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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karama Khamisan (ISN 586, Yemen) Released August 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Padsha Wazir (ISN 631, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mamdouh Habib (ISN 661, Australia) Released January 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mohammed Anwarkurd (ISN 676, Iran) Released August 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hammad Gadallah (ISN 712, Sudan) Released July 2005

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

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

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

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

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

Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730, Maldives) Released March 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qalandar Shah (ISN 812, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Belmar (ISN 817, UK) Released January 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For nearly a decade,” the article explained, “the US has conducted a major cloak-and-missile campaign against al-Qaeda, teaming up with friendly Arab leaders to swap intelligence, interrogate suspects, train commandos or carry out military strikes from Morocco to Iraq … Now popular movements sweeping the region have knocked some counterterrorism allies from power, and left others too distracted or politically vulnerable to risk open cooperation with the US. Intelligence-sharing has already slowed in some areas as the US struggles to identify reliable counterparts in reshuffled governments.”

One official said, “It’s difficult to share information when you don’t know who the players are.”

The article also claimed, “The upheaval has upended US foreign policy in the region, with old friends shaken or gone and the allegiance of emerging leaders uncertain. The effects on counterterrorism efforts are one of the aftershocks that worry the intelligence community the most.”

Barnes and Embus also quoted government officials as telling them that they had “lost track of many former Guantánamo detainees who had been sent home to the Middle East and North Africa,” and that losing track of these former prisoners was “a sign that unrest in the region is disrupting critical terror-fighting relationships America has built up since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Why US intelligence officials’ statements to the Wall Street Journal are disturbing

There were problems with these claims that neither journalist picked up; namely, that the claim about “losing track” of former prisoners is, to put it bluntly, a lie, and also that the revolutionary “unrest” that has toppled the regimes of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt can legitimately be viewed not as “disrupting” what US intelligence agencies regard as “critical terror-fighting relationships” but as hugely popular revolutionary movements that have removed from power two hated dictators whose oppression of their people was only possible because they were backed by the US and by other Western countries.

For these home-grown revolutionary movements, the description of their hated dictators as “friendly Arab leaders,” with whom the United States was cosily involved in “swap[ping] intelligence” and “interrogat[ing] suspects,” will, if widely disseminated in the region, only reinforce the notion that America cannot be trusted. This is because one of the drivers of the revolutionary movement in Egypt was a thorough disgust at how the government’s “emergency powers,” enforced continually throughout Mubarak’s 30 years in power, underpinned an essentially unaccountable regime of torture prisons run by the state security services, and secretive courts handing down punitive sentences and laundering information derived through the use of torture, without anything resembling due process. Similar complaints also drove the Tunisian uprising, which lit the spark of revolution throughout the Middle East in the first place.

The tension between America’s perceived security needs and the desires of the people of the Middle East was clearly recognized in the Wall Street Journal article, which noted, “Publicly, the Obama administration has embraced the democratic tide, arguing that political freedoms will diminish the standing of al-Qaeda in the Middle East and beyond,” and quoting defense secretary Robert Gates stating that “the pro-democracy protests ‘give the lie’ to al-Qaeda’s message that change is possible only through violence,” and that they “are an extraordinary setback for al-Qaeda.”

This ought to be the key message that America takes from the upheavals sweeping the Middle East, although the Wall Street Journal also noted, “Privately, counterterrorism officials in the US and Europe are watching the sweeping changes with a mixture of alarm and dread,” worried about Yemen, long regarded as a dangerously unstable nation, and also “worried that the level of cooperation from security services in Tunisia and Egypt, longtime partners, will decline as new leaders distance themselves from past abuses.”

It should also be noted that, when Robert Gates referred to the pro-democracy movements giving the lie to al-Qaeda’s message that “change is only possible through violence,” he ought to have reflected that the same message should apply equally to the US. Such an epiphany seems unlikely, but although this places America in an unusual position with regard to the bigger picture of the upheavals in the region — largely confined to watching as people’s movements take the initiative themselves — on other details, such as claims about the value of America’s relationship with regimes notorious for their use of torture, and the significance of prisoners released from Guantánamo, it is more than possible to refute claims that seek to suggest that the crimes, mistakes and distortions of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” are in any way justified.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Egypt or Tunisia

In the first instance, to thoroughly undermine the claim that the US government is “losing track” of former prisoners — and to demonstrate that this encounter between the Wall Street Journal and US intelligence was therefore something of a propaganda construct — it is only necessary to consider that, in the only countries where “unrest” has toppled dictators — Tunisia and Egypt — only four former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and none of them are even remotely involved in anything to do with terrorism.

In Egypt, one of the two men is Sami El-Laithi (aka El-Leithi, and spelled Allaithy by the US authorities). Now 55 years old, he had been teaching at the University of Kabul when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, and, like many hundreds of others, he was seized and sent to Guantánamo after escaping to Pakistan. Unlike any other Guantánamo prisoner, however, El-Laithi was so brutally set upon by guards in Guantánamo one evening that they broke his spine, and he has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Returned to Egypt on October 1, 2005, he was then held by Egypt’s state security agency at a special prison section in Cairo’s El-Qasr Al-Eini Hospital, and has stated his belief that, had he not been physically handicapped, he would not have been released. Now largely confined to his home village, outside Cairo, he is neither a threat nor an unknown quantity.

Had El-Laithi not been crippled, his thoughts about how he would not have been released from Egyptian custody reflect what happened to Reda Fadel El-Weleli (identified in Guantánamo as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli), the first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt, who arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared. In October 2009, Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, complained that, after a visit to Egypt in April 2009, he “regrets that the Government of Egypt did not reply to his questions on the fate of … El-Weleli,” although I was later told that UN representatives finally succeeded in tracking him down, and that he was a broken figure, and very obviously a threat to nobody, who explained that, after his return from Guantánamo, he had been held and tortured in a secret prison in Egypt for three and a half years.

In Tunisia, the US government also knows the whereabouts of the two men it transferred to Tunisian custody in June 2007, who, it should be noted, had been cleared for release by a military review board convened under President Bush. Until very recently, both were in prison, having been imprisoned after show trials on their return, despite the signing of a “diplomatic assurance” between the US government and President Ben Ali, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated fairly when repatriated.

One of the two, Lotfi Lagha, was freed after his three-year sentence came to an end last year, and the other, Abdallah Hajji, was freed in February this year after the flight of Ben Ali. The eight-year sentence he had been given in 2007 was overturned, amidst the recognition that he had never been involved in any kind of terrorism, and was, instead, a member of Ennahdha, the Islamic opposition group, banned by Ben Ali, whose members were conveniently labeled as terrorists during the “War on Terror.” Both men can easily be found in Tunisia, as a former exiled political opponent of the regime, Fathi Messaoudi, explained to me when I met him a few days ago.

Having recently returned to Tunisia for the first time in 20 years, Messaoudi, a charismatic blind man who was regarded as such a threat by Ben Ali that he had been given a 75-year prison sentence by the former regime, told me that he met Abdallah Hajji and that, although he relished his freedom, he too was a broken man, and had been haunted, since his imprisonment on his return to Tunisia, by threats that his wife and daughters would be brought before him by the secret police and raped.

