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

This is Part 23 of the 70-part series. 293 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three features another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose file is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdel Hakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in secret CIA prisons, before they were returned to Libya and imprisoned by Colonel Gaddafi. Also see Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten.

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

Said Al Malki (ISN 157, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Said al-Malki (also identified as Saed al-Malki or Saed al-Maliki), a security officer with the Saudi police, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan in January 2001 after a sheikh suggested that distributing food and clothing to the poor was a worthwhile pursuit for a devout Muslim. He said that he and a companion then spent ten months traveling around Afghanistan, distributing food, clothing and “books and tapes regarding Islam,” and he said of his arrest in Pakistan that the police “said I was Arabic and I was good value.” He also explained that he ran into problems because he sought advice from the Al-Birr Foundation, a Saudi charity, founded in 1987, which was put on a US terror watchlist in November 2002.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Malki was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 12, 2005, in which he was also identified as Sa’id al-Malki and Sa’ed al-Maliki, and it was noted that he was born in 1969. It was also noted that, in common with many of the prisoners, he was “diagnosed with latent Tuberculosis,” although he “refused treatment in October of 2002.” It was also noted that he had “a history of asthma but [was] not on medication for it.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had “provided at least four versions of his personal history,” and that only one was described in the file. According to this account, al-Malki had been a police officer for over ten years, for which he apparently only “received a salary of about $2,600 USD per year,” and had “left the police force to pursue a private business venture selling cars but never started the business.”

In this employment limbo, he met a man named Hassan El-Nashiri at the “Holy Temple Mosque” in Mecca, in July or August of 1999. El-Nashiri, the financier for the Al-Birr Foundation, apparently convinced al-Malki to travel to Afghanistan in 1999, although he did not travel until 2001. El-Nashiri apparently arranged and paid for his travel, and was “assessed to be an Al-Qaida facilitator,” although the evidence for this was not immediately forthcoming in al-Malki’s case, as he said that he “worked in Afghanistan as a volunteer” for Al-Birr, with El-Nashiri, and that the two men “bought goods on the border of Pakistan (PK), entered Afghanistan and delivered the goods to several small villages throughout Afghanistan.”

When “the bombing in Afghanistan became intense,” al-Malki said he “decided it was time to return home to Saudi Arabia,” although he also said that he was “robbed of his money and passport” while working in Afghanistan, and that, when he reached Pakistan, the Pakistani police captured him while trying to enter Peshawar on December 12, 2001. According to what was described as “altemate reporting,” he “was transferred from Kohat prison, Pakistani custody, to the Kandahar Detention Facility, US custody, on 30 December 2001,” and was sent to Guantánamo on January 17, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on foreign NGOs operating in Afghanistan.”

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

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

In assessing his story, the Task Force was obviously perturbed by the perception that, as an analyst decried it, al-Malki was “not being open and forthcoming with his debriefers, and resist[ed] answering direct questions,” so that, as a result, his “veracity [was] in question due to the multiple versions of cover stories that he has used as well as his use of other individual’s [sic] names and portions of their stories.” This may indeed have been suspicious, but there was nothing in the way of evidence to establish that he was not what he said he was: a volunteer providing humanitarian aid to one of the most wretched countries on earth.

As the Task Force described it, al-Malki was assessed as “a member of Al-Qaida’s global terrorist network,” because he “traveled to Afghanistan with the help of a facilitator under the guise of working for the Al-Birr Foundation,” which “has been linked to Al- Qaida.” An analysis of the Al-Birr Foundation claimed that it was “established in part to perform charitable works; however, it also supports Islamic extremist activities worldwide and maintains deliberate and purposeful associations with terrorist organizations including Al-Qaida,” and noted that, “as of 8 April 2005, [it had] been designated as a Tier 4 NGO, defined as all other NGOs which are considered to be anti-US but are not included in Tiers 1-3NGOs,” To provide further context, Tier 1 organzations were those regarded as posing a direct threat, but even Tier 2 organizations were often nothing more than alleged fronts for terrorist activities, with no way of ascertaining how exaggerated these claims were.

In al-Malki’s case, there was nothing to link him to the purported terrorist support activities of Al-Birr, but the Task Force also drew on a claim that he “was identified as participating in a specialized course entitled, ‘mountain tactics training,’” which “was a seven-week course covering guerilla warfare in mountainous terrain taught at the Al-Qaida-run Al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan,” which was actually established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but was associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11. Without even a mention of the source of this “identification,” it is the weakest sort of hearsay, although it undoubtedly contributed to the rationale for al-Malki’s continued detention, even though no other source suggested that he had undertaken training at Al-Farouq.

Also significant was a note that a previous — and thoroughly ludicrous — assessment was made that Hassan al-Nashiri “was possibly involved in the USS Cole incident” (the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000), when the prime suspect in the case is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (ISN 10015, a torture victim and former CIA “ghost prisoner,” who is still held at Guantánamo). The Task Force conceded that, “After much analysis, no reporting could be found to corroborate this statement,” and it was probably this that contributed largely to the decision to downgrade al-Malki from someone recommended to be retained in DoD control (as decided on January 17, 2004), to the revised decision to transfer him for continued detention in Saudi Arabia.

As the Task Force noted, leading up to the decision by Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, to recommend him for transfer, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although personally I think that both assessments demonstrate how over-classification was built into the system at Guantánamo, as he was surely of very little interest for intelligence purposes, and was not a risk at all.

This was confirmed in the description of him as “a low threat from a detention perspective,” in which it was noted that his “overall behaviour ha[d] been cooperative,” and that he was “located in Victor block in Camp 4, and [was] at a Low Risk level, and [had] been at a Reward Level of one [the highest level in a reward system graded from 1 to 4] for approximately seven-hundred and twenty six days, which indicates that [he] is passive in his actions and has caused little problems for the guard force and staff.”

Even so, it took another eleven months for him to be freed, to be put through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, and to resume his life.

Muhammad Ben Moujan (ISN 160, Morocco) Released October 2006

In Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Muhammad Ben Moujan (also identified as Mohammed Ben Moujane), who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, went to Afghanistan to visit his sister, who was married to Said Boujaadia (ISN 150, released in May 2008), and stayed at their house in Kandahar. In Guantánamo, he denied an allegation that he undertook weapons training in the mountains north of Kandahar, and explained that, after “fleeing from death and riots in Kandahar,” he crossed into Pakistan with numerous Afghans and Arabs, and was arrested by Pakistani soldiers on arrival. It was also alleged that he and Boujaadia “engaged in jihad in the Tora Bora mountains,” although Ben Moujan insisted that this was invented by Moroccan interrogators who questioned him in Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Ben Moujan was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated November 25, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in February 1981, and had been “seen for weight loss management and dehydration due to hunger strike and minor body aches and pain.” This, presumably, was a reference to his involvement in the prison-wide hunger strike that began in the summer of 2005, in which between 100 and 200 prisoners took part, as it was also noted, “As of 03 December 2005 detainee was no longer listed on a hunger strike.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after completing middle school, Ben Moujan “attended various trade schools such as barber, auto mechanic, carpenter and locksmith, but failed to graduate from any of them,” and then, in mid-2001, traveled “with his immediate family” to Damascus, Syria where Said Boujaadia and a second brother-in-law, Riyadh, were already living. Then “he, his family and Boujaadia traveled from Tehran to Meshad, IR, by train and then rented a car and went to Kandahar, Afghanistan,” where they stayed at the house of Ben Moujan’s third brother-in-law, identified as Abu Zuhair al-Tbaiti.

After staying only a few days at this house, Ben Moujan apparently traveled to the Al-Farouq training camp, and (refuting the claim in the documents from his tribunal at Guantánamo) apparently “stated that he went to Al-Farouq of his own volition,” where he “trained on small arms firing, physical conditioning, map reading, topography, and explosive devices,” although he asserted that “he did not do any advanced training.” After “approximately one month,” his training “was suspended and the trainees were instructed to go home.” He “claimed he did not know at the time why training was suspended,” but, as the Task Force noted, “it was in September 2001,” and Al-Farouq closed immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

Ben Moujan said that he then “went back to al-Tbaiti’s house and stayed with his family until the bombing in Kandahar began,” when he said that “they traveled on the road out of Afghanistan, [until] it became too unsafe and he was instructed to go into the mountains of Tora Bora to wait until the Afghans cleared the road.” This contradicted his earlier account, but in another version of the story, he “traveled to the mountains north of Kandahar with an unidentified group and took up fighting positions against the Americans and the Northern Alliance.” In this version of events, he “claimed he did not do any fighting, but that he hid in a ditch while the US planes bombed his position.”

What is clear, however, is that, as he fled to Pakistan, “Pakistani Army units at the border arrested [him], and he was turned over to US forces several weeks later.” An unidentified report (presumably from Pakistani intelligence) indicated that he “was transferred from Kohat, PK, to US custody at the Kandahar Detention Facility on 30 December 2001,” and he was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “[m]ay have limited information on Arab element operations in final days before his group was arrested in Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that his “timeline and actions during his stay in Afghanistan are not consistent. He initially claimed he participated in training at Al-Farouq and then recanted that statement. He claims total ignorance of his brothers’-in-law extremist activities. He also does not provide any information about his actual activities at Tora Bora.”

There was certainly some truth to this assessment, although it is difficult to see that Ben Moujan was anything more than a lowly recruit, swept along in the wake of — possibly — more significant players in his extended family. The Task Force additionally assessed him as “an Islamic extremist who received training at Al-Farouq and was active in Tora Bora prior to his capture,” although that too may be an exaggeration, as the only witness who identified him at either location was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who “stated detainee began his training at Al-Farouq two weeks prior to [his] training,” and who “also alleged that detainee was at Tora Bora with him.” Further undermining Basardah’s claims, it was noted that “In at least one report, [Basardah] attended training at Al-Farouq around April/May 2001,” whereas Ben Moujan does not appear to have been in Afghanistan at that time.

In fact, the most troubling aspects of Ben Moujan’s story involved his “familial ties” — with Saad Boujaadia, allegedly caught after engaging US forces in combat, and particularly with his other two Saudi brothers-in-law, described as “Al-Qaida operatives who were planning attacks against western assets in the Straits of Gibraltar.” In Riyadh’s case, this information was based on an unverified claim that he was involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, but in the case of the other brother-in-law, Abu Zuhair al-Tbaiti, it is because, in June 2002, he was seized with six others (two Saudis and four Moroccans, including the Saudis’ wives) for “plotting to use explosive-packed boats to attack American and British ships in the Straits of Gibraltar.” The Task Force noted that al-Tbaiti “was captured after authorities put his Moroccan in-laws under surveillance,” and claimed that he had been “in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan” before returning to Morocco and in outside reporting (see this New York Times article from 2004) it was claimed that the information about this “plot” had come from Guantánamo.

Al-Tbaiti was also identified as Zuhair Hilal al-Tbaiti, and it may be (although it is not conclusively confirmed) that he was also known as Abu Zubair al-Haili, otherwise known as “The Bear,” who was seized in Morocco in June 2002 and regarded as one of the 25 most significant figures in Al-Qaida. After a trial, he reportedly received a 10-year prison sentence in January 2003, although if they are not one and the same, then al-Haili’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Despite this, Ben Moujan’s “familial ties” were not proof of his own terrorist sympathies, and the most the Task Force could claim was that he “appears to have had limited access to operational information regarding his two brother-in-law’s [sic] terrorist activities, [although] it is probable that the Islamic extremist training he was receiving in Afghanistan was the initial stage of being incorporated into terrorist operations planned by his in-laws.” He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and it was also noted that was “assessed as a moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour [was] typically compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood approved his transfer to continued detention in Morocco, updating a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, which was issued on November 11, 2003. This, it was noted, was “[b]ased upon information obtained since [his] previous assessment” (which was not specified), although his transfer was only approved “if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or exploited intelligence.” The Task Force added, “If a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached for his continued detention, he should be Retained under DoD Control (CD).”

In February 2007, AFP reported that Ben Moujan (identified as Mohamed Ben Moujane), who, implausibly, was described as having been “accused of briefly being a member of Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard[s],” was “given a 10-year jail sentence by a Moroccan anti-terrorism court.” AFP added that he “denied terrorism but admitted visiting an Al-Qaida training camp and meeting Bin Laden in Afghanistan.” He was charged and convicted of “membership of a criminal group with the aim of preparing to commit terrorist acts” and “failing to denounce crimes against state security,” even though his lawyer, Idriss Oua Ali, had “called on the court to acquit the defendant, arguing that he had already spent five years in Guantánamo.”

As AFP noted, it was “the toughest sentence handed down by the court” to former Guantánamo prisoners,” although he was acquitted on appeal in May 2007. In June 2008, he spoke to the Associated Press, stating that he “interrupted his life as a construction worker for a ‘family visit’ in Afghanistan” that led to nearly five years in Guantánamo. Announcing his intention to “seek compensation” from the US government with the help of the legal action charity Reprieve, he said, “My brain is destroyed,” and “accuse[ed] his jailers of drugging” him and other prisoners, of being “regularly forced to eat pork,” and of being “beaten ‘like a sack of potatoes.’”

Describing himself as “a moderate Muslim,” Ben Moujan said “he did not feel hatred towards the Americans, but only those who had held him captive all these years.” In a mixture of Arabic, French and broken English, he said, “They stole my life … I’m like a skeleton that can still stand up.” After describing how he believed he had been sold to US forces in Pakistan, he said that he was then immediately transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport. “There, I stopped being human,” he said. “I became number 149,” and the AP noted that he “referr[ed] to brutal interrogations and repeated violence.” In Guantánamo, he said, he took part in “numerous hunger strikes,” and was force-fed. He also said that “his last months in this prison were also the worst, because drugs were always mixed with water and food served to him.” “Every time I ate, I had visions,” he said. He also said that he “felt nothing” when he was told he would be released, and claimed that “Moroccan police were given videotapes showing that he had several times attempted suicide by strangulation with his long hair.”

It is not known whether Ben Moujan remained a free man. The AP report noted that the Moroccan authorities appealed to the Supreme Court and his case would be judged again in October 2008, but the only information I have been able to find is that the photo above (and another of Ben Moujan with his lawyer) was taken as he “walk[ed] out of the Sale courthouse … after his trial [was] postponed” on October 7, 2008, as the Associated Press described it.

Ali Al Tays (ISN 162, Yemen) Released December 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ali al-Tays, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, admitted in Guantánamo that he attended the al-Farouq training camp (established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11), but said that he only wanted to receive training to protect himself, because there were “tribal problems” in Yemen, and it was easier to receive training in Afghanistan than at home. In his tribunal, he took particular exception to claims that he had “fled to the Tora Bora mountains, and that the Pakistanis seized him “when attempting to flee the Tora Bora region.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Tays was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 8, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in June 1977, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had “a history of depression, chronic sinusitis, and had a tonsillectomy in June 2004.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he approached a man at his local mosque who evidently knew about training in Afghanistan, and, as he explained in his tribunal, said he wanted to receive training “because of tribal problems between his tribe and the Al-Dogha tribe.” He said he gave this man “money for a visa and airline tickets,” and, at the start of September 2001, flew with him to Karachi, Pakistan. They then took a bus to Quetta, where they stayed for one night, and then took a taxi across the border to Kandahar.

Al-Tays then began training at Al-Farouq, but he “was there only four days, when on 11 September 2001 the instructors woke everyone and told them to leave out of fear from [sic] US retaliation as a result of the US attacks that had taken place that day.” He was then “taken to Kabul, AF, and stayed 15 days in a guesthouse that used to be the Saudi Ambassador’s residence,” and then “left for Jalalabad, AF, where he was instructed to go into the Hindu Kush Mountains in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan due to the bombing campaign,” and where, he said, he “hid amongst the trees of the mountains for fifteen days, six of which consisted of walking through snow towards the Pakistani border, when he got separated from the group.”

After successfully crossing the border, he said he “saw Pakistani police in a town and surrendered to them with the hopes of being returned to the Yemeni embassy.” However, he “was detained by the Pakistanis in Kohat, PK, and was eventually transferred to US custody on 30 December 2001.” He was sent to Guantánamo on February 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on: Recruiter and facilitator named Saif who recruited from the Al-Ghanari Mosque located in Saada, YM [and] The Al-Farouq Taliban and Al-Qaida training facility.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force could not find any compelling reasons to demolish his story, although analysts clearly doubted that, as he claimed, he did not know about Al-Qaida or the Al-Farouq camp’s affiliation with Al-Qaida and claimed that “it wasn’t until after hearing the term used by US debriefers that he first heard of Al-Qaida.” This sounds implausible, but it is possible — if not probable — that discussions amongst the recruits focused on their role as mujahideen rather than as “members of Al-Qaida,” which required an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden.

An analyst also noted that al-Tays had “repetitively used the excuse of a sore throat to terminate debriefings, even after being cleared medically on numerous occasions,” which led the analyst to suggest that he was “showing signs of resistance to hide parts of his true intentions and activities while in Afghanistan.”

Nevertheless, the US authorities could not find a single witness to speak out against al-Tays, and to suggest, for example, that he had been involved in anti-coalition activities in Tora Bora. It was also noted that he had not been a difficult prisoner at Guantánamo, as he had “a past history of passive behaviour,” had “a relatively short disciplinary history,” and had “no reported forced cell extractions.”

In recommending him for transfer to continued detention, Brig. Gen. Hood drew on conclusions reached by the Joint Task Force and the Criminal Investigative Task Force: that he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and also as “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because, although he was “seeking training to be a low-level combatant of the Taliban and Al-Qaida’s global terrorist network,” and “[did] not seem to be truthful in his claims of seeking training on behalf of his tribal affiliation and their disputes with neighboring tribes,” he also did not appear to be “a senior leader or have direct ties to senior leadership,” although he had “associations with known terrorist organizations and facilitators, and he may be vulnerable to recruitment for terrorist groups.”

Although it took another two years and two months for Ali al-Tays to be released, he and the five other Yemenis freed in December 2006 were amongst the few relatively fortunate Yemenis in Guantánamo, as only 23 have been released throughout the prison’s history, primarily because of institutional fears regarding security in Yemen, and as a result over half of the 171 prisoners who remain at Guantánamo at the time of writing are Yemenis.

Even so, on their return to Yemen, only one of these six men was released outright, and the others, including al-Tays, were “held in the National Security without any charges being brought against them,” as Khaled al-Anisi, a lawyer and the executive director of the Yemeni National Organization for Defending Rights and Liberties (HOOD), told Yemen Times on January 7, 2007. A Yemeni security official said they “would be released if investigations showed that they were not involved in any terrorist acts,” but al-Anisi said, “We have sent a letter to the General Prosecution and another one to the National Security Organization, in which we demanded the immediate release of the men or put them on trial.” He added that, even though previous prisoners had been released they were “facing another Guantánamo” in their own country. “They are put in jail for a long time without any charges,” he noted.

When he was finally freed from Yemeni custody, al-Tays (identified as Ali al-Taiss) reportedly joined up with Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (a Yemen-based Al-Qaida offshoot, which was reportedly formed in January 2009 as a result of the merger of Al-Qaida’s Saudi and Yemeni branches), but surrendered to the Yemeni authorities in August 2010, when he “expressed remorse for having served in Al-Qaeda” and said he was “ready to collaborate” with Yemeni authorities,” according to a report by AFP, citing a source quoted by the official Saba news agency.

Fahd Al Jutayli (ISN 177, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Fahd al-Jutayli, who was just 18 years old at the time of his capture, stated in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan for training, although he denied an allegation that he was specifically recruited by a sheikh “to fight in Kashmir and Chechnya.” Instead, he trained at Al-Farouq, but never made it out of Afghanistan, except to be captured by the Pakistani authorities and turned over to the US.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Jutayli was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 1, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in May 1981, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after graduating from high school, and working for two months as a cashier in a food market, he “quit his job to learn more about the Muslim religion.” He “attended the Mosque of Akbar for two months and then enrolled into the Al-Imam Mohammed Bin Saud University, where he only attended one term,” before he responded to a fatwa and “volunteered for military training in Afghanistan in August 2001.” He then followed a well-worn route, flying to Karachi, taking a bus to Quetta, and then traveling to “the Center for Arabs” in Kandahar, which was assessed to be a reference to the Al-Nebras guesthouse. There, he “handed over his passport and belongings to the person in charge of the house,” and, approximately four days later, was taken by bus, with four others, to the Al-Farouq training camp.

