operating in Uruzgan Province.”

The alleged connection with Mullah Omar continued with a claim that one of Noor Allah’s sisters was married to Mullah Omar, although it was unclear where this information had come from, or how accurate it may or may not have been. It was noted instead that Noor Allah had “not been forthcoming during interrogations when questioned on his personal and familial ties to Mullah Omar and the Taliban,” and “had lie [sic] several times stating that he [did] not even know Mullah Omar.” It was also claimed hat he had “not been forthcoming with his knowledge of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Hekmatyar Forces.”

As a result, he was assessed as being “still of intelligence value based on potential knowledge of Mullah Omar, Taliban leaders from the Deh Rawood district, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” In addition, it was stated that his “ties to Mullah Omar [made] him a threat until the cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan or until Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [were] detained by friendly forces.” Although he was “assessed as being neither a member of AI-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” he was “assessed as having knowledge of Taliban leadership and of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s forces and leaders in Afghanistan,” and although the Joint Task Force described him as being “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” he posed “a high threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he “be retained under DoD control.”

The Task Force also noted that it had “notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of this recommendation on 18 August 2003, who previously approved the detainee’s transfer under a conditional release agreement on 2 April 2003,” although Noor Allah was eventually released in September 2004, apparently without any strings attached.

Mohammed Noman (ISN 541, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In a JTF-GTMO assessment on February 9, 2004 (which was included in the files instead of a Detainee Assessment Brief, for no apparent reason, as it also was in the case of ISN 101, Mohammed Irfan), it was noted that, “[b]eing religious and wanting to actively participate in the jihad, [he] went to a Jamiat-Ul-Mujahideen sponsored pro-Taliban recruiting office in his hometown,” and was then taken to Afghanistan where he attended a training camp. He then “went back to his home town, traveled to the Paki-controlled side of Kashmir [sic], then traveled back to Afghanistan five more times,” on that last occasion fighting the forces of Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud near Bagram. It was noted that he had traveled extensively in Afghanistan, and that he “was ordered to retreat while fighting near Herat, and that his unit was in retreat when Northern Alliance forces closed in on him near a town called Gulran, capturing him on November 18, 2001, and taking him back to Herat, and then on to US custody.

Assessed as being a medium risk, it was noted that he had “demonstrated a commitment to jihad, ha[d] attended combatant training, and ha[d] participated and or supported hostilities against the US and coalition in support of jihad and maintain[ed] the capabilities to continue to do so.” However, it was also noted that he had been “extremely cooperative and appears truthful,” that he had been “fully exploited,” and that he was recommended for transfer to the control of another country for continued detention.

Mohammed Abas (ISN 542, Pakistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1980 and described in his assessment on August 16, 2003 as Mohammed Noramer Abbas, he told his interrogators that “he left Faisalabad in early November 2001 to visit his brother who [was] a clerk in the Pakistani military in Quetta.” There, he said, he “was re-united with an acquaintance at the bus station … who invited [him] to accompany him to visit his brother in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan.” From there, he said they “decided to visit the famous mosque in Kandahar.” From here his story jumped to “approximately” April 2002, when, “while returning to Quetta, his coach was stopped en route by an oncoming vehicle. Four men boarded the coach, and removed detainee and three other passengers who happened to be sitting towards the front and drove them to Gorlan, AF, where they were held for seven to eight days. After this time, all four were transferred to Herat, AF, where detainee claims he spent approximately two and a half months before being delivered into US custody in Kandahar.”

Abas “claimed that he had only been in Afghanistan for 10 days before being captured,” but the Task Force noted that the “transfer team” concluded that he had “not been truthful during his interrogations,” that “[i]nconsistencies in his timeline [had] not been truthfully explained” and that he had “not revealed all of his associates and his true reasons for traveling to Afghanistan,” and had “failed to be truthful and forthright in his interviews.”

The Task Force assessed Abas “as being a probable Taliban recruit who traveled to Afghanistan to support the call for Jihad,” although it was also noted that he was “of low intelligence value to the United States.” The Task Force concluded, without too much enthusiasm, that he posed “a medium threat risk to the US, its interests and its allies because of his possible interest in the cause of Islamic extremism, and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he “be considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” The unconfirmed suspicions about him also emerged in the spurious reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 16, 2002, which was “because he was suspected of being a foreign fighter assisting the Taliban.”

Wali Mohammed (ISN 547, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

Born in 1964, he was assessed on June 27, 2004, when it was noted that, two weeks before, he had had a “malignant tumour removed from his chest cavity (a malignant thymoma),” also described as a “large tumour,” which was “invasive.” It was also noted that “his chest require[d] further treatment with radiation to prevent a recurrence of this cancer,” although the “[r]ecommended radiation treatments [could] not be performed here at Guantánamo Bay.”

It was also noted that he had “a history of chronic hepatitis B and a seizure disorder,” and that he “should start radiation therapy after his surgical wound [had] healed, with an expectation that this would be by August 1, 2004.” It was also noted that the “long-term prognosis with treatment [was] probably very good, though data [was] lacking since this is an unusual cancer.”

Mohammed was only released because of the absence of necessary equipment at Guantánamo, although it is difficult to see how he would have survived in Afghanistan.From a security point of view, there was no obvious reason for his release so soon after this assessment, because It was stated that his “overall behavior has been non-compliant and slightly aggressive,” and that he “continue[d] to be of medium intelligence value,” and the Task Force noted that the opinion regarding his detention was the same as stated in the previous year’s Detainee Assessment Brief, when Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he “be retained under DoD control.” Significantly, however, it was also determined that he posed “a low risk, due to his medical condition,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen, Jay Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, accepted the Joint Task Force’s recommendation that, based on his “health status, intelligence value and risk level,” he “be released or transferred to the control of another country for continued detention.”

Sohab Mahud Mohammed (ISN 563, Iraq) Released March 2004

Born in 1976 and described in his assessment on August 16, 2003 as Surab Mahmed Mohammed, he was clearly not well, as it was noted that he was “blind in his right eye and his left eye require[d] correction.” He had also “been seen by psychiatric staff for Depressive Disorder” and was “listed in ‘poor condition’ with a fair prognosis.” It was also stated that he had “been refusing medications, thus complicating his condition.”

Relating his story, the Task Force explained that, according to Mohammed, he served in the Iraqi army from 1993 to 1995. but deserted because it was “too hard.” He then “fled north and attempted to join up with the Kurds but was not accepted by them,” so he “then fled to Iran where he lived for three years doing various odd jobs and committing various crimes to earn money.” He was then “arrested by Iranian police and deported to Afghanistan because they believed he was Afghani,” and, “fearing execution for desertion,” he said that he “told the Iranians he was Afghani to keep from being deported back to Iraq.” He said that he then “traveled to Nimruz, AF, in late 2001,” where he “continued his life as a common criminal,” and where,  “[a]t one point, he was arrested by the Taliban under suspicion of being a spy.” He also said that “[t]he Taliban imprisoned [him] until Northern Alliance forces captured him.”

Despite the coherence of this narrative, the Task Force concluded that his story became “convoluted and complicated” and that he had “failed to be forthright, owing to his profession as a criminal.” It was also stated that the “transfer team” concluded that he was “an opportunist and a criminal,” who had “told so many disjointed stories that anything he was to say would be entirely unbelievable without direct corroboration.” With blunt confusion, the Task Force stated that he “may have had knowledge of the Taliban and possibly even AI-Qaida personalities but that knowledge is considered suspect and unreliable.”

Shorn of any convincing reason for holding Mohammed, who appeared to be nothing more than an unfortunate drifter, like other Iraqis in Guantánamo, and, moreover, one who had fallen foul of the Taliban and had actually been imprisoned by them, the Task Force nevertheless assessed him “as a criminal and as such, held in his country of origin and subject to its laws,” although it was conceded that “[n]o creditable information ha[d] come to light” to suggest that Mohammed was “affiliated with either the Taliban or AI-Qaida as a member.”

He was also described as being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests, and its allies because of his criminal history and possible connections to criminal groups and organizations that continue to support Islamic extremism in the region.” This seemed unlikely, but Maj. Gen. Miller recommended him for “transfer to the control of another government for continued detention,” even though it was uncertain how he would have been treated in Iraq, one year after the US invasion.