Why America’s intelligence services still love arbitrary detention and torture

In addition, another intention regarding the US claims about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt appears to be to cast doubts on the security of both countries following their popular revolutions and the flight of their dictators. This, too, is groundless, and is nothing more than scaremongering, because, although there are policing problems in Tunisia, the country is ruled by an interim government that consists primarily of Ben Ali’s former colleagues (in other words, America’s long-standing allies in the region). Similarly, in Egypt, the interim government — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces — consists of Mubarak’s former colleagues, even though, in the end, the army’s senior generals chose to seize power themselves rather than entrusting it to Hosni Mubarak’s chosen successor, Omar Suleiman.

As was noted before Mubarak’s fall, if there was to be meaningful change in Egypt, it could not involve Suleiman, the former spy chief who not only symbolized the brutality of Egypt’s police state to its own citizens, but was also central to the key role played by Egypt as a partner in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” personally overseeing the brutal torture of terror suspects seized by the CIA, including the Australian Mamdouh Habib, the Pakistani scholar Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, and the Libyan Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan. Under torture — almost certainly at Suleiman’s hands — al-Libi falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a tortured lie that, although retracted by al-Libi (who was later returned to Libya and a suspicious death by “suicide” in 2009), was used by the Bush administration to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was persuaded to use it in a key presentation to the United Nations the month before.

Even so, positive perceptions of Omar Suleiman and Hosni Mubarak are at the heart of the US intelligence officials’ complaints about the changing political landscape in the Middle East. “Obviously, our most important relationship over the last decade has been Egypt,” a senior US intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal. “And clearly that is in line for significant change. We won’t re-create the relationship we had with Mubarak.”

Examining the importance of that relationship, the article proceeded to mention — with obvious approval — how, “Before this year’s revolts, the secret police in authoritarian countries like Egypt and Tunisia had far more leeway than the US and its European allies to hold detainees indefinitely and use interrogation methods widely regarded by human-rights groups as torture to try to extract information,” and that the Egyptian government also “secretly held and interrogated Islamist militants who had been captured by the CIA and the US military under a practice known as rendition, widely condemned by human-rights groups.”

Remove the careful caveats from the sentences above, and what you have is a clear statement that the US and at least some of its Western allies enjoyed the fact that, under Hosni Mubarak, prisoners could be kidnapped anywhere in the world and rendered to Egypt, where they could be detained indefinitely and tortured — and it is, to be honest, rather disturbing to be hearing US officials stating so openly, in 2011, how they wish that torture was still something they could use.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Libya or Yemen

With the US intelligence services’ love of torture exposed, and the misinformation about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt debunked, it is clear that the central premises of the Wall Street Journal article — that former Guantánamo prisoners, unmonitored, are on the loose in the Middle East, and that the governments responsible for monitoring them have either been toppled or are too distracted by their own revolutionary movements — do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Moreover, looking at countries other than Tunisia and Egypt, similar problems can be perceived. The article, for example, also specifically mentioned Libya and Yemen. “The flow of information from Libya, Yemen and other governments in the region about the whereabouts and activities of the former Guantánamo detainees, along with other Islamists released from local prisons, has slowed or even stopped,” officials told the Wall Street Journal, adding that “they fear that former detainees will re-join al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups.”

Again, on close inspection, what is portrayed as a problem engendered by the revolutionary movements spreading across the Middle East, and also as one on a significant scale, is easily dismissed when the facts are introduced. In Libya, for example, where, rather terrifyingly, the counterterrorism relationship between the US and Gaddafi, another blatant torturer, was described by a senior US official as “especially productive,” only two former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and as I explained in a recent article, “Deranged Gaddafi Blames Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners for Unrest in Libya, Even Though Only One Ex-Prisoner Has Been Released,” one of these men is still imprisoned in Tripoli, and the other, freed last summer, is verifiably not involved in any al-Qaeda activities. Nor, outside of wild claims by Colonel Gaddafi, has there been any serious suggestion that al-Qaeda, as such, is involved in the Libyan people’s uprising against their hated dictator, which, as elsewhere, is led primarily by young people rather than religious organizations, and supported by trade unionists and intellectuals.

With this in mind, it is noticeable that the Wall Street Journal‘s commentary on the Guantánamo prisoners repatriated to Libya was nothing more than a succession of errors. “In Libya, the US has been completely cut off,” the article claimed, citing an Obama administration official stating, “It’s dead with Gaddafi. We don’t know the status of the people [the returned prisoners].” The article then falsely claimed that both men had been returned in 2006, when one was returned in October 2007, and although it was correctly stated that, since their return, “US officials have paid multiple visits to the men in Libyan prisons,” it was, again, mistaken to suggest that, “once the uprising in Libya boiled over into a full-blown rebellion and the US called for Col. Moammar Gaddafi to step down, American officials lost track of the two men,” because, as indicated above, one remains in prison, and the other can easily be traced, and is very clearly no threat to anyone — as the Americans realized when they released him in 2007.

Similarly, in Yemen, the explicit claims made in the article that “US and European officials are increasingly concerned that former Guantánamo detainees are no longer under much, if any, government surveillance” is, fundamentally, nothing more than unjustifiable scaremongering. The authorities may well be concerned because they have, according to the article, “detected an uptick in activity by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” with a senior counterterrorism official claiming that “the group is ‘very actively’ plotting new strikes against the US during the lull in American and Yemeni counterterrorism operations” caused by the revolutionary upheavals in Yemen in the last two months.

However, this has nothing to do with the prisoners released from Guantánamo. According to US intelligence, a handful of Saudi ex-prisoners released by President Bush have been involved in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but only one Yemeni ex-prisoner — Hani Abdo Shaalan (aka Hani Abdu Shu’alan), released in June 2007 and apparently killed by Yemeni security forces in December 2009.

To get the Yemeni story in perspective, only 23 Yemeni prisoners have ever been released from Guantánamo, and in the last 15 months, just one Yemeni — Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized by mistake while visiting other students in a university dormitory in Pakistan, who won his habeas corpus petition — has been freed.

Of the other 89 Yemenis still held in Guantánamo, 58 were cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the Guantánamo cases throughout 2009, but they are still held because of an ongoing and open-ended moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, which was announced by President Obama in January 2010, after it was claimed that the failed plane bomber on Christmas Day 2009, the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Of the prisoners returned to Yemen, it is not actually difficult to establish that the overwhelming majority of them can be located easily, and are trying, with varying degrees of success, to rebuild their shattered lives. I recently, for example, spoke to David Remes, the attorney for several of the released prisoners, who told me about his recent meetings with them on a visit to Yemen, and updated me about their working lives, their hopes and aspirations, and their families.

Behind the headline-grabbing fears, this is the norm for Yemenis returned from Guantánamo, and the biggest problem Yemen causes to the US, when it comes to Guantánamo, is not those who have been released, but those who have not, because clearing men for release, and then not releasing them because of the perceived threat of terrorism from Yemen in general, tars the entire Yemeni population as terrorist sympathizers, and is, essentially, “guilt by nationality,” which is a deep insult to the Yemeni people, and a guaranteed basis for ill-feeling. In addition, as I have been explaining all year, it makes those held into political prisoners, no longer held because of any just or judicial process, but because of the whims of an unaccountable government.

If the US should draw one obvious lesson from what is happening throughout the Middle East, it ought to be that it is time for the paranoia and state-sanctioned violence of the “War on Terror” to be brought to an end. After all, Islamist militants have been conspicuously absent during the upheavals, which have been led primarily by young people, and the Islamic groups who have appeared have shown themselves willing to take part in the democratic process.

Nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks, there is now an historic opportunity for the US to recognize that it is time to move on from a decade dominated by the lawlessness and brutality of al-Qaeda, and the lawlessness and brutality with which America responded, and to learn a lesson from the revolutionaries of the Middle East — that living in hope is far better than living in fear.

POSTSCRIPT April 3: A misleading article in the Wall Street Journal has focused on the role played in the resistance to Gaddafi by former opponents with alleged ties to al-Qaeda; specifically, Sufyan Ben Qumu (aka Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu), the former Guantánamo prisoner who was freed from Libyan custody last year, after returning to Libya in 2007 and being subsequently imprisoned. Described by the Wall Street Journal as “training many of the city’s rebel recruits [in Darna],” which may be true, but sounds like an attempt to beef up a suggestion that he has volunteered to join the resistance to Gaddafi, it was also claimed that he was a “Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan,” whereas, as I explained in a recent article:

[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 … 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.

Please note that no evidence was ever produced to establish that al-Wafa was “an al-Qaeda linked charity,” as the Wall Street Journal suggested so casually, and everyone connected with the organization, including al-Matrafi, was released from Guantánamo.

Fathi Messaoudi, the Tunisian dissident mentioned above, also told me that I was incorrect in describing Abdallah Hajji, the former Guantánamo prisoner freed in Tunisia following Ben Ali’s fall (after serving over three years of a sentence he was given after a show trial on his return in 2007), as a member of Ennahdha, even though that has been reported widely for many years. According to Messaoudi, Ennahdha members sought refuge in European countries, and none of them traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan like other opponents of the regime.

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 the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Jessen and Mitchell did this by taking torture techniques taught in US military schools to train US military personnel to resist torture if captured (the program known as SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), and reverse engineering them for use in the real-life interrogations of alleged terror suspects. And as the article lays out in clear detail for the first time, the purpose was not just to obtain intelligence, as was always asserted in public by senior officials: “Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to ‘exploit’ detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to ‘collaborate’ with government authorities.”

Jessen’s role in the torture program — and the disgraceful way in which his and Mitchell’s actions went against the advice of most of their colleagues, and were viewed by many as a fundamental betrayal of their professional responsibilities — have been previously established over several years, and are spelled out most clearly in a detailed report on detainee treatment that was issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee in December 2008 (PDF). This devastating document, which lays out a clear chronology explaining how the torture prgram was introduced, and how all dissenting voices were sidelined or silenced or ignored, ought to have provided much of the evidence for the prosecution of George W. Bush and other senior officials in his administration for authorizing the use of torture, had there been the will to do so.

However, as we now know to our disappointment — and to America’s undying shame — there was no political will to pursue those in the Bush adminstration who did all they could to drag America down to the level of the most vilified human rights abusers on earth, and there is still no political will today, with the result that, in those parts of the country and of the American psyche that have been infected by the unchallenged sins of the torturers, the prevailing view of America and its role in the world is now even more feral and cruel than it was under George W. Bush.

Although much of Jessen’s story has been exposed before, Leopold and Kaye shine new light on it through the central involvement in their exposé of retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a former friend and colleague of Jessen’s who “said he decided to come forward” because he was “outraged that Jessen used their work to help design the Bush administration’s torture program.” In September 2009, Capt. Kearns stumbled upon documents prepared by Jessen 20 years ago, and, as a result, was physically sick when he realized how his former colleague had paved the way for the torture program that, after 9/11, he implemented with James Mitchell, infecting the whole of the United States’ detention policies, from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from Guantánamo to the CIA’s secret prisons, with the “dark side” of the SERE program, reverse engineered and brought to inappropriate life in real-life situations.

I had the pleasure to meet Capt. Kearns and to get to know him over several days last October in Berkeley, where I was a special guest of the organizers of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and, as well as finding him to be a very sympathetic character, it was also impossible not to be struck by the intensity with which he regarded Jessen’s betrayal of the SERE program, turning something that was designed to prevent harm to US soldiers in the field into something completely different — a template for the torture of foreign prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

As he explained to Leopold and Kaye, Jessen’s template for the “full exploitation” of prisoners, rather than just their interrogation, was designed to be used for propaganda purposes, “or other needs [of] the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents.” As he added, “Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

After talking to Capt. Kearns in October, it became apparent — as is also emphasized in Leopold and Kaye’s article — that what Jessen (and Mitchell) did was not only to reverse engineer the techniques for use in the real world, but also to reverse engineer the program’s intent, turning its practioners from careful advisors, trying to mitigate the effects of torture on US personnel, into actual torturers, indistinguishable from the foreign torturers aganst whom the SERE program was designed as a protection. As Capt. Kearns says at the end of Leopold and Kaye’s excellent article, cross-posted below, “Bruce Jessen knew better. His duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life.”

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program
By Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, March 22, 2011

Dr. Bruce Jessen’s handwritten notes describe some of the torture techniques that were used to “exploit” ”war on terror” detainees in custody of the CIA and Department of Defense.

Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.

Indeed, a report released in 2009 by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the treatment of detainees in US custody said Jessen was the author of a “Draft Exploitation Plan” presented to the Pentagon in April 2002 that was implemented  at Guantánamo and at prison facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. But to what degree is unknown because the document remains classified. Jessen also co-authored a memo in February 2002 on “Prisoner Handling Recommendations” at Guantánamo, which is also classified.

Moreover, the Armed Services Committee’s report noted that torture techniques approved by the Bush administration were based on survival training exercises US military personnel were taught by individuals like Jessen if they were captured by an enemy regime and subjected to “illegal exploitation” in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Jessen’s notes, prepared for an Air Force survival training course that he later “reverse engineered” when he helped design the Bush administration’s torture program, however, go into far greater detail than the Armed Services Committee’s report in explaining how prisoners would be broken down physically and psychologically by their captors. The notes say survival training students could “combat interrogation and torture” if they are captured by an enemy regime by undergoing intense training exercises, using “cognitive” and “exposure techniques” to develop “stress inoculation.” [Click here to download a PDF file of Jessen's handwritten notes. Click here to download a zip file of Jessen's notes in typewritten form.]

The documents stand as the first piece of hard evidence to surface in nine years that further explains the psychological aspects of the Bush administration’s torture program and the rationale for subjecting detainees to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a “master” SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).

Kearns and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence’s Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns, who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in the number of new survival training courses being taught and “the fact that it required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis.”

“Special Mission Units”

Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on “a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation.”

The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen’s notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, “Psychological Aspects of Detention.”

Special mission units fall under the guise of the DoD’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and engage in a wide-range of highly classified counterterrorist and covert operations, or “special missions,” around the world, hundreds of whom were personally trained by Kearns. The SV-91 course Jessen and Kearns were developing back in 1989 would later become known as “Special Survival for Special Mission Units.”

Before the inception of SV-91, the primary SERE course was SV-80, or Basic Combat Survival School for Resistance to Interrogation, which is where Jessen formerly worked. When Jessen was hired to work on SV-91, the vacancy at SV-80 was filled by psychologist Dr. James Mitchell, who was also contracted by the CIA to work at the agency’s top-secret black site prisons in Europe employing SERE torture techniques, such as the controlled drowning technique know as waterboarding, against detainees.

While they were still under contract to the CIA, the two men formed the “consulting” firm Mitchell, Jessen & Associates in March 2005. The “governing persons” of the company included Kearns’ former boss, Aldrich, SERE contractor David Tate, Joseph Matarazzo, a former president of the American Psychological Association and Randall Spivey, the ex-chief of Operations, Policy and Oversight Division of JPRA.