After two weeks of training, he and his fellow trainees were taken to a guesthouse in Kabul (probably after the 9/11 attacks), and, three weeks later, were driven by bus to Jalalabad, “During this time,” as the Task Force described it, he “and his group were armed with weapons,” but he then “informed Mehjad, the leader, who had provided food and clothing to the group, [that] he wished to go to Pakistan,” but was informed he would need to wait a while.” Approximately ten days later, in mid-November 2001, he said that he and Mehjad “traveled by car to the Tora Bora Mountains,” where he was handed over to a Yemeni guide responsible for taking him through the mountains to Pakistan. With nine others, he was led to a village, where “they were required to hand over their weapons,” and “were then captured by Pakistani authorities.”

He was apparently “transferred from the Kohat prison in Pakistan and turned over to US custody on 31 December 2001,” and was sent to Guantánamo on February 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban training activities at Al-Farouq in Kandahar, Afghanistan (AF) and Camp Umar Seyf [the Omar Saif Center] in Kabul, AF, Taliban recruiting activities in Barayada [Burayda], SA, Hamza Al-Muhajir [an Al-Qaida explosives expert, who was a trainer at Al-Farouq, and is described in this file as the man who ran the camp], Abu Al-Munthir [presumably another trainer, although further details were not provided] [and] Escape routes and methodology from Afghanistan to Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force took exception to his claims about what happened after Al-Farouq, stating that he had traveled with others from Al-Farouq to the front lines at Bagram, and that, when the front lines collapsed, he “fled with the others to Tora Bora,” before leaving for Pakistan. It was not entirely clear what the source of this assessment was, although two witnesses were cited. One, Ali Yahya al-Raimi (ISN 167, cleared but still held), apparently stated that, “following the closure of Al-Farouq training camp,and a quick stop at Al-Ansari Al-Nebras guesthouse in Kandahar, he traveled to Kabul with the remaining members of his training group,” although he failed to mention al-Jutayl by name, and the other witness was Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as the most prolific and unreliable witness in Guantánamo, who claimed that he had seen al-Jutayli “at the Al-Nebras guesthouse, Al-Farouq, and Tora Bora.”

The Task Force assessed al-Jutayli as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and also assessed him as “a low-level member of Al-Qaida who went to Afghanistan (AF) for the purpose of receiving jihadist training.” It was also noted that he “ha[d] been non-compliant during his detention,” and “ha[d] a relatively high amount of disciplinary reports,” having been “forcefully extracted from his cell two times.” In conclusion, although al-Jutayli was recommended to be retained in DoD control on November 22, 2003, Brig. Gen. Hood approved his transfer to continued detention, although it was not specified what had happened to change the assessment over the previous 16 months.

After his release, al-Jutayli was processed through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, but in February 2009 he was included as one of eleven former Guantánamo prisoners in a list of the Saudi government’s 85 most wanted militants, all of whom had allegedly left Saudi Arabia. He was reportedly killed in September 2009 “during a shootout between the Yemeni Army and the Shiite Houthi rebels,” although it was unclear why he would have been fighting with Shiites, and in June 2011 former prisoner Ibrahim al-Rubeish (ISN 192, see below), reportedly the chief theologian of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, stated in a video that al-Jutayli was actually killed in an accident during training. He “trained with some of his brothers with bombs, during which one of the bombs exploded at them and he was the closest to it” and “was instantly killed,” al-Rubeish said.

Issam Al Jayfi (ISN 183, Yemen) Released December 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Issam al-Jayfi, who was 22 years old, described himself in Guantánamo as a government clerk and a wayward youth, who smoked, drank alcohol and loved the company of women, and was persuaded to go to Afghanistan by a religious friend called Sami. Never having been outside Yemen, he thought it would be like Europe, a place where he could live freely, but he explained that when they arrived Sami told him they had come to fight. He said he then fled to Pakistan, where some villagers turned him over to the police.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Jayfi was a “Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 29, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in September 1979 and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, in the summer of 2001, he “was approached by a neighborhood acquaintance,” who “encouraged [him] to travel to Afghanistan and made all the necessary travel arrangements,” telling him that “the Saudi Arabian and Yemeni governments had issued fatwas concerning the jihad in Afghanistan.” On August 22, 2001, he set off with this acquaintance, traveling to a guesthouse in Kabul via Karachi, Quetta and Kandahar. Two weeks later, his companion departed to fight the Northern Alliance, but he “refused to join him and stayed at the guesthouse for a total of seven weeks.”

However, as the Northern Alliance approached Kabul, he “and other members of the guesthouse were forced to flee,” and “were taken to the ‘Tunisian guesthouse’ in Jalalabad, AF, where they stayed for a couple of days until the situation there became dangerous,” and “then moved to a small village right outside Jalalabad where they remained for over one month.” He said that he “wanted to leave Afghanistan, but was told it was too difficult to leave at that time,” but he “eventually took a chance anyway” and set off for Pakistan with a group of about ten people. He also said that he “and three other men in the group were stopped by a group of Pakistanis,” who “convinced them to follow them to safety, and instead handed them over to the Pakistani authorities.” He was turned over to US forces in Kohat on December 31, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 17, 2002, although it was “not documented why [he] was transferred to JTF GTMO.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force determined that he was “of low intelligence value due to his limited knowledge of safehouses and activities of associates in Afghanistan,” and that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” The Task Force also claimed that his activities were “consistent with those of a low-level fighter or associate,” although “details regarding [his] true activities have yet to be extracted.” Elsewhere, it was noted that it was “difficult to assess the true nature of [his] role in Afghanistan,” and the Task Force stated that, although he had been “cooperative [and] consistent,” he had “revealed little.” Conflicting accounts included the fact that, although he said that he “was convinced to travel to Afghanistan for military training unavailable to him in Yemen,” he “did not receive any type of training while in Afghanistan”; and that, although he “admit[ted] he carried a weapon, he claim[ed] he never fired or felt the need to use the weapon while in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

It was also noted that he did “not appear to have special skills, education, or the capability to organize or coordinate attacks against the US,” and that his “overall behaviour ha[d] been generally compliant and non- aggressive,” and he had only “one incident where he threw water on the guards.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for release or transfer, although even the Task Force’s assessment was too severe for the Criminal Investigative Task Force, which had “assessed [him] as a low risk on 23 March 2004.” However, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF [deferred] to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a medium risk,” and it took another two years and two months until he was released.

After his release in December 2006 with five others, only one of these men was released outright, and the others, including al-Jayfi, were “held in the National Security without any charges being brought against them,” as Khaled al-Anisi, a lawyer and the executive director of the Yemeni National Organization for Defending Rights and Liberties (HOOD), told Yemen Times on January 7, 2007. A Yemeni security official said they “would be released if investigations showed that they were not involved in any terrorist acts,” but al-Anisi said, “We have sent a letter to the General Prosecution and another one to the National Security Organization, in which we demanded the immediate release of the men or put them on trial.” He added that, even though previous prisoners had been released they were “facing another Guantánamo” in their own country. “They are put in jail for a long time without any charges,” he noted.

Othman Al Ghamdi (ISN 184, Yemen) Released June 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (5) – Escape to Pakistan (The Yemenis),” I explained how Othman al-Ghamdi (also identified as Othman al-Omairah),  who was 28 years old when he was seized, was listed by the Pentagon as a Yemeni, but was one of the 14 prisoners released to the Saudi Arabian authorities in June 2006. In the thin series of allegations in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, it was alleged that he answered a fatwa and traveled to Afghanistan on a forged passport, provided a false name when captured, and trained for a month from October to November 2001 at Al-Farouq. Noticeably, this latter allegation was impossible, because Al-Farouq shut down after 9/11.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Ghamdi was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer With Conditions to the Control of Another Country (TWC),” dated June 6, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1973, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he “served in the Saudi military,” but deserted after he was overpaid accidentally and was unable to repay the amount because he had spent it. He then “worked in Steel and Iron construction in Jeddah, SA from 2000-2001,” when he traveled to Mecca (for the hajj, presumably) and his taxi driver “told [him] about the sufferings of the Muslims in Chechnya and encouraged [him] to fight there,” and “showed [him] videotapes on Chechnya and then spoke to him regarding routes of travel for foreign fighters going into Chechnya.” The taxi driver had reportedly “fought in the jihad in Kashmir and had contacts that would facilitate entry into Afghanistan, and eventually into Chechnya.” He also bought al-Ghamdi’s plane ticket to Afghanistan, although al-Ghamdi “claim[ed] to have financed the rest of his trip.”

It was then noted that he traveled to Afghanistan and “trained at Al-Farouq from October to November 2001,” and an analyst claimed that he “was there after the 9/11 attacks, but before the bombing of Al-Farouq by coalition forces,” which, as I mentioned above, doesn’t make sense, as every other account indicates that Al-Farouq closed immediately after 9/11, because those in charge feared instant retaliation from the US.

It was then noted that “he was captured by Pakistani police near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border without documentation,” and was transferred to US custody on December 31, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Military training conducted by Taliban instructors at Al-Farouq to include small arms training and physical fitness training [and] Location, security, and physical layout of Al-Farouq.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he had “stated that he hates America,” and also that he “believes all fatwas (religious declarations) which state that Americans should not be in the Arabian Peninsula.” It was also noted that he had lied about his name and nationality, which, of course, aroused suspicion. In addition, it was noted that he “ha[d] not been cooperative and ha[d] been hostile since being at GTMO,” because he “ha[d] determined that he will be in prison whether in American custody or Saudi custody, but prefers the former. By keeping his potential intelligence to himself and remaining a hostile-appearing detainee, he believes the US will see it as a requirement to keep him out of need to exploit him due to his threat level.” To back this up, the Task Force noted that he had said that, because he “went AWOL from the Saudi military and fled to Afghanistan,” he believed this would “lead to severe punishment in Saudi Arabia,” and also because, according to al-Ghamdi, “the Saudi delegation told him that if Saudi Arabia gets him, he would not go home.”

Following up on this, it was noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been hostile and non-compliant,” and he was “often reported using refusals, harsh/threatening language and major/minor assaults in order to intimidate the guard force into getting what he wants.”

Nevertheless, the Task Force determined that he was “of low intelligence value,” and that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for “transfer with conditions” updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, which was issued on March 13, 2004. Even so, it took another year for him to be released to the custody of the Saudi government.

After his release, al-Ghamdi was processed through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, but in February 2009 he was included as one of eleven former Guantánamo prisoners in a list of the Saudi government’s 85 most wanted militants, all of whom had allegedly left Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Gazette reported that, although he was married with a son, and, after passing through rehabilitation,  had been living in Bahah, in the south of Saudi Arabia, working as a car dealer, he had suddenly disappeared. The speculation was that he was “believed to have sneaked into a neighboring country along with Adnan Al-Sayegh” (aka al-Saigh), another former Guantánamo prisoner, profiled in Part Two of this series. In May 2010, al-Ghamdi was featured in a videotape released by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, in which it was stated that he had “risen to the rank of operational commander” within the organization.

Jabir Al Fayfi (ISN 188, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Jabir al-Fayfi, who was 26 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that, having responded to a fatwa and traveled to Afghanistan, he received two weeks’ training and was then moved to the front lines, but added that “there was no fighting during my time there,” and that he was soon forced to retreat, crossing to Pakistan with a group of other people. Denying an allegation that he met Al-Qaida members in Tora Bora, he said that he only passed through the area on his way to Pakistan, and pointed out that, although he met some other Arabs, he did not know whether they were al-Qaeda, because “Al-Qaida do not have a special uniform for me to recognize and avoid them.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Fayfi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated December 16, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in 1975, and it was also noted that he was “in good medical health,” although he had “a history of latent TB,” in common with many of the prisoners, but had “refused therapy.” It was also noted that he had “a history of left foot sensory neuropathy and GERD [Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease aka acid reflux or heartburn],” and that he “went on hunger strike in June 2005,” at the start of the prison-wide hunger strike that summer, when between 100 and 200 prisoners went on a hunger strike.

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that, after dropping out of high school, and spending two years at a technical school, he “joined the Saudi military and worked as a military policeman for two and a half years,” and was then discharged and spent three to four years as a taxi driver. An analyst noted that he “claimed to have five brothers and one uncle who were serving in the Saudi military or police force at the time of his capture.”

In late 2000, he met a man at a mosque, identified by the US authorities as a recruiter known to have “identified young men for jihad in Chechnya and Kashmir,” who persuaded him to travel to Kashmir to fight. He was reportedly “motivated to join the jihad by feelings of solidarity with his fellow Muslims and the reward of heaven,” and traveled to Kashmir in February 2001, where he undertook military training and “admitted to conducting at least three attacks on Indian forces,” although he claimed not to know whether the camp was run by the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, as the US authorities believed. In June 2001, he was asked if he wanted to travel to Afghanistan,” and said that he “initially declined, but was convinced to fight alongside the Taliban after reading an article” in which a Saudi sheikh “issued a fatwa against the violators in Afghanistan.”

He then apparently traveled by bus to Kabul, and then on to the Said Arab Center in Bagram, where he stayed for about three weeks, and then moved with the shifting of the front lines, where he served with approximately 25 other Arabs for a four-month period, until, after the US-led invasion, and “[d]ue to the increased intensity of the coalition bombing campaign, a retreat to the caves in Tora Bora, AF, was ordered in November of 2001.”

There, he said, he “and three Pakistanis who were fighting alongside the Taliban evaded through the cave complex for seven to twelve days.” Explaining more about his perception of the differences between himself and Al-Qaida, he said that “[s]ome of the caves contained all Arabs and [he] heard that others contained Al-Qaida,” and that “these individuals could be identified because they carried radios and served in various leadership roles.”

Al-Fayfi also stated that he “and his group surrendered to the Pakistani army on 19 December 2001 in the Tora Bora/Pakistani border region,” and that he “was arrested and,imprisoned for two to three weeks and then delivered to US custody on 31 December 2001.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The Jaish-e-Mohammed organization and information on weapons training, training camp locations, and camp instructors near Kandahar.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value,” but posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” Although he was also identified as being “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] become increasingly non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” it was noted that he had been cooperative with his interrogators, and had been “forthcoming about his recruitment, initial training and operations in Kashmir, as well as his subsequent decision to travel to Afghanistan.” It was also noted that he may have arrived in Afghanistan before 9/11, rather than afterwards, and, without commentary, it was also noted that, “While he admits to serving in a primarily Arab unit, he denies being a member of Al-Qaida.”

He was also assessed as “a probable member of Al-Qaida and a highly trained fighter,” who had “probably minimized any combat he may have seen against US or coalition troops in Bagram and Tora Bora,” but all that could be drawn on to identify him as anything more than an extremely peripheral Arab fighter (no doubt because he had come from Kashmir rather than through an Afghan training camp) were dubious claims about variations of his name or his purported aliases being found on documents recovered from computers during house raids.

Of particular importance was the fact that, in July 2002, a delegation from Saudi Arabia “identified detainee as of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US, and unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests.” In addition, the Saudi delegation “indicated that the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to take custody of detainee for possible prosecution as soon as the US determined it no longer wanted to hold him.”

Presumably as a result of this, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention (following up on a previous recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, which was issued on May 21, 2004), but with the proviso that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” In addition, it was reiterated that a visiting Saudi delegation “indicated that the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to take custody of detainee for possible prosecution.” A year later, he was released.

After his release, al-Fayfi was processed through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, but in February 2009 he was included as one of eleven former Guantánamo prisoners in a list of the Saudi government’s 85 most wanted militants, all of whom had allegedly left Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Gazette reported that his family “declined to talk about his life,” so little more was heard about him until October 2010, when he turned himself in to Saudi authorities.

According to AFP, he “contacted the Saudi government in recent weeks saying he wanted to return home and a handover was arranged through Yemen’s government, interior ministry spokesman General Mansour al-Turki said.” Just a few weeks later, he was credited with providing “the key tip-off that led to the discovery of the two mail bombs sent from Yemen to the US” at the end of October 2010, indicating that not all the “recidivism” stories end badly.

Saleh Al Khathami (ISN 191, Saudi Arabia) Released June 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Saleh al-Khatami, who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001 and traveled “from village to village staying with Afghan families and teaching the Koran.” He also “stated that he could have possibly admitted to some things that were identified in the unclassified summary because he was pressurised and tortured by the Pakistani police” — presumably the claims that he “stayed at Najm Al-Jihad, a known terrorist organisation housing compound owned by Osama bin Laden,” and trained at Al-Farouq.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Khathami was an “Update Recommendation to Retain in DoD Control,” dated July 25, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in November 1981, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had latent TB, in common with many of the prisoners, “but ha[d] not been compliant with treatment,” and also that he had “a history of mild malnourishment and ha[d] been followed by the weight program.” No further information was provided about his “history of mild malnourishment,” and whether it was to do with being on a hunger strike, but in “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation,” a report I compiled in 2009, based on weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, I noted that he weighed 134 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, but that his weight then dropped to just 106 pounds in October 2002.

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had just finished studying at school, and had “enrolled in a summer sports center program for two months,” when he attended a lecture given by a sheikh who “proclaimed that Russian soldiers were killing innocent Muslims in Chechnya and that the situation warranted every Muslim, no matter what fighting skills they had, to join the struggle.” The sheikh and a student friend of al-Khathami’s “encouraged [him] to train in Afghanistan and then fight in Chechnya,” and so he set off for Afghanistan in August 2001, traveling to the Al-Farouq training camp near Kandahar via Karachi and Quetta.

He then traveled to Jalalabad, via Kabul, where he apparently stayed at Osama bin Laden’s Najm Al-Jihad compound for three weeks “while trying to come up with a way to get out of Afghanistan” — and, as was stated elsewhere in the file, because “he became ill with jaundice-like symptoms” — and then “joined a group of Arabs heading to Tora Bora, AF, where he remained for approximately six weeks until the massive withdrawal from Tora Bora to the border of Pakistan.”

According to “reporting by Pakistani intelligence,” he was “transferred from Kohat Prison, Pakistani control, to Kandahar Detention Facility, US custody, on 31 December 2001,” and was sent to Guantánamo on February 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Al-Qaida-run Al-Farouq training camp in Kandahar, AF, Personalities involved with training fighters in Afghanistan, to include but not limited to Al-Jarah [this reference was not identified further], Sheikh Abdullah Abdah Rahman Jabrin, who directed him to go fight [and] Abu Said Sharki,who was in charge of the Arab safehouse in Jalalabad, AF.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force described him as “a probable member of Al-Qaida due to his name being found on a number of documents associated with that group.” This was a reference to dubious claims that his name and/or his supposed aliases were found on documents recovered from computers seized in house raids, but even if they were true, the reference to being “a probable member of Al-Qaida” tends to obscure the fact that he was only involved in the military wing of Al-Qaida, in a specifically Afghan conflict that only mutated into a war against the US after the US-led invasion, and not with that part of Al-Qaida that was devoted to international terrorism.

The Task Force assessed al-Khathami as lying when he “tried to refute his claims by stating that his admissions of traveling to Afghanistan for jihad [were] a lie and that he was forced by the Pakistani authorities to make those admissions.” This was “deemed false due to his knowledge of the front lines of Afghanistan,” and was appropriate, but there was nothing else in his file to identify him as anything other than an insignificant foot soldier, barely trained, and unable to shed any light on significant personalities, and in fact, the Task Force assessed him as being “of low intelligence value,” but claimed that he posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

It was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant, but not hostile in nature,” and, as a result, it was not entirely clear why Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention in Guantánamo (updating a previous recommendation that he retained in DoD control, dated March 6, 2004), rather than recommending him for a transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although this evidently took place eleven months later.

Ibrahim Al Rubeish (ISN 192, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ibrahim al-Rubeish, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was only in Afghanistan for three months. In Guantánamo, he admitted training at al-Farouq and passing through Tora Bora on his way to Pakistan, but said that he went to Afghanistan primarily to “train for the jihad for God.” When asked who he was training to fight, he replied, “Whoever fights Muslims,” and when asked if he thought that this included the US, he said, “the United States is a partner with Saudi Arabia, so how could I consider it an enemy of Islam if it’s a friend of Saudi Arabia?”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Rubeish was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated November 30, 2005, in which his name was spelt Arbaysh, Al-Rabeesh, Al-Rubaish, El-Roubish and Al-Rubaysh, and it was also noted that he was born in 1978, and was “in good health,” although he “refused treatment for latent TB,” and “went on a hunger strike in March 2002.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he had studied Islamic law, and “claimed he received an inheritance and did not need to work.” He apparently “decided to participate in jihad” at the urging of a sheikh who was particularly concerned at the atrocities in Chechnya, and followed a familiar route to Afghanistan to be trained, via Karachi and Quetta, where “an Afghan met [him] at the airport, and they traveled to a guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan (AF), circumventing checkpoints at the border.” There, he “was instructed to stay at what he believed was an Arab guesthouse for a few days,” and “then traveled to Al-Farouq, arriving in what he believed to be the end of May 2001.”