Noor Ahmad (ISN 580, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

Born in 1973, it was stated in his assessment on January 11, 2003 that he had fled to Pakistan in 1994 due to the war in Afghanistan, and had not set foot in Afghanistan since 1999. A merchant, he apparently traveled between Quetta and Sanzar Khel in the North West Frontier Province on a regular basis but, in February 2002, was questioned by “two Pakistani police officers performing routine document inspections,” who took him to a police station for “further questioning,” when he was “[u]nable to produce any documents.” Ahmed also stated that, “While in jail, [he] was told that he would be released if he raised 1,000 Rupees [about $12],” but that, because he “did not have the money to pay the bribe, [he] was thus incarcerated for several days before being transferred to US forces.” Although it was clear from this story that he was seized on a random basis by the US military’s Pakistani allies and handed over — or probably sold — it was also stated, without any shame, that the reason for his transfer to Guantánamo, which was, of course, grafted onto his case after the event, was “because of his general knowledge of routes of ingress into 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 [580] 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.”

Ibrahim Al Umar (ISN 585, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2003

Born in 1985, and therefore a juvenile when seized (to add to the 22 other known juveniles held in Guantánamo), he was assessed on September 27, 2002, when it was stated that he went to Pakistan to study at a religious school in Bannu, in western Pakistan, attending for four months until, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, “the  school director requested that [he] leave Pakistan for his own safety, and so that the Pakistani authorities would not close the school.”

It was stated that he then “headed towards Karachi in a car driven by a Pakistani,” but that, “[w]hile driving to Lahore, the car hit a pedestrian. The driver panicked and continued driving, but Pakistani police stopped the car at a checkpoint and took everyone in the vehicle into Pakistani custody on 28 February 2002,” when he would have been either 16 or, conceivably, 17. He was then taken to a prison run by Pakistan’s most notorious intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), where he was held for 45 days before being turned over to US forces. He was transferred to Guantánamo on June 15, 2002, and the spurious reason given was that it was “because of his knowledge of an Islamic school frequented by Jihadists.”

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 [585] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida, and as not 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.” It was also noted positively that, when he was being interviewed in Afghanistan, he “gave his true name to US forces rather than an alias.”

In addition, it was noted that, during a visit to Guantánamo from July 1 to 12, 2002, Saudi intelligence officers interrogated him and “concluded that he had little or no intelligence value,” and stated that they would accept custody of him if he was released. As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Nematuallah Sahib Khan Alizai (ISN 628, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

Born in 1958, he was assessed on January 18, 2003, when it was stated that, like many of the prisoners, he had latent tuberculosis, but also suffered from chronic headaches, and had been diagnosed with moderate depression and hypertension.

A Taliban conscript, he was apparently taken from his village shortly before Ramadan in 2001, arriving in Kunduz on October 4. He was then taken north to Takhar province, where the Taliban leader was Mullah Rahoof, with whom he “had a multi-year adversarial relationship as a result of a land dispute.” When he discovered that Mullah Rahoof was the leader, “he escaped by boarding a truck headed to Kabul,” but was seized en route by Northern Alliance troops and taken to a camp in Bamiyan, where he was held for approximately two months before being transferred to US forces. He arrived in Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, and the spurious reason given for his transfer was “because of his general knowledge of the Taliban conscription process” — a weak reason in an ocean of poor excuses for kidnapping or buying people and rendering them halfway round the world.

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 [628] 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.”

Mahngur Alikhan (ISN 629, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

Born in 1957, he was described in his assessment on February 1, 2003 as Mahngur Ali Khan, and it was stated that he had been diagnosed with “gastroesophageal reflux disease and latent tuberculosis,” and in his own report he referred to illness, stating that, “[a]fter returning from an unsuccessful trip to Karachi, Pakistan to find work, [he] began experiencing stomach problems,” and traveled to Pakistan seeking treatment. After hitching a lift, he “was given a ride by one of three vehicles that traveled together in a convoy,” but which was then attacked by two US helicopters, “causing the vehicle occupants to scatter.” Alikhan “fled the battle and hid until the gunfire ceased, and was then detained by US forces and transported to Bagram.” On June 15, 2002, when he was sent to Guantánamo, the spurious reason given was “because of his general knowledge on [sic] migrant worker travel across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for winter work.”

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 [629] 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.”

Nisar Rahmad (ISN 630, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

Born in 1980, he was assessed on April 8, 2003, when it was stated that he had become a Taliban conscript in place of his brother, who had been chosen, but who had “severe injury to both arms,” obliging his family to “use its financial resources to pay for the brother’s medical expenses and family funds could not cover the 5 million Afghani payment to be exempt from service.” After serving for 20 days in Bamiyan province, the Taliban retreated, and he “fled with other conscripts through the mountains,” eventually being seized by members of the Hazara militia, the Hezb-e-Wahdat, and imprisoned for four months in Bamiyan before being handed over — or sold — to US forces. On June 9, 2002, when he was transferred to Guantánamo, the spurious reason given was that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban travel routes, and recruitment.”

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 [630] 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 to the control of another government.”

Ali Mohammed (ISN 634, Pakistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1958, he was described in his assessment on October 21, 2003 as Ali Muhammad Murad. It is unclear what he was supposed to have done, as the Detainee Assessment Brief refers only to a previous DAB, dated August 16, 2003, in which Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government,” based on an assessment that he “was affiliated with the Taliban as a member and a foreign Islamic extremist fighter.” However, “[a]fter consultation with the Criminal Investigative Task Force and further analysis concerning [his] detention,” it was decided that he was “not a member of the Taliban,” and that, although, “by his own admission, [he] traveled to AF to fight on behalf of the Taliban,” he may not pose an ongoing threat to the US” if released.

As a result, he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaeda or a Taliban leader.” It was also stated that he was “of no intelligence valet the United States,” and posed “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government” — the same outcome as two months earlier, but presumably with more weight put on the option to release him rather than for him to be detained on arrival in Pakistan.

Insanullah (ISN 637, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Born in1980, he was described in his assessment on March 8, 2003 as Insan Ullah, and it was stated that he was “forcibly conscripted” by the Taliban from his village in Nangarhar province, where he was a sharecropper, on October 10, 2001, and flown to Bamiyan. He immediately escaped, “before he could receive any weapons training,” and traveled to the next village where he sought a lift to Kabul but was, instead, taken captive by villagers who took him to a prison camp near the city of Bamiyan, where he was held for four months until he was “turned over” to US forces. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 25, 2002, and the spurious reason for his transfer was “because of his knowledge of Taliban conscription in Nangarhar province.”

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 [637] 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 for release [sic] to the control of another government.”

Bismillah (ISN 639, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

Born in 1968, he was described in his assessment on November 20, 2003 as Bismulah, and it was stated that, approximately 25 days before Ramadan in 2001, he left home to buy flour and cooking oil, but “was approached by an individual named Mullah Musa, a Taliban commander,” who told him “he had to either pay 5,000,000 Afghani rupees or serve in the Taliban army. As he could not afford the bribe, he and three other villagers were forcibly conscripted and sent to the border with Hazara territory, in central Afghanistan, where they stayed for 17 days until Hazara troops advanced and they fled to a town where they were captured by a local militia affiliated with the Northern Alliance, and transferred to a prison in Bamiyan, where they were held for four months until they were “turned over” to US forces. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 11, 2002, and the spurious reason for his transfer was “because of his general knowledge of Taliban conscription, and of the facility he was guarding.”

In his assessment, it was stated that he was “assessed as being neither affiliated with AI-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” that he was “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and that he posed “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended him for “release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” It was also stated that, “pursuant to an agreement between the CITF [Criminal Investigative Task Force] and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that the detainee poses a medium threat,” although there was no indication as to whether CITF had initially regarded him as more or less significant.

Hamidullah (ISN 642, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Born in Kunduz in 1980 and described in his assessment on April 8, 2003 as Hamidullah Haji Abdul Ghafor, he was diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (as were many other prisoners), but also with “an anxiety disorder.” It was stated that, in order to prevent him being conscripted by the Taliban, along with his brother and a friend, his family paid 300,000 Afghanis, which came from “family savings and farm sales.” However, while trying to flee south in a specially commissioned Flying Coach, they heard that Kabul was “already overrun,” and the driver refused to proceed. They then hired a taxi, but near Pul-i-Kumri, in Baghlan province, they were seized by Taliban forces, and transferred to a prison in Bamiyan province, where they were held for four months before being turned over to the Northern Alliance, who in turn handed them on to US forces. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 26, 2002, and the spurious reason for his transfer was “because of his knowledge of Taliban and their operations in and around Kunduz.”

