In addition, as well as ignoring this important contextual analysis in the coverage of cables from embassies and consulates around the world, there has also been a distinct refusal to discuss the bigger picture: the Obama adminstration’s retreat from boldness to paralysis regarding the closure of the prison, and decisions on whether to charge or release the men held there (or, it should be noted, whether to reclassify some as prisoners of war).

Nevertheless, the documents have been useful for revealing more than was previously known about the horse-trading involved in negotiations with the Maldives, Bulgaria, Norway, Lithania, Slovenia, the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, China, Germany, Finland, Albania, Afghanistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia — and also for revealing praise for the efforts of former prisoner Moazzam Begg in seeking the release of former prisoners in Luxembourg.

The New York Times reported that the Maldives “tied acceptance of prisoners to American help in obtaining International Monetary Fund assistance,” which evidently didn’t happen — or, at least, has not happened yet, although Der Spiegel noted that Daniel Fried, the State Department’s Special Envoy for Guantánamo, had been involved in financial negotiations with politicians in the Maldives, telling them that “other states had received $25,000 to $85,000 per detainee to cover ‘temporary living expenses and other costs,’” and attempting to reassure them that they “could expect something toward the upper end of the range.”

Bulgaria, which took one prisoner in May this year, was also involved in financial negotiations. The interior ministry, as Der Spiegel described it, “expressed willingness to accept two men, on condition that the US got rid of visa requirements for Bulgarian tourists and businessmen and helped with relocation expenses,” which led Daniel Fried to propose “a symbolic amount in the neighbourhood of $50,000 – $80,000 per detainee.”

Other countries, the cables reveal, had no interest in accepting former prisoners under any circumstances. The Norwegians, for example, called resettling Guantánamo detainees “purely a US responsibility,” at the same time that President Obama was in Norway to collect his aspirational and undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.

The cables also reveal that, in the fall of 2009, Lithuania’s newly elected president “backed out of her country’s previous agreement to resettle a prisoner amid an uproar over reports that the Central Intelligence Agency had run a secret jail in Lithuania.” The chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament’s national security committee “privately apologized and suggested using mutual allies to pressure her to reconsider,” but that too has not led to any action to date.

More details also emerged of the State Department’s dealings with Slovenia and Kiribati, which I mentioned in a previous article. Slovenia “was encouraged to ‘do more’ on detainee resettlement if it wanted to ‘attract higher-level attention from Washington,’” and it was noted that the prime minister later “linked acceptance of detainees to ‘a 20-minute meeting’” with Obama, “but the session — and the prisoner transfer — never happened.” With Kiribati, the Bush administration offered “an incentive package” of $3 million to take all 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, and the most high-profile cleared prisoners at Guantánamo), but that too never came to fruition.

The plight of the Uighurs

The plight of the UIghurs is the focus of much of the horse-trading revealed in the cables. The 17 Uighurs, seized by Pakistani villagers and sold to US forces after fleeing a settlement in the Afghan mountains, won their habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C. in October 2008, but were then prevented from being resettled on the US mainland, as ordered by the judge in their case, in a hearing in the D.C. Circuit Court in February 2009, in which Obama’s Justice Department fought to prevent their release. The cables reveal that, at a meeting in Beijing in October 2009, a Chinese official suggested that, if the Americans wanted to help secure supply routes through China for the Afghan war, then more “prudent” actions regarding the Guantánamo Uighurs — in other words, returning them to Chinese custody — “would help remove ‘some of the obstacles’ on the Chinese side to helping with the shipments.”

To their credit, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever contemplated returning the men to China, understanding that to do so would inevitably lead to their disappearance, possibly forever. Nevertheless, having failed to accept responsibility for finding the men new homes on the US mainland, the Obama administration faced an uphill struggle persuading others to do so, before finally securing homes for 12 of them in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, leaving five still stranded in Guantánamo.