At Al-Farouq, he said, he “was searched, allowed to retain his passport and other personal belongings, and instructed to fill out an application,” and then received military training for approximately three weeks,” after which “he was told that the camp was to be evacuated because of the risk of coalition bombing,” which indicated that he probably arrived at Al-Farouq in August 2001, and not in May, as the risk of coalition bombing followed the 9/11 attacks.

He was then “told to go to a guesthouse in Kabul” — or, more probably, he was taken there — where he stayed for seven to ten days, and then departed for Jalalabad, where he stayed in a guesthouse for approximately a month. A commander from Tora Bora then turned up and “told him to ‘return’ to Tora Bora since Jalalabad was about to fall,” and, when he arrived in Tora Bora, his unit commander issued him a Kalashnikov. He said that it was in Tora Bora that he lost his passport, although the Task Force doubted this, believing that, despite what he said, he would have been obliged to hand it over “for safekeeping” at the guesthouse.

He was then seized by Pakistani authorities as he was fleeing Afghanistan into Pakistan, and was transferred to US custody on December 31, 2001 in Kohat. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and its weapons training, training camp locations, and camp instructors near Kandahar.” This did not appear to make sense, as al-Rubeish had not mentioned Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistani militant group, but elsewhere in his file it was noted, “It is unclear why officials at Bagram believed [he] had information related to Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM),” and its mention here was obviously following up on that.

In assessing his story, the Task Force concluded that he was “of medium intelligence value,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “a moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been non-compliant and rarely hostile to the guard force and staff.”

What should have counted in his favor was the Saudi government’s opinion about him, because it was noted that, “After the 2002 Saudi delegation visit, detainee was identified by Mabahith [the Saudi secret service] as one of the seventy-seven Saudi nationals of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US Government but of whom [sic] the Saudi Government would attempt to prosecute if transferred to their custody from Guantánamo Bay.”

The main reason that Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention at Guantánamo (updating a recommendation to retain in DoD control, dated October 15, 2004) instead of recommending him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia appears to be because of certain doubts about him — primarily because he was “assessed as an Al-Qaida member who traveled to Afghanistan intent on training for jihad in Chechnya, but stayed and joined the Taliban,” because he “stayed in Al-Qaida guesthouses” and attended what was described, in exaggerated terms, as “that group’s Al-Farouq terrorist training camp,” because he participated in hostilities in Tora Bora,” and also because he was “linked to known Al-Qaida members.”

The latter claim was probably the most troubling to the Task Force, which specifically noted that he “had the name Ibad al-Maki and a phone number in his pocket litter,” which was assessed to refer to Ibada al-Makki, described as “a known Al-Qaida facilitator and fundraiser,” and “a close contact” of Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016, still held), who was described as “a senior Al-Qaida operative,” but is more aptly described as the mentally damaged gatekeeper for the Khalden training camp, and one of the Bush administration’s most notorious torture victims and CIA “ghost prisoners,” prior to his arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006. It was also noted that, when Abu Zubaydah was “asked to review the names” on a list allegedly recovered from a house used by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (ISN 10024, still held), “detainee’s name/alias was familiar to Abu Zubaydah.”

That means nothing, as Abu Zubaydah seems regularly to have claimed to identify people he did not know, and had no reason to know, presumably only to stop his torture, but what also probably convinced the Task Force of al-Rubeish’s significance was a statement by Abdul Aziz al-Baddah (ISN 264, released in June 2006 and also identified as Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Rahman), who apparently claimed that al-Rubeish had “some type of leadership role among detainees and strongly influence[d] them,” and also had “deep and strong information.” An analyst noted that it was unknown whether this referred to “information about Al-Qaida or about others at Guantánamo Bay,” but it was certain that, in the paranoid atmosphere at Guantánamo, it would have been regarded as significant. As a result of all the doubts above, he was not released for another 13 months.

After his release, al-Rubeish was processed through the Saudi government’s extensive rehabilitation program, but in February 2009 he was included as one of eleven former Guantánamo prisoners in a list of the Saudi government’s 85 most wanted militants, all of whom had allegedly left Saudi Arabia. In November 2009 (identifying him as Ibrahim al-Rubaish), the Jamestown Foundation published an article identifying him as the Mufti, or chief theologian of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The article noted that he “was born in the ultra-conservative region of Buridah in al-Qasim in 1980, where he studied until graduating from Imam Muhammad bin Sa’ud University with a BA degree in Shari’a,” and that, after his time in Guantánamo and in the Saudi rehabilitation program, he “decided to complete his Master’s degree, but suddenly disappeared,” and it later emerged that he “left his wife and three children behind to join al-Qaeda in Yemen in April 2008.” He is now regarded as one of the most significant members of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Also see “A Poem From Guantánamo: “Ode to the Sea” by Ibrahim al-Rubaish,” included in the book, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, published in 2007.

Mohsin Moqbill (ISN 193, Yemen) Released December 2006

In Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mohsin Moqbill (also identified as Muhsin Moqbill), who was 20 years old at the time of capture, was one of several Yemeni prisoners recruited for jihad by Ibrahim Baalawi (aka Ba Aloui), also known as Abu Khulud (or Abu Khalud) and regarded by the US authorities as a facilitator for Osama bin Laden, who escaped from Tora Bora (the site of a showdown between Al-Qaida and US forces in December 2001) and would clearly have been a much bigger catch than any of the foot soldiers rounded up instead.

Moqbill said in Guantánamo that Baalawi recruited him by teaching him about fatwa and jihad, which he described as the obligation “to help others, to give what you can.” However, he said that when he arrived at Al-Farouq, he regretted his decision, and pointed out that many of the militant sheikhs in the Gulf had now “recalled all their fatwas.” Captured after staying in a village in the Tora Bora mountains for 26 days and then crossing into Pakistan with a dozen other people, he and his group surrendered their weapons in a border village and were then taken to the Pakistani police.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Moqbill was a “Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 1, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in 1980, and was “in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force elaborated on the story he told at Guantánamo, noting that, as he was “approaching the completion of his high school education, he spoke about the jihad in Afghanistan (AF) with a friend of his,” after hearing a fatwa in his family’s local mosque, and “decided to go fight for the Taliban, whom he revered for favoring Arabs and treating them well.” Around October 2000, he traveled to the Al-Farouq training camp near Kandahar, via Karachi and Quetta, where, he said, he “trained for 10 days,” and then “went to the Mullah Ibrahim Center north of Kabul, AF, where he spent 11 to 12 months on the second line near Bagram.” There, he said, he “was issued an AK-47, but didn’t participate in any battles,” although “he did witness artillery and tank activity during that time.” Instead, he said, “he spent most of his time eating, reading and playing soccer.”

Moqbill said that, “[w]hen the US airstrikes began in November 2001, [he] and his group fled to Jalalabad,” where they “stayed at an unidentified Taliban center,” and were then taken to a location “one hour outside of Jalalabad in the direction of Tora Bora where they stayed for another 26 days.” He and his group were then led for four days by an Afghan guide “across the border to a small Pakistani village where he was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.” He was reportedly handed over to the US authorities on December 31, 2001, in Khost, Afghanistan (although no explanation was forthcoming as to why he was not handed over in Pakistan), and was then flown to Kandahar “for initial debriefings.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 3, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on: Al-Qaida or Taliban recruiter/travel facilitator Ibrahim Ba Aloui, aka Abu Khalud, Safehouses in Quetta, PK, Kandahar, AF, Kabul, AF, and Jalalabad, AF, The Al-Farouq Al-Qaida basic training camp [and] The second line in the Bagram area of Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force described him as being “of low intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” primarily because he was assessed as “a low-level combatant of the Taliban and Al-Qaida’s global terrorist network,” who had  “participated in combatant training, and participated in hostile actions against the US or allies as part of a jihad.” It was also assessed that his “associations with known terrorist organizations and facilitators” meant that “he may be vulnerable to recruitment for terrorist groups.”

However, it was also noted that “he does not appear to be a senior leader or have direct ties to senior leadership,” and that JTF GTMO believed he had been “truthful in his claims” and had been “fully exploited.” As a result, and also because he “[did] not have any disciplinary history in the camp,” and was “now fully cooperative with his debriefers, often showing signs of extreme remorse,” Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” although he was not freed for another two years and two months.

After his release, with five others, only of these men was released outright, and the others, including Moqbill, were “held in the National Security without any charges being brought against them,” Khaled Al-Anisi, a lawyer and the executive director of the Yemeni National Organization for Defending Rights and Liberties, known as HOOD. told Yemen Times on January 7, 2007. A Yemeni security official said they “would be released if investigations showed that they were not involved in any terrorist acts,” but Al-Anisi said, “We have sent a letter to the General Prosecution and another one to the National Security Organization, in which we demanded the immediate release of the men or put them on trial.” He added that, even though previous prisoners had been released they were “facing another Guantánamo” in their own country. “They are put in jail for a long time without any charges,” he noted.

Muhammad Al Futuri (ISN 194, Libya) Released December 2006

In a footnote to Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Muhammad al-Futuri (also identified as al-Futri), who was 33 years old at the time of his capture,  had been living in Jalalabad. In Guantánamo, he denied allegations that he was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and presented himself as an economic migrant.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Futuri was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 8, 2006, in which he was also identified as Muhammad al-Rimi, and it was noted that he was born in December 1968, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had “a history of latent tuberculosis,” in common with many of the prisoners, but had “refused INH therapy.” It was also noted that he had “congenital clubbed feet,” and “was on hunger strike in August 2005, October 2005, and January’ 2006.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that “he claimed to be a merchant selling used furniture, clothing, and home appliances in the outdoor bazaar in Benghazi” between 1987 and 1998, but that, “[i]n approximately June 1999, [his] neighbors informed him that the Libyan Secret Service (LSS) came to his house to question him.” Al-Futuri said the LSS “was arresting ‘all bearded, committed Muslims,’” but that, [w]ith the assistance of ‘some brothers’ (NFI), he was smuggled out of Libya and into Egypt (EG) with $1000USD.”

According to an analyst, he said he left Benghazi in a traveling group of the vast missionary organisation Jamaat al-Tablighi (JT) as a volunteer, “traveling around Islamic countries, visiting madrases and preaching Islam” until 2001. However, in another account, he left Egypt after two months and traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he met a Yemeni, and the two men, motivated for jihad by fatwas, traveled to Pakistan. In Peshawar, they met a Pakistani and an Afghan who took them to Jalalabad. From there, he said, his companion went to the front lines north of Kabul, whereas he remained in Jalalabad, and “claimed to have traveled frequently to Kabul, AF, and Pakistan as a JT member.”

He then said that, when the Northern Alliance took Jalalabad, he “fled back to Pakistan where he was arrested, jailed for a couple of days, and then turned over to US custody in Kandahar.” However, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of the independent Khalden training camp, which was closed down by the Taliban in 2000, because al-Libi would not let it be run by Osama bin Laden, claimed that al-Futuri was seized with him, as part of a large group captured at the time. The problem with this story is that statements credited to al-Libi are thoroughly unreliable because, after his capture, al-Libi (identified by the number ISN 212, even though he was never held at Guantánamo), was sent by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured until he made a false confession that there were links between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. He later recanted this claim, but it was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. After this, he was held in a variety of secret prisons, and was returned to Libya, probably in 2006, where he died in prison, allegedly by committing suicide (although this was disputed by those who knew Gaddafi’s regime well) in May 2009.

Whether there was any truth to al-Libi’s claim, al-Futuri “was transferred from Pakistani authorities in Kohat, PK, to US custody on 31 December 2001,” and was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, although there were “no reasons for transfer documented in [his] record.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force described him as being “of medium intelligence value” (adding that his “most recent interrogation session occurred on 26 January 2006″), and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was “assessed to be deceptive,” partly because he “initially claimed to be Yemeni and attempted to change nationalities several times before admitting he [was] a Libyan in 2003,” but primarily because he “provided conflicting timelines and accounts of his travels, associations and activities.”

It was specifically noted that his claim that he “departed Libya in 1999 for religious purposes and avoiding arrest” was set against what was suggested by other sources — that he “departed Libya much earlier for activities associated with jihad, LIFG [the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, opponents of Colonel Gaddafi] and possibly Al-Qaida.” It was also noted that there were “numerous corroborating accounts from Al-Qaida and LIFG members that contradict[ed his] account or provide[d] details of his activities and travel that [he had] entirely omitted.”

These accounts did not entirely justify the US authorities’ assessment of him, which also included a claim that he “was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and associated with Al-Qaida members and facilitators,” as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for example, stated that he “was a simple man with a bad leg, which prohibited him from training,” and that, “[d]ue to [his] condition, [he] lived off the charity of others and had no relationship with Al-Qaida or LIFG.”

In addition, the torture victim and CIA “ghost prisoner” Abu Zubaydah, who claimed to have seen him in Peshawar in 1994, and in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001, said that, when he saw him at a training camp in 2000, he “was not training at the camp, but simply ‘sitting with the brothers.’” In addition, he “recalled that detainee walked with a limp, and added [that he] was a ‘simple person who could not make explosives and had bad security.’ He also said that, when al-Futuri was staying at the Khalden guesthouse in Kabul (in September 2001), he “gave [him] $1000USD” so that “he could marry a woman in Jalalabad, AF.” (Al-Libi also stated that, in late 2001, “as the Arabs were evacuating Jalalabad, detainee collected money from several of the Arabs in order to get married”).

It was also noted that Hassan Ghul, another CIA “ghost prisoner,” seized in Iraq in 2004, and subjected to the Bush administration’s torture program, whose current whereabouts are unknown (although it is claimed that he was held in a CIA prison in Romania and then freed), recognized al-Futuri “as a Libyan he had seen in Jalalabad, AF, after 11 September 2001,” although he “added that [he] was not an Al-Qaida member.”

Other sources identified him as a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, contradicting Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, although their testimony may also be unreliable because of the circumstances in which it was gathered. Abu Zubaydah, for example, “said that he “may have joined LIFG in 1995, but later left the group,” which means very little on examination. More came from three Libyans, Ayoub al-Libi, Adnan al-Libi, and Muhammad Ahmad al-Shuru’iya (aka Hassan Raba’i), but they too were CIA “ghost prisoners,” held in secret prisons, where torture was used, for several years before they were returned to Libya.

Ayoub al-Libi, for example (identified as Ayuub Al-Libi and described as being “responsible for LIFG finances in Pakistan”), “identified [al-Futuri] as Abu Bakr Al-Libi and a member of LIFG,” and added that he “believed [he] wanted die a martyr’s death, but could not have received any rigorous training because he had a bad right leg.” He also “confirmed [al-Futuri] had left the LIFG and thought [he] had been caught at Tora Bora.” (Also note that, in a separate entry, Abu Hazim Al-Libi aka Muhammad Dawud was credited with identifying al-Futuri as Abu Bakr Al-Libi, and mentioning that he “walked with a noticeable limp and was captured in a group leaving Tora Bora,” all of which is remarkably similar to the above because Abu Hazim al-Libi is Ayoub al-Libi, but the US authorities failed to notice).

In addition, Adnan al-Libi, described as an “Al-Qaida and LIFG facilitator,” identified [al-Futuri] as Abdul Haleim,” said that he met him in 1992 in Peshawar, and “claimed [he] was an LIFG member who left the group in 2000 due to some unspecified disagreement.”

Muhammad Ahmad al-Shuru’iya, described as an LIFG member, stated that he knew al-Futuri “as Abu Bakr al-Libi or Abu Haleem,” and said that he met him in Pakistan in 1997 or 1998. He added that al-Futuri “was a member of LIFG but did not know any details about [him] participating in any training because he had some form of disability to one of his feet.” When he met researchers from Human Rights Watch at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in 2009, al-Shuru’iya (aka al-Shoroeiya) stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was a secret facility in Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “the interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg.”

Another Libyan who mentioned al-Futuri was Abd al-Hakim al-Khuwayladi al-Misri Bilhaj (aka Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq), described as the leader of the LIFG in Pakistan, who recently came to prominence in the media as Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a prominent military commander of the NATO-backed Libyan rebels, who, it turned out, had been seized in Bangkok in an operation in which MI6 played a major part, and was then held and tortured in a secret CIA prison before being turned over to Colonel Gaddafi. Belhaj apparently said that al-Futuri traveled to Pakistan sometime during 1990 or 1991, undertook military training and fought for a while (presumably in Afghanistan), and then traveled to Sudan in 1993, to Syria in 1996, and to Turkey in 1997, before returning to Peshawar, and moving to Jalalabad, were he stayed at a guesthouse.

A final Libyan witness — and former “ghost prisoner” — was Sami Mustafa al-Sadi (aka Abu al-Munthir al-Sadi aka Sheikh Yusif), identified as the leader of the religious committee of the LIFG, but better known recently as Sami al-Saadi or Abu Munthir, who, with MI6 in the driving seat, was kidnapped with his family from Hong Kong, and, like Belhaj, held and tortured in a secret CIA prison before being turned over to Colonel Gaddafi. Al-Saadi said that al-Futuri had trained and fought “in several Afghan battles, primarily the Battle of Jalalabad,” and also stated that, “when the Pakistanis launched their campaign against Arabs in 1993, [he] probably fled to Sudan.” He also said that he “did not see [him] again until 1999 in Jalalabad, “and added that he “publicly withdrew from the LIFG in 2000-2001 because the jihad groups were not united.”

While these accounts are primarily of interest because of what they expose about the Bush administration’s interconnected web of prisons outside the law, about how “intelligence” was derived through statements based on photo-identifications, and about the desire of senior US officials to ingratiate themselves with Colonel Gaddafi in the “War on Terror” (and how, in two cases, the British were also deeply involved), it is also clear that the picture that emerges of al-Futuri was of a drifter rather than a major player.

In concluding its assessment, the Task Force noted that he was “assessed as a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” but although Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention at Guantánamo (updating a recommendation for transfer to the control of another country for continued detention, dated April 29, 2005), it was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO),” and this evidently happened nine months later.

Nearly four years after his release, in an article in September 2010, I explained how al-Futuri (identified as Muhammad al-Rimi or Abdesalam Safrani), who was one of only two Libyans to voluntarily accept repatriation, had been approved for release from Guantánamo by a military review board, although he did tell the authorities, “I have a problem with the Libyan government and it is a long story.” According to a Human Rights Watch report in September 2008, the Gaddafi Foundation stated that al-Rimi was treated for tuberculosis upon his return. An official also said that he would “go back to his family soon,” but by all accounts he was still held in Abu Salim prison, three years and eight months after his return.

The US State Department told Human Rights Watch in January 2008 that US officials visited al-Rimi in August and December 2007 and stated that “Libyan security forces were detaining him but were treating him well.” Human Rights Watch also noted that, at the meeting in December 2007, which took place in the presence of Libyan officials and an official from the Gaddafi Foundation, al-Rimi was not informed of the charges against him, and apparently explained that he “had not seen a lawyer since his return” and “had received no family visits.”

This latter claim seems not to have been true, as, in a US diplomatic cable released by WiiLeaks, detailing a US visit to al-Futuri in June 2008, it was noted that:

[Al-Rimi] said he had been detained at an External Security Organization (ESO) detention facility between December 2006 and June 2007, when he was transferred to the Abu Salim prison … Al-Rimi said he remains in solitary detention in a 15 foot by 15 foot cell and has not been mistreated. He is able to walk outside regularly, and is able to speak with other prisoners during exercise periods. He is provided with drinking water, tea and three meals a day. He does not have access to books, radio or television. He has access to medications and has been visited by a prison doctor on the occasions when he has been ill. Al-Rimi stated that members of his family have visited him three times since his return to Libya, most recently in March 2008. (Note: As reported … their previous visits were in January and May 2007).

Asked about the condition of his arm and his teeth, about which he had previously complained … al-Rimi said both were better. He repeated his earlier claim … that he sustained the injury to his arm in 2004 or 2005 during a scuffle with US soldiers who entered his cell to punish him for allegedly instigating a disturbance among several other prisoners.

At the time of the US visit, al-Rimi was awaiting a trial, and his understanding was that “he face[d] four charges: 1) membership in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group; 2) membership in al-Qaeda; 3) forging a passport and travel documents and using them to exit the country, and; 4) failing to secure permission to exit the country when he left to fight in Afghanistan.”