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 [642] 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 to the control of another government.”

Mohammed Kabel (ISN 645, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

Born in 1963 in Parwan province, north of Kabul, he was assessed on December 5, 2002, when it was stated that he was conscripted by the Taliban because he was unable to pay a bribe of five million Afghanis. He was sent to a fighting position in the mountains for 21 days, until, “having decided to surrender,” he and others walked to Bamiyan province where they were seized by Northern Alliance forces three days before the start of Ramadan in November 2001, and held for four months before being transferred to US custody. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, and the spurious reason for his transfer was “because of his general knowledge of Taliban conscription procedures and extortion activities.”

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 [645] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida or 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.”

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.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

Two suspicious omissions: Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr

Of the 14 missing stories, just two are overtly suspicious. The first of these is the file for Abdullah Tabarak Ahmad (ISN 56), a Moroccan who, according to a Washington Post article in January 2003, “was one of [Osama] bin Laden’s long-time bodyguards,” and who, in order to help bin Laden to escape from the showdown with US forces in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, “took possession of the al-Qaeda leader’s satellite phone on the assumption that US intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position.” Whether or not there is any truth to this story is unknown, as the Post‘s source was a number of “senior Moroccan officials,” who have visited Guantánamo, and had interviewed Tabarak. One official said, “He agreed to be captured or die. That’s the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it was enough.” Moroccan officials also stated that Tabarak, who was 43 years old at the time, “had become the ‘emir,’ or camp leader,” at Guantánamo.

One sign of Tabarak’s supposed significance is that, when representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited Guantánamo in October 2003, he was one of four prisoners they were not allowed to visit. However, the problem with this is not that they were refused access to him, but that he was no longer present at Guantánamo. Although it was reported in August 2004 that he had been released from Guantánamo at that time with four other Moroccans, it actually transpired that he had been released 13 months earlier, on July 1, 2003.

The reason for this is unknown, although in January 2006, in another article in the Washington Post, Tabarak’s attorney, Abdelfattah Zahrach, “said his client’s importance as an al-Qaeda figure ha[d] been exaggerated, although he acknowledged that Tabarak knew bin Laden and worked for one of his companies.” Zahrach stated, “He was in bin Laden’s environment, but he didn’t play an operational role. Do you think that if he was really the bodyguard of bin Laden that the Americans would have let him come back to Morocco?” In response to this question, others in Rabat who were “familiar with Tabarak’s case” told the Post that “Moroccan officials had pressed the US military for many months to hand over Tabarak, arguing that they would have a better chance of persuading him to reveal secrets about al-Qaeda.”

The truth may never be known, but Tabarak’s missing file suggests that there were some secrets that were regarded as off-limits to general readers of the Guantánamo DABs in the US intelligence circles with access to them — focused, presumably, on the 13 months between his real date of his release, and his stated date of release.

The second suspicious missing file is that of Abdurahman Khadr (ISN 990), listed as Abdul Khadr. A Canadian, and the brother of Omar Khadr (ISN 766), he was persuaded to work as a spy, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files:

Abdurahman was captured by Afghans in Kabul in November 2001, when he was 20 years old, and was then handed over to the Americans. Describing himself as the “black sheep” of the family, who saw no value in the radical beliefs of the rest of his family, Abdurahman agreed to work as a spy for the CIA in Kabul, and then in Guantánamo, but was told that, to protect his cover, he would have to be treated like all the other prisoners. He said that his imprisonment at Bagram — where he was stripped, photographed naked and subjected to an anal probe — was the start of “the longest and most painful ordeal of his life,” and that he “had no idea what he was getting into.”

After ten days at Bagram, he was flown to Guantánamo, where, he said, he arrived “a broken man,” and was then kept in isolation for a month before being moved to a cell near other prisoners. The plan, as he described it, was that “they could put me next to anyone that was stubborn and that wouldn’t talk and I would talk him into it. Well, it’s not that easy — lots of people won’t talk to anyone because everybody in Cuba is scared of the person next to him. I couldn’t do a lot for them.” Unable to cope with his situation, he spent the rest of his time in Guantánamo in a “luxurious” private cell, and was then sent to Bosnia, where his mission was to infiltrate radical mosques and gather information on al-Qaeda’s activities.

When the CIA wanted to send him to Iraq, however, he decided that he couldn’t take the pressure any more, and after resigning from the agency he returned to Canada, where his most salient comments concerned the prisoners in Guantánamo. He said that he told the CIA that the vast majority of the prisoners were innocent, and that it was “a huge mistake for the US military to offer large cash rewards for the capture of al-Qaeda suspects when they first arrived in Afghanistan.”

The US “enemy combatant”: Yasser Hamdi

One other missing file relates to Yasser Hamdi or Yaser Hamdi (ISN 009), identified as Himdy Yasser in the files, who was one of around 80 survivors of a massacre in the Qala-i-Janghi fort in Mazar-e-Sharif in November 2001. This came about after several hundred prisoners had surrendered, as part of the fall of the city of Kunduz, apparently on the basis that they would be allowed to return home after doing so. However, after being transported to the fort, some of the men started an uprising, because of their betrayal, or because they feared that they were about to be killed, which was then suppressed savagely. Hamdi and the other survivors hid in the basement for a week, where they were bombed and, finally, flooded.

Hamdi was initially regarded as a Saudi, even though he had told a journalist on his emergence from the basement that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When it finally dawned on the US authorities that they were holding an American citizen at Guantánamo, Hamdi, who retained his US citizenship, although he had moved to Saudi Arabia as a child, was immediately moved to the US mainland (on April 5, 2002), where he was one of only three US citizens or residents held as “enemy combatants” — along with Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri — and subjected to profound isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation (in other words, torture), until he was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in September 2004 — and stripped of his citizenship — after he won a landmark case in the US Supreme Court (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which the Court rejected the government’s attempts to detain him indefinitely without trial).

The late arrivals — in 2007 and 2008

Three other missing files relate to three of the last six prisoners brought to Guantánamo, between March 2007 and March 2008, two of whom are, according to the US authorities, regarded as “high-value detainees.”. I am unsure why these files are missing, as files are available for the three other prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo during this period.

The first of these three (and the first of the two missing “high-value detainees”) is Nashwan Abd Al-Razzaq Abd Al-Baqi, more commonly known as Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi (ISN 10026), who is referred to repeatedly in the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and the third to arrive (and the other “high-value detainee”) is Muhammad Rahim (ISN 10029), an Afghan.

This is how they were described in the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed report issued in February 2010 (PDF, or see here):

On 27 April 2007, the Department of Defense announced that another high-value detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, described as “a high-level member of Al-Qaida”, had been transferred to Guantánamo. On the same day, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, stated that the detainee had been transferred to Defense Department custody that week from the CIA although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom”. However, a United States intelligence official stated that al-Iraqi “had been captured late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country”. Another high-value detainee, Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was transferred to Guantánamo on 14 March 2008. In a press release, the Department of Defense stated that, “prior to his arrival at Guantánamo Bay, he was held in CIA custody”. According to reports in Pakistani newspapers, he was captured in Lahore in August 2007.

The Government of the United States provided no further details about where the above-mentioned men had been held before their transfer to Guantánamo; however, although it is probable that al-Iraqi was held in another country, in a prison to which the CIA had access (it was reported in March 2009 that he “was captured by a foreign security service in 2006” and then handed over to the CIA), the Department of Defense itself made it clear that the CIA had been holding Muhammad Rahim, indicating that some sort of CIA “black site” was still operating.

The second to arrive (who was not regarded as a “high-value detainee”), was Inayatullah (ISN 10028), another Afghan, whose arrival at Guantánamo was announced on September 12, 2007. As I explained in an article at the time:

Captured, according to the DoD’s press release, “as a result of ongoing DoD operations in the struggle against violent extremists in Afghanistan,” the DoD claimed that Inayatullah had “admitted that he was the al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran, and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” adding that he “collaborated with numerous al-Qaeda senior leaders, to include Abu Ubaydah al-Masri and Azzam, executing their instructions and personally supporting global terrorist efforts.” (Al-Masri and Azzam were not identified in the DoD’s press release, but the former is an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, and the latter is probably the American Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American, who has produced al-Qaeda propaganda with Ayman al-Zawahiri).