Mitchell, Jessen & Associates’ articles of incorporation have been “inactive” since October 22, 2009 and the business is now listed as “dissolved,” according to Washington state’s Secretary of State website.

Lifting the “Veil of Secrecy”

Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written by Aldrich, who nominated Kearns officer of the year.

He said he decided to come forward because he is outraged that Jessen used their work to help design the Bush administration’s torture program.

“I think it’s about time for SERE to come out from behind the veil of secrecy if we are to progress as a moral nation of laws,” Kearns said during a wide-ranging interview with Truthout. “To take this survival training program and turn it into some form of nationally sanctioned, purposeful program for the extraction of information, or to apply exploitation, is in total contradiction to human morality, and defies basic logic. When I first learned about interrogation, at basic intelligence training school, I read about Hans Scharff, a Nazi interrogator who later wrote an article for Argosy Magazine titled ‘Without Torture.’ That’s what I was taught — torture doesn’t work.”

What stands out in Jessen’s notes is that he believed torture was often used to produce false confessions. That was the end result after one high-value detainee who was tortured in early 2002 confessed to having information proving a link between the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, according to one former Bush administration official.

It was later revealed, however, that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had simply provided his captors a false confession so they would stop torturing him. Jessen appeared to be concerned with protecting the US military against falling victim to this exact kind of physical and psychological pressure in a hostile detention environment, recognizing that it would lead to, among other things, false confessions.

In a paper Jessen wrote accompanying his notes, “Psychological Advances in Training to Survive Captivity, Interrogation and Torture,” which was prepared for the symposium: “Advances in Clinical Psychological Support of National Security Affairs, Operational Problems in the Behavioral Sciences Course,” he suggested that additional “research” should be undertaken to determine “the measurability of optimum stress levels in training students to resist captivity.”

“The avenues appear inexhaustible” for further research in human exploitation, Jessen wrote.

Such “research” appears to have been the main underpinning of the Bush administration’s torture program. The experimental nature of these interrogation methods used on detainees held at Guantánamo and at CIA black site prisons have been noted by military and intelligence officials. The Armed Services Committee report cited a statement from Col. Britt Mallow, the commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), who noted that Guantánamo officials Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller used the term “battle lab” to describe the facility, meaning “that interrogations and other procedures there were to some degree experimental, and their lessons would benefit [the Department of Defense] in other places.”

What remains a mystery is why Jessen took a defensive survival training course and helped turn it into an offensive torture program.

Truthout attempted to reach Jessen over the past two months for comment, but we were unable to track him down. Messages left for him at a security firm in Alexandria, Virginia he has been affiliated with were not returned and phone numbers listed for him in Spokane were disconnected.

A New Emphasis on Terrorism

SV-91 was developed to place a new emphasis on terrorism as SERE-related courses pertaining to the cold war, such as SV-83, Special Survival for Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations (SRO), whose students flew secret missions over the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, and other communist countries, were being scaled back.

SSTP evolved into the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), the DoD’s executive agency for SERE training, and was tapped by DoD General Counsel William “Jim” Haynes in 2002 to provide the agency with a list of interrogation techniques and the psychological impact those methods had on SERE trainees, with the aim of utilizing the same methods for use on detainees. Aldrich was working in a senior capacity at JPRA when Haynes contacted the agency to inquire about SERE.

The Army also runs a SERE school as does the Navy, which had utilized waterboarding as a training exercise on Navy SERE students that JPRA recommended to DoD as one of the torture techniques to use on high-value detainees.

Kearns said the value of Jessen’s notes, particularly as they relate to the psychological aspects of the Bush administration’s torture program, cannot be overstated.

“The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered — not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation.

“And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

Ironically, in late 2001, while the DoD started to make inquiries about adapting SERE methods for the government’s interrogation program, Kearns received special permission from the US government to work as an intelligence officer for the Australian Department of Defence to teach the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) how to use SERE techniques to resist interrogation and torture if they were captured by terrorists. Australia had been a staunch supporter of the invasion of Afghanistan and sent troops there in late 2001.

Kearns, who recently waged an unsuccessful Congressional campaign in Colorado, was working on a spy novel two years ago and dug through boxes of “unclassified historical materials on intelligence” as part of his research when he happened to stumble upon Jessen’s notes for SV-91. He said he was “deeply shocked and surprised to see I’d kept a copy of these handwritten notes as certainly the originals would have been destroyed (shredded)” once they were typed up and made into proper course materials.

“I hadn’t seen these notes for over twenty years,” he said. “However, I’ll never forget that day in September 2009 when I discovered them. I instantly felt sick, and eventually vomited because I felt so badly physically and emotionally that day knowing that I worked with this person and this was the material that I believe was ‘reverse-engineered’ and used in part to design the torture program. When I found the Jessen papers, I made several copies and sent them to my friends as I thought this could be the smoking gun, which proves who knew what and when and possibly who sold a bag of rotten apples to the Bush administration.”

Kearns was, however, aware of the role SERE played in the torture program before he found Jessen’s notes, and in July 2008, he sent an email to the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, who was investigating the issue and offered to share information with Levin about Jessen and the SERE program in general. The Michigan Democrat responded to Kearns saying he was “concerned about this issue” and that he “needed more information on the subject,” but Levin never followed up when Kearns offered to help.

“I don’t know how it went off the tracks, but the names of the people who testified at the Senate Armed Services, Senate Judiciary, and Select Intelligence committees were people I worked with, and several I supervised,” Kearns said. “It makes me sick to know people who knew better allowed this to happen.”

Levin’s office did not return phone calls or emails for comment. However, the report he released in April 2009, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody,” refers to SV-91. The report includes a list of acronyms used throughout the report, one of which is “S-V91,” identified as “the Department of Defense High Risk Survival Training” course. But there is no other mention throughout the report of SV-91 or the term “High Risk Survival Training,” possibly due to the fact that sections of the report where it is discussed remain classified. Still, the failure by Levin and his staff to follow up with Kearns — the key military official who had retained Jessen’s notes and helped develop the very course those notes were based upon that was cited in the report — suggests Levin’s investigation is somewhat incomplete.

Control and Dependence

A copy of the syllabus for SV-91, obtained by Truthout from another source who requested anonymity, states that the class was created “to provide special training for selected individuals that will enable them to withstand exploitation methods in the event of capture during peacetime operations … to cope with such exploitation and deny their detainers useable information or propaganda.”

Although the syllabus focuses on propaganda and interrogation for information as the primary means of exploiting prisoners, Jessen’s notes amplify what was taught to SERE students and later used against detainees captured after 9/11 . He wrote that a prisoner’s captors seek to “exploit” the prisoner through control and dependence.

“From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer’s goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION,” Jessen wrote. “Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc.) … Your detainer wants you to feel ‘EVERYTHING’ is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind.”

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the “end goal” of the detainer, who wants the detainee “to see that [the detainer] has ‘total’ control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.).”

Jessen described the kinds of pressures that would be exerted on the prisoner to achieve this goal, including “fear of the unknown, loss of control, dehumanization, isolation,” and use of sensory deprivation and sensory “flooding.” He also included “physical” deprivations in his list of detainer “pressures.”

“Unlike everyday experiences, however, as a detainee we could be subjected to stressors/coercive pressures which we cannot completely control,” he wrote. “If these stressors are manipulated and increased against us, the cumulative effect can push us out of the optimum range of functioning. This is what the detainer wants, to get us ‘off balance.’”

“The Detainer wants us to experience a loss of composure in hopes we can be manipulated into some kind of collaboration …” Jessen wrote. “This is where you are most vulnerable to exploitation. This is where you are most likely to make mistakes, show emotions, act impulsively, become discouraged, etc. You are still close enough to being intact that you would appear convincing and your behavior would appear ‘uncoerced.’”

Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the  Bush administration’s torture program, Jessen clearly “reverse-engieered” his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse “war on terror” detainees.

The SSTP course was “specifically and intentionally designed to assist American personnel held in hostile detention,” Kearns said. It was “not designed for interrogation, and certainly not torture. We were not interrogators; we were ‘role-players’ who introduced enemy exploitation techniques into survival scenarios as student learning objectives in what could be called Socratic-style dilemma settings. More specifically, resistance techniques were learned via significant emotional experiences, which were intended to inculcate long-term valid and reliable survival routines in the student’s memory. The one rule we had was ‘hands off.’ No (human intelligence) operator could lay hands on a student in a ‘role play scenario’ because we knew they could never ‘go there’ in the real world.”

But after Jessen was hired, Kearns contends, Aldrich immediately trained him to become a mock interrogator using “SERE harsh resistance to interrogation methods even though medical services officers were explicitly excluded from the ‘laying on’ of hands in [resistance] ‘role-play’ scenarios.”

Aldrich, who now works with the Center for Personal Protection & Safety in Spokane, did not return calls for comment.

“Torture Paper”

The companion paper Jessen included with his notes, which was also provided to Truthout by Kearns, eerily describes the same torturous interrogation methods US military personnel would face during detention that Jessen and Mitchell “reverse engineered” a little more than a decade later and that the CIA and DoD used against detainees.

Indeed, in a subsection of the paper, “Understanding the Prisoner of War Environment,” Jessen notes how a prisoner will be broken down in an attempt to get him to “collaborate” with his “detainer.”

“This issue of collaboration is ‘the most prominent deliberately controlled force against the (prisoner of war),” Jessen wrote. “The ability of the (prisoner of war) to successfully resist collaboration and cope with the obviously severe approach-avoidance conflict is complicated in a systematic and calculated way by his captors.

“These complications include: Threats of death, physical pressures including torture which result in psychological disturbances or deterioration, inadequate diet and sanitary facilities with constant debilitation and illness, attacks on the mental health via isolation, reinforcement of anxieties, sleeplessness, stimulus deprivation or flooding, disorientation, loss of control both internal and external locus, direct and indirect attack on the (prisoner of war’s) standards of honor, faith in himself, his organization, family, country, religion, or political beliefs … Few seem to be able to hold themselves completely immune to such rigorous behavior throughout all the vicissitudes of long captivity. Confronted with these conditions, the unprepared prisoner of war experiences unmanageable levels of fear and despair.”

“Specific (torture resistance) techniques,” Jessen wrote, “taught to and implemented by the military member in the prisoner of war setting are classified” and were not discussed in the paper he wrote. He added, “Resistance Training students must leave training with useful resistance skills and a clear understanding that they can successfully resist captivity, interrogation or torture.”

Kearns also declined to cite the specific interrogation techniques used during SERE training exercises because that information is still classified. Nor would he comment as to whether the interrogations used methods that matched or were similar to those identified in the August 2002 torture memo prepared by former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

However, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee report, “SERE resistance training … was used to inform” Yoo and Bybee’s torture memo, specifically, nearly a dozen of the brutal techniques detainees were subjected to, which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, wall slamming and placing detainees in a confined space, such as a container, where his movement is restricted. The CIA’s Office of Technical Services told Yoo and Bybee the SERE techniques used to inform the torture memo were not harmful, according to declassified government documents.

Many of the “complications,” or torture techniques Jessen wrote about, declassified government documents show, became a standard method of interrogation and torture used against all of the high-value detainees in custody of the CIA in early 2002, including Abu Zubaydah and self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as well as detainees held at Guantánamo and prison facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The issue of “collaborating” with one’s detainer, which Jessen noted was the most important in terms of controlling a prisoner, is a common theme among the stories of detainees who were tortured and later released from Guantánamo.

For example, Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen who was rendered to Egypt and other countries where he was tortured before being sent to Guantánamo, wrote in his memoir, My Story: the Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, after he was released without charge, that interrogators at Guantánamo “tried to make detainees mistrust one another so that they would inform on each other during interrogation.”

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British citizen, who the US rendered to a black site prison in Morocco, said that a British intelligence informant, a person he knew and who was recurited, came to him in his Moroccan cell and told him that if he became an intelligence asset for the British, his torture, which included scalpel cuts to his penis, would end. In [February 2010], British government officials released documents that show Mohamed was subjected to SERE torture techniques during his captivity in the spring of 2002.

Abdul Aziz Naji, an Algerian prisoner at Guantánamo until he was forcibly repatriated against his wishes to Algeria in July 2010, told an Algerian newspaper that “some detainees had been promised to be granted political asylum opportunity in exchange of [sic] a spying role within the detention camp.”

Mohamedou Ould Salahi, whose surname is sometimes spelled “Slahi,” is a Mauritanian who was tortured in Jordan and Guantánamo. Investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported that Salahi was subjected to “prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, death threats, and threats that his mother would be brought to Guantánamo and gang-raped” unless he collaborated with his interrogators. Salahi finally decided to become an informant for the US in 2003. As a result, Salahi was allowed to live in a special fenced-in compound, with television and refrigerator, allowed to garden, write and paint, “separated from other detainees in a cocoon designed to reward and protect.”

Still, despite collaborating with his detainers, the US government mounted a vigorous defense against Salahi’s petition for habeas corpus. His case continues to hang in legal limbo. Salahi’s fate speaks to the lesson Habib said he learned at Guantánamo: “you could never satisfy your interrogator.” Habib felt informants were never released “because the Americans used them against the other detainees.”

Jessen’s and Mitchell’s mutimillion dollar government contract was terminated by CIA Director Leon Panetta in 2009. According to an Associated Press report, the CIA agreed to pay — to the tune of $5 million — the legal bills incurred by their consulting firm.

Recently a complaint filed against Mitchell with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists by a San Antonio-based psychologist, an attorney who defended three suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantánamo and by Zubaydah’s attorney Joseph Margulies. Their complaint sought to strip Mitchell of his license to practice psychology for violating the board’s rules as a result of the hands-on role he played in torturing detainees, was dismissed due to what the board said was a lack of evidence. Mitchell, who lives in Florida, is licensed in Texas. A similar complaint against Jessen may soon be filed in Idaho, where he is licensed to practice psychology.

Kearns, who took a graduate course in cognitive psychotherapy in 1988 taught by Jessen, still can’t comprehend what motivated his former colleague to turn to the “dark side.”

“Bruce Jessen knew better,” Kearns said, who retired in 1991 and is now working on his Ph.D in educational psychology. “His duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life.”

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.

I very much hope that this is the case, and that Suleiman will not try to keep control himself, as he is, if anything, an even more hated and hateful figure than the 82-year old Mubarak, as was explained today in a timely article in The Australian. In the article, Mamdouh Habib, the former Guantánamo prisoner who received a financial settlement from the Australian government last year for its role in rendering him to Egypt, where he was tortured prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, forcefully reminded the world why any transfer of power to Omar Suleiman would be disastrous for the people’s revolution, which must continue to call for nothing less than the removal of every aspect of Mubarak regime from the corridors of power.