In another visit, in September 2008, “Al-Rimi stated that he had received one family visit — his sisters came to see him in July — since our last meeting with him on June 10,” and “said he would like to receive more family visits, if possible.” Crucially, it was also noted:

In our previous meeting on June 10, al-Rimi said he understood his case was being deliberated at that time by a panel of judges, who were to render a verdict and issue a sentence on/about June 16. Al-Rimi said he was not present when his verdict and sentence were issued, but heard from other prisoners who were present in the courtroom on June 16 in connection with their own cases that he was found guilty of some charges (NFI) and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment … Al-Rimi has received no information from Libyan officials about his trial, verdict or sentence. He met with his court-appointed legal counsel on one occasion about two months before his reported conviction and sentencing on June 16, and has not heard from him since.

Finally, it is presumed that he was freed when Abu Salim was liberated in August this year, but his story has not been reported.

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

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

This is wrong on both fronts, as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explained in response to an early manifestation of the story, put out by torture apologists Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol:

It may have taken nearly a decade to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but it took less than twenty-four hours for torture apologists to claim credit for his downfall.

Keep America Safe, an organization run by former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, released a victory statement today that entirely failed to mention President Obama, but lavishly credited “the men and women of America’s intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden.”

Funny. You would think that if the CIA’s interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the US government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA’s custody of so-called “high-value detainees” ended. Instead, after the Supreme Court ruled that year that prisoners needed to be treated humanely in compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the CIA was forced to turn its special detainees over to the military for detention and interrogation using more lawful tactics in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It took five more years before all the dots could be adequately connected.

Although it was suggested that the key to bin Laden’s killing — tracking down one of his most trusted couriers — began with the interrogation of the “high-value detainee” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during his long detention in secret CIA prisons, from March 2003 to September 2006, involved the interrogation in 2004 of a “ghost prisoner,” Hassan Ghul, who was never held at Guantánamo, and was followed up during the interrogation of another “high-value detainee,” Abu Faraj al-Libi, seized in Marwan, Pakistan, in May 2005 and also held in secret CIA prisons until September 2006, when he, KSM and 12 others were transfered to Guantánamo, the only parts of the story that involved detention in secret prisons were the disclosure by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of the kunyas (nicknames) used by various couriers, and it has not been suggested that torture was used in extracting this information, and the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, seized in Iraq, and held in unknown locations.

As the Associated Press reported, “four former US intelligence officials” told them that KSM had yielded the names of “several of bin Laden’s couriers” while being held in “a secret prison in Eastern Europe” — in other words, in Poland or Romania, where he was held in 2003 and 2004. In relation to Hassan Ghul, the New York Times reported that, “according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations,” Ghul “provided a crucial description of the courier” after “some tough treatment.” It would be useful, of course, if Ghul could one day be asked about what happened, but that seems unlikely as, although he is now being referred to widely in the mainstream media, and also turns up regularly in the classified military documents released last week by WikiLeaks, his whereabouts are completely unknown, as he is one of dozens of “ghost prisoners” held by the Bush administration in its shadowy network of secret CIA prisons, who never ended up in Guantánamo. As such, it would be appropriate if those mentioning him in the media were to ask what happened to him, but now, it seems, “ghost prisoners” can be summoned up without context in news stories, as though their actual existence — their life or death — is completely irrelevant.

A clear sign of the distortions seeping into media reports was to be found elsewhere in the AP report, when the authors, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, claimed that “The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in US history.” That shameful defense of torture in secret CIA prisons — in which torture itself was coyly and dishonestly referred to as “the harshest interrogation methods in US history” –was followed up by a bullish, triumphalist quote from Marty Martin, described as “a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden,” who said, “We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day.”

Only in the next paragraph did the AP deign to acknowledge that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “did not reveal the names while being subjected to … waterboarding,” which was described, as is usual in the mainstream media, as a “simulated drowning technique,” even though it is a torture technique, recognized as such for centuries, and does not involve anything simulated at all.

After finally explaining that KSM “identified them [the couriers] many months later under standard interrogation,” the AP concluded that these revelations left it “once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.”

Readers will, I hope, realize how everything in these passages from the AP confirms what I described at the start of this article as the “casual and widespread acceptance” that bin Laden’s death “would not have been achieved without the use of torture, and without the existence of Guantánamo,” as the KSM element of the story, which, the AP eventually conceded, did not involve torture, and the main part of the story actually involved the name of a key courier being disclosed in 2007, at Guantánamo, by Abu Faraj al-Libi (as revealed in his Detainee Assessment Brief, released by Wikileaks last week). Even then, it took another two years until US officials were able to identify where this particular courier operated, and they didn’t manage to locate the actual compound in which bin Laden was found and killed until August last year.

As a defense of torture, the bin Laden trail is therefore useless, as Jane Mayer explained. “This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative,” she wrote, adding, “One would think that if so-called ‘enhanced interrogations’ provided the magic silver bullet, and if the courier was a protégé of KSM’s, then the CIA might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times.”

Moreover, as a defense of Guantánamo — also implied in the general tenor of the reporting suggesting that there should be a  renewed “debate” about torture — it also fails. “High-value detainees” like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi should never have been tortured, but had they been interrogated lawfully they would still have been recognized as particularly significant prisoners, and therefore the extraction of information from them has absolutely nothing to do with Guantánamo.

Rather than being a prison focused on securing intelligence from a handful of significant prisoners, Guantánamo was — and still is, fundamentally — an abomination and an aberration, an experimental facility in which prisoners seized in a largely random manner were held neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, but as “unlawful enemy combatants,” a category of prisoner invented by the Bush administration, who were supposed to be held without any rights whatsoever for as long as George W. Bush wished, and interrogated for “actionable intelligence” in whatever way the Commander in Chief saw fit.

Alarmingly, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, an advocate of indefinite detention without charge or trial for “War on Terror” prisoners, has tried to claim that what the news about the information that led to bin Laden’s death demonstrates is the opposite: that it justifies the limitless dragnet conceived by the Bush administration in the early years of its “War on Terror,” in which as many people as possible should be rounded up and interrogated for years — or decades — to produce pieces of a larger “mosaic” of intelligence.

In Wittes’ words, the account of how the information was obtained “strongly supports what intelligence community folks have long argued about the way good operational intelligence comes about.” He continued by claiming that “Information has a very long life,” that it “gets put together piece by piece in a kind of mosaic over many years,” and, moreover, that “one doesn’t necessarily know what the significant pieces will be when one is collecting the information.”

Not only is this not backed up by the evidence about the “high-value detainees,” rather than the general population of Guantánamo, but anything that tries to revisit the worst years of the Bush administration, and to justify holding hundreds, or thousands of prisoners for what they may be able to conribute to some sort of limitless “mosaic” of intelligence, still fills me with chills, as do attempts to defend the use of torture.

On that front, the most significant comments I have read over the last few days have come from former FBI agent Jack Cloonan. I have regularly quoted from Cloonan and his colleague Dan Coleman, discussing their abhorrence of torture and their defense of rapport-building and psychological, torture-free interrogations with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker back in 2006, so I was delighted to see that David Danzig of Human Rights First also drew on an interview with Cloonan in an article on Tuesday, “Five Reasons Why Torture Did Not Help U.S. Forces Find Bin Laden.”

Danzig wrote:

Some will argue that it was only thanks to the waterboarding that KSM and al-Libi were willing to talk at all. This notion is rejected by the more than 75 interrogators, questioners and debriefers with the military, the FBI and the CIA who I have spoken to in depth about this subject since the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib. I have yet to speak to a professional interrogator who believes that torture is an effective means of questioning suspected terrorists.

Jack Cloonan who served on the FBI’s Osama Bin Laden unit for 6 years told me that during an interrogation (or what the FBI calls an interview) the goal was to, “work towards the objective of getting this person to cross the threshold and become, in effect, a traitor to their own cause.”

According to Cloonan, “the Al-Qaeda people that I dealt with were all very sophisticated in terms of their language skills and understanding of what was at stake.” Cloonan said that it essentially became a question of whether he could offer the detainee enough of what he wanted (protection for his family, more lenient sentencing/incarceration etc.) to convince him to talk. “They struggled,” he said, “with whether or not I was being truthful and I was going to honor everything I said.”

If you gave the detainee any reason not to trust you, there is no negotiation, Cloonan explained. The detainee won’t be willing to bargain with giving up his knowledge in exchange for something the interrogator can provide. He simply won’t trust you. Torture, Cloonan says, shatters any possibility for trust. “It changes the dynamic,” Cloonan said. “And once you have gone down that path, in my experience there is no going back.”

My conclusion, then? Without torture, Osama bin Laden might have been found many years ago. Torture remains illegal, as well as counter-productive, and attempts to revive it as a topic for “debate” are as vile and unprincipled as attempts to claim that the death of Osama bin Laden somehow justifies the ongoing existence of Guantánamo.

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 Cageprisoners.

These are the words of a young woman in Libya — a student , a blogger and a member of the youth protest movement in Libya that is part of a growing uprising against the tyrannical 41-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Speaking to the Guardian by phone from her home on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city where the revolution in Libya began just six days ago, and where hundreds of protestors have been killed by Gaddafi’s security forces, she said, “I’ve seen violent movies and video games that are nothing compared to this. I can hear gunshots, helicopters circling overhead, then I hear the voices screaming. I can hear the screeching of four-by-fours in the street. No one has that type of car except his [Gaddafi's] people. My brother went to get bread, he’s not back; we don’t know if he’ll get back. The family is up all night every night, keeping watch, no one can sleep.”

Described by the Guardian as “an expert in subverting net censorship,” who “had regularly posted messages online to gather support” for the protests that began last week, the student explained how, since the uprising began, “her internet connection is down, landlines cut off, mobile coverage interrupted, electricity sporadically cut off and the house plunged into darkness.” She added, “There are even stories here that he [Gaddafi] has poisoned the water, so we dare not drink. If he could cut off the air that we breathe, he would.”

Unlike the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where there was remarkably litle bloodshed, and the dictators Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak fell from power through the pressure of sheer numbers, there are no signs that Colonel Gaddafi has any intention of relinquishing power without a bloody fight. As the Guardian also reported, sources close to his family told the Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, “We will all die on Libyan soil,” and it appears that the brutal suppression of the uprising in Benghazi is being led by one of his sons, Khamis, described as “the Russian-trained commander of an elite special forces unit,” and that another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, is also present, along with Abdullah al-Senussi, the regime’s long-standing head of military intelligence.

For those familiar with Libyan history, the brutal response to the uprising is typical, demonstrating what experts told the Guardian was Gaddafi’s “instinctive brutality when faced with challenges to his rule.” The London-based writer and activist Ashour Shamis explained, “For Gaddafi it’s kill or be killed. Now he’s gone straight for the kill.”

In the 1980s, as the Guardian explained, Gaddafi “sent hit squads to murder exiled ‘stray dogs’” who challenged his dictatorship, and throughout the 1990s he crushed Islamist opposition — and any other political opposition — at home, most notoriously instigating a massacre of at least a thousand prisoners in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in June 1996, as I reported in an article in 2009, entitled, UK protestors mark 13th anniversary of Libyan prison massacre.

An adept survivor, Gaddafi came onside in the “War on Terror” after the 9/11 attacks, prompting the most miserably transparent examples of hypocrisy on the part of Western nations, as their leaders queued up to welcome the former pariah as an ally, and barely managed to disguise their excitement at having access to Libya’s rich oil reserves.

In ingratiating themselves with the dictator, both the US and the UK willingly abandoned former opponents of the regime, who had, until then, been regarded as victims of oppression. The US willingly rounded up exiled Libyans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sending them to Guantanamo and labeling them as “enemy combatants.” Two of these men eventually accepted voluntary repatriation from Guantanamo, but both were imprisoned on their return, and only one of the two, Abu Sufian Hamouda (transferred in October 2007), has been released, while the other, Muhammad al-Rimi (transferred in December 2006), is still held in Abu Salim.

Both of these men are, however, more fortunate than Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who was rendered by the CIA to Egypt after his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although al-Libi recanted his tortured lie, it was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and after al-Libi had been moved around various other secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where he conveniently died, reportedly by committing suicide, in May 2009, just three days before the US reopened its embassy in Tripoli.

In the UK, meanwhile, Libyan asylum seekers, who had found themselves welcomed as refugees from the terrorist-supporting dictator Gaddafi, suddenly discovered that they had been designated as “terror suspects,” and were imprisoned without charge or trial pending deportation.

When judges went off-script, refusing to allow the government to return any of these men, and ruling that the “diplomatic assurances” agreed between Gaddafi and the UK government, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated humanely, were worthless, the men were then held on control orders, an oppressive form of house arrest that, like the deportation regime, involved them being held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence.

After the Law Lords — following the lead of the European Court of Human Rights — ruled in June 2009 that the control order regime breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, the Libyans had their control orders dropped, either because the disclosure of any information would have demonstrated that they were pawns in a deeply cynical game, or because their liberty was now useful to Gaddafi, who, at the time, was brokering a deal with former political opponents, whereby they would left unmolested if they renounced violence.

As the unrest in Libya spreads to the capital, Tripoli, the Gaddafi regime continues to respond with brute force, using planes to fire on protestors. Whether they can prevail against a people who are overcoming their fear in vast numbers and are apparently prepared to die in an attempt to secure their freedom remains to be seen, but the regime is clearly under threat. Last night, another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam, the supposed moderate and reformer of the family, embraced by Western hypocrites as a sign of the way forward, was wheeled out to deliver an incoherent speech on TV that was full of threats, hyperbole and lies.

Although he conceded that it was a “tragedy” that Libyans had died and stated, “There were some planning errors,” including “Errors from the police … and the army that was not equipped and prepared to confront angry people and … to defend its premises, weapons and ammunition,” he also warned apocalyptically of “civil war” unless order was restored, telling the TV audience that his father was still in the country and that the regime had the fiull support of the army. “We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet,” he said.

He also claimed, “There is a plot against Libya,” blamed “an Islamic group with a military agenda” for the bloodshed in Benghazi — despite there being no evidence of Islamist involvement in a movement spearheaded by young people, trade unions and lawyers — and said Libya “would see ‘rivers of blood,’ an exodus of foreign oil companies and occupation by ‘imperialists’ if the violence continued.”

At the time of writing, al-Jazeera was reporting that “At least 61 people were killed in clashes in Tripoli,” but that “The protests appeared to be gathering momentum, with demonstrators saying they had taken control of several key towns in the country,” including Benghazi. Ahmad Jibreel, a Libyan diplomat, who confirmed rumors that the justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al-Jeleil had resigned because he “sided with the protesters,” also told al-Jazeera that “key cities near Libya’s border with Egypt were now in the hands of protesters, which he said would enable foreign media to now enter the country.”

Summing up the spirit of resistance, he said:

Gaddafi’s guards started shooting people in the second day and they shot two people only. We had on that day in Al Bayda city only 300 protesters. When they killed two people, we had more than 5,000 at their funeral, and when they killed 15 people the next day, we had more than 50,000 the following day. This means that the more Gaddafi kills people, the more people go into the streets.

Echoing this spirit, I have just received a message from an exiled Libyan friend, who told me:

Finally and maybe we will be free at last! I am having sleepless nights filled with euphoria about what’s happening in Libya. I am so sick of being in exile and not being able to contribute to my country’s development. Am sick of being ashamed of it and what Gaddafi made of it.

As the situation continues to develop, those words mean much more to me than the platitudes of government representatives in the US and the UK, who have done so little to oppose Gaddafi’s rule, and so much to enrich themselves, and who, in addition, have almost excelled in cynicism when it comes to Libya’s role in the “War on Terror.” As my friend also told me:

All I can say is that we are all so excited about the prospects of change and the ability to have some say in how to manage our wealth of natural resources. The West robbed us of this right earlier, then we allowed our own dreadful leaders do the same and worse.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), 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.

This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in Pakistan between February and September 2002, which, as I explained in Parts Five and Six (which told the stories of another 27 men seized in Pakistan), was part of a process of capturing prisoners that was, if anything, even more alarmingly random, opportunistic, or reliant on dubious intelligence than the well-chronicled seizure of Arabs in Afghanistan or crossing the border into Pakistan that I chronicled in Parts One to Four of this series.

Of the hundred or so prisoners seized in Pakistan — mostly in house raids, but also in random raids on mosques, on buses and in the street — all but these 40 have been released. The cases of those released reveal, in general, how US intelligence was often horrendously inaccurate, and how opportunism often played a part in the actions of the Pakistani authorities, who were being rewarded financially. As President Musharraf admitted in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Moreover, of the 13 men whose stories are described in this chapter, many appear to be victims of the same failures of intelligence or opportunism as those already released. It is unknown what conclusions President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force reached about these men, but only two were cleared for release under the Bush administration. One of these men subsequently lost his habeas corpus petition, and two others have also lost their habeas petitions, and it is a fair presumption that many of these men were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force.

ISN 695 Abu Bakr, Omar (Omar Mohammed Khalifh) (Libya)
Khalifh, a Libyan amputee, lost his habeas corpus petition in April this year, despite doubts about where he was captured, and what he had been doing in Afghanistan, as well as disturbing revelations about his treatment in Guantánamo. According to the US authorities, he had worked for a trucking company owned by Osama bin Laden in Sudan, had worked as an explosives trainer at various training camps in Afghanistan from 1996-98, had been “identified” as a trainer and the leader of a Libyan training camp near Kabul, visited by bin Laden, where he was “identified as someone whom others would approach to receive explosives training if they wanted to commit a terrorist attack,” and had also been “identified” as “a military leader in charge of many Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other Gulf States while on the front line” in 2001, who “would meet with other Taliban leaders to plan military operations.” The US authorities also allege that he was seized in the house raids in Karachi on February 7, 2002, which I described in Part Five of this series, but his lawyer, Edmund Burke, explained that he had worked for the Taliban as a mine cleaner until 1998, when his right leg was severely damaged by a land mine, and had then spent years moving from hospital to hospital in Afghanistan to receive treatment for his leg, which was eventually amputated. Burke added that he moved to Pakistan in 2001, and was living in a school for boys when it was raided by Pakistani police. The most disturbing revelations about Khalifh came from former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who told me that that Khalifh’s status had been exaggerated by the authorities in Guantánamo. “They call him ‘The General,’” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’” Despite these contradictory claims, Judge James Robertson denied his habeas petition, finding the government’s version of events generally convincing (although it was not reassuring that, in his unclassified opinion, he muddied the waters still further by incorrectly stating that Khalifh was seized in Jalalabad in March 2002).

ISN 708 Al Bakush, Ismael (Libya)
Apparently a former mujahid in the dying days of Afghanistan’s Communist regime, al-Bakush reportedly stated that he returned to Afghanistan “to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance,” and the US authorities allege that he “and his group would fight sporadically whenever there was a fight between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.” However, al-Bakush also provided a detailed explanation for doing so, stating that “the reason he decided to help fight with the Taliban was because he lived in Afghanistan both prior to Taliban control and after Taliban control. Prior to Taliban control there were robberies, thefts, and fights between groups. After the Taliban took over the area became safe.” Beyond these claims, there was nothing to indicate that he took up arms against the United States, or had any desire to do so. He stated that he “had never met bin Laden,” said that “at no time did he conduct any operations against the American Forces,” and, moreover, “said he had no feelings towards the United States and considered the United States like any other country.” “His main concern,” he explained, “is Libya and the overthrow of [Colonel] Gaddafi.” Much of the evidence against Bakush consisted of allegations about his involvement with Libyan groups opposed to the Gaddafi regime, and the question of Bakush’s continued detention, therefore, seems, as with other Libyans held in Guantánamo, to hinge on whether it is acceptable to hold dissidents opposed to a regime that, until the “War on Terror” began, was regarded as a terrorist dictatorship by the very government that has been holding Bakush for the last eight and a half years.

ISN 713 Al Zahrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
Apparently seized in a house raid in Lahore (around the same time as the house raids in Faisalabad, described in Part Six), al-Zahrani (also identified as Mohammed Muti Zahran) is one of several amputees held at Guantánamo, having apparently lost a leg in Afghanistan. According to the US authorities, he “admitted to being proud that he was a low-level Taliban fighter,” and “stated he was proud that he came to Afghanistan to be a Mujahedin [sic], and stated that if he had not lost his leg, he still would have fought.” These admissions — plus a detailed list of statements, attributed to al-Zahrani, relating to his training at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before the 9/11 attacks) and at an Algerian guest house in Afghanistan — suggest that he was indeed a foot soldier, and that he had undertaken advanced military training, but, as in other cases, they may not be reliable. Noticeably, however, the US authorities have also come up with other allegations indicating that he was a member of al-Qaeda. These include allegations that he was friends with one of the 9/11 hijackers, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, that he “met [Ayman] al-Zawahiri [al-Qaeda’s second-in-command] three or four times and they had a very good relationship,” that he “met with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [the future leader of “al-Qaeda in Iraq”] several times about logistics and personnel issues for the fight against the Northern Alliance,” and that he was involved in planning the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was murdered on September 9, 2001. Again, it is impossible to know how much truth there is to these allegations. They may be as they appear, or they may have been produced through the dubious interrogations of other prisoners connected with al-Qaeda. What is certain is that there are holes in al-Zahrani’s jihadist CV: in another statement attributed to him, for example, he “stated that he doubted the viewpoints of al-Qaeda because some of their operations contradict Islamic principles and go against Islamic laws.”