On May 18, 2011, it was reported that Inayatullah had “died of an apparent suicide,” according to a news release issued by US Southern Command. The news release also stated, “While conducting routine checks, the guards found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing. The guards immediately initiated CPR and also summoned medical personnel to the scene. After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician.”

As it transpired, the death could have been avoided, had the authorities been concerned to act on information that, according to the dead man’s attorney, was readily available to them. Paul Rashkind, a federal defender in Miami, explained that his client, whose real name was Hajji Nassim, “had never been known as Inayatullah anywhere but in Guantánamo, had never had a role in al-Qaeda and ran a cellphone shop in Iran near the Afghan border.” He also explained that he “suffered significant psychosis, a paralyzing psychosis beginning many years ago, long before he got to Gitmo,” and that he had previously attempted to commit suicide twice. Rashkind told the Associated Press that that he was “not permitted to provide details” about either of his client’s two previous suicide attempts, “except to say both were serious,” although he did explicitly state, “He was close to death the first time.”

Note: I wrote about the death of Hajji Nassim (aka Inayatullah) in two articles, The Only Way Out of Guantánamo Is In a Coffin and Guantánamo Suicide Was Severely Mentally Ill, And Was A Case of Mistaken Identity.

The eight others, released between 2003 and 2005

And finally, eight of the missing files seem to refer to generally Insignificant prisoners:

The first, Badshah Wali (ISN 638), an Afghan released in March 2003, is known about because he is the brother of Niaz Wali (ISN 640), also released in March 2003. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “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 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, it was revealed for the first time that Niaz Wali (Neyaz Walijan) 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 (Patcha Walijan) “freely vsited” 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.

Haji Mohammed Wazir (ISN 996), a 60-year old Afghan, was released in March 2004 with 22 other Afghans. A farmer from Helmand province, he spent a year in Guantánamo and was held for two and half years in total. Speaking briefly to reporters on his release, he said, “I’m a poor and innocent man. I was in my home, unaware of Taliban and al-Qaeda, when I was caught. If I’m a Taliban or al-Qaeda I want to be punished. If I’m not, then they should compensate me. The two-and-a-half years that I have spent in pain and soreness — who is going to pay?”

Mirwais Hasan (ISN 998) is an Afghan, apparently born in 1980, who was released in March 2004, but nothing else is known about him.

Reda Fadel El-Waleeli (ISN 663), identified by the US as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli, is an Egyptian, apparently born in 1966. The first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt, he arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared. As I explained in an article in April this year:

In October 2009, Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, complained that, after a visit to Egypt in April 2009, he “regrets that the Government of Egypt did not reply to his questions on the fate of … El-Weleli,” although I was later told that UN representatives finally succeeded in tracking him down, and that he was a broken figure, and very obviously a threat to nobody, who explained that, after his return from Guantánamo, he had been held and tortured in a secret prison in Egypt for three and a half years.

Ayman Mohammad Silman Al-Amrani (ISN 169) is a Jordanian, apparently born in 1978, who was released in November 2003, but nothing else is known about him.

Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah (ISN 705), from Sudan, is the only one of these eight released after September 2004. He was freed in July 2005, and, like all the prisoners released after September 2004, was subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, whose results were released by the Pentagon in 2006. He 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. This is how I described his story in The Guantánamo Files:

32-year old Hamad Gadallah (released in July 2005) 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 27 May 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.

Sadee Eideov (ISN 665) is a Tajik, apparently born in 1953, who was released in March 2004, but nothing else is known about him.

Shirinov Ghafar Homarovich (ISN 732), also identified as Abdughaffor Shirinov, is one of three Tajiks seized in a raid on an improvised dorm in the library of Karachi University, where he was working, and where he allowed two of his compatriots to stay. Files exist for the other two — Muhibullo Umarov (Moyuballah Homaro) and Mazharuddin — and all three were released in April 2004. This was how I explained their story in The Guantánamo Files (via an article in Mother Jones), and the files for Umarov and Mazharuddin reinforce this explanation of how they were seized by mistake:

In 2006, the journalist McKenzie Funk met Umarov by chance while reporting from Tajikistan, when a farmer in the remote Obihingou valley told him, “There’s a man in the valley who has been to America. Really. He was in a prison. They made a mistake.” After tracking Umarov down to his tiny, mud-walled home, Funk heard how, during the civil war, when he was 14 years old, his father took him and his two younger brothers to Pakistan and installed them in madrassas for the duration of the war.

Six years later, he returned to his home village, diploma in hand, and began helping the family with their harvest of apples, potatoes and walnuts, “but then America bombed Afghanistan and the whole world went crazy.” Sent back to Pakistan to raise money to bring his brothers home, he found odd jobs in the bazaar in Peshawar and on 13 May 2002, in search of a better job, set off for Karachi, where his friend Abdughaffor Shirinov, who was working at the library, had a place for him to stay. Mazharuddin was also staying there, and at night the three men hung their T-shirts on the bookcases and slept on thin carpets on the floor.

Six days after his arrival, in the wake of Pakistan’s first suicide bombing, Pakistani intelligence agents raided the library, using the men’s T-shirts to tie them up and blindfold their eyes, and took them away. Held for ten days by the Pakistanis, Umarov was moved to secret prison — in what appeared to be a luggage factory — that was run by Americans, where he was questioned about al-Qaeda and was locked them up for ten days in a concrete cubicle that was only a metre long and half a metre wide, and was “insufferably hot.” “All my thoughts were about how my life was going to end,” he told the journalist. He was then returned to his friends in the Pakistani jail, and the following day the three men were transported to Kandahar.

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

As published exclusively on WikiLeaks.

His account is fascinating on his own terms, as it provides an insight into how vulnerable refugees from other countries could end up in Guantánamo, but it is also of great interest because, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first ever interview with a prisoner released from Guantánamo to Iraq, and although the man in question — who uses the pseudonym Hussein Latif — is clearly struggling to make a living in Baghdad, it is reassuring that he is a free man, and was only imprisoned on his return for “several months,” as those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely feared that the men returned from Guantánamo to Iraq might languish in Iraqi jails for years (or forever), unnoticed by the outside world.

I leave it to readers to see if they can ascertain, from the accounts of the three Iraqis released from Guantánamo in January 2009, which of the three is “Hussein Latif,” who, as the credits to the original article explain, was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2006.

From Iraq to Guantánamo: The Accidental Prisoner

An Iraqi’s tale of an odyssey through war zones, trying to reach the West but ending up in Guantánamo.

As a young man in Iraq, I longed to live in the West. Yet when I finally came within reach of the free world, it was no longer as a free man.

The quest to escape my homeland ended with my imprisonment by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay. I spent eight years there, followed by several months in jail in Baghdad when I was repatriated, before I was finally freed.

Today, I live at liberty in the country I spent my youth trying to flee. As I drive around my home city, Baghdad, I ask myself whether I have been treated fairly. Perhaps I was wrong to try and leave my family behind in the first place.

I grew up with reckless desires and whimsical dreams. I wanted to live in Europe, and to date a beautiful, blonde woman; I wanted a job and a car. My family was poor and I wanted to help them buy a house.

My experiences have taught me to be patient. I have learnt that an Iraqi wandering abroad is like a ball flung around in different directions, from one misfortune to another.

I was born in 1974 in southern Baghdad. When I was six years old, my uncle was executed for links to a banned Shia religious party, the Dawa. The party was founded in Iran and its members were regarded as traitors by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which was suspicious of Shia Arabs and spent much of the 1980s at war with Iran.

My uncle’s execution plunged my family into a state of fear. The security forces searched our home. My father seemed to be lost in a vast, black sea, perplexed about how we were to survive, and worried for his own safety.

At the age of 12, I started working part-time. At first, I helped mechanics fix cars. Later, I took to the streets, selling cold water, cigarettes and juice to support my family.

After finishing technical school, I was conscripted into the army. Military intelligence had been briefed about my uncle, and I was constantly intimidated, interrogated and insulted. Faced with this hell, I decided to desert and join the opposition.

It was 1995, and Iraq was under international sanctions as a result of its invasion of Kuwait. I set off for the semi-autonomous Kurdish north, where opponents of Saddam could operate relatively freely.