As Egypt’s intelligence chief, Suleiman’s crucial role in torture has been exposed by a handful of perceptive journalists, who have pointed out — ever since Mubarak appointed him as Vice President — that he was in charge of the torture regime that has terrified Egyptians throughout Mubarak’s 30-year reign, and that, in addition, played a major role in radicalizing the Islamists who went on to form the core of al-Qaeda.

As has also been noted, and as I explained in my articles Revolution in Egypt – and the Hypocrisy of the US and the West and As Egyptians Call for Mubarak’s Fall, He Appoints America’s Favorite Torturer as Vice President (in which I cross-posted an analysis of Suleiman’s torture history by Stephen Soldz), Suleiman played a crucial role in the unholy alliance between Egypt and the United States in the “War on Terror,” when an unknown number of prisoners, seized by the Americans, were rendered for torture in Egypt.

It has not yet been confirmed that Suleiman was personally involved in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who falsely confessed, under torture, that al-Qaeda was discussing the use of chemical and biological weapons with Saddam Hussein, but in 2006, the author Ron Suskind, in his book The One Percent Doctrine (which also first exposed the US government’s false claims about the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah), stated that Suleiman was directly involved in his torture, and it seems likely, given that Mamdouh Habib has stated that Suleiman was responsible for personally overseeing his own torture.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, as Suleiman, described by a former senior US intelligence official as having a “close and continuing” relationship with the CIA, would therefore be directly implicated in one of the most monstrous lies of the “War on Teror,” in which, whether by accident, or, more likely, by design, torture was deliberately inflicted not to protect the US and its allies from further terrorist attacks, but to provide a justification for the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi, who was eventually returned to Libya, where he died in mysterious circumstances in May 2009, later recanted his tortured lies about the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but not before Colin Powell had presented the fruits of his torture as evidence of the need to invade Iraq during a crucial presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

Mamdouh Habib, who was kidnapped from a bus in Pakistan in October 2001, and suspected of involvement in terrorism because he had allegedly been in contact with supporters of the jailed Egyptian terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) was also tortured (subjected to electric shocks, nearly drowned, beaten, and hung from metal hooks) until he made a false confession — in his case, that he had personally trained some of the 9/11 hijackers. Although this lie was also patently untrue, the Bush administration was prepared to put him on trial at Guantánamo until Dana Priest and Dan Eggen of the Washington Post revealed the story of his torture in January 2005, and he was immediately released.

Speaking to the Australian, Habib explained that “it would be a disgrace if Mr. Suleiman became leader of Egypt given his personal role in overseeing the torture of terror suspects” from the mid-1990s onwards, when, under President Clinton, the US first started sending kidnapped terror suspects to Egypt, to be tortured. disappeared and/or tried and executed. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer described how the program began — and how crucial Suleiman was to its development:

Each rendition was authorised at the very top levels of both governments … The long-serving chief of the Egyptian central intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman, negotiated directly with top [CIA] officials. [Former US Ambassador to Egypt Edward] Walker described the Egyptian counterpart, Suleiman, as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognisant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way.”

Technically, US law required the CIA to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the EGIS [the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, or Mukhabarat el-Aama], such assurances were considered close to worthless. As Michael Scheuer, a former CIA officer [and head of the al-Qaeda desk], who helped set up the practise of rendition, later testified, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Reinforcing these claims, Mamdouh Habib told the Australian, “This guy is an agent for the United States and the CIA. If Australia supports Suleiman, they are supporting torture and crime.” As the Australian described it, Habib said that, after he was rendered to Egypt, “Mr Suleiman helped torture him,” and explained that, in his book, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, Habib “wrote that Mr. Suleiman had often been present during his interrogations.”

The following passages are taken from the article in the Australian:

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

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

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

They had taken Mr Habib to another room and then Mr Suleiman had said: “Now you are going to tell me that you planned a terrorist attack. I give you my word you will be a rich man if you tell me you have been planning attacks. Don’t you trust me?”

Mr Habib had replied that he did not trust anyone.

“Immediately he slapped me hard across the face and knocked off the blindfold; I clearly saw his face,” Mr Habib writes.

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

When you think that a similar process must also have taken place with Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose death in a Libyan prison in May 2009 suited three parties — the US, the Libyans, and the Egyptians, who had been somewhat humiliated by the revelations of his tortured lies — it becomes horrifically clear that the last person who should be anywhere close to a position of power in Egypt is the CIA’s most trusted foreign torturer.

Suleiman, like Mubarak, must go — and in his wake, those seeking an end to Egypt’s torture regime, and accountability for America’s repulsive alliance with the Mubarak regime in the torture program at the heart of the “War on Terror,” must focus not only on Omar Suleiman, but also on those who were feeding on the tortured lies emanating from Egypt’s dungeons — former US President George W. Bush, and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Note: On March 10, 2011, this article, which I wrote for free, was sponsored — for $50 — by a friend and supporter, George Kenneth Berger. This was an initative I launched during my quarterly fundraising appeal, as a way of trying to raise money to cover what I described as “the otherwise unpaid hours I spend writing the many articles that are published exclusively here.” I like it as a model for supporting bloggers, who often write for nothing (in between paid assignments, if they’re lucky!), and I’m grateful to George for picking up on it. It is, I hasten to add, a permanent offer!

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.

Only the most perceptive people in the West realize that, for decades, the perceived threat of communism, and, in recent years, the perceived threat of Islamists, has led their governments to support the dictatorial regimes that are now being challenged or overwhelmed by ordinary people whose eruptions of revolutionary anger are largely spontaneous and leaderless, and, as such, cannot easily be suppressed.

What will happen next is unknown. It is no wonder that the West is getting jittery, but it is difficult to see how Western governments will be able to maintain their influence when the revolutionary movements know that, although they have been oppressed by their own rulers — kept in poverty, deprived of work, and often subjected to torture, arbitrary detention, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution — their rulers have largely been able to abuse them so thoroughly because of the backing of the West.

The horrors of the Cold War are behind us, but on the Islamist front, it is all too easy to see how the United States, in particular, enlisted the support of the dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Morocco in its “War on Terror,” drawing on their expertise in torture to host secret torture prisons on behalf of the CIA, where dozens of men and boys — seized in other countries and subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — were delivered, some of whom have never been seen or heard from again.

It is also easy to see how numerous countries, including the U.K. and France, responded to the Islamic Salvation Front’s first-round electoral victory in Algeria in 1991 by backing a military takeover that led to an almost unspeakably horrendous civil war, while protecting Western interests in Algeria’s supplies of oil and gas, and how Libya — previously a pariah — was also drawn into the “War on Terror,” when Colonel Gaddafi, with his plenteous supplies of oil, also joined the Western alliance.

With Libya, the hypocrisy was laid bare — although few realize it — when political refugees to the U.K., whose claims for asylum had been accepted, were suddenly labeled as terrorist suspects and imprisoned, or held under control orders (a pernicious form of house arrest) without charge or trial, and on the basis of secret evidence, after Gaddafi became a British ally in 2005.

Although judges intervened independently to prevent the involuntary repatriation of these men, ruling that “diplomatic assurances,” which were supposed to guarantee humane treatment on their return, were fundamentally untrustworthy, the control orders against the men were only finally dropped in the last few years when the Gaddafi regime began a program of reconciliation with its former opponents.