ISN 717 Bin Hadiddi, Abdulhadi (Hedi Hammamy) (Tunisia)
Like many Tunisians, Hammamy, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in search of a new life. After arriving in 1987, he settled in Bologna where he worked as a hotel porter, and later in a restaurant. In 2000, he moved to Pakistan, where he married the daughter of another Tunisian he met while applying for asylum, and had a daughter, Marwa. He then worked alongside his father-in-law, but one evening, in April 2002, as he went with a Pakistani friend to look at a house to rent, he was seized by the Pakistani police, presumably for the lucrative bounty payments available for vulnerable Arabs in Pakistan. Despite being cleared for release, his habeas corpus petition reached the US District Court in April 2009, when Judge Richard Leon denied his petition, choosing to believe an allegation submitted by the Italian authorities — that he was “a member of an Italy-based terrorist cell that provided support to various Islamic terrorist groups” — as the basis for presuming that he had therefore arrived in Pakistan in connection with terrorism, even though the charges leveled against him in Italy — of “supporting terrorism, in part, by furnishing false documents and currency” — had not been tested in a court of law. Judge Leon was partly persuaded to regard the unsubstantiated Italian allegations as trustworthy, because he concluded that they tied in with another claim put forward by the government, regarding Hammamy’s identity papers, which were apparently “found after the Battle of Tora Bora in the al-Qaeda cave complex.” As with the Italian allegation, which he has persistently refuted, Hammamy has always denied being in Tora Bora, and has claimed that his papers were in fact stolen from him, and that the government has evidence that this is the case. The result of this ruling was that, for the first time, a prisoner cleared under President Bush had his detention justified by a judge, and as one of his lawyers, Cori Crider of Reprieve, explained, “While this doesn’t change the military’s opinion that Hedi Hammamy is transferable, it certainly isn’t going to help him in the political context. Being found subject to military detention is not remotely the same thing as a criminal conviction, but that won’t stop right-wing elements in potential resettlement states from conflating the two issues.”

ISN 722 Diyab, Jihad (Syria)
The story of Jihad Diyab (or Deyab) is spotted with unsubstantiated allegations. A former driver for the Syrian Air Force, he has stated that he left Syria with his family in May 2000 and traveled to Kabul, via Iran and Pakistan, “to start a business selling honey,” and has maintained this story throughout his imprisonment. When he arrived at Bagram in June 2002, the following comments were made by the interrogators who first spoke to him (these were reproduced by Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of one of the interrogators in the US prisons in Afghanistan, in his book The Interrogators, in which he also noted that Diyab and the other prisoners who arrived with him had already been interrogated in Pakistani prisons with the assistance of the CIA): “31 years old; Lebanese; speaks Arabic well, English. Was in the Syrian Air Force. Severe kidney problems. Think he is lying. Says he was a honey trader. Captured in Lahore. Doctor says good to go. Watch him.” With seven and a half years to come up with another story, the US authorities have certainly managed to do that, but it is impossible to know how accurate the allegations are, and very little information has come from Diyab himself, who, as the authorities noted under the sub-heading “Intent,” “would not talk; he spent the entire interrogation looking at the floor.” The allegations accrued from the interrogations of other prisoners include a claim that he was “identified as having fled to Afghanistan where he joined al-Qaeda’s military training camps,” a claim that he “allowed a senior al-Qaeda operative to stay in his house,” and other allegations made by two unidentified “senior al-Qaeda operatives”: one claimed to have met Diyab in the 1990s, when he noted that he was an expert in passport and document forgery, and added that he had met him again in Kabul in 2000 or 2001, and in Lahore in 2002, and another claimed that he had “showed up in Afghanistan in 2000 expecting to be able to attend Khaldan training camp because he had known another individual from their time together in Syria.” This source apparently “disapproved” of him, because he “expected to be accepted into the camps without prior vetting.”

ISN 757 Abdul Aziz, Ahmed Ould (Mauritania)
A Mauritanian seized in a house raid on June 25, 2002, Abdul Aziz is accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, even though the US government has failed to come up with a single piece of evidence to support the claim. Evidently an educated and articulate man (his first lawyers at Guantánamo noted hat he studied literature and philosophy, and speaks French and English, in addition to Arabic), Abdul Aziz, according to the government’s account, traveled to Afghanistan in September 1999 to support the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and undertook training in 2000. At the time of his capture, however, he was working as an Arabic language teacher at an institute in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, and certainly no evidence that he was ever involved in any activities against the United States. Instead, he is quoted in the government’s documents as saying that he “believed his direct supervisor was more affiliated with the Taliban than with al-Qaeda,” that he “visited [the] supervisor’s house but never discussed things such as al-Qaeda,” and that, although “a man he worked for told him that al-Qaeda needed a good administrator and approached him on al-Qaeda’s behalf,” he turned down the offer. Set against this are an array of unsubstantiated al-Qaeda allegations, which are in marked contrast to Abdul Aziz’s own account, in which he admitted that he “spoke with Osama bin Laden about the Institute … for approximately five minutes in October 2000.” The claim that he was a member of al-Qaeda came from an unidentified “source,” who also claimed that he had sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden. It was also claimed that he had been recruited to join al-Qaeda by “a personal adviser of Osama bin Laden, who leads the Mauritanian al-Qaeda cell,” and had attended the wedding of one of bin Laden’s sons in 1999 or 2000.

ISN 894 Abdul Rahman, Mohammed (Lotfi Bin Ali) (Tunisia)
Abdul Rahman (also identified as Lotfi bin Ali), who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review under the Bush administration, had been living in Italy before traveling to Pakistan, and was essentially an economic migrant. In Guantánamo, he explained that he went to Pakistan for medical treatment and to find a wife. “I have told my story five hundred times,” he said. “I went to Pakistan for drugs. I was sick and I wanted to heal myself, so I went to Pakistan.” He also traveled, he said, “to get married and relax and to get out of what I was in.” Although the US authorities compiled an array of allegations that purported to undermine his story, including claims that he was involved in various North African terrorist groups, and a claim by “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” that he attended the Khaldan training camp in 1998 or 1999, he refuted all the allegations, and insisted that, although he had traveled to Afghanistan from Pakistan, he had only done so because the Pakistani government had started a campaign against Arabs. In his last review before he was cleared for release, he also retracted a confession, “admitted some time ago,” that he associated with “various amounts” of terrorists while in Jalalabad, saying, “I do not pose a threat. I am against terrorism … I am against the killing of innocent people … I live a normal life. I do not like problems. That’s it.” Like the majority of Tunisians in Guantánamo, bin Ali received a prison sentence in Tunisia in absentia (on dubious charges of belonging to a terrorist organization), with the result that, in 2007, when the US authorities were planning to repatriate him against his will, Judge Gladys Kessler of the US District Court in Washington D.C. intervened to prevent his repatriation. Judge Kessler was particularly concerned because two Tunisians repatriated in June 2007 — Abdullah bin Omar and Lotfi Lagha — received prison sentences on their return, after trials denounced by observers as show trials, and in her ruling, in October 2007, Judge Kessler ruled that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.” Since Judge Kessler’s ruling, Lotfi bin Ali has been stuck in Guantánamo, while the State Department has tried to find a third country prepared to accept him.

The following six men were seized in house raids in Karachi on or around September 11, 2002, around the same time that the “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized in a separate house raid. Also seized with bin al-Shibh, who was immediately rendered to the CIA’s network of secret prisons, was Hassan bin Attash, the 17-year old brother of Waleed bin Attash (another “high-value detainee” seized six months later), and the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Bin Attash was held for a week in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul (a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of 24-hour music and noise), and his torture was then outsourced to Jordan, where he was held for 16 months before his return to Afghanistan in January 2004 and his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2004, and KSM’s children were held for a unspecified amount of time, although it is believed that, at the time of writing, they are no longer in US or Pakistani custody (see Part Nine for more on these stories). Although the six men below were not captured with bin al-Shibh, the US authorities have been content to allow observers to infer that they were somehow connected to bin al-Shibh, even though, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, they seem, at most, to have been “nothing more than recent Taliban recruits who ended up in Karachi as part of an extended safe house system that was sheltering all Arabs from arrest, and not just those who were committed to al-Qaeda.”

ISN 836 Saleh, Ayoub Murshid Ali (Yemen)
All six of the men described here were probably rendered, after their capture, to the “Dark Prison,” but only two — Musa’ab al-Madhwani and Hail al-Maythali (see below) — have spoken about their experiences. Saleh, who is accused of traveling to Afghanistan “to join the jihad” in 2000, and of training at al-Farouq, appears, like all the men, to have been an extremely peripheral figure in the Afghan conflict. He has stated that he learned first aid as well as receiving weapons training at al-Farouq, and that his training was cut short because he contracted malaria, and, like Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only seized in Karachi because a plan to return home via Iran was thwarted by the Iranian authorities, obliging him to return to Pakistan.

ISN 837 Al Marwalah, Bashir (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Marwalah, who had studied nursing in Yemen, admitted traveling to Afghanistan in September 2000 and training at al-Farouq and another camp, but he added that he then returned to Yemen to see his family, and especially his father, who was ill. He said that he then returned to Afghanistan in August 2001 and attended al-Farouq for a second time, but refuted an allegation that he had participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and said that he had fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion began. When the tribunal asked him why he had gone to Afghanistan, he said that he wanted to train to fight in Chechnya, and when he was asked, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” he said, “I don’t know. I know I am an Arab fighter” (although he also noted that he had not engaged in any actual combat). In the government’s most recent publicly available allegations, it was noted that, unlike other men who had traveled to Tora Bora, al-Marwalah “and about 400 others” were evacuated to Khost, after “approximately four weeks moving back and forth between two guest houses, one in Kabul, and the other in Bagram,” and that, after traveling through Pakistan, he “stayed in a safe houses” [sic] in Karachi “from July to September 2002.”

ISN 838 Balzuhair, Shawki Awad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Balzuhair was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in April or May 2001, attending al-Farouq, and serving on the Taliban front lines near Bagram. In the most recent publicly available documents, it was noted that he “decided to go to Afghanistan after viewing a video about Chechnya, and became concerned about the Palestinian struggle for independence.” Balzuhair’s route out of Afghanistan apparently involved staying, in a variety of house with “about 20 others” from September to December 2001, and then living “wth a group of about 60 Arabs in the mountains of Afghanistan near Zormat.” From there, he ended up in Karachi, where, after an ill-fated diversion in Iran (as with Ayoub Saleh and Musa’ab al-Madhwani), he was seized after also staying in a house in Quetta for a month and “another house near a rail road track for another month.” As with the other five men, there were no allegations that he had engaged in combat at any point in his travels.

ISN 839 Al Mudwani, Musab (Musa’ab Al Madhwani) (Yemen)
Al-Madhwani is the only one of the six whose habeas corpus petition has been ruled on by a District Court judge, and the outcome was not entirely satisfactory. In December 2009, when Judge Thomas F. Hogan denied his petition, he said that, although the government had “met its burden” in establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that al-Madhwani was connected to al-Qaeda, he “did not think Madhwani was dangerous.” Noting that he had been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, he explained, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.” Moreover, Judge Hogan refused to rely on any statements that al-Madhwani had made to interrogators at Guantánamo, ruling that they were “tainted by abusive interrogation techniques,” to which he was subjected in the weeks after his capture in the “Dark Prison,” although he did accept statements that al-Madhwani made during his Administrative Review Board at Guantánamo in 2005, which, he said, were not tainted because they were made years after the abuse took place. Al-Madhwani’s lawyers had argued that these statements should also have been excluded, because they were “contaminated because he was still worried about upsetting his captors,” but the judge refused to accept this argument, even though one of his attorneys, Darold W. Killmer, explained, “He was threatened that if he changed his story, he would be sent back to a place worse than at the ‘Dark Prison.’” According to al-Madhwani’s own account, he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and trained briefly at al-Farouq, until it closed immediately after the attacks. After spending a few months in guest houses in Afghanistan, he made his way to Pakistan via Khost, traveling with other Arabs, Pakistanis and Afghans, and then, after trying unsuccessfully to return home via Iran, where, he said, he was “beaten and questioned” before being refused entry, spent ten months being moved around various houses in Lahore, Quetta and Karachi, waiting for an opportunity to return home that never came. Moreover, when he explained the situation in Karachi at the time of his arrest, an even less militant picture emerged. “The group I was arrested with were staying in two apartments,” he said. “One person from each apartment refused to surrender and fought the Pakistani forces sent to arrest us. I was in the group that chose to surrender.” He added that the Pakistanis were “thankful for our cooperation and surrendering without fighting.” He then explained that there were seven men in his apartment, including one who was killed, who had only been there for about five days, and that two other men shared the other apartment with a family. In his Review Board, he spoke only briefly about the “Dark Prison,” but it was easy to understand why Judge Hogan, who also spoke to him by video-link from Guantánamo, concluded that his “allegations about abusive interrogations were credible,” and, noticeably, added that they “were not challenged by government lawyers.” In 2005, when a Board Member asked him, “Are you holding anything back from the interrogators?” he replied, “That is impossible, because before I came to the prison in Guantánamo Bay I was in another prison in Afghanistan, under the ground [and] it was very dark, total dark, under torturing and without sleep. It was impossible that I could get out of there alive. I was really beaten and tortured.”

ISN 840 Al Maythali, Hail Aziz Ahmed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Maythali stated that he went to Afghanistan in November 2000 to “fight in the jihad,” and admitted ferrying supplies on the back lines near Kabul, but he added that he was only on the front lines for a week because he had no military experience. He denied allegations that he trained at al-Farouq, and explained that these allegations had only arisen because of his torture in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “there was very bad torture conducted on people,” including himself, which was “so bad that he knew by making up and agreeing to the training it would stop the torture.” He added that “his testicles were disfigured to the point where they cannot be repaired.” Like Ayoub Saleh, Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only captured after returning to Pakistan following an abortive attempt to return home via Iran.

ISN 841 Nashir, Said Salih Said (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Nashir was accused of attending al-Farouq from July to September 2001, when the camp closed. He then apparently served as a guard at Kandahar airport until November 2001, when he traveled to a valley between Zormat and Khost, Afghanistan, where he stayed in caves for approximately ten days, before moving on to Pakistan. In “factors favor[ing] release or transfer,” it was noted that he “stated he would never kill innocent women or children in the United States because it was against his religion.”

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.

This is the fourth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This fourth article tells the stories of 19 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan.  Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Three, where I told 22 more stories. Disturbingly, seven of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and at least five have been cleared for release (or “approved for transfer,” to use the language that the Obama administration learned so carefully from its predecessor).

ISN 249 Al Hamiri, Mohammed (Yemen)
Al-Hamiri, who was 19 when he was seized, claimed that he “left Yemen for medical treatment and was tricked by a British resident into going into Afghanistan where he did nothing for six months.” An unidentified source — or sources — claimed that he had trained at al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) and had spoken to bin Laden at a guest house in Kabul, but al-Hamiri denied the allegations, and only conceded that, in Kabul, he had stayed in the home of someone he “felt may have been associated with the Taliban.” His most critical comments were delivered in a statement that was read out in his absence during his tribunal. All the charges, he said, “were made up in order to keep him and other Muslims at the camp,” because he “never had a weapon, never carried one and never even killed a chicken.” According to weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 122 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, but his weight dropped to just 102 pounds in February 2003, probably during one of the many hunger strikes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s history (PDF).

ISN 251 Bin Salem, Mohammed (Yemen)
In a particularly thin set of allegations, the US authorities claim that bin Salem, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan in July 2001, and received training at al-Farouq. Noticeably, he is not accused of having taken part in combat against the Taliban (let alone US forces), as it is only alleged that he “supported al-Qaeda and Taliban forces by serving as a cook at a rest and relaxation facility for front line troops at Bagram,” and that he was captured by Pakistani forces after retreating directly from Bagram to Pakistan.

ISN 254 Khenaina, Muhammad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Khenaina has stated that he went to Afghanistan in August 2001 “to teach the Koran in Arabic,” although he admitted that he “did not actually teach the Koran.” After staying in a guest house in Kabul, he said that he heard of the 9/11 attacks and was “concerned about retaliation by the Americans and wanted to get out.” He explained that the owner of the house arranged for him to travel to Logar and then Khost, where he stayed with an Afghan, and then traveled through the mountains to Pakistan with five other Arabs and an Afghan guide. After joining up with another group of 19 men who were also fleeing Afghanistan, he reached the border, where he was detained by the authorities. Throughout this story, the only claim of militancy against Khenaina was an allegation that the manager of the guest house “arranged transportation for guests to a Taliban training area 35 minutes north of Kabul,” but Khenaina insisted that “he was not in Afghanistan to participate in jihad,” and that he “did not have a weapon while in Afghanistan.” He also condemned the 9/11 attacks, and explained that, if released, “he would return to Yemen and marry a cousin who has been betrothed to him and never leave again.”

ISN 255 Hatim, Saeed (Yemen)
In December 2009, Hatim won his habeas corpus petition, but it did not lead to his release. In fact, the Obama administration has appealed the ruling, even though the judge in Hatim’s case, Judge Ricardo Urbina, clearly established that the government’s allegations — that he trained at al-Farouq, stayed in al-Qaeda and Taliban guesthouses, “operated under the command of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the battlefront against the Northern Alliance,” and fought at the battle of Tora Bora — “rest[ed] almost entirely upon admissions made by the petitioner himself,” which he made “only because he had previously been tortured while in US custody” in Kandahar. In addition, Judge Urbina discredited the Tora Bora allegation, because it was made by a fellow prisoner who had made false allegations against dozens of other prisoners (first exposed publicly in 2006), and “whose grasp on reality,” as Judge Urbina explained, “appears to have been tenuous at best.” Distressingly, the Obama administration’s appeal has been filed despite knowledge that Hatim has suffered from what Judge Urbina described as “severe psychological problems” in Guantánamo, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions. Indeed, in May 2002, an interrogator stated, “I do not recommend [Hatim] for further exploitation due in part to mental and emotional problems [and] limited knowledgeability.”

ISN 259 Hintif, Fadil (Yemen)
Prior to traveling to Afghanistan, Hintif, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had spent many years working as a farmer on his family’s land, and had then moved to Sana’a to look for work. There he met a man at a mosque who asked him about “going to Afghanistan to help poor Afghans,” and he “felt this would be a chance to do something good in memory of his deceased father, so he thought it was a good idea.” He then apparently sold his car to raise funds for his trip, received some money from his brother and set off for Afghanistan. In Kabul, he “began living with an individual who previously taught the Koran in Afghanistan,” and when he asked him how he could help the Afghans, was told that “he could either work with the Afghani Red Crescent or he could help distribute food supplies.” Having decided to work for the Red Crescent, he said that he traveled with the instructor to Logar province, south of Kabul, but stopped his work after the US-led invasion began, when he was escorted to the Pakistani border. There, he said, he surrendered to the Pakistani police, who took him to a prison in Peshawar. He was then transferred to a larger prison in Kohat, and was eventually turned over to the Americans. Throughout his whole story, Hintif maintained that he “did not receive any training in Afghanistan” and “did not fight in Afghanistan because he was not convinced of the causes that were being fought for.” He explained that he “felt that the groups there were fighting for power, and that there was no reason to fight a jihad.” Disturbingly, apart from vague allegations about the guest houses in which he stayed, the only allegations that the US authorities have been able to come up with are that his name was on a document “recovered from a safe house raid associated with al-Qaeda in Karachi, Pakistan” (which is not necessarily reliable, as it may not have been his name, but a kunya or alias that does not necessarily refer to him) and a much-derided claim that his Casio watch was the same model as one used in improvised explosive devices “in bombings linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorist groups.”