However, I was arrested en route when the security forces stopped me and discovered I was carrying a copy of my uncle’s death sentence. I had hoped to use the document to prove my credentials as a dissident once I reached the offices of the United Nations or an opposition party.

I was tried as a deserter and sentenced to death by firing squad. My family sold their most valuable possessions to bribe the judge, and the sentence was reduced to a year’s imprisonment.

Back in the military, life was even harder, as I was now stigmatised as a deserter. My family borrowed money from relatives to obtain a forged document that said I had been demobilised. I used this to procure an Iraqi passport, and in 1998, I crossed the border into Jordan.

My search for work took me to Libya, Syria and eventually to Turkey — the gateway to Europe.

The Turkish authorities arrested me and sent me to northern Iraq. After another failed attempt at crossing through Turkey, I changed tack and set off eastwards through Iran. I thought that, with luck, I would be able to get to Russia, or perhaps travel by sea from India to Australia.

I lived as a vagabond in Iran and Pakistan, sleeping rough and scavenging for food. My family lost touch with me.

Eventually, a friend suggested I go to Afghanistan for work. I’d never heard of Afghanistan, but I didn’t think twice about going. I had found it impossible to find employment in Pakistan, where Iraqis seemed to be viewed with distrust.

The border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan was a sight to behold — a lone policeman, sitting on a chair with a stick in one hand and a hashish cigarette in the other.

In August 2001, I made my way to Kabul along with a group of other homeless Arabs. We were given shelter by some men who appeared to be very religious. They hired me as a driver to ferry their fighters around.

The work was unpaid and it felt as if I was a captive. I was regarded with great suspicion by my employers, perhaps because of my Shia origins. They were very different to me — I could not understand why they did not shave, while they didn’t understand why I hadn’t grown a beard.

Soon after I came to Afghanistan in 2001, the radio broadcast news of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.

The Arabs handed me over to a group of Afghans, who promptly sold me on to the American military.

I was initially relieved to see the Americans, as I felt they would believe my story and grant me asylum.

Instead, they sent me to Guantánamo Bay.

Many of my fellow prisoners there were hard-line Sunnis who regarded Shia Muslims as apostates. They threatened me because of my faith, throwing food at me and cursing Iraq loudly, because most of its population is Shia.

I spent a lot of time in solitary confinement because of the way other prisoners behaved towards me. I also developed a friendly relationship with some of the guards. A Turkish-American officer gave me books, and a female soldier shared her cigarettes.

Over the years, I taught myself good English. During a military hearing held by the Americans, I asked for the official interpreter to be dismissed because I knew he was not translating what I was saying accurately.

One evening, I was playing cards with some American guards when the extremists started shouting abuse at me from their cells. I did not share their religious vocabulary, so I responded in the only way I could — by blowing a raspberry at them. Everyone started laughing, the American soldiers and the prisoners.

I guess I am easily amused. Even when I was being interrogated by the Americans, I kept recalling images from an Egyptian comedy film about a witness who knows nothing.

Since I am Shia, I think it is ridiculous that I was imprisoned by the Americans together with Sunni extremists. I still don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the years I spent there.

The rules in Guantánamo were strict, but as long as you obeyed them, you did not get into trouble. On the streets of Baghdad today, no one knows what the rules are any more. There is danger everywhere.

I no longer have wild fantasies about the future. I am a realist now. But my family is still poor, and they still don’t own a home. I still dream of the day when I will not have the landlord at my door asking for the rent.

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

Al-Sahlani (whose last name had never been registered by the Pentagon) had explained in Guantánamo that he had been seized by mistake. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004 (a one-sided administrative review board convened to assess whether, on capture, he had been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant” who could be held without charge or trial), he said that he and his family had left Iraq because of the intolerable living conditions under Saddam Hussein, and that they had gone first to Iran, and then to the UN in Pakistan, where he sought asylum.

When it became apparent that the UN would not be able to help him, he said that he planned to return to Iran and was told that the easiest route back was through Afghanistan. However, the guides he traveled with left him in Kabul, and he said that he then approached Mullah Nitham Eddine, who worked for the police, and, after explaining that he and his family were immigrants, was found an Afghan family to live with.

He added that he then moved with his family to a village near Mazar-e-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, which was where he had been for most of the three and a half years he had spent in Afghanistan, working mainly as a taxi driver, but also, on occasion, selling fuel and working as a mechanic. He explained that, in 2002, he was arrested at his home by an Afghan commander, and was then sold to the Americans, who took him to Kandahar and then Guantánamo.

Despite this coherent and plausible explanation, al-Shalani was obliged, in his tribunal, to point out the huge discrepancy between the allegations against him and his own account. Although he is a Shiite Muslim, which explains why he fled the oppression of Saddam Hussein, as the Shiite majority was persecuted by Iraq’s dictator, it was alleged that in Iraq he had worked for the Amin Emergency Response Group, who were “responsible for tracking down people opposed to Saddam Hussein, and torturing and/or killing [them].” It was also alleged that, in Afghanistan, he was a Taliban commander, a Taliban recruiter, an interrogator for the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif, in charge of ten to 15 other interrogators, that he was “heavily involved in the heroin trade for the Taliban,” and that he received funds from Osama bin Laden that were funneled through a Saudi charity operating in Afghanistan.

In a rather contradictory allegation, it was claimed that he recruited a group of his own fighters, provided them with weapons, communications equipment and vehicles, and “intended to sell his fighting group’s service[s] to the highest bidding warlord in Afghanistan.” According this scenario, if a recruit refused to join his group, he was turned over to the Taliban as a spy, although, in defiance of the “highest bidder” scenario mentioned above, it was also alleged that he and his group fought with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance on the front lines. Perhaps the most ludicrous allegation of all — given his background and his religion — was a claim that he had “operated as a conduit between the Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif and Saddam Hussein.”

In response, he denied ever working for the Taliban at all, and explained that, while he was in Mazar-e-Sharif, he had, in fact, worked occasionally for the Northern Alliance, repairing vehicles for a representative of General Rashid Dostum, the leader of the Alliance’s Uzbek faction in northern Afghanistan, who he also helped, after the US-led invasion began, by “pointing out Taliban locations.” He added, poignantly, “I put my life, my wife’s life and the life of my children in danger in order to help the Northern Alliance.”

When asked for his opinions about the allegations against him, he said that he thought they had come about because of disagreements with other prisoners who had told lies about him. He pointed out that he was being held in Camp V (one of the prison’s maximum-security blocks) for protection against attacks by other prisoners, because he was a Shiite Muslim (in contrast to the prison’s Sunni majority), and because “I cooperated with interrogators.” He added that he had suffered a broken arm after he was attacked by a Saudi prisoner, and blamed two particular interrogators for the incident, saying that they had deliberately left the two of them in a room together.

As the examples of other Shiite prisoners has shown — primarily other Iraqis, whose bitter experiences of false allegations I reported when four Iraqi prisoners were released in the dying days of the Bush administration — the conflict in Guantánamo between Sunni agitators and Shiites was very real, and, to be honest, reflects badly on the US authorities, who should have realized that both the radical Sunni fanatics of al-Qaeda and the radical Sunni fanatics of the Taliban (who were responsible for several massacres of Afghanistan’s Shiite minority, the Hazara) would never have accepted a Shiite Muslim into their midst.

In one of al-Sahlani’s annual review boards (convened to assess whether, having been found to be an “enemy combatant,” he still posed a threat to the US or its allies), two Iraqi witnesses provided further explanations of the Sunni/Shiite conflict, and, in addition, one pointed out that al-Sahlani had also been targeted by two particular prisoners who were known within Guantánamo as notoriously unreliable informants.

Arkan al-Karim, one of the men released in January, refuted allegations that al-Sahlani had threatened other prisoners, pointing out that it was he who had been threatened, and another, Abbas al-Naely (also released in January), who had met al-Sahlani in Afghanistan, first provided a spirited defense of his character, describing him as a man devoted to his family, who was “not a political man nor a religious man nor a war man and he is a peaceful person,” and adding, “I was in Mazar-e-Sharif addicted to hashish but in spite of that he helped me,” and then explained that the allegations against him had resulted from a disagreement with two particular prisoners whose false allegations plagued countless prisoners in Guantánamo: Ali al-Tayeea, another Iraqi (also released in January), and Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni, profiled in the Washington Post in February, whose habeas petition was granted by a judge the following month.