The problem, as was highlighted in Germany’s response to a request to take the men, was that China’s opposition was difficult to ignore. Negotiations were covered in the media at the time, but the cables add some first-hand accounts from those involved in the negotiations. In May 2009, for example, a cable from an ambassadors’ meeting in Beijing stated that “German ambassador Michael Schaefer reported that Germany had informed China of the US request to accept some Uighur detainees held at Guantánamo and had been subsequently warned by China of ‘a heavy burden on bilateral relations’ if Germany were to accept any detainees,” and although Daniel Fried tried to exert pressure on Germany to take two brothers, one of whom had mental health problems, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s security advisor Christoph Heusgen “was not optimistic that China would demonstrate any understanding for the two humanitarian cases.” The men were eventually resettled in Switzerland, in March this year, while Germany belatedly took two other men — a stateless Palestinian and a Syrian — in August.

In addition, an aide to Finland’s prime minister stated in August 2009 that Chinese diplomats in Helsinki had “repeatedly warned them about the damage to bilateral relations should Finland accept any Uighurs,” and although Albania, which took five Uighurs in 2006, was not prepared to take any more, the cables note that Albania offered in 2009 to take three to six non-Chinese prisoners. This was described as “gracious, but probably extravagant,” and it was noted, “As always, the Albanians are willing to go the extra mile to assist with one of our key foreign policy priorities.” Despite the slightly patronising tone, Albania proved a willing ally, taking three men in February this year.

There is also mention of Afghanistan, where, in July 2009, diplomats in Kabul complained that the Karzai government had failed to ensure an agreement that returned prisoners would face prosecution, and “granted pretrial releases to 29 out of 41 such former detainees from Guantánamo,” allowing “dangerous individuals to go free or re-enter the battlefield without ever facing an Afghan court.”

The problem with Yemen

Mostly, however, the cables identify problems with Yemen, and the New York Times focused, in particular, on a meeting between John Brennan and the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in September 2009. This was before seven Yemenis were successfully released, which was a positive move, but it was also before President Obama announced an unprincipled moratorium on releasing any more Yemenis, in January this year, following Republican hysteria at the discovery that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had trained in Yemen.

The cables reveal that President Saleh “proposed transferring them all into his prisons,” but US officials later concluded, “Saleh would, in our judgment, be unable to hold returning detainees in jail for any more than a matter of weeks before public pressure — or the courts — forced their release.”

As with Afghanistan, the problem of requiring countries to do more than monitor returned prisoners is problematical, given that they have never been charged, tried or convicted of any offense, and I maintain — however contentious it may seem — that, after nine years, releasing everyone that the adminstration has no intention of putting on trial (or reclassifying as prisoners of war) is more important than remaining paralyzed by the fear that a handful of released men might bear a grudge and end up engaging, or reengaging in combat against the US.

I do sympathize, however, with the frustrations of dealing with President Saleh, as revealed in what the Times described as his “erratic approach” in that same meeting, in which, on the one hand, he “signaled that rehabilitation is not his concern, but rather ‘the US’s problem’ because he is ready and willing to accept all Yemeni detainees into the Yemen prison system,” but then, on the other hand, almost immediately told Brennan that he was committed to “freeing the innocent people after a complete and total rehabilitation.”

President Saleh was also anxious for money from the US. The Times noted that neither he nor the Saudis “were enthusiastic about an American proposal to send Yemeni detainees to a Saudi deradicalization program,” but that “when Mr. Saleh proposed a Yemeni version, the United States showed interest — but also caution.”

In March 2009, he “demanded $11 million to build such a program in Aden,” but Brennan told him that “such a program takes time to develop and that Saleh had his hands full dealing with al-Qaeda in Yemen.” When they met again in September, Saleh “repeatedly” asked, “How many dollars will the US bring?” When Brennan “offered $500,000 as an initial investment currently available for the crafting of a rehabilitation program, Saleh dismissed the offer as insufficient.”

Saudi rehab, alleged recidivism, and excessive security concerns

In other cables, the Saudi rehabilitation program was discussed — and the alleged rate of recidivism of those put through the program, which is a profound problem for those seeking the closure of Guantánamo, because, in recent years, the Pentagon has released a number of scaremongering press releases, or insubstantial reports, which in turn, have irresponsibly inspired further Republican opposition to the closure of Guantánamo.