ISN 263 Sultan, Ashraf (Libya)
Sultan, who is accused of being a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (opposed to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi), training at various camps in Afghanistan, and fighting at Tora Bora, has denied the allegations, stating that he left Libya because of religious persecution, and lived with other Libyan refugees in Jalalabad. He has also stated that he was not a member of the LIFG (or of al-Qaeda), and was not at Tora Bora, and has declared that he traveled to the Pakistani border, where he was seized on December 18, 2001, with an Afghan guide, and not with a group of soldiers. His disdain for the betrayal of justice at Guantánamo was revealed in his appearance at his tribunal in 2004, when he stated, “I know my fate is already predetermined and the judgment has been pronounced already. So this Tribunal is just for show and it is not real. Everybody is reading from papers that are already printed and everything is already predetermined. I know for sure my destiny is already predetermined. The judgment against me is already made up. My presence, me defending myself or not defending myself, will have no importance whatsoever.”

ISN 275 Abbas, Yusef (Abdusabar) (China)
Abbas is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. He is one of 17 of the men who were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and who, after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. 21 years old at the time of his capture, Abbas was a farmer, who, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “learned about the oppression of his people as he was growing up, and was determined to leave to find a better life, but could find little information about other countries, except through broadcasts that were made by a covert US radio station. Having finally obtained a passport, he decided to try to get to America. Taking $600 with him, he went first to Kyrgyzstan, where he was warned that the police planted false evidence on Uighurs and handed them over to the Chinese authorities, but where they took $300 from him instead, and laughed at him when he told them that he wanted to go to America. He then went to Pakistan, where a Uighur businessman, who befriended him at the airport, encouraged him to go to an Uzbek house in Jalalabad, where another Uighur took him to the camp in the Tora Bora mountains.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Abbas — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Yusef Abbas and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 280 Khalik, Saidullah (Khalid) (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), little is known of Khalik’s story, as he refused to engage with the tribunal process at Guantánamo. In his absence he was accused of being in Afghanistan during the US bombing campaign, and, in a sign of how information was twisted in a ridiculous manner to come up with anything that officials might find a way of using, of receiving “wounds to his face and arm as well as other flesh wounds” during the bombing. Like the other four remaining Uighurs, he is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 282 Abdulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantánamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), Abdulghupur told his tribunal at Guantánamo, when asked about the “training camp” in the Afghan mountains, where he and 16 others had lived before the bombing raid that destroyed the settlement, “They called this place a camp but that’s way too much of a name for that place we stayed. They did not have enough bathrooms to use or housing or anything. That is way too big of a name for the place where we stayed.” He added, “the conditions were really bad and stressful and there was lots of hard work, [but] I decided to stay there because our goal was to be against the Chinese government and I wouldn’t give up my goal even in the bad conditions to live.” After the bombing raid that completely destroyed the settlement, so that, as Abdulghupur explained, “it looked like no one ever even stayed in that place,” the men’s journey to Pakistan (and their betrayal by Pakistani villagers) was also described by Abdulghupur. “After that there was no stopping,” he said. “There was constantly bombing all the time. In the mountain we stayed in a cave because we didn’t know where to go … We were waiting for our leaders to come and tell us to go to the city or somewhere else but no one showed up and we decided to go to Pakistan. When we got to Pakistan, the local people came to us with tea, bread and meat, really good stuff. In the middle of the night they came to take us to the mosque. We went to the mosque and then they turned us over to the Pakistani authorities … They put us in cars and took us to jail. After that they turned us over to the US.” Like the other four remaining Uighurs, Abdulghupur is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 288 Saib, Motai (Algeria)
One of five Algerian prisoners facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Saib (also identified as Mutaj Sayab), had been living in Jalalabad prior to his capture (like many of the Algerians held at Guantánamo), and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. Throughout nearly nine years of detention, he has only been accused of “receiving small arms training” near Jalalabad. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, his lawyers explained, in a court filing in July 2008, that in February 2008 the Department of Defense notified them that he had been “approved to leave Guantánamo,” but stated obliquely that “such a decision does not equate [to] a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor does is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantánamo as his departure is subject to ongoing discussions.” As his lawyers noted, “Saib has serious concerns that this ambiguous and damaging language will prevent his safe release from Guantánamo” to a third country, and these fears have only heightened after the involuntary repatriation of another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji, in July this year.

ISN 290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria-UK)
Another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Belbacha was cleared for release in March 2007, and has repeatedly appealed to the US courts to prevent his return to Algeria — although in September 2009, the notoriously Conservative D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the lower courts were no longer able to grant injunctions preventing their forcible repatriation. A former footballer in Algeria, Belbacha then worked as an accountant for a government-owned oil company, but after receiving death threats from Islamist militants, fled to the UK in 1999, where he sought asylum and secured work in Bournemouth. During the Labour Party conference in 1999, he received a thank-you letter and a tip from Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott, whose room he was responsible for cleaning. In June 2001, he decided to take a holiday in Pakistan with a friend, and then traveled to Afghanistan to see the country, staying for several months in a guest house in Jalalabad, and then fleeing to Pakistan after the US-led invasion, where he was seized by opportunistic villagers and sold to US forces. Despite being cleared for release in 2007, the British government has persistently refused to accept Belbacha, so that his lawyers at Reprieve, and other organizations, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Cageprisoners, have sought help from the governments of Ireland and Luxembourg as well, although to date all these efforts have been unsuccessful. He has also been offered a home in Amherst, Massachusetts, although a law passed by Congress, banning any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland except to face a trial, has prevented him from taking up this offer. In case any doubt remains about the legitimacy of Belbacha’s fears of repatriation, it should be noted that, in November 2009, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for what his lawyers can only conclude was the crime of speaking out about his fears of being repatriated. As Reprieve explained, “In a disgraceful show trial, the court sentenced Ahmed to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group.’ Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction,’ which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about human rights abuses in Algeria.”

ISN 309 Abd Al Sattar, Muieen (UAE)
One of Guantánamo’s least-known prisoners, al-Satter is ostensibly from the United Arab Emirates, although the UAE claims not to know who he is, and his Unclassified Summary of Evidence also states that he “has a Pakistani passport and originally went to Pakistan on vacation in September 2001.” All that is known of this man — listed by the US authorities as Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd Al Fusal Abd Al Sattar — is contained in this slim document, released in September 2007, but it makes clear that al-Sattar taught at the Private Holy Koran School in Mecca, that he paid for his own travel, that he was “convinced by a friend to go to Afghanistan and teach the Five Pillars of Islam,” and that he “thought if he traveled to Afghanistan that he would get credit from God and that, since the trip was only going to be for a week, there would be no harm in going.” This seems fairly straightforward, and is certainly more comprehensible than other claims from unattributed sources: that he “was identified as a trainer at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan” (which would have been impossible if he arrived in Pakistan in September 2001, as al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks), and that he was “a fighter in Tora Bora who moved around encouraging people to fight and be religious.” Perhaps what actually happened, as was indicated in other passages in the Unclassified Summary, was that the “friend” who convinced him to travel to Afghanistan — a Syrian whom he had met in Karachi — tricked him into traveling to Tora Bora. According to the allegations, al-Sattar “advised that if he saw al-Moaz again, he would be very upset with him and would want to do him physical harm for getting him into so much trouble.”

ISN 310 Ameziane, Djamel (Algeria)
Ameziane, another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, had also been living in Jalalabad. A Berber, he left Algeria in 1992 “in order to escape persecution and make a better life for himself,” and unsuccessfully sought asylum in Austria, where he worked legally for three years, becoming the top chef at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, until a new government clamped down on immigrants, and his work permit was denied without explanation. From there, he moved to Canada, where he obtained a temporary work permit and worked for an office supply company and for various restaurants in Montreal. In 2000, after five years in Canada, his asylum claim was denied, and, as his lawyers explained, “Fearful of being forcibly returned to Algeria, and with few options, [he] went to Afghanistan, where he could live freely without discrimination as a Muslim man, and where he would not fear deportation to Algeria.” Apart from an allegation that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul that was associated with the Taliban, before traveling to Jalalabad, the US authorities failed to come up with a shred of evidence against him, with the exception of an evidently unreliable claim, by an unidentified “source,” who said that he “met the detainee” at al-Farouq. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, Ameziane fears returning to Algeria because of the stigma of Guantánamo and the instability in his hometown of Kabylie, where, as his lawyers have explained, practicing Muslims are “targeted for arrests and detention by the government based solely on their religious practices” and “The stigma of having spent time at Guantánamo would alone be enough to put him at risk of being imprisoned if he is returned.”

ISN 311 Bin Mohammed, Farhi Saeed (Algeria)
Bin Mohammed, who is 50 years old, is one of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. In his case, uniquely, he was also cleared for release by a US judge after winning his habeas corpus petition in November 2009.  A former conscript in the Algerian army, bin Mohammed had traveled around Europe for many years, working as a laborer in the UK, France and Italy, before traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, apparently in search of a wife. Although the US authorities alleged that he had undertaken military training in Afghanistan, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruled that the government’s evidence was unreliable because it came from statements made by Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and torture victim, who had been subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004. In an attempt to prevent his enforced repatriation, and to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Judge Kessler issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria in June this year, following up on his lawyers’ request for her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there.” After protracted wrangling with the notoriously Conservative judges of the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Kessler’s temporary order was overturned, and the Circuit Court’s decision — which drew on previous rulings preventing the lower courts from interfering in the Executive branch’s right to decide how and where to dispose of prisoners — was upheld in July this year, when the US Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court, just a few hours before the Supreme Court also approved the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, who was immediately sent home. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.” Despite the ruling, bin Mohammed remains at Guantánamo, still desperately hoping that a third country will offer him a new home, although he could, of course, be sent back to Algeria any time the Obama administration feels like doing so.

ISN 324 Al Sabri, Mashur (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, al-Sabri traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2000, lived in Jalalabad for a year, and traveled on occasion to the Taliban lines at Bagram and Kabul. Quite what else he did is difficult to ascertain — not because there are no allegations, but because their trustworthiness is hard to gauge. According to various unidentified sources, in May 2001 he was working as a facilitator for new arrivals at two guest houses in Kabul, and was “well known and well respected as an administrator in the guest houses.” It was also noted that he “was said to facilitate the transfer of weapons and other supplies to the front lines,” and, most worryingly (or most outrageously, depending on your point of view), was accused of working for Osama bin Laden. According to the unidentified allegations, he was “believed to have sworn bayat to Osama bin Laden,” because he and others around him knew bin Laden’s travel dates and routes, and another “source” identified him as “a member of al-Qaeda,” because he was “following Osama bin Laden’s orders to keep the guest house up and running.”

ISN 326 Ahjam, Ahmed (Syria)
Ahjam is one of four Syrians who had been living in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border. As one of these men, Maasoum Mouhammed (also known as Bilal Abdah Mohammed), was released in Bulgaria in May this year, despite having been accused of running “a safe house,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, it seems likely that Ahmed Ahjam and the other two men, Ali Husein Shaaban (ISN 327) and Abu Omar al-Hamawe (ISN 329) have also been approved for release. Certainly, there is nothing in the men’s story to indicate that they were connected in any way with al-Qaeda. At Guantánamo, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep,” and, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running.” According to his account in Guantánamo, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and, with a few exceptions (including Ahmed Ahjam), the many dozens of prisoners who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, have all been released.

ISN 327 Shaaban, Ali Husein (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), Shaaban, who was just 19 years old when he was seized, came from a poor family in Syria and had been an ironsmith in his father’s store. He told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there to seek a new life.

ISN 328 Mohamed, Ahmed (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), and also identified as Hammad Mohammed, he is one of an unknown number of prisoners subjected to “do-over” tribunals at Guantánamo, after the military panels responsible for reviewing their cases in 2004 and 2005 concluded that they were not “enemy combatants” and should be released. These “do-over” tribunals were convened in secret in Washington D.C. — often on more than one occasion — until the military officers delivered the desired verdict, and in Mohammed’s case he was not finally vindicated until a subsequent military review board cleared him for release in 2006. In his initial tribunal, he explained why his desire for military training was aimed at China and not America. “The Chinese people have tortured and pressured the Uighur people really bad,” he said. “The Uighur people are trying to go all over the world now. One sixth of the world’s population is in China. They are a threat to the whole world. If I have such a large enemy, why would I go and fight with another enemy?” Throughout his tribunal, the only explanation for the administration’s determination to continue holding him was an allegation that he was a weapons instructor from May to October 2001. In response, he called one of his compatriots as a witness, who explained, “I saw that he was sick during that time. He has a stomach problem and he was helping with the kitchen work and helping the cook. He was also studying the language.” The allegation was then dropped, but in the meantime ludicrous new allegations were added to his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, in which it was claimed that he “was identified as Abdul Jabar, an al-Qaeda member with the Islamic Movement of Turkistan,” and was also “identified as a visitor to known al-Qaeda guest houses.”

ISN 329 Al Hamawe, Abu Omar (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), al-Hamawe, who was just 20 years old when he was seized, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had been working at a store in Kabul, but that he planned to move on to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files. He also stated that the house in Kabul was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

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, Uruknet and New Left Project.

This is the third part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This third article tells the stories of 22 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Four, where 19 more stories are told. Two of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and three others have lost their petitions (although none could remotely be described as terrorists). As before, the majority of the prisoners are Yemenis, and although many have presumably been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, they are waiting to see if the President will, at any point in the future, lift the unprincipled moratorium on transfers to Yemen that he announced in January.

ISN 152 Al Khalaqi, Asim (Yemen)
As described in The Guantánamo Files, al-Khalaqi stated that he “went to Pakistan with a friend to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, but decided to go to Afghanistan after discovering that there were too many Tablighi representatives in Pakistan. He explained that he and his friend were successful in their mission, but everything changed after 9/11, when his friend ‘went one day to go eat lunch and didn’t return home.’ He then met an Afghan, who advised him to leave because Arabs were being killed, and explained that this man took him in his car to the foothills where he joined a group of Arabs crossing the mountains to Pakistan and handed himself in to the army on arrival.” The US authorities allege that he undertook military training and was on the front lines at Bagram.

ISN 153 Suleiman, Fayiz (Yemen)
According to a summary of evidence at Guantánamo, Suleiman “identified himself as a trained imam in Jeddah,” and stated that various sheikhs “would frequent his facility to solicit money for other countries and to address jihad.” He added that the majority of the sheikhs’ talks “focused on Chechnya.” Although he was accused by unknown sources of training to make poisons at Kandahar airport and of being in Tora Bora, he maintained that “he had no military service and he had no desire to serve in such a capacity,” stated that he was “never trained on the use of weapons,” and “denied any connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.”

ISN 156 Latif, Adnan Farhan Abdul (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Latif, who was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, stated that he had sustained a serious head injury in an automobile accident in 1994, and had spent years trying to find affordable medical treatment. After being told about the health-care office of a Pakistani aid worker in Afghanistan who would treat him, he said that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, and explained that, when the US-led invasion began, he fled to the border town of Khost and then made his way into Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani forces, along with about 30 other Arabic-looking men. He told his lawyer, Marc Falkoff, that he later learned that each of them had been turned over to the US military for a bounty of $5000. On July 21 this year, Latif won his habeas corpus petition, but he has still not been released. This is partly because of President Obama’s unprincipled moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, even though it has been repeatedly established that Latif is suffering from schizophrenia, and has attempted to commit suicide on numerous occasions, and partly, as Lette Taylor of Human Rights Watch explained in a recent article for Global Post, because the US government “informed the court shortly after the ruling that it [was] giving ‘serious consideration’ to appealing his release.” I need hardly add that, in light of Latif’s serious mental problems, even entertaining an appeal marks out the Obama administration as fully capable of plumbing depths of cruelty that are, essentially, no different from the brutal innovations of the Bush administration.

ISN 163 Al Qadasi, Khalid (Yemen)
Little is known of al-Qadasi, because, as the authorities at Guantánamo have explained, “he claims that he is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison and has emphatically stated that he would rather die than answer questions.” The authorities have apparently ascertained that he served in the Yemeni army as a young man and traveled to Afghanistan in July 2001, and al-Qadasi has apparently stated that he “left Yemen for Pakistan to obtain medical treatment,” and has also said that he “never possessed any weapons in Afghanistan, as he was unable to fight due to his bad back.” The only evidence against him is a claim by an unidentified source that he was a mujahideen fighter who came to Tora Bora, and other claims that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul and traveled on a truck from a guest house in Jalalabad to Tora Bora.

ISN 165 Al Busayss, Said (Yemen)
Al-Busayss, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, apparently “traveled to Afghanistan in late 2000, attended a Taliban training camp and fought on the front lines until his unit withdrew, when he was given the option of staying or escaping. Choosing the latter, he fled to Pakistan, where he ‘surrendered his weapon and was arrested by Pakistani police,’” as I explained in The Guantánamo Files.

ISN 167 Al Raimi, Ali Yahya (Yemen)
Al-Raimi, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, was just 17 at the time of his capture, and has stated that he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan, because he had a job in a restaurant in Yemen, but his parents, who were living in Afghanistan, forced him to visit. He added that, once he was there, his father and brother told him that he could only return to Yemen if he agreed to attend al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) for two months’ training. He said that he got sick at the camp, went to a clinic in Kabul, and then returned to resume training, but added that this was four days before 9/11, after which “the training stopped and the camp was closed down.” After the US-led invasion began, he said that he was unable to contact his family, so he crossed the mountains with some friends, and was in Pakistan for a few days before he was arrested in a car by Pakistani soldiers. In the unclassified summary of evidence, one of the factors justifying his detention was, “The detainee’s country of origin does not participate in joint enforcement of the global war on terrorism.”

ISN 168 Hakimi, Adel (Hakeemy) (Tunisia)
Before traveling to Afghanistan, Hakimi had lived in Belgium, and for eight years in Italy, where, as I explained in an article in 2008, he had worked as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he told Cori Crider of Reprieve (his London-based lawyers) during a visit at Guantánamo in May 2008. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.” According to Reprieve, he traveled to Pakistan to get married and was living in Jalalabad, near his wife’s family, when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and was then seized crossing the border like most of the other men described in this article. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, both the US authorities and investigators in Europe still seem to regard him as a member of a group of Tunisians who joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and who helped recruits cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan, according to a Belgian police report produced at the 2003 trial in Belgium of Sliti’s uncle, Amor Sliti, when he and Hisham Sliti (ISN 174) were sentenced in absentia. His lawyers argue that the allegations are false, and are based on testimony extracted through torture, but since last summer, there have been rumors that he and Sliti might be extradited to Belgium.

ISN 170 Masud, Sharaf (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was reported that Masud traveled to Afghanistan “because he heard that the Afghan leader led by Islamic ways” and that he supported the Taliban, but “did not travel to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban … because it was Muslim versus Muslim.” He stated that he “left Kabul because the Afghans were trying to kill Arabs in the market,” took a taxi back to Jalalabad, and then joined a group of people walking to the border, where he was arrested after asking to be taken to his embassy. There are no allegations that he took part on any kind of combat — only claims that he stayed in guest houses for four months — and a ludicrous allegation by a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” who “noted the detainee looked familiar and that he may be a Tunisian with connections to Italy.”

ISN 171 Alahdal, Abu Bakr (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, Alahdal “served as a fighter for the Taliban Arab forces” at Bagram, but then “contracted malaria and some other unidentified illness” and was sent to a hospital in Kabul, where he spent two months recuperating. He then made his way to Jalalabad, where he “waited to be recalled to the front lines,” but “withdrew to a village on the outskirts of Jalalabad,” from where he made his way to Pakistan, where he was turned in by villagers. In Guantánamo, he has been a long-term hunger striker. Although he only weighed 99 pounds on arrival, his weight dropped at one point to just 81 pounds, and he was force-fed daily from the end of August 2005 until the publicly-released weight records ended in December 2006, when he still weighed only 101 pounds (PDF).

ISN 174 Sliti, Hisham (Tunisia)
In January 2009, Sliti, who had lived in various countries in Europe, including Belgium and Italy, lost his habeas corpus petition, when Judge Richard Leon ruled that he was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” based on claims made by the government that he traveled to Afghanistan as “an al-Qaeda recruit … at the expense of known al-Qaeda associates and on a false passport provided to him by the same,” that he stayed in a guest house and a mosque, and attended a training camp, which also had connections to al-Qaeda, and that he was “instrumental” in “starting a terrorist organization with close ties to al-Qaeda.” As I explained in an article at the time, “The problem with all of these allegations is that Sliti’s story actually suggests that all these conclusions are based on guilt by association. He may well have been connected with others who were involved in or interested in terrorism, but his own trajectory is that of a junkie rather than a jihadist, or, if you prefer, a tourist rather than a terrorist.” Judge Leon disregarded Sliti’s own claim that he went to Afghanistan “to kick a long-standing drug habit and to find a wife,” but it was certainly true that he had been a drug addict in Europe (where he had been imprisoned on several occasions), and he also has a worldly cynicism that is fundamentally at odds with the fanatical rigor of al-Qaeda. In a review board at Guantánamo, he explained that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.” Despite this, he, like Adel Hakimi (ISN 168, above) faces possible extradition to Belgium, where he was sentenced in absentia in 2003.