From the above, it is, I hope, abundantly clear that Jawad al-Sahlani’s story exemplifies many of Guantánamo’s most persistent problems: prisoners handed over to US forces by opportunists seeking the handsome bounty payments being offered for “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects,” who were then labeled as “enemy combatants” without any screening whatsoever, and were victimized by the lies of other prisoners (whether under duress, through bribery or because they had severe mental problems), which were then regarded as the truth by credulous interrogators and administrators.

On his release, al-Sahlani’s lawyer, Jeffrey Colman, reiterated the story told by his client in Guantánamo, but added that in 2003 “senior US military leaders and the head of the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force” had “recommended he be released.” Colman was at a loss to explain why it had taken so long. He said he had asked, but had “gotten no answers,” and added that the delay was also inexplicable because, unlike other prisoners who cannot be returned to their home countries because they face the risk of torture, al-Sahlani “wanted to go home from the start.”

Colman was scathing about the way Guantánamo was run. In his 35-year career, he said, he had “represented clients in the most dire legal and physical circumstances imaginable,” visiting maximum-security prisons and working for death row prisoners in Illinois and Georgia, but representing men held at Guantánamo had been the “most depressing, difficult, frustrating experience of my legal career. Never have I seen the kind of disrespect for the attorney-client relationship as at Guantánamo.” He added, “It’s unlike any other institution. There’s a level of isolation and hopelessness unlike anything I have ever seen.” He also explained that it was almost impossible for the men in Guantánamo to understand what was happening to them. “How do you say to a client that we’ve been talking about the same question — does a court have the power to hear your case — for six years?” he asked.

Al-Sahlani’s ordeal is now at an end — and I can only hope that his optimism about how he will be treated in Iraq is justified — but there has, as yet, been no explanation of why it took the Obama administration five months to release him, nor why his release took place when it did. I don’t mean to end on a sour note, but it appears, from a comment made by Colman, that the new government was motivated less by an impulse to correct a long-standing injustice, than by a fear that it would be shown up in a courtroom.

As Colman explained, he was only informed on May 15 that al-Sahlani had been cleared for release by the Obama administration’s inter-departmental task force, which is reviewing the cases of all the remaining prisoners, and he added that his release from Guantánamo “occurred as Jenner & Block lawyers were preparing for a habeas corpus hearing that was scheduled to start on June 18 before Washington D.C. federal district court judge Rosemary Collyer.”

That, I have to conclude, is more than a little convenient.

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 3 Saudis (here and here).

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

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

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

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

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

Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed’s testimony at Guantánamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following exchange then took place:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The weakness of the supposed evidence

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

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

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

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

The bigger picture regarding false allegations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his testimony to the Senate Committee, Maj. Burney wrote that “a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

In an article to follow, I’ll look at how Maj. Burney — almost accidentally — assumed a pivotal role in the implementation of torture techniques in the “War on Terror,” but for now I’m going to focus on the significance of his comments, which are, of course, profoundly important because they demonstrate that, in contrast to the administration’s oft-repeated claims that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” foiled further terrorist attacks on the United States, much of the program was actually focused on trying to establish links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that would justify the planned invasion of Iraq.

Maj. Burney’s testimony provides the first evidence that coercive and illegal techniques were used widely at Guantánamo in an attempt to secure information linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, but it is not the first time that the Bush administration’s attempts to link a real enemy with one that required considerable ingenuity to conjure up have been revealed.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: the tortured lie that underpinned the Iraq war

In case anyone has forgotten, when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of the Khaldan military training camp in Afghanistan, was captured at the end of 2001 and sent to Egypt to be tortured, he made a false confession that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi later recanted his confession, but not until Secretary of State Colin Powell — to his eternal shame — had used the story in February 2003 in an attempt to persuade the UN to support the invasion of Iraq.

It’s wise, I believe, to resuscitate al-Libi’s story right now for two particular reasons. The first is because, when he was handed over to US forces by the Pakistanis, he became the first high-profile captive to be fought over in a tug-of-war between the FBI, who wanted to play by the rules, and the CIA — backed up by the most hawkish figures in the White House and the Pentagon — who didn’t. In an article published in the New Yorker in February 2005, Jane Mayer spoke to Jack Cloonan, a veteran FBI officer, who worked for the agency from 1972 to 2002, who told her that his intention had been to secure evidence from al-Libi that could be used in the cases of two mentally troubled al-Qaeda operatives, Zacarias Moussaoui, a proposed 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, and Richard Reid, the British “Shoe Bomber.”

Crucially, Mayer reported, Cloonan advised his colleagues in Afghanistan to interrogate al-Libi with respect, “and handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He added, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’”

However, after reading him his rights, and taking turns in interrogating him with agents from the CIA, Cloonan and his colleagues were dismayed when, in spite of developing what they believed was “a good rapport” with him, the CIA decided that tougher tactics were needed, and rendered him to Egypt. According to an FBI officer who spoke to Newsweek in 2004, “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to f*** her.’ So we lost that fight.” Speaking to Mayer, Jack Cloonan added, “At least we got information in ways that wouldn’t shock the conscience of the court. And no one will have to seek revenge for what I did.” He added, “We need to show the world that we can lead, and not just by military might.”

In November 2005, the New York Times reported that a Defense Intelligence Agency report had noted in February 2002, long before al-Libi recanted his confession, that his information was not trustworthy. As the Times described it, his claims “lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.” The report itself stated, “It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”

Had anyone asked Dan Coleman, a colleague of Cloonan’s who also had a long history of successfully interrogating terrorist suspects without resorting to the use of torture, it would have been clear that torturing a confession out of al-Libi was a counter-productive exercise.

As Mayer explained, Coleman was “disgusted” when he heard about the false confession, telling her, “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq. I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with Iraq. Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren’t any. The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.”

This, I believe, provides an absolutely critical explanation of why the Bush administration’s torture regime was not only morally repugnant, but also counter-productive, and it’s particularly worth noting Coleman’s comment that “Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren’t any.” However, I realize that the failure of torture to produce genuine evidence — as opposed to intelligence that, though false, was at least “actionable” — was exactly what was required by those, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, “Scooter” Libby and other Iraq obsessives, who wished to betray America doubly, firstly by endorsing the use of torture in defiance of almost universal disapproval from government agencies and military lawyers, and secondly by using it not to prevent terrorist attacks, but to justify an illegal war.

Where are Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and the other 79 “ghost prisoners”?

In addition, a second reason for revisiting al-Libi’s story emerged two weeks ago, when memos approving the use of torture by the CIA, written by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, were released, because, in one of the memos from 2005, the author, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury, revealed that a total of 94 prisoners had been held in secret CIA custody. As I noted at the time, what was disturbing about this revelation was not the number of prisoners held, because CIA director Michael Hayden admitted in July 2007 that the CIA had detained fewer than 100 people at secret facilities abroad since 2002, but the insight that this exact figure provides into the supremely secretive world of “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons that exists beyond the cases of the 14 “high-value detainees” who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA custody in September 2006.

Al-Libi, of course, is one of the 80 prisoners whose whereabouts are unknown. There are rumors that, after he was fully exploited by the administration’s own torturers (in Poland and, almost certainly, other locations) and by proxy torturers in Egypt, he was sent back to Libya, to be dealt with by Colonel Gaddafi. I have no sympathy for al-Libi, as the emir of a camp that, at least in part, trained operatives for terrorist attacks in their home countries (in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East), but if there is ever to be a proper accounting for what took place in the CIA’s global network of “extraordinary rendition,” secret prisons, and proxy prisons, then al-Libi’s whereabouts, along with those of the other 79 men who constitute “America’s Disappeared” (as well as all the others rendered directly to third countries instead of to the CIA’s secret dungeons), need to be established.

Torturing Abu Zubaydah “to achieve a political objective”

Al-Libi’s story is, of course, disturbing enough as evidence of the utter contempt with which the Bush administration’s warmongers treated both the truth and the American public, but as David Rose explained in an article in Vanity Fair last December, al-Libi was not the only prisoner tortured until he came up with false confessions about links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

According to two senior intelligence analysts who spoke to Rose, Abu Zubaydah, the gatekeeper for the Khaldan camp, made a number of false confessions about connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, above and beyond one particular claim that was subsequently leaked by the administration: a patently ludicrous scenario in which Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq) were working with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. One of the analysts, who worked at the Pentagon, explained, “The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”

However, none of the analysts knew that these confessions had been obtained through torture. The Pentagon analyst told Rose, “As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done. I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.” He added, “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective.”

This is the crucial line, of course, and its significance is made all the more pronounced by the realization that, as one of Bradbury’s torture memos also revealed, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) 83 times in August 2002. The administration persists in claiming that this hideous ordeal produced information that led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Jose Padilla, but we have known for years that KSM was seized after a walk-in informer ratted on him, and those of us who have been paying attention also know that, in the case of Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber,” who spent three and a half years in solitary confinement in a US military brig until he lost his mind, there never was an actual “dirty bomb” plot. This was admitted, before his torture even began, by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who stated, in June 2002, a month after Padilla was captured, “I don’t think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk.”

All this leaves me with the uncomfortable suspicion that what the excessive waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah actually achieved — beyond the “30 percent of the FBI’s time, maybe 50 percent,” that was “spent chasing leads that were bullshit,” as an FBI operative explained to David Rose — were a few more blatant lies to fuel the monstrous deception that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

A single Iraqi anecdote, and a bitter conclusion

It remains to be seen if further details emerge to back up Maj. Burney’s story. From my extensive research into the stories of the Guantánamo prisoners, I recall only that one particular prisoner, an Iraqi named Arkan al-Karim, mentioned being questioned about Iraq. Released in January this year, al-Karim had been imprisoned by the Taliban before being handed over to US forces by Northern Alliance troops, and had been forced to endure the most outrageous barrage of false allegations in Guantánamo, but when he spoke to the review board that finally cleared him for release, he made a point of explaining, “The reason they [the US] brought me to Cuba is not because I did something. They brought me from Taliban prison to get information from me about the Iraqi army before the United States went to Iraq.”

However, even without further proof of specific confessions extracted by the administration in an attempt to justify its actions, the examples provided in the cases of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Abu Zubaydah should be raised every time that Dick Cheney opens his mouth to mention the valuable intelligence that was extracted through torture, and to remind him that, instead of saving Americans from another terror attack, he and his supporters succeeding only in using lies extracted through torture to send more Americans to their deaths than died on September 11, 2001.

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

As published on CounterPunch (as “Cheney’s Twisted World”), Antiwar.com (as “Torture ‘to Achieve a Political Objective’”), the Huffington Post and ZNet.

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

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

Cheney’s statement came just days after Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, had ruled in the habeas corpus review of one of the supposed “hardcore” prisoners  — a Chadian national called Mohammed El-Gharani, who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a random raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, and was later sold to US forces — that the government had failed to establish a case against El-Gharani, and ordered his release “forthwith.”

Leon ruled that what purported to be evidence had been supplied by two of El-Gharani’s fellow prisoners whose reliability had been called into doubt by government officials, and when it came to a key allegation, which, in Cheney’s version of reality, ought to have bolstered his claims — an allegation that El-Gharani had been part of an al-Qaeda cell in London in 1998 — Leon was particularly dismissive. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is – at best – unknown.”

Leon’s words, delivered in sober language, were nonetheless witheringly dismissive, but El-Gharani’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, had been advancing the same argument for years in rather more colorful terms. After noting that El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time that he was supposed to have been plotting in London, Stafford Smith explained, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Judge Leon’s dismissal of Mohammed El-Gharani’s case was not the only development that fatally undermined the Vice President’s words during his last weekend in power. Largely unnoticed, as most of the mainstream media prepared the bunting for Barack Obama’s inauguration, was the release of six prisoners from Guantánamo — an Afghan, an Algerian and four Iraqis — whose stories also demonstrate that, when the facts are examined rationally, rather than being spun through a veil of paranoia, Dick Cheney’s “War on Terror” was largely a “War on Truth.”

A pro-American Afghan, betrayed by the Taliban

One of these cases — that of Haji Bismullah, an Afghan who was 23 years old when he was seized in February 2003 — was reported in the New York Times last Monday, and his story alone discredits Dick Cheney’s words. As the Times explained, and as Bismullah insisted during his imprisonment at Guantánamo, at the time of his capture he was working for the government of Hamid Karzai as the chief of transportation in a region of Helmand province. In a story that echoes dozens of others from Guantánamo, it transpired that he was removed from his job by unscrupulous rivals, connected with the Taliban, who cooked up a false story to impress the US military.

Bismullah’s long imprisonment is particularly disturbing, as his brother, a spokesman for the pro-American provisional governor, had filed a sworn statement with officials at Guantánamo in 2006, declaring that Bismullah and his entire family “fought to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan,” and Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, a member of the Afghan Senate and an ally of Hamid Karzai, had also declared in a sworn statement that “he had known Bismullah and his family for years,” and that, when they had fought the Taliban, “Haji Bismullah was with us.”

However, while the Times is to be credited for picking up on the injustice of Haji Bismullah’s story, the cases of the other five prisoners released at the same time also do nothing to bolster Cheney’s claims, and in fact reveal, in shocking detail, how Guantánamo has been sustained not by evidence that it contains “hardcore” prisoners bent on the destruction of the United States, but on false allegations, which, in the majority of cases — like the supposed evidence against Mohammed El-Gharani — wither away under scrutiny.

A lack of evidence

The first of the five, Hassan Mujamma Rabai Said, was 25 years old when he was seized in Pakistan and sold to US forces, having traveled across the mountains with an Afghan guide. According to the account compiled by the military during his seven years of imprisonment, he left his homeland in August 2000, traveled to Syria, where he lived for ten months, and then made his way, via Iran and Pakistan, to Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Said may have become involved in militancy during the few months that he was in Afghanistan prior to the 9/11 attacks, and in the three months before his capture, but the authorities failed to establish that this was what had happened.

Instead, the case against him relied on unsubstantiated allegations made by his fellow prisoners in unknown circumstances. These included claims that he “was identified as training at al-Farouq” (the main training camp for Arabs, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11), that he “was identified” as being “in charge of weapons inventory” in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, where Northern Alliance soldiers (with US back-up) fought al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in late November and early December 2001, and that he “was identified as having been chosen to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.” This latter allegation is particularly suspicious, as it is incomprehensible that someone would have been chosen to be a bodyguard for bin Laden after such a short amount of time, but it was also noticeable that Said himself persistently refuted all the allegations. Although he conceded that “political motivation and a properly declared fatwa are legitimate reasons for participating in jihad,” he maintained that he “did not participate in jihad actions.”

Even vaguer allegations were leveled against Hassan Abdul Said, an Iraqi who was also 25 years old when he “turned himself in” to US forces in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif on January 1, 2002. With the exception of two unsubstantiated allegations — that he stayed at a Taliban guesthouse in Mazar-e-Sharif for three months, and was “an Arab fighter on the Northern Front” — the authorities failed to come up with any evidence to justify holding him as an “enemy combatant.”

Instead, the last summary of allegations against him (in November 2005) focused on complicated and often contradictory claims about his life in Iraq and allegations of his involvement in drug smuggling, and stated that he was briefly imprisoned in Uzbekistan for two and a half months for having false documents, and was then “turned over to the Taliban and imprisoned for one month.” This is hardly the type of treatment that would have encouraged Said to support the regime, and it seems probable that the authorities realized this two years ago, when he was cleared for release after the first round of the annual Administrative Review Boards, which came to an end in February 2006.

“Many people died”: testimony from the survivor of a massacre

For the other Iraqis in Guantánamo, life seems to have been even harder. Ali al-Tayeea, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, was a mechanic, who had been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, and had also been imprisoned in Turkey. He then made his way to Afghanistan, where, he said, he found paid work driving a truck for the Taliban.

In November 2001, after the fall of the city of Kunduz, al-Tayeea was one of several hundred men who, after surrendering to the forces of General Rashid Dostum, a US ally and one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, were subsequently imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in Mazar-e-Sharif. After some of the prisoners seized weapons and started a battle against their captors, he was one of around 85 prisoners who survived by hiding in the basement, which was bombed and flooded over the course of a week. One of his companions was John Walker Lindh (photo, left), the so-called “American Taliban,” who received a 20-year sentence for supporting the Taliban in October 2002.

Al-Tayeea’s description of his experience in Qala-i-Janghi is one of the most harrowing first-hand accounts available:

Now, all the people were outside and we hear the bomb and someone from Dostum’s army had a machine gun on his shoulder. He opened fire on people. People were yelling, “please don’t shoot” and he opened fire… There were RPGs and Kalashnikovs. There was nothing we could do. We were in the centre and fire came from everywhere. A lot of people died. I laid down because my hands were tied. I asked someone to just open my hands a little bit. I begged for someone to just open my hands because they had been tied for a long time with wire and they were blue and cold. They opened my hands and I went inside the shelter. There was bombing and fire for the first three days. It was dark and you couldn’t see who your neighbor was. Like, 70 people had died and it smelled bad. After three days, Dostum’s army … they thought we had guns. There were some people fighting outside … We were inside the shelter. I didn’t fire because I’m not a jackass. I stayed inside. After three days, they opened the window and put fire inside the shelter and there was nothing we could do about it. Many people died in the fire and it smelled like steak. I looked and I was beside John Walker. After this they put water in through the window. John Walker was tall and he’s beside my shoulder. Some of the detainees that were short were under water.

Like Hassan Abdul Said and the other Iraqis released the weekend before last, Ali al-Tayeea had been cleared for release from Guantánamo for two years before he was eventually dispatched to an unknown fate in his homeland, but his time in the prison was particularly uncomfortable, as, by his own account, he had provided information to the interrogators, and had been threatened as a result. Whilst it is understandable that prisoners would crack under the pressure of their harsh treatment in Guantánamo and their seemingly endless incarceration, and provide false information to the interrogators, it is, unfortunately, clear from the statements of other prisoners that al-Tayeea’s allegations were particularly troublesome. Moreover, despite appealing for “the American government to help me with asylum,” his experience shows that cooperation was no guarantee of any kind of reward.

Can a beggar befriend bin Laden?

In contrast to al-Tayeea’s case, the other two Iraqis had to contend with their own barrage of false allegations. Abbas al-Naely, who was 33 years old at the time of his capture, appears to have entered Afghanistan as a refugee from the Iraqi army in 1994. Seized in Pakistan in April 2002, he was described by a fellow Iraqi prisoner, Jawad Jabber Sadkhan (the only Iraqi still imprisoned in Guantánamo), as a beggar with a hashish problem. In a written statement, Sadkhan explained that, when al-Naely came to his house begging for help, “I did not have anything to offer [him]. But when I looked at his overall look and his dirty clothing he had on, he looked so miserable. So I went to a friend of mine and asked him for money.” He added, “He is a peaceful man and he does not pose a threat on nobody and he has parents that need him.”

In spite of this, and al-Naely’s statement that, when he was seized, the Pakistani authorities “told us that every Arab person has to go to the Americans for an investigation,” he came to be regarded by the US military as a fighter for the Taliban who had “trained at the al-Farouq camp in Kabul,” had met Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, and had sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to Omar. In response, he denied ever meeting bin Laden, and, although he acknowledged that he had met Mullah Omar, explained that he had only asked him for financial help and assistance in returning to Iraq.

When it came to the allegation about al-Farouq, an extraordinary exchange took place between al-Naely and the Presiding Officer of his review board. “I never went to Farouq,” al-Naely explained, also pointing out that the camp was in Kandahar, not Kabul, to which the Presiding Officer replied, “Well I beg to differ with you because this source we have is very reliable. I have no problem if you admit to it. I would just prefer if you tell me the truth.”

The identity of the supposedly reliable source was not revealed, of course, but it was clear from Jawad Sadkhan’s statement that he had lied about al-Naely under duress, and there is no reason to suppose that any other sources were any more reliable. “Anything that happened between him and me, like some kind of animosity, was a result of the investigators here on this facility,” he wrote. “I was exposed to a lot of abuse, psychological abuse from the investigators and God only knows what happened. This person ISN 758 [al-Naely] is innocent from any allegations and God knows everything.”

Tortured testimony and Guantánamo lies

For the last of the four Iraqis, Arkan al-Karim, who was 25 years old when he was taken by US forces from a prison in Kabul in June 2002, even Abbas al-Naely’s experiences were tame. In an extraordinary list of allegations, al-Karim was accused of being “part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle,” and an al-Qaeda member “who ate frequently with Osama bin Laden,” and who “commanded 200 Arab and Taliban fighters in Kabul, and was also responsible for sending Arab fighters to Chechnya.”

It was also alleged, inter alia, that he had “worked for Osama bin Laden for 13 years conducting weapons maintenance,” was “an expert in the areas of poisons, explosives, martial arts and weapons,” had “carried out an operation in Kuwait in which he blew up a building he believed was being used by the Israelis,” and had “taken up jihad in the Philippines, Chechnya and Bosnia.” Another claim involved an unidentified “al-Qaeda member” naming him as an understudy of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the cleric who had founded the first organization that supported the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and who was assassinated in 1989.

As al-Karim pointed out, the allegations about Abdullah Azzam, and about being a member of al-Qaeda for 13 years, were patently ludicrous, as he was just 13 years old in 1989, and had been in Iraq until 1994, when he drifted to Iran, and then Afghanistan, after deserting from the Iraqi army, but it also seems clear, from his experiences in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo, that every other allegation was equally worthless. As he explained to his review board, far from working with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, he was actually imprisoned by the Taliban for two years. During this time, a fellow prisoner, a Syrian Kurd called Abdul Rahim al-Ginco (photo, left), who was also transferred to Guantánamo and is still held, “was tortured by al-Qaeda and eventually told them he and [al-Karim] were spies for the United States.”

Al-Karim explained that al-Ginco had “confessed in front of the interrogator [in Guantánamo] and said that he made me suffer and told a lot of lies on me in front of all those Arabs,” and added, “His confession is on a piece of paper and is here in Cuba.” He also reassured his review board that there were no problems between the two men, and explained, “I told him that I forgave him and I knew what they did to him. He was suffering just as I was.” In a separate statement, al-Ginco confirmed that he had identified al-Karim as an American spy, but said that he did it “because of the torturing that I was receiving,” and added that he chose to identify al-Karim and not someone else “because they pressured me and they told me to say that he was a spy.”

However, while this accounts for some of the false information masquerading as evidence in al-Karim’s case, it’s also clear that other prisoners were responsible for some of the other allegations. As he told his review board, he was a victim of the long-standing religious divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The overwhelming majority of the prisoners in Guantánamo were (and are) Sunni Muslims, and as al-Karim — a Shiite — explained, “I have no friends in this camp at all; most of them, if they don’t give me a hard time or they don’t give me a problem, they will not talk to me. But also, they’ve threatened me more than five or six times. They will say things about me.”

As these men struggle to rebuild their lives, or to avoid being arbitrarily imprisoned once more — in Afghanistan, where even government officials had no influence on the Bush administration; in Algeria, where justice resembles a game of Russian Roulette: and in Iraq, where no one seems to know what fate awaits them — their stories demonstrate conclusively the utter contempt that Dick Cheney showed for notions of truth and justice, and they will, I hope, act as an encouragement to those in the new administration who are preparing to review the cases, to see who can be released and who should still be held, to scrutinize the evidence — such as it is — with profound skepticism.

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

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

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers are as follows:

ISN 968: Haji Bismullah (Afghan)
ISN 175: Hassan Mujamma Rabai Said (Algeria)
ISN 435: Hassan Abdul Said (Iraq)
ISN 111: Ali al-Tayeea (Iraq)
ISN 758: Abbas al-Naely (Iraq)
ISN 653: Arkan al-Karim (Iraq)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; and December 2008 — 3 Bosnian Algerians; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

Mostly foreign stragglers, picked up individually by opportunistic Afghan soldiers, or by US forces acting on dubious intelligence, they were amongst the 45 or so prisoners seized in Afghanistan in late 2001, who were not held in Sheberghan prison, which features in Chapters 3 and 9, and in the previous online chapter.

What is most notable about their cases — beyond a demonstrable lack of any involvement with terrorism — is that those who are still detained have mostly been cleared for release, but cannot be repatriated for a variety of reasons that I explain in the chapter. As Barack Obama begins working out how to fulfill his pledge to close Guantánamo, securing a new home for these men –- and many dozens more –- will be a major challenge.

I now have just four more online chapters to complete –- two looking at prisoners seized in Pakistan, and two looking at the mainly Afghan prisoners seized between January 2002 and July 2003, when the industrial-scale rendition of prisoners to Guantánamo came to an end. I hope to have these completed by the end of the year, and to follow it up with a definitive list of all of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo.

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

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