The West’s hypocrisy in the “War on Terror” also included Tunisia and the brutal regime of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (whose fall is leading to hopes that the terrorist stigma attached to his former political opponents might now be exposed for what it was), and, of course, Syria, whose fearsome Mukhabarat (secret police) tortured at least nine CIA “ghost prisoners” in 2001 and 2002, even as Bush’s speechwriters were including the regime in an “axis of evil.” A few of these prisoners — who included teenagers rendered from Pakistan — have resurfaced (most notably, the Canadian citizen Maher Arar), but others remain unaccounted for.

Of all the allies in torture, however, Egypt was the most prominent, the final bloody destination for those seized in America’s first forays into “extraordinary rendition” under President Clinton, and the place where, in the “War on Terror,” an untold number of men were disappeared.

Just a few of these stories are known, but they expose the true horrors of America’s relationship with Egypt. One prominent victim is Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, seized on a bus in Pakistan, who was rendered to Egypt before being sent to Guantánamo (and released in January 2005). Providing a dark insight into why Hosni Mubarak’s decision to appoint intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice president on Saturday is the worst possible move for Egyptians seeking total regime change, the author and journalist Richard Neville, drawing on Habib’s memoir, reported:

Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman … Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al-Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks … To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib — and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

Another prominent torture victim is Abu Omar (Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr), an Egyptian cleric who was brazenly kidnapped from a street in Milan in February 2003, by CIA operatives and their Italian counterparts. In November 2009, an Italian judge handed down, in absentia, a sentence of between five and eight years to 22 CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force colonel for their part in Abu Omar’s kidnap and rendition (and two Italian agents received three-year sentences), but not before Abu Omar had been imprisoned in Egypt for four years, and, during much of that time, subjected to torture.

The most significant story of all, however, is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which was closed down by the Taliban in 2000, when he refused to cooperate with Osama bin Laden. After his capture in December 2001 — in Afghanistan, or crossing the border into Pakistan — al-Libi was rendered to Egypt by the CIA, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that al-Qaeda representatives had been meeting Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Despite the fact that al-Libi later recanted his false testimony, it was used by the United States to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, figuring prominently in Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. the month before.

After visits to other torture prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA, al-Libi was eventually returned to Libya, where he died in prison in May 2009, allegedly by committing suicide — although no one who knows anything about “suicides” in Libyan jails believed that particular story. His death was convenient for at least three countries — Libya itself, and the two countries responsible for the deadly lie about Iraq; namely, Egypt and the United States.

More than anything else, the story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi defines the blood-soaked relationship between the Bush administration and the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak, and if there is to be genuine change in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, then the Obama administration and other Western governments need to step back from supporting torturers or enlisting their torture assistance or making convenient arrangements with them to establish secret dungeons in their countries to pursue their own repulsive agendas.

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, 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.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Revolution in Egypt — and the Hypocrisy of the U.S.”

As Stephen Soldz (psychoanalyst, psychologist and anti-torture activist) reports, in an incisive article for Op-Ed News (cross-posted below), Suleiman played a major role in the Bush administration’s torture program, which not only casts a bleak light on America’s relationship with the Mubarak regime, but also indicates that, for the Egyptian people, devastated by a torture regime that has lasted throughout Mubarak’s reign, Omar Suleiman is the last man that should be being groomed as a possible successor.

The Torture Career of Egypt’s New Vice President: Omar Suleiman and the Rendition to Torture Program
By Stephen Soldz, Op-Ed News, January 29, 2011

In response to the mass protests of recent days, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has appointed his first Vice President in his over 30 years rule, intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. When Suleiman was first announced, Aljazeera commentators were describing him as a “distinguished” and “respected” man. It turns out, however, that he is distinguished for, among other things, his central role in Egyptian torture and in the US rendition to torture program. Further, he is “respected” by US officials for his cooperation with their torture plans, among other initiatives.

Katherine Hawkins, an expert on the US’s rendition to torture program, in an email, has sent some critical texts where Suleiman pops up. Thus, Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, pointed to Suleiman’s role in the rendition program:

Each rendition was authorized at the very top levels of both governments … The long-serving chief of the Egyptian central intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman, negotiated directly with top Agency officials. [Former US Ambassador to Egypt] Walker described the Egyptian counterpart, Suleiman, as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way” (pp. 113).

Stephen Grey, in Ghost Plane, his investigative work on the rendition program also points to Suleiman as central in the rendition program:

To negotiate these assurances [that the Egyptians wouldn't "torture" the prisoner delivered for torture] the CIA dealt principally in Egypt through Omar Suleiman, the chief of the Egyptian general intelligence service (EGIS) since 1993. It was he who arranged the meetings with the Egyptian interior ministry … Suleiman, who understood English well, was an urbane and sophisticated man. Others told me that for years Suleiman was America’s chief interlocutor with the Egyptian regime — the main channel to President Hosni Mubarak himself, even on matters far removed from intelligence and security.

Suleiman’s role was also highlighted in a Wikileaks cable:

In the context of the close and sustained cooperation between the USG and GOE on counterterrorism, Post believes that the written GOE assurances regarding the return of three Egyptians detained at Guantanamo (reftel) represent the firm commitment of the GOE to adhere to the requested principles. These assurances were passed directly from Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS) Chief Soliman [sic] through liaison channels — the most effective communication path on this issue. General Soliman’s word is the GOE’s guarantee, and the GOE’s track record of cooperation on CT issues lends further support to this assessment. End summary.

However, Suleiman wasn’t just the go-to bureaucrat for when the Americans wanted to arrange a little torture. This “urbane and sophisticated man” apparently enjoyed a little rough stuff himself.

Shortly after 9/11, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was captured by Pakistani security forces and, under US pressure, tortured by Pakistanis. He was then rendered (with an Australian diplomat watching) by CIA operatives to Egypt, a not uncommon practice. In Egypt, Habib merited Suleiman’s personal attention. As related by Richard Neville, based on Habib’s memoir:

Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman … Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al-Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.

That treatment wasn’t enough for Suleiman, so:

To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib — and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

After Suleiman’s men extracted Habib’s confession, he was transferred back to US custody, where he eventually was imprisoned at Guantánamo. His “confession” was then used as evidence in his Guantánamo trial [actually his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, a miltary review board].

The Washington Post‘s intelligence correspondent Jeff Stein reported some additional details regarding Suleiman and his important role in the old Egypt the demonstrators are trying to leave behind:

“Suleiman is seen by some analysts as a possible successor to the president,” the Voice of America said Friday. “He earned international respect for his role as a mediator in Middle East affairs and for curbing Islamic extremism.”

An editorialist at Pakistan’s International News predicted Thursday that “Suleiman will probably scupper his boss’s plans [to install his son], even if the aspiring intelligence guru himself is as young as 75.”

Suleiman graduated from Egypt’s prestigious Military Academy but also received training in the Soviet Union. Under his guidance, Egyptian intelligence has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA’s counterterrorism programs, most notably in the 2003 rendition from Italy of an al-Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar.

In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine ranked Suleiman as the Middle East’s most powerful intelligence chief, ahead of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In an observation that may turn out to be ironic, the magazine wrote, “More than from any other single factor, Suleiman’s influence stems from his unswerving loyalty to Mubarak.”

If Suleiman succeeds Mubarak and retains power, we will likely be treated to plaudits for his distinguished credentials from government officials and US pundits. We should remember that what they really mean is his ability to brutalize and torture. As Stephen Grey puts it:

But in secret, men like Omar Suleiman, the country’s most powerful spy and secret politician, did our work, the sort of work that Western countries have no appetite to do ourselves.

If Suleiman receives praise in the US, it will be because our leaders know that he’s the sort of leader who can be counted on to do what it takes to restore order and ensure that Egypt remains friendly to US interests.

There are some signs, however, that the Obama administration may not accept Suleiman’s appointment. Today they criticized the rearrangement of the chairs in Egypt’s government. If so, that will be a welcome sign that the Obama administration may have some limits beyond which it is hesitant to go in aligning with our most brutal “friends.”

We sure hope that the Egyptian demonstrators reject the farce of Suleiman’s appointment and push on to a complete change of regime. Otherwise the Egyptian torture chamber will undoubtedly return, as a new regime reestablishes “stability” and serves US interests.

Note: For more on Omar Suleiman and the US torture program, see this short commentary at the New Yorker by Jane Mayer. I’ll also be looking at more of this story in an article to be published soon.

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, 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.

I do, however, urge everyone to read the whole report, because the introduction and conclusions are important, as are the sections establishing the legal approach to secret detention and its historical context, the section detailing current practices in 25 other countries worldwide, and the annexes, which contain government responses to a questionnaire about secret detention, and a number of case studies.

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published here, provided an introduction, and dealt with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looked at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third, published below, looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Please note that I have inserted hyperlinks where possible. However, the original report contains footnotes, and not all of these provide links to websites. In most cases, I have added the information contained in the footnotes in square brackets, but for full details, please see the original.

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

Prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances.

C.  Proxy detention sites

141. Since 2005, details have emerged of how the United States was not only secretly capturing, transferring and detaining people itself, but also transferring people to other States for the purpose of interrogation or detention without charge. The practice had apparently started almost simultaneously with the high-value detainee programme. The British Government transmitted to the experts a summary of conclusions and recommendations of the Intelligence and Security Committee report on rendition (2007), in which it was noted that “the Security Service and SIS were … slow to detect the emerging pattern of “renditions to detention” that occurred during 2002” [The summary was sent in response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, dated 8 July 2009]. The CIA appears to have been generally involved in the capture and transfer of prisoners, as well as in providing questions for those held in foreign prisons. Beyond that, a clear pattern is difficult to discern: some prisoners were subsequently returned to CIA custody (and were  generally sent on to Guantanamo), while others were sent back to their home countries, or remained in the custody of the authorities in third countries.

142. The Government of the United States has acknowledged that “some enemy combatants have been transferred to their countries of nationality for continued detention” [E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69]. In its report to the Committee against Torture on 13 January 2006, the Government attempted to deflect criticism of its policy of sending detainees to countries with poor human rights records, including those where they might face the risk of torture, declaring that “the United States does not transfer persons to countries where the United States believes it is ‘more likely than not’ that they will be tortured … The United States obtains assurances, as appropriate, from the foreign government to which a detainee is transferred that it will not torture the individual being transferred” [CAT/C/48/Add.3/Rev.1, para. 30. See also the reply of the Government to a general allegation regarding the its involvement in one case of extraordinary rendition transmitted by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, in which it affirmed that “the United States does not transport individuals from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. Furthermore, the United States has not transported individuals, and will not transport individuals to a country where the Government believes they will be tortured” (A/HRC/10/9, para. 425)]. Various United Nations bodies, including the experts and the Committee against Torture, have criticized heavily this policy of “extraordinary rendition” in a detailed way in the past, defining it as a clear violation of international law. They also expressed concern about the use of assurances [See A/HRC/6/17/Add.3, para. 36; A/HRC/4/40, paras. 43 and 50; E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69; A/HRC/4/41, para. 458 and A/60/316, para. 45; CAT/C/USA/CO/2, paras. 20-21; and A/60/316, E/CN.4/2006/6 and A/HRC/4/40, paras. 52-56].

143. Given the prevailing secrecy regarding the CIA rendition programme, exact figures regarding the numbers of prisoners transferred to the custody of other Governments by the CIA without spending any time in CIA facilities are difficult to ascertain. Equally, little is known about the number of detainees who have been held at the request of other States, such as the United Kingdom and Canada. While several of these allegations cannot be backed up by other sources, the experts wish to underscore that the consistency of many of the detailed allegations provided separately by detainees adds weight to the inclusion of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Djibouti as proxy detention facilities where detainees have been held on behalf of the CIA. Serious concerns also exist about the role of Uzbekistan as a proxy detention site.

1.  Jordan

144. At least 15 prisoners, mostly seized in Karachi, Pakistan, or in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, claim to have been rendered by the CIA to the main headquarters of the General Intelligence Department of Jordan in Amman, between September 2001 and 2004. They include three men and one juvenile subsequently transferred to Guantanamo via Afghanistan:

• Jamal Mar’i, a Yemeni, and the first known victim of rendition in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Seized from his house in Karachi, on 23 September 2001, he was held for four months in Jordan before being flown to Guantanamo, where he remains [PDF, pp. 130-44] [Postscript: he was freed in December 2009].

• Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian, was rendered to Jordan after handing himself to Mauritanian authorities on 28 November 2001. Mr. Slahi was held in Jordan for eight months, and described what happened to him as “beyond description”. He was then transferred to Afghanistan, where he spent two weeks, and arrived in Guantanamo, where he remains, on 4 August 2002 [PDF, pp. 28-38; PDF, pp. 184-218][Postscript: he won his habeas petition in March 2010].

• Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, a Yemeni, was rendered to Jordan after his capture in Karachi on 7 February 2002. Flown to Afghanistan on 8 January 2004, he was held there for eight months, then flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was continuously tortured throughout his 23 months in Jordan. [Postscript: his torture was referred to by a US judge in this habeas petition].

• Hassan bin Attash, a Saudi-born Yemeni, was 17 years old when he was seized in Karachi on 11 September 2002 with Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He was held in Jordan until  8 January 2004, when he was flown to Afghanistan with Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi. He was then delivered to Guantanamo with al-Sharqawi on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was tortured throughout his time in Jordan.

145. Also held were Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi seized by United States agents in Afghanistan in December 2001 and released in Saudi Arabia in late 2002 or early 2003, and Samer Helmi al-Barq, seized in Pakistan on 15 July 2003, who was kept for three months in a secret prison outside Pakistan, before being transferred to Jordan on 26 October 2003. He was released on bail in January 2008 [Others reportedly held in Jordan are Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni student rendered from Karachi on 23 October 2001, who has not been heard of since; Ibrahim al- Jeddawi, a Saudi seized in Yemen (or Kuwait) in the first half of 2002, who was reportedly transferred to Saudi custody; at least five other men (three Algerians, a Syrian and a Chechen), seized in Georgia in 2002; an Iraqi Kurd, possibly seized in Yemen; and a Tunisian, seized in Iraq. The current whereabouts of all these men is unknown. According to former prisoners interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, seized with Hassan bin Attash and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was also held in Jordan for an unspecified amount of time, as was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, seized in Afghanistan in late 2001, who was subjected to multiple renditions. See also para. 146. For Samer Helmi al-Barq, see Amnesty International, submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review, February 2009 (PDF)].

2.  Egypt

146. At least seven men were rendered to Egypt by the CIA