ISN 178 Baada, Tareq (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was alleged that Baada, who denied being a member of al-Qaeda, trained al-Farouq, and that he and a group of fighters were then assigned to the third line, about 4 km south of the front line near Kabul. It was also alleged that, after the fall of Kabul, he fled to Tora Bora, where he was put on guard duty. One of the most persistent hunger strikers at Guantánamo, he weighed 121 pounds on arrival at the prison, but in January 2006, when he was one of a handful of hunger strikers to continue after the prison-wide strike of 2005 was largely halted, he weighed just 94 pounds (PDF). In March 2007, Sami al-Haj (the al-Jazeera cameraman released in 2008) mentioned that he was one of three prisoners who had been on hunger strike — and force-fed — for the previous year.

ISN 189 Gherebi, Salem (Libya)
Little is known of Gherebi. Initially, it was alleged that he arrived in Afghanistan in 1995, having lost most of the fingers of his right hand in an explosives accident in Tajikistan the year before, and that he was an al-Qaeda operative in Kabul, who had “reportedly” trained at an al-Qaeda training camp in 1996 (an allegation that borders on the implausible, as Osama bin Laden only returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996). By 2006, the US authorities had dropped the claims about losing his fingers and being an al-Qaeda member in exchange for a new set of allegations, most of which centered on his purported links with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Deciding that his name was actually Rafdat Muhammed Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, the authorities alleged that he had lived in Pakistan in the early 1990s and then, fearing that talks between the Libyan and Pakistani governments would lead to the deportation of all Libyans from Pakistan, had moved back to Afghanistan, where he stayed in refugee camps.

ISN 195 Al Shumrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
The US authorities allege that al-Shumrani left Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan in June 2001, because he “wanted to fight in Chechnya, but was told he would need military training that could best be obtained in Afghanistan.” It is also claimed that he “stated he attended a training camp,” and then spent about five months on the front lines. In what seemed to be an attempt to beef up the allegations, it was also claimed that he “stated that while he was fighting in Afghanistan, he tried to see Osama bin Laden,” and that he “operated a hand-held two-way radio, which he used to request additional supplies” in the Tora Bora area.

ISN 197 Chekhouri, Younis (Morocco)
Chekhouri is accused of being a founder member of the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (or GICM, the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), who had a training camp near Kabul, but he has always maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after six years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education, and has stated that they lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. He has also repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and he has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

ISN 200 Al Qahtani, Said (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Qahtani attended a training camp in Pakistan in 2000, when he also spent some time (possibly a day, possibly a week) with Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. However, although the US authorities have steadily distanced themselves from making grand claims about Zubaydah, al-Qahtani’s brief association with him has probably counted against him in Guantanamo. In his tribunal in 2004, he said that he didn’t know that Zubaydah was allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, and asked, “just because somebody stays at someone’s house, who may not be the best person in the world, does that make the people who stayed at that house bad people?” After returning home, he spoke to an imam who explained that he should help the Taliban because, after the Soviet occupation and the civil war, “they brought peace to 95 percent of the country, except the places where the Northern Alliance were at the time. I don’t think there was anything wrong with helping to make peace after 30 years of fighting.” Returning to Afghanistan in April 2001, he served as a guard on the front lines near Kabul before fleeing to Pakistan with around 15 other people, but pointed out that he was in Afghanistan before 9/11, and insisted, “Even if you say I am right or wrong, I don’t think I did anything wrong. At the time I didn’t think I did anything wrong, and I still don’t. I didn’t do anything illegal or bad to anyone. I want you to understand this.”

ISN 219 Razak, Abdul (China)
Razak is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. 17 of the men were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, they made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. In The Guantánamo Files, I described Abdul Razak’s story as follows: “Yusef Abbas, who was injured in the raid, said that one man died and ‘we were covered in half a bucket of his body meat.’ After the bombing, he was taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where Abdul Razak, a Uighur who worked at the hospital and occasionally brought food to the camp, took care of him, until ‘there was a riot in the city’ and he returned to the other Uighurs in the mountains, taking Razak with him.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Razak — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Abdul Razak and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 223 Sulayman, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
On July 21 this year, Sulayman lost his habeas petition. In Guantánamo, he explained that a man identified by the US authorities as a known recruiter for al-Qaeda had facilitated his travel to Afghanistan, although he added that he had been recruited under false pretences and that the man “promised me that I’d be able to get married in Afghanistan. He may have had different intentions for me other than the marriage, but I didn’t know.” This was not the whole story, as Sulayman also conceded that, after arriving in Afghanistan in March 2001, he stayed in Kabul for seven months, and then, when given the opportunity to go to the front lines or the second lines or to return home, he went to the second lines because he didn’t want to fight but he also didn’t want to return home. It was there, he said, that he received some weapons training, and later, after the US-led invasion began, he fled to Pakistan in the company of men that he didn’t know, where he was seized and handed over to US forces. This was enough for him to lose his habeas petition, although it fails to demonstrate that he was a threat to the US, and what his case reveals most of all is how much of the supposed evidence was demonstrably false, and almost certainly produced by unreliable witnesses, either in Guantánamo or in other US-run prisons. These included ludicrous allegations that he was identified as a mortar instructor from a video made in the Tarnak Farms training camp in 2000 (before he arrived in Afghanistan), that he “was identified as an al-Qaeda spokesman and was part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage … during the escape from Tora Bora,” and, most alarmingly, that he was identified as a Taliban prison guard “who used torture techniques on inmates under his control.”

ISN 224 Muhammad, Abd Al Rahman (Yemen)
Muhammad, who was just 19 when he was seized, said that he initially traveled to Karachi to look for work, and stayed for three months with a Yemeni friend. He then visited the Taliban’s office in Quetta, in July or August 2001, “seeking a teaching job in Afghanistan,” but was told that there was “no work in Afghanistan.” After returning to Karachi, he decided to try again, and this time paid for a guide to take him to Kandahar, where he stayed in a madrassa for ten days. After the 9/11 attacks, he said that “the people at the madrassa” sent him to a “known Taliban house” near Kabul, and from there he eventually made his way to the Pakistani border, where he was seized. Although the US authorities came up with an impressive list of documents seized in raids, on which Muhammad’s name and details were allegedly recorded, there is no way of knowing how accurate these records are, as many featured supposed “aliases” that were notoriously generic, and others appear to record the names of prisoners that were leaked to al-Qaeda sympathizers, who duly described them in online postings as al-Qaeda members. For his part, Muhammad “denied that he received any weapons [training] during his one-month stay in Kabul.”

ISN 232 Al Odah, Fawzi (Al Awda) (Kuwait)
Al-Odah, who lost his habeas corpus petition last August, has always claimed that he took a break from work and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and provide humanitarian aid (which he had done previously in other countries), and has also admitted that he established contact with the Taliban, as they were the government at the time, and spent one day at a Taliban-controlled training camp. He has also stated that, after the US-led invasion, he was sent by a Taliban representative to a safer location outside Kabul, and, from there, traveled to Jalalabad, where he stayed with another family, who gave him an AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself. He then joined other people crossing the mountains to Pakistan, where he handed himself in to the border guards, and was subsequently handed over — or sold — to US forces. However, in what I described as “another shallow victory for the government,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied his habeas petition because she agreed with the government that it was “more likely than not” that he “became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan,” basing her ruling, as I described it, “on a dubious assemblage of information that relied more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of his activities than it did on anything resembling concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when she wrote that there were ‘significant reasons why the Government’s proffered evidence may not be accurate or authentic.’” Al-Odah appealed the ruling, but his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year. The result, as I also explained, is that, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, “the United States is still asserting that it has the right to hold a young man who spent just one day at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was given, and no evidence that his training involved anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.”

ISN 233 Salih, Abdul Al Razzaq (Yemen)
Salih is accused of training at al-Farouq, and was also “identified”, by an unknown source, as “a jihadist” in Tora Bora, although he maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks because he “felt compelled to go to Afghanistan to teach the Koran to the Afghanis.” He added that “he was not formally trained in the Koran, but wanted to go just recite what he could.” In reports elsewhere in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, he reported that a particular sheikh had told him that “it was forbidden to fight for the Taliban,” and that “he doesn’t like violence and was not fighting in Afghanistan, but was seeking a job teaching in a mosque.” In Guantánamo, Salih took part in the mass hunger strike in 2005. Although he weighed a comfortable 160 pounds on arrival at the prison, his weight dropped on two occasions, in December 2005 and January 2006, to just 110 pounds (PDF).

ISN 235 Jarabh, Saeed (Yemen)
The story of Saeed Jarabh is particularly unclear. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he stated that he traveled to Afghanistan in August or September 2001 to teach the Koran (and also in the hope of finding gold to trade), and refuted a claim that he trained for a week at a camp identified as Abu Abaida by stating, “This was not military training; it was simply shooting for proficiency with friends.” He also denied allegations that he participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and was present in Tora Bora, stating that he “was not in Tora Bora” and was “captured under false pretences in Pakistan by the Pakistanis.” He added that he “had made a decision to leave Afghanistan long before the war started,” but that “People in Afghanistan lied to him and told him they would help him go home but [instead] turned him over to Americans.” Whether or not this story was true, it was certainly more credible than other, unsubstantiated allegations made by unidentified sources, including a ludicrous claim that he “was a suicide bomber who had sworn bayat (an oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden.”

ISN 238 Hadjarab, Nabil (Algeria-France)
In 2001, Nabil Hadjarab, a 22-year Algerian who had been shuttled between France and Algeria throughout his childhood as his family disintegrated around him, was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan by someone who took advantage of his fears about being caught without papers as he applied for formal French residency. After living in Kabul, he then moved to the eastern city of Jalalabad, but as Afghanistan descended into chaos following the US-led invasion in October 2001 and he tried to flee across the mountains to Pakistan, he was wounded by a bomb and taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where he was sold to US forces. As I explained in a recent article, Hadjarab was cleared for release from Guantánamo under the Bush administration, but was not freed because of long-standing fears about returning him to Algeria, and also because of inertia on the part of the French government, which has refused to offer him a new home, even though he spent much of his childhood in France and has close family there. Now, however, he is at risk of being forcibly repatriated to Algeria after the US Supreme Court refused to intervene to prevent him and four other Algerian prisoners from being transferred against their will, as happened in July with another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji.

Note: See Part Four of this series for the stories of the other four Algerians, who, like Nabil Hadjarab, were also cleared for release under President Bush, and have been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. They are: Motai Saib (ISN 288), Ahmed Belbacha (ISN 290), Djamel Ameziane (ISN 310) and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed (ISN 311), who was also cleared for release by the US District Court in Washington D.C., when he won his habeas corpus petition (in November 2009).

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, Eurasia Review, Uruknet, Blog from Middle East and New Left Project.

Although the release of the 37 men was obviously timed to shift attention from protests marking the anniversary by the regime’s many opponents — including family members of those whose deaths or disappearances have never been acknowledged — it is, nevertheless, a sign of progress, as well as political opportunism.

Under the influence of Saif al-Islam, one of Gaddafi’s sons and the head of the Gaddafi Foundation, a charity that includes a human rights committee, the Libyan regime has, in recent years, sought to reconcile itself with former political opponents, leading to the release of hundreds of prisoners since 2007. As Reuters explained, “Saif al-Islam has campaigned for reconciliation with Islamists who promise to lay down their arms. His initiative has met resistance from conservatives in his father’s entourage with whom he is competing for influence.”

According to official Libyan figures, 705 prisoners have been released as part of the initiative. Tuesday’s release followed the release of 214 men in March, and on Tuesday Mohamed al-Allagi, the chairman of the human rights committee of the Gaddafi Foundation, stated, “These releases come in the context of national reconciliation and social peace,” adding, as AFP reported, that ”these people had completed their rehabilitation program, which was aimed at getting the prisoners to renounce violence and reintegrate them into Libyan society.” Although over 300 prisoners “accused of having ties to Islamist militant groups” are still imprisoned, al-Allagi also explained that the foundation was “working to free the other detainees so that there will no longer be any prisoners of opinion in Libya.”

As Reuters explained, five of the prisoners released on Tuesday had links to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), according to Abdelhakim Belhadj, a former leader of the group who was freed in March. Formed by former Libyan mujahideen who had traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union, the LIFG was formed in 1995, and dedicated to the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. In 2007, as AFP explained, “Al-Qaeda announced that the LIFG had joined the jihadist network and Abu Laith al-Libi, one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants, was thought to be directing it for a time from Central Asia. Libi was killed in a 2008 US missile strike in the tribal zone of northwest Pakistan and last year, the Gaddafi Foundation announced that Islamists being held in Libyan prisons that had previously had links with Al-Qaeda had renounced those ties.”

Belhadj, one of three significant LIFG figures released in March, along with “military chief” Khaled Sharif and “ideological official” Sami Saadi (as AFP described them) also said that the rest of the prisoners released on Tuesday had been detained “because they sympathized with Islamist militant movements, but were not LIFG members.”

The release of ex-Guantánamo prisoner Abu Sufian Hamouda

They included a former Guantánamo prisoner transferred to Libyan custody nearly three years ago, in October 2007, named by AFP as Abu Sofian Ben Guemou, and by Reuters as Sofiane Ibrahim Gammu. Reuters noted that media reports had “quoted an official in the Gaddafi Foundation as saying Gammu was a former driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” but as he left the prison on Tuesday, he stated, “I am not bin Laden’s driver. It’s a misunderstanding.”

This was almost certainly true. Identified in Guantánamo as Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu, his story, as revealed in publicly available documents, suggests that the bin Laden connection was only relevant in relation to a job that he took in Sudan for a company owned by bin Laden, when the al-Qaeda leader was involved in construction work and other activities unrelated to terrorism between 1992 and 1996, prior to his expulsion from Sudan and his return to Afghanistan.

As Hamouda explained in Guantánamo (and as I reported at the time of his transfer to Libyan custody):

[H]e had served in the Libyan army as a tank driver from 1979 to 1990, but was “arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for drug and alcohol offenses.” Having apparently escaped from prison in 1992, he fled to Sudan, where he worked as a truck driver. In an attempt to beef up the evidence against him, the Department of Defense alleged that the company he worked for, the Wadi al-Aqiq company, was “owned by Osama bin Laden,” and also attempted to claim that he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group … even while admitting that an unidentified “al-Qaeda/LIFG facilitator” had described him as “a noncommittal LIFG member who received no training.”

After relocating to Pakistan, [he] apparently stayed there until the summer of 2001, when he and a friend crossed the border into Afghanistan, traveling to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where [he] found a job working as an accountant for Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, the director of al-Wafa, a Saudi charity which provided humanitarian aid to Afghans, but which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for al-Qaeda.

In the years since Hamouda’s transfer to Libyan custody, everyone connected to al-Wafa, including Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, has been released, but in any case, as I also explained at the time:

[His] involvement with the organization centered on its humanitarian work … In the “evidence” presented for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal — under factors purporting to demonstrate that he “supported military operations against the United States or its coalition partners” — it was stated that, while working for al-Wafa, he traveled to Kunduz “to oversee the distribution of rice that was being guarded by four to five armed guards.” In Guantánamo, it seems, even the distribution of rice can be regarded as a component in a military operation.

I also explained:

Captured in Islamabad, after fleeing from Afghanistan following the US-led invasion, [he] was held for a month by the Pakistani authorities, and was then handed over to the Americans, who began mining him for the flimsy “evidence” of terrorist activities outlined above. Earlier this year [2007], he was cleared for release, and, despite misgivings on the part of his lawyers, stated that he was prepared to return to Libya, even though what awaits him may not be any better than what he was suffered over the last five years. Perhaps, as one of Guantánamo’s truly lost men, he has decided that, if he is to spend the rest of his life in prison for no apparent reason, he would rather be in Libya, where his wife and his family might be able to see him, than in Guantánamo, where, like every other detainee, he was more isolated from his relatives than even the deadliest convicted mass murderer on the US mainland.

In September 2008, Human Rights Watch stated in a report that, according to the US State Department, officials had visited Hamouda in December 2007, and that, although the Libyan security forces “were holding him on unknown charges and apparently without access to a lawyer … he did not complain of maltreatment [and] was scheduled to receive a family visit” at the end of the month. The Gaddafi Foundation subsequently claimed that he had indeed been “granted a family visit,” and added that the foundation was providing an apartment for his family in Tripoli.

As a result, Hamouda may indeed be regarded as fortunate, given that, two years after the Human Rights Watch report, he has eventually been released, and also because so many of the men held with him in Guantánamo are still there, are still totally isolated from their families, and have no notion of when, if ever, they will be released. However, it should also be noted that being returned to Libya from Guantánamo — or from any of the secret prisons operated by the Bush administration — is no guarantee that prisoners will finally be released after three years in Abu Salim prison.

Not released: Muhammad al-Rimi, transferred from Guantánamo to Libyan custody in December 2006

In December 2006, Muhammad al-Rimi (also identified as Muhammad al-Futuri or Abdesalam Safrani), a 40-year old who had been held at Guantánamo for four years, also voluntarily accepted repatriation. Accused of being a member of the LIFG, al-Rimi had denied the charges (and had been approved for release from Guantánamo by a US military review board), although he did tell the authorities, “I have a problem with the Libyan government and it is a long story.”

According to the Human Rights Watch report in September 2008, the Gaddafi Foundation stated that al-Rimi was treated for tuberculosis upon his return. An official also said that he would “go back to his family soon,” but by all accounts he is still held in Abu Salim prison, three years and eight months after his return. The US State Department told Human Rights Watch in January 2008 that US officials visited al-Rimi in August and December 2007 and stated that “Libyan security forces were detaining him but were treating him well.” Human Rights Watch also noted that, at the meeting in December 2007, which took place in the presence of Libyan officials and an official from the Gaddafi Foundation, al-Rimi was not informed of the charges against him, and apparently explained that he “had not seen a lawyer since his return” and “had received no family visits.”

Reasons to be wary: the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

Moreover, al-Rimi is not the only returnee from US custody who might be tempted to regard Abu Sufian Hamouda as fortunate. The most horrendous recent story is that of Ali Mohamed Abdelaziz al-Fakheri, more commonly known as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a former CIA “ghost prisoner,” who, notoriously, was sent to Egypt by the CIA after his capture on the Pakistani border in December 2001, where, under torture, he made a false confession about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, regarding the use of chemical weapons, that was used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Al-Libi was subsequently held in a variety of secret prisons in a number of different countries, either directly run by the CIA (in Afghanistan) or on behalf of the CIA (in countries including Jordan and Morocco), but was finally returned to Libya in 2006, where, last May, he reportedly died in Abu Salim prison by committing suicide, even though most observers concluded that this was highly unlikely — and also noted that, with suspicious timing, the US embassy in Tripoli reopened just three days after his death.

Al-Libi’s death, in such dubious circumstances, reinforces the warnings contained in recent reports by Amnesty International (PDF, June 2010) and Human Rights Watch (December 2009) that, although improvements have been made in recent years, “The human rights situation in Libya remains dire” (as Amnesty International described it), and Libya’s human rights record “remains poor, despite some limited progress in recent years,” as Human Rights Watch explained.

Other Libyans held in secret CIA prisons

For cases involving the United States, al-Libi’s remains the bleakest of benchmarks for suspicion of all the parties involved, but questions also remain about the fate of a number of other men repatriated after being held in secret CIA prisons. As the UN explained in a major report on secret detention earlier this year, four other Libyans (along with al-Libi) were returned to Libya in 2005 or 2006. The four men were:

Hassan Raba’i and Khaled al-Sharif, both captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003, who had “spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan”; Abdallah al-Sadeq, seized in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004; and Abu Munder al-Saadi, both held briefly before being rendered to [Libya]. In May 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that its representatives briefly met Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi on a visit to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, although he refused to be interviewed. Human Rights Watch interviewed four other men, who claimed that, “before they were sent to [Libya], United States forces had tortured them in detention centers in Afghanistan, and supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand.” One of the four was Hassan Raba’i, also known as Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, who stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “the interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg.”