The cables, while revealing an increase in suspected recidivism, do not back up the Pentagon’s most outrageous claims. In March 2009, it was “estimated that the program had processed 1,500 extremists, including 119 former detainees,” and that the recidivism rate was between 8 and 10 percent. “[T]he real story of the Saudi rehabilitation program is one of success,” a cable stated, adding, “at least 90 percent of its graduates appear to have given up jihad and reintegrated into Saudi society.”

By March this year, however, Daniel Fried “told European Union officials that the Saudi program was ‘serious but not perfect,’ citing a failure rate of 10 to 20 percent” — which, even if true, is still far from the 20 percent of the 532 prisoners released by President Bush, which is what the Pentagon claimed, without providing evidence, in January this year.

Other cables covered familiar territory, noting, as previously reported, that “of 85 militants on a ‘most wanted’ list published by Saudi authorities in early 2009, 11 were former Guantánamo detainees,” although the Times also noted that “the cables offer details on only a few individual cases — like a Saudi who became a leader of al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch and a Kuwaiti who committed a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2008, both of which have been previously reported.”

The Times did, however, add that the death of Abdullah al-Ajmi, the Kuwaiti, “proved deeply embarrassing for the Kuwaiti government,” and that, in February 2009, Kuwait’s interior minister, Sheik Jaber al-Khaled al-Sabah, told the US ambassador, “You know better than I that we cannot deal with these people. If they are rotten, they are rotten and the best thing to do is get rid of them. You picked them up in Afghanistan; you should drop them off in Afghanistan, in the middle of the war zone.”

The Times suggested that “Sabah’s private comments contrasted with the public stance of his government,” which, “[u]nder domestic pressure to urge the United States to send home all Kuwaitis from Guantánamo … has strongly suggested that it is doing so,” but this may be reading too much into his comments, as there have been no problems with other Kuwaitis returned from Guantánamo, and nor are there any indications, from those who know the stories well, that either of the remaining Kuwaitis in Guantánamo, Fawzi al-Odah and Fayiz al-Kandari, who lost their habeas corpus petitions on thin or non-existent evidence, pose a threat to anybody. Instead, as reported earlier this year, part of the problem seems to be that the Obama administration has tried to impose unreasonable demands on the liberty of those already released before it will engage in dialogue regarding the release of al-Odah and al-Kandari.

The security concerns — beyond those previously mentioned with reference to Afghanistan and Yemen — are also touched on in the cables. As the Times noted, “The United States often has required countries to impose travel bans — among other restrictions, including continuing surveillance — on freed prisoners, sometimes with mixed success.” The Times proceeded to explain how, in February 2009, a US diplomat in Qatar urged Attorney General Eric Holder “not to meet with his Qatari counterpart, citing reports that a Qatari former detainee traveled ‘despite explicit assurances that he would not be permitted to do so.’” The man in question, Jarallah al-Marri, had “traveled to Britain to join a speaking tour” — entitled “Two Sides, One Story,” organized by the NGO Cageprisoners, which also featured the organization’s director, Moazzam Begg, and other released prisoners, including Omar Deghayes.

I met Jarallah at the start of the tour, along with the former Guantánamo guard Chris Arendt, and was happy to do so, finding him to be an articulate men, quietly appalled by the treatment of prisoners in the “War on Terror,” and I thought that his freedom to travel to the UK showed a certain degree of enlightenment on the part of the UK authorities. I was therefore disappointed when, a few weeks later, after he had returned to Qatar and was trying to return to the UK, he was imprisoned in a deportation centre and then deported.

Praise for Moazzam Begg

Despite this, there was high praise for Moazzam Begg from another American diplomat, who was present during a visit to Luxembourg by Begg — and representatives of Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights — in January this year, as part of a number of visits to European capitals in an attempt to persuade countries to take in former prisoners. Despite initial reticence, Luxembourg was persuaded to take in a former prisoner, a Yemeni, although the plans fell through when the man in question decided that he would prefer to be returned to his home country (although he is, or course, still held). Neverthless, the success of the mission — which also swayed opinion in Germany, leading to the acceptance of the two former prisoners in August — can be gauged by a cable from the US diplomat, who stated:

Begg, an articulate man, argued that there are dozens of prisoners in GTMO just like him — not dangerous to society, able to communicate and assimilate, able to be a contributing and responsible member of society — and they just need governments to stand up and offer them a place to call home. In an interview … Begg was asked if countries like Luxembourg have a responsibility regarding ex-detainees. Begg reportedly responded that it is a European tradition to offer asylum to refugees, and that this tradition also should be extended to former Guantánamo detainees who have not been convicted of crimes, are not dangerous, and are deemed as releasable.

At a screening of the Oscar-winning documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” much of which, according to the cable, “was an undisguised attack on the Bush Administration, focusing much of its venom on Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Former Vice President Cheney,” it was noted that “Mr. Begg, on the other hand, presented an image of ‘forgive, but never forget,’ and has focused his attentions not on the ill treatment he allegedly received, but on what can be done to resettle the remaining ‘releasable’ prisoners in Guantánamo Bay … During his presentation, Begg spoke almost exclusively of the future, with hardly any mention of the past. He did not discuss the question of legality of torture. Rather than stressing past injustices, he focused on what to do now. He acknowledged that he lives with the past, but that he now wants to be part of the solution, and is working to convince Luxembourg and other governments — and their populaces — to want the same.”

The cable continued:

In a 90-minute Q&A session, Begg was asked, how would ex-detainees fit in in Luxembourg. How would it work? Where would they live? How would they be supported? The fear and skepticism was palpable in the audience. Begg and his NGO cohorts stressed that there were Algerians and Tunisians in GTMO who could come to Luxembourg and speak French, one of Luxembourg’s official and most-commonly used languages. He stressed that neighboring countries — France, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland — provided examples. Begg even argued that if detainees could fit in in Palau, they could do the same in Luxembourg.  Begg deplored that certain people believe the world is not big enough for the ex-detainees. He added that if there were colonies on the Moon, “I’m sure they’d send us there.”

Begg declined to speak about specific physical transgressions against his person.  When told how physically well and mentally sound he appeared, he joked, “Well, I used to be taller.”  Begg spoke articulately, demonstrating minimal ill will toward his captors — even going so far as to say he speaks on the phone occasionally with his former interrogators. Consular officer took note of the following exchange: Asked if he would ever consider a return to the US, Begg replied that he had never been to the US, but that the US had come to him. Begg commented that as a British citizen, he could travel to the US without a visa, but that he thinks he would need “a lot more than a visa to get out.”

The cable concluded:

Mr. Begg is doing our work for us, and his articulate, reasoned presentation makes for a convincing argument. It is ironic that after four years of imprisonment and alleged torture, Moazzam Begg is delivering the same [message] as we are: please consider accepting GTMO detainees for resettlement.

… but problems remain

This is a positive note on which to end, but I reiterate that, above all, the cables deflect attention from the United States’ own responsibility for taking in cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated, and also deflect from an even bigger issue: America’s failure to close Guantánamo, as President Obama promised in January 2009. There is also another unexplored sub-text — that, with such obvious wheeling and dealing going on, the welfare of the released men, and their legal status, might not be a priority for any of the parties concerned. This is a topic that has not yet been addressed thoroughly, but it will have to be tackled one day, because, although free from Guantánamo, the men scattered around the world remain tainted by their detention, and are still, essentially, the “enemy combatants” conjured up by the Bush administration at the height of the lawless frenzy of the “War on Terror.”

While stories of problems encountered by recently released prisoners are only slowly emerging (as, for example, in Slovakia and Bulgaria), the cables reveal how the experience of the first eight men to be rehoused — five Uighurs and three other men, given new homes in Albania in 2006 — should have sounded warning bells for the Obama adminstration. As Der Spiegel reported:

Since [their arrival] there has been nothing but trouble — not because the men are dangerous, but simply because the State Department is allegedly breaking its promises. The Uighurs complained to the US Embassy in Tirana that before leaving Guantánamo they had been told, “in two months (from arrival in Albania), you will have a house, a job, money, documents. You will have everything you need.” In fact, it had been impossible for them to find work or permanent accommodation. They couldn’t marry either, they said, because Albanian fathers didn’t want former Guantánamo detainees as sons-in-law. They also claimed they were being overcharged by the state electricity company.

At their wits end, US diplomats relayed their frustration back to Washington: “Post does not have the human or financial resources to provide full-time social work assistance.” They said the situation in Tirana threatened to spiral out of control unless action was taken quickly. “The prospect of eight ex-detainees camping at the Embassy’s front door, being dragged away by the Albanian police,” the dispatch read, “is another PR nightmare to be avoided.”

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record and Uruknet.

• To help coordinate assistance to prisoners who remain beyond the rule of law, who are often subjected to torture and abuse;

• To assist former prisoners to reintegrate into society in a positive and peaceable manner, many of them in countries with limited available resources, and with governments hostile to human rights;

• To assist the family members of those being held.

The launch was trailed on Wednesday, when Sami al-Haj, the al-Jazeera cameraman released in May 2008, who now heads the Human Rights Desk at al-Jazeera in Qatar, told the Associated Press that the Centre “aims to help over 500 men who have been released from the prison get medical and psychological treatment and find jobs.” Al-Haj explained that “only one in 20 former inmates has a job, and many have received no psychological or medical assistance,” and stated, “If you lock someone up in a normal prison for six months they need help. These people have been in jail for more than six years in an institution that’s much worse than a normal jail.”

He added that released prisoners “have received no explanation or apology, despite having never been charged with a crime,” and also explained that the organization will “lobby for the release or court trial of the 229 remaining inmates,” and, in the longer term, will “explore ways” of suing Bush administration officials for ordering the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo.

At the launch itself, which was extremely well-attended, Moazzam Begg began by explaining that returning British ex-prisoners had support from families, activists, community members and individuals, but that those returning to developing countries had little help. “Whether they are in Bermuda, Morocco, Mauritania or Yemen, the story is pretty much the same,” he said, as Reuters described it. “Where is the welfare for the people who have been tortured? Where is the support system for people who have endured cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment? The fact of the matter is — rarely does it exist.”

Adding that former prisoners face the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo every single day, Begg said, “How do you remove that from your head? How do you tell people that I am not a criminal, but I endured criminality? How do you explain that to anybody? When Guantánamo, by its definition, means that you must have been guilty of something because the world’s most powerful democracy could not have got it wrong. Even though we know it has got it wrong, we still carry that stigma with us, every single one of us.”

Describing the extent of the stigma, Sami al-Haj added, “My son does not deal with me as a normal father and even my wife and our close family like brothers and sisters and even our friends are keeping away from me because they do not want to put themselves in trouble.”

Binyam Mohamed, speaking for the first time in public since his release from Guantánamo in February, explained that he was not involved with the GJC “to win compensation,” and asked, “How much money can you give me that would make me forget the seven years I have gone through?” He also explained to reporters that, during an interrogation in Karachi shortly after he was seized at the airport in April 2002, his US captors explained how the US approach to the law had changed after 9/11. They told me, “You are guilty until you are proven innocent,” he said.

Describing his difficulties in readjusting to life after Guantánamo, and “at times struggling to control his emotions,” as the BBC described it, he said that he would “automatically” treat ordinary questions as an “interrogation,” and explained, “You have to live it to explain it. It’s very hard. If I enter a room and the light turns off for some reason I wonder if I’m back in the ‘Dark Prison.’” Mohamed was referring to the secret CIA prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for several months in 2004 after being tortured in Morocco for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities.

He also said, “What the world doesn’t understand is that most people love to hear about torture stories — somebody hanged here, beaten there, blood over here, blood over there, but that’s physical torture. What remains [on release] is, each time you see a rope, you always go back to the time you were hung. That doesn’t go away.”

Adding, “I cannot fit into society,” he described the opening of the Guantánamo Justice Centre as “an important event” for the former prisoners, saying, “We are here and we are living in torture — a world of torture,” and, insisting that it was not a political organization, stated bluntly, “From my point of view, there’s a mess that has been done and someone has to fix it.”

Like all the other ex-prisoners, Mohamed was concerned not primarily with relating his own difficulties adjusting to freedom, and the ghosts of torture that still haunt him, but with the plight of others. He explained that he had recently spoken on the phone to Mohammed El-Gharani, the Chadian national — just 14 years old when he was seized in Pakistan — who was released from Guantánamo in June, and that El-Gharani was now “sleeping on the streets, rejected by his family, branded as a terrorist although he was released by the US and cleared of any wrong-doing.” “I realized that he can not talk to others, like his lawyers, as he can to me,” Mohamed said. “So I have to speak out for him here.”

Returning briefly to his own ordeal, he explained, “No one knows that what stays after torture is the memories. Lawyers speak about my rights in court, but I can only think about Military Commissions and about having no rights. After four years I can only think of things in terms of Guantánamo. No institution or medical foundation in the world can change how I feel.” He then added, poignantly, “And how about in Chad, where there is nothing to help El-Gharani?”

This was a theme reiterated by Jamil El-Banna, released in December 2007, who also spoke for the first time in public since his release. El-Banna explained, “The only people who can help are those who went through this,” and, as Victoria Brittain described it in the Guardian, “told the story of Ahmed Hassan, a Jordanian who lost most of both sight and hearing from torture in Guantánamo. He spoke of the moment when Hassan trusted him as they spoke on the phone and he was able to tell him he had found a doctor here who will help him. Hassan had previously found no material or medical support in Jordan, but only promises, which disappeared into thin air. El-Banna emphasized that Hassan’s was just one of many, many stories of deep disappointment on release.”

Moazzam Begg also spoke on this theme, explaining that the Yemenis, who make up the largest single group of remaining prisoners in Guantánamo (about a hundred of the remaining 229), were of particular concern to the new organization because Yemen lacked the facilities necessary to care for people traumatized by their long and brutal imprisonment.

He explained that former prisoners from Western countries were suffering too, and described how two men now living in London “were unable even to communicate with other people due to psychological and physical damage.” “One of them lives in a room that is so tiny it is close to the size of his cell where he spent five years. That is the difficulty in the UK,” he said, but he added, “Our own situation is much better than the vast majority of people who were held there.”

The former prisoners also read out messages of support from other ex-prisoners. Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan who had lived for nearly 20 years in the UK, and was repatriated from Guantánamo in March 2007, wrote that “the life of ex-detainees is simply a life on pause,” and from Qatar Jarallah al-Marri (released in July 2008) explained, “Freedom is more than walking away from a world of cells, shackles and beatings. It is a state of mind, a state of being that takes time to develop.”

As the meeting wound up, Moazzam Begg added further details about the Centre’s aims, explaining that it would partner with NGOs in the Middle East and in African countries who were well placed to deliver care on the ground, and that it was looking for funds from sources in the Gulf, Europe and elsewhere, and Ramzi Kassem, a US lawyer who represents prisoners in Guantánamo and in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, described the prisoners of George Bush’s “War on Terror” as the “victims of an ill-conceived policy” and criticized the Obama administration for retaining the system of Military Commissions introduced by its predecessor. “They only exist for one reason and that’s to whitewash torture,” he said, adding — in a sign that the GJC’s work will not be solely concerned with Guantánamo — that the estimated 600 prisoners in Bagram, unlike those in Guantánamo, are still being denied the right to challenge their detention in court.

For a short interview with Binyam Mohamed, see this BBC video, and see below for two reports on the GJC’s launch, from Al-Jazeera and Press TV (via YouTube):

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.

This is both unpleasant and inexplicable, as Jarallah came to the UK without incident last month to take part in the UK tour — “Two Sides One Story” — which was organized by Cageprisoners, and featured released prisoner Moazzam Begg and former guard Chris Arendt. Standing in at the last minute for Sami al-Haj, the al-Jazeera journalist who was supposed to be the star of the show, but whose visa was refused by the British government, Jarallah travelled around the UK with Moazzam and Chris, explaining, in his softly-spoken manner, that he did not wish to talk about himself, but was, instead, devoted to publicizing the light of his brother Ali, a legal US resident, who has been held in the United States without charge or trial for over seven years, and has spent the last four years and eight months in horrendous solitary confinement as the only “enemy combatant” on the US mainland.

Moazzam Begg explained on Tuesday that, after the tour, Jarallah returned home but made plans to return on Sunday to discuss Ali’s case with solicitor Gareth Peirce, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, and representatives of Amnesty International. Moazzam added that “even more relevant was his desire to meet Binyam Mohamed, with whom he was held for so many years,” and that he hoped to meet Binyam on Tuesday with Moazzam.

As Moazzam also explained, the reason for Jarallah’s detention and impending deportation, as he explained on the ‘phone from Colnbrook, was because he did not disclose on his visa form that he had been held in Guantánamo.

Moazzam said, “Considering this is his second time coming to the UK and in light of the very public nature of that visit, it seems astounding that he would be detained, and on the very day of Binyam’s release, at that.” In addition, it strikes me as appalling that Jarallah is being refused entry by the UK because, like all the Guantánamo prisoners, he is indelibly tainted by his association with that most notorious of prisons, even though he was never charged with a crime during the seven years that he was held in US custody, where he was abused and held in horrendous isolation.

As Jarallah stated in a telephone conversation with an Associated Press reporter, “They said, ‘We didn’t know you were in Guantánamo.’ All the world, they know. (The British government is) the last to know? It’s a shame.”

That was putting it mildly — but then, that’s typical of Jarallah.

Jarallah is being held at:
Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre
Colnbrook Bypass
Harmondsworth
West Drayton
UB7 0FX
Telephone: 020 8607 5200 (phone lines open at 9 am)

Photos by Sarah Mirk. Visit her website Guantánamo Voices for more about the “Two Sides One Story” tour — and more on Jarallah.

UPDATE March 1: I’ve heard that Jarallah has now been returned to Qatar from the UK, but have no further news. I’ll add more details if I discover further information.

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

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportation and extradition, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009).

While critics might point out that holding prisoners without an effective screening process, labeling them all as “enemy combatants,” to be held without charge or trial, transporting them halfway round the world to an illegal offshore interrogation center, and depriving them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions might also be regarded as “an unprecedented step in the history of warfare,” what is distressing about this latest batch of releases (which brings the total number of prisoners released to 506) is that two of the men — those from Afghanistan and the UAE — have left Guantánamo as unknown as they arrived: ghost-like and anonymous, and not even identified by the Internment Serial Numbers which replaced their names for the last five or six years of their life.

As some sort of compensation, however, the third prisoner — Jarallah al-Marri, Guantánamo’s sole Qatari prisoner — has been identified, and his story is fascinating for various reasons. Married with children, al-Marri was 28 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001 at a time when around a third of Guantánamo’s total population (at least 250 prisoners) were captured. As I explain in my book The Guantánamo Files, many of these men were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, economic migrants or drifters enticed by rumors that the Taliban were crafting a “pure Islamic state in Afghanistan.” Others — al-Marri included — had been encouraged to travel to Afghanistan “to participate in the jihad,” as described in al-Marri’s tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 or 2005. However, not all of these men were aware of the reality of the jihad, and al-Marri was one of many who stated that he had been tricked.

Arriving in Afghanistan just days before the 9/11 attacks, al-Marri admitted that he had met people in Saudi Arabia who had arranged his trip to Afghanistan, and also admitted attending the al-Farouq training camp (a 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). However, he only arrived at the camp on September 10, and left the following day, without receiving any training, when the camp was shut down. After hiding out at various locations in Afghanistan — including a stint in the mountains near Kabul — he said that “an individual in Afghanistan arranged for [him] to be smuggled across the border into Pakistan,” and that he “crossed the border on a motorcycle, using a gate at which the smuggler seemed to know the guard.” He was then seized “while taking a bus from one town to another in Pakistan … after a guard boarded the bus and questioned [him] on his nationality.” At no point was he accused of raising arms against US forces, and in his tribunal, at which he authorized his Personal Representative to speak on his behalf, after requesting the services of a lawyer, he explained, “I never fought anyone. I did not want to continue because it was wrong.”

In statements made to interrogators, al-Marri elaborated on his misgivings about the situation in Afghanistan. He said that he “was misled” about the jihad and explained that he did not realize, until he was in Afghanistan, that it “was a battle of Muslim against Muslim.” He also stated that he “learned after his arrival in Afghanistan that the Taliban were not as good as he was told,” and made a point of adding that “he had second thoughts and wanted to return to Qatar after learning that the al-Farouq camp was owned by Osama bin Laden.” In addition, when questioned about al-Qaeda, he made a point rarely mentioned by other prisoners: that he did not hear the name “al-Qaeda” until after his capture, because “al-Qaeda, along with all the fighters and trainees, were called Mujahideen.”

Despite the fact that he did not undertake military training in Afghanistan, and never raised arms against US forces, al-Marri was treated abysmally in Guantánamo. In 2005, his lawyer, Jonathan Hafetz, reported that “Mr. al-Marri has been in solitary confinement for over 16 months and often goes as long as 3 weeks without being allowed outside his cell for recreation. The lights in Mr. al-Marri’s cell remain on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and he has been denied adequate bedding and clothing. Mr. al-Marri is able to sleep only 2 hours a night, and his physical and mental health have deteriorated significantly.”

In summer 2005, he was one of at least 200 prisoners who undertook a mass hunger strike to protest about their daily living conditions and the injustice of their seemingly endless imprisonment without charge or trial. As a result, although he only weighed 122 pounds (8 stone 10 pounds) on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped to 105 pounds (7 stone 7 pounds) and he was hospitalised and placed on an IV, his situation complicated by a deteriorating heart condition. He explained to Jonathan Hafetz that “the government had a nurse make sexual advances towards him while he was lying in his hospital bed in a vain attempt to convince him to give up his hunger strike.”

What has not been made clear about Jarallah al-Marri’s case is his relationship with his brother Ali, a legal US resident who was seized by the FBI in Peoria, Illinois in December 2001 and has been held in complete isolation as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland since June 2003, without charge or trial. Although the government alleges that Ali al-Marri was part of a US-based al-Qaeda sleeper cell, references to him are scant in the documentation relating to Jarallah, and relate primarily to the grand jury indictment of May 2003, in which he was accused of “making false statements to the FBI” in relation to the 9/11 attacks. What is curious is that Jarallah was released from Guantánamo just two weeks after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, although Ali has some vague right to appeal his untested designation as an “enemy combatant,” the President’s dictatorial powers, granted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, remain intact, and he has the right to imprison any American, either citizens or residents, and hold them forever without charge or trial if he believes them to be “enemy combatants.”

The timing of Jarallah’s release may be coincidental, particularly as Jonathan Hafetz explained to me that he was cleared for release after an administrative review in April, and it may be that, in an attempt to reduce the population of Guantánamo in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the prisoners have constitutional habeas corpus rights, his repatriation — and those of his unknown fellow prisoners — was a straightforward process, which enabled a quietly desperate administration to prevent a few more prisoners from challenging the basis of their detention in the District Courts in the coming months.

Certainly, the case against him would, I am sure, appear dismally weak when scrutinized by a proper court rather than the mockery of justice served up at Guantánamo, where, as noted by former insider Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, the tribunal system was designed merely to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ designation as “enemy combatants,” without any meaningful way for them to challenge the “evidence” against them. Jonathan Hafetz also wondered if his release was timed to avoid a court showdown over a motion regarding the destruction of evidence relating to Jarallah, which, he stated, “was presumably about to go forward.”

I can’t help wondering, however, if Jarallah’s release was not also timed to remove a potential witness from his brother’s case, one who might have exculpatory evidence proving that Ali was a legitimate student in the United States, and that the case against him, which is based solely on information provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during the first few months of his torture in secret CIA custody in spring 2003, is nothing more than a web of lies spun by a prisoner who, as torture victims do, told his captors whatever they wanted to hear to get the torture to stop.

POSTSCRIPT: The prisoner from the UAE has been identified as Abdullah al-Hamiri. What little is known of his story can be found here.

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

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers are as follows:

ISN 334: Jarallah al-Marri (Qatar)
ISN 48: Abdullah al-Hamiri (UAE)

The Afghan, whose identity was unknown at the time of his release, is:

ISN 1165: Mohammed Mussa Yakubi (his story will be described in a forthcoming online chapter, but I can reveal that he was a security officer working for the government of Hamid Karzai)

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; 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).