In a visit to Abu Salim prison in May 2009 (the details of which were not reported until June 2010), representatives of Amnesty International confirmed that the four men discussed above were held, and also that two other men previously held in secret CIA prisons — al-Mahdi Jawda, aka Ayoub al-Libi, and Majid Abu Yasser, aka Adnan al-Libi — were also held. These were important revelations, as the whereabouts of both men were previously unknown, and they provide a few more crucial details for the handful of researchers — myself included — who continue to regard the fate of the 94 prisoners held in secret prisons, and the unknown number rendered to prisons in other countries, as an outstanding crime of the Bush administration that needs exposing, and that President Obama has lamentably failed to address.

Noticeably, three of these men were released in March this year, as AFP mentioned: in their report, Khaled Sharif is Khaled al-Sharif, Sami Saadi is Abu Munder al-Saadi (also identified as Sami Mustafa al-Saadi) and Abdelhakim Belhadj is Abdallah al-Sadeq. Their release apparently brings to an end their long, extra-legal detention as a result of cooperation between the US and Libyan authorities, although it is of concern that the other three are still held, and as the Amnesty report pointed out, “To the best of Amnesty International’s knowledge, before they were released Abdelhakim Belhadj was sentenced to death and Khaled al-Sharif aka Abu Hazem was facing trial proceedings for terrorism-related offences” that could also lead to a death penalty being imposed. Although these sentences have now been suspended, their imposition obviously means that a great weight still hangs over both men.

During visits by Amnesty representatives in 2009 and 2010, only one of these men, Khaled al-Sharif, agreed to speak to them, and his descriptions of his treatment are worth repeating, if only to emphasize how a full accounting for the Bush administration’s program of rendition and detention in secret prisons remains of the utmost importance. As Amnesty described al-Sharif’s testimony:

He described his arrest by US and Pakistani forces in Peshawar on 3 April 2002 along with Mohamed Shu’iya, known as Hassan Ruba’i, and his detention in various facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan — in Peshawar, Islamabad, Kabul and Bagram. He recounted being tortured in a detention facility in Peshawar, where he spent a week, by Pakistani officials who beat him with a leather belt and stepped on his injured foot, while being questioned by an American man. He also said that he was tortured while detained in Kabul for about a year [perhaps in the CIA’s “Salt Pit” prison], including by having icy water poured on him and being punched in the stomach. He also described being attached to the ceiling and left suspended for days and being handcuffed to an iron bar in an uncomfortable position for months — the handcuffs were only removed for 15 minutes during meals, either once or twice a day. He was not allowed to shower during the time spent attached to the iron bar. He said that in Kabul, he was interrogated and tortured by US officers. After about a year, he was transferred to Bagram in Afghanistan, where he spent another year before being taken to a US airbase and flown to Libya with Mahdi Jawda, aka Ayoub al-Libi in April 2005.

What this means for the future

The lesson from all this — beyond the hope that calls will be made for President Obama to reveal the names of all those held in Bush’s secret program, and what happened to them — is that, although Saif al-Islam and the Gaddafi Foundation are to be cautiously congratulated for their reforms, the release of the 37 men on Tuesday — and of Abu Sufian Hamouda in particular — cannot be regarded as providing the Obama administration with a viable rationale for repatriating any of the four remaining Libyans in Guantánamo, unless they are clear about what awaits them.

This year, two Libyans who feared repatriation were given new homes — one, Abdul Ra’ouf al-Qassim, who had been fighting against enforced repatriation since 2007, was sent to Albania in February, and Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was sent to Georgia in March. As I have recently heard uncomfortable rumors that the US authorities are sounding out the possibility of repatriating other Libyans from Guantánamo, the lesson of Abu Sufian Hamouda and Muhammad al-Rimi should not be forgotten — unless, of course, the men in question have concluded, as Hamouda and al-Rimi did under George W. Bush, that anything is better than remaining in Guantánamo with less chance of being released under Barack Obama than existed under his predecessor.

And that, sadly, is a very real possibility.

Note: For a good report on the release of the former LIFG leaders in March this year, see this CNN article.

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.

I’ll discuss the stories of Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani and Abdul Aziz Naji in a separate article, but for now the focus must be on the legal maneuvering that led to the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, because, for the first time in Guantánamo’s history, a prisoner has been sent home against his will, even though Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers, told the Washington Post two weeks ago that he was “adamantly opposed to going back.” At the weekend, another of his lawyers, Ellen Lubell, told the Miami Herald that Naji “fears extremists will try to recruit him — associating him with Guantánamo — and will torture or kill him if he resists.” She added, “He has nothing against the Algerian government, but he fears that the government will be unable to protect him from Algerian extremists.” In a press release, the Center for Constitutional Rights explained that Naji “fled various forms of persecution in Algeria many years ago, including having been attacked by an extremist.” CCR also sounded a note of caution about how the Algerian government will receive Naji, stating, “we are deeply concerned that he will disappear into secret detention.”

These are valid concerns, as Algeria has a poor human rights record. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations (PDF, pp. 108-9) regularly express concerns about the use of torture in Algeria, and in its 2009 report on human rights in Algeria, the US State Department noted, “Local human rights lawyers maintained that torture continued to occur in detention facilities, most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In contrast, an Obama administration official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post two weeks ago, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.” This was a bold statement to make, in light of the allegations made by NGOs and the UN, and concerns about torture or other ill-treatment were not diminished by a response to the news of Naji’s repatriation in Monday’s Washington Post, in which it was noted that “The government said that Algeria has provided diplomatic assurances that Naji would not be mistreated, assurances that administration officials say are credible because 10 other detainees have been returned to Algeria without incident.”

The problems with this statement concern the “diplomatic assurances,” and the claim that 10 men have been repatriated “without incident.” On the “diplomatic assurances,” Human Rights Watch explained in a press release that its own research “has shown that diplomatic assurances provided by receiving countries, which are legally unenforceable, do not provide an effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment,” and, on the status of the 10 men returned, although there have been no allegations of torture, there has been very little information at all about the conditions in which they have been held, and what has emerged publicly is not reassuring, as it reveals both prolonged pre-trial detention, and calls for punitive sentences from the prosecutors. As I explained in January this year:

[F]rustratingly little is known about the eight Algerians repatriated from Guantánamo between July 2008 and January 2009, although one indication of how the Algerian justice system deals with returned Guantánamo prisoners was provided in November 2009, when the BBC reported that, 15 months after two of these men were repatriated, they had been acquitted after a trial in which the prosecutor had called for prison sentences of 20 years.

Alarmingly, despite Abdul Aziz Naji’s fear of being repatriated — and the fears of five other Algerians, as revealed by the Washington Post two weeks ago — his release was not only supported by the Obama administration, but also by the Supreme Court.

Judge Gladys Kessler takes on the D.C. Circuit Court – and the Supreme Court

The spur for a legal battle that has largely been taking place without the mainstream media paying much attention — and with an alarming reliance on secrecy — was a principled stand taken by Judge Gladys Kessler, of the District Court in Washington D.C., who, single-handedly, has been attempting to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

In November, Judge Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, a 49-year old Algerian, after concluding that the government’s supposed evidence relied almost entirely on unreliable confessions produced by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004.

Six months after Judge Kessler delivered her ruling, with bin Mohammed still not released, his lawyers asked her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there,” as SCOTUSblog described it. As a result of two depressing rulings in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. Circuit Court (the District Court), judges are not actually able to order the release of prisoners who have won their habeas petitions, and are not even supposed to interfere with the disposition of prisoners, whose fate, according to the Circuit Court, is entirely dependent on the whims of the Executive branch. Judge Kessler, however, was undeterred.

On June 3, she issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria, and on June 10 mounted a stout defense of his right not to be forcibly repatriated, noting (PDF):

Petitioner has voiced great fear about being transferred to Algeria. He has not lived in Algeria for more than 20 years, and has no ties to that country. Because he has been designated an “enemy combatant,” he greatly fears retribution by the Algerian authorities and that he will be formally charged under the Algerian Penal Code, tortured, convicted, and very possibly executed by the Algerian Government. He has claimed that he will be caught between the Algerian Government, which will brand him as an international terrorist, and armed domestic terrorists, who oppose the existing government, often pressure individuals to join their ranks, and retaliate violently when such individuals refuse. Petitioner has made clear that he would rather suffer continued confinement in Guantánamo Bay than be placed in the control of the Algerian Government.

In response to a brief filed by the government, Judge Kessler complained that two declarations submitted, which purported to guarantee bin Mohammed’s humane treatment if returned to Algeria, “appear to be boilerplate statements which have been filed in a number of the Government’s Oppositions to Motions,” and that a third, written by Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, “was submitted ex parte so that [bin Mohammed] has not had an opportunity to read it.” After noting that bin Mohammed’s fears “are of great concern,” and that it is “essential” that assurances received from the Algerian government, purporting to guarantee that bin Mohammed will receive “humane treatment,” are “tested,” Judge Kessler ordered Fried to appear in person in her court, explaining, “Given the centrality of those representations and assurances to the future of [bin Mohammed] and possibly to his very life, this Court has an obligation to ensure that there is real substance behind the conclusory phrases contained in Special Envoy Fried’s declarations.”

Fried never turned up, of course, because the Justice Department immediately filed an appeal with the Circuit Court, which then ordered Judge Kessler to “resolve all outstanding motions” in the case with reference to Munaf v. Geren and Kiyemba v. Obama (aka Kiyemba II), the cases that the Circuit Court had drawn on (Munaf) and issued (Kiyemba II) to demonstrate that only the Executive branch was entitled to make decisions about where to send Guantánamo prisoners. As SCOTUSblog noted, “While the order did not say that Kessler could not hold a hearing on Mohammed’s plea not to be sent to Algeria, it specified that the judge was to rule on that issue ‘without requiring testimony from Special Envoy Fried or any other United States government official,’” which, of course, “completely undercut the purpose that Kessler had” for calling the hearing in the first place.

The Circuit Court then issued an amended ruling, instructing Judge Kessler to decide the Mohammed plea “in an order from which a party can take an immediate appeal,” and as SCOTUSblog noted in response to this instruction:

The Circuit Court thus had taken over, in a significant way, the further proceedings in Kessler’s Court, and has sent her the strongest hint that she risked being overturned if she barred his transfer anew. Since it noted the binding nature of the precedents she was to observe, the Circuit Court clearly was signaling that, if it accepted the government’s view that Mohammed’s case was no different, Kessler would be found to be without authority to prevent his transfer to Algeria.

After this, the struggle between Judge Kessler and the Circuit Court was swamped in secrecy. At a hearing convened by Kessler on June 28, all the documentation was sealed, but SCOTUSblog was able to deduce, from a subsequent appeal filed by the government, that she had once more barred bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria. On July 8, however, in another secret hearing, the Circuit Court “summarily overturned” Judge Kessler’s ban, prompting SCOTUSblog to note that the court’s order “continues a seldom-interrupted string of rulings by the Circuit Court against detainees challenging their confinement or transfer,” which “contrasts with a majority of rulings by District Court judges upholding detainees’ challenges under federal habeas law.”

The final blow for bin Mohammed — and for those who, like Judge Kessler, had quaintly presumed that the “non-refoulement” requirement of the UN Convention Against Torture might actually mean something to the judiciary and the Executive branch — came last Friday, when, by 5 votes to 3, the Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.”

Although three of the justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — dissented, noting that they “would grant the stay to afford the Court time to consider, in the ordinary course, important questions raised in this case and not resolved in Munaf v. Geren,” just a few hours later the Supreme Court unanimously approved the forced repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji.

This was a bleak day for US justice, not only because it involved the Supreme Court blithely disregarding the UN Convention Against Torture’s “non-refoulement” obligation, joining in an unholy trinity with the D.C. Circuit Court and the Obama administration, but also because it brings to an abrupt, cruel, and — I believe — illegal conclusion a struggle to release prisoners without violating the UN Convention Against Torture, which, for the most part, was actually respected by the Bush administration.

The Bush administration’s record on not returning prisoners to torture

The long history of the authorities grappling with the “non-refoulement” obligation at Guantánamo began with the Uighurs, 22 Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who were mostly seized in Pakistan in December 2001 after crossing from Afghanistan, where they had been living in a run-down settlement in the Tora Bora mountains, thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or nursing futile hopes of rising up against their only enemy, the Chinese government.

With the Uighurs, the Bush administration recognized its “non-refoulement” obligation, refusing to return them to China, and finding new homes for five of the men in Albania in 2006. When the Obama administration inherited the problem of the remaining 17 men, who had, in the meantime, won their habeas corpus petitions, it found new homes for 12 of them in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, although five still remain at Guantánamo, and, last spring, the administration turned down a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to bring some of the men to live in the US, which would have done more in the long run to defuse scaremongering about Guantánamo than any other gesture.

Despite the Bush administration locating some principles when it came to the Uighurs, in other cases prisoners had to fight in the courts to prevent their forcible repatriation to countries where they faced the risk of torture. In 2007, a Libyan, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, sought the intervention of the courts to prevent his return to Libya, and after two Tunisians were repatriated in June 2007 — and were subsequently mistreated and given jail sentences (of three and seven years) after show trials — a judge intervened to prevent the repatriation of a third, Mohammed Abdul Rahman (also known as Lotfi bin Ali), and, by extension, other Tunisians in Guantánamo.

In other cases, like that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, lawyers successfully sought injunctions preventing their return, and by the time Obama came to power, it was generally understood that prisoners were not be involuntarily returned to China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Uzbekistan. As a result, in the last year, the Obama administration has resettled prisoners from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland. Algeria was more problematical, as was demonstrated by the cases of the men who had returned voluntarily, even though there was, to be honest, no guarantee that they would be treated humanely, and my constant analogy was that return to Algeria was like Russian Roulette.

How the Circuit Court defended expansive executive power

However, all this came to an end with the Circuit Court’s intervention in the Uighurs’ case — firstly, in February 2009 (in Kiyemba v. Obama, aka Kiyemba I), when a panel of judges ruled that the courts could not order the resettlement in the US of prisoners who had won their habeas petitions but could not be repatriated, because only the Executive branch could decide matters relating to immigration. As I explained in a review of the ruling:

The judges were seemingly unmoved that this would leave the Uighurs (and, very possibly, others in Guantánamo) with no means of leaving the prison, and that it stripped the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2008, granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights, of all practical meaning, if it was not possible for judges to order their release. In the judges’ words, however, “the political branches have the exclusive power … to decide which aliens may, and which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.”

The second blow came last September (in another Kiyemba v. Obama case, identified as Kiyemba II), after the Uighurs’ lawyers asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider its opinion en banc (in other words, with all the judges ruling, instead of just a panel of three), and also sought assurances that the courts would be able to act if the government proposed sending their clients to countries where they faced the risk of torture. However, as I explained at the time:

[N]ot only did the court refuse to reconsider its ruling, but the judges also refused the Uighurs’ request for the court’s assistance “to prevent their transfer to a country where they are likely to be subjected to further detention or to torture,”, drawing on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, although “The Court held the district court had jurisdiction over the petitions,” it also ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

It is this narrow reading of Munaf that has particularly enraged those opposed to the Circuit Court’s resolute endorsement of executive power — and which at least caused some consternation last Friday to Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Essentially, though, the Circuit Court’s ruling in Kiyemba II dictates what happens to prisoners like Abdul Aziz Naji — and, presumably, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed — when the administration tires of trying to find new homes for them, and decides to subject them involuntarily to the Russian Roulette repatriation package that Abdul Aziz Naji received this week.

Although government officials told the Washington Post on Monday that they “will nonetheless continue to examine each case individually before any repatriation,” noting that some officials “have expressed some concern about returning one of the Algerians [Ahmed Belbacha] who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia” last year, for what his lawyers think was the crime of speaking out about his fears of repatriation, there now appears to be no obstacle to prevent the Obama administration from sending the other four Algerians home whenever it feels like it.

To discover that such shameless disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture has come not only from the Supreme Court, but also from the man who promised to close Guantánamo (but then failed to do so), and who also promised to uphold the absolute ban on torture (while refusing to prosecute anyone who authorized its use in the previous eight years), is depressing news indeed.

Note: With these releases, 178 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was recently approved. 594 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

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 Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

I learned about the ruling through a “Guantánamo Habeas Scorecard” maintained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, but although Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion is not yet available, to ascertain why he decided that the government had met its burden of proof in establishing that Khalifh was part of, or supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban, at least part of his story — and of the government’s allegations — can be found through publicly available documents, and through representations made on his behalf by his lawyer, Edmund Burke. Other information has been provided to me by the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who is aware of how Khalifh has been treated at Guantánamo over the last eight years.

As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, drawing on the publicly available information, Khalifh (or Abu Bakr) was seized during a series of house raids in Karachi, Pakistan in February 2002, which led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi, a Yemeni also identified as Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and more commonly known as Riyadh the Facilitator, and at least 15 other men. Sharqawi was subsequently rendered to Jordan, where he was tortured on behalf of the CIA, and the fruits of this torture were recently excluded as evidence in the habeas petition of another Guantánamo prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, as I explained in a recent article. Without access to the unclassified opinion, I have no idea whether the government alleged that Khalifh was seized with Sharqawi, although it is noticeable that Burke claimed that he was not, and it is also worth noting that the majority of the other men seized at this time have been released from Guantánamo.

In The Guantánamo Files, my analysis of Khalifh’s story was as follows:

It was claimed that he traveled to Afghanistan in 1998, that he was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was “known to assist Osama bin Laden in purchasing weapons,” that he was a military trainer for the LIFG, that he established a training camp in summer 2001, that he “was a military leader of Arabs,” who fought against the Northern Alliance near Taloqan, that he “met with Taliban leaders to plan military operations,” and that he and his group were directed to Tora Bora [where a showdown took place between al-Qaeda and the US in November and December 2001] by Osama bin Laden.

One of his lawyers, Edmund Burke, refuted all the allegations, however. He acknowledged that his client had been a member of the LIFG, and had worked for the Taliban as a mine cleaner until 1998, when his right leg was severely damaged by a land mine, but said that he spent the ensuing years moving from hospital to hospital in Afghanistan to receive treatment for his leg, which was eventually amputated. He added that he moved to Pakistan in 2001, and was living in a school for boys when it was raided by Pakistani police. Pointing out that his client “can’t bear his weight on his good leg and only hobbles about with the help of a walker or crutches,” he explained, “It’s very hard to imagine him as a combatant of any kind.”

In the government’s most recent allegations, it was noted that Khalifh had “worked overseeing Sudanese drivers for one of Osama bin Laden’s construction companies in Sudan,” had been “identified” as a trainer and the leader of a Libyan training camp near Kabul, visited by bin Laden, where he was “identified as someone whom others would approach to receive explosives training if they wanted to commit a terrorist attack,” had allegedly attended two other training camps in 1996-97, and had also been “identified” as “a military leader in charge of many Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other Gulf States while on the front line” in 2001, who, as alleged before, “would meet with other Taliban leaders to plan military operations.”

These sound like typically overblown assertions, based on dubious evidence produced by Khalifh’s fellow prisoners under duress, or as a result of bribery, or as a result of false confessions made by Khalifh himself, given that the other narrative identified by Burke — that he worked as a mine cleaner for the Taliban until he lost his leg — is also included, and suggests a much more humble role than the leadership role ascribed to him by the government’s unidentified witnesses.

Moreover, this conclusion is one endorsed by Omar Deghayes, who explained to me that Khalifh’s status has been exaggerated by the authorities in Guantánamo. “They call him ‘The General,’” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’”

Given that this information is unlikely to have been included in the documents compiled by the government for its response to Khalifh’s habeas corpus petition, it’s possible that Judge Robertson’s unclassified opinion will reveal only that Khalifh lost his habeas petition based solely on his work as a mine cleaner for the Taliban, which, under the detention standards decided by the courts, would be sufficient to justify his ongoing detention. If so, he will be yet another insignificant player in Afghanistan’s inter-Muslim civil war, which predated the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with international terrorism, who is consigned to oblivion in Guantánamo on an apparently legal basis, even though there is no logical justification for equating the Taliban’s military activities (whether before or after the 9/11 attacks) with acts of international terrorism committed by al-Qaeda. In addition, he will also be another victim of Guantánamo, whose hidden story of abuse and exploitation never even surfaces publicly to reveal darker truths about how the prison has operated.

(‘’)

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Uruknet, CounterCurrents and Eurasia Review.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. 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), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010).

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

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

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

The Uighur brothers released in Switzerland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Libyan refugee released in Georgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unprincipled obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo

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

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

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

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

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

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

As published exclusively on Truthout. Digg the original here.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 52 prisoners released from February 2009 to February 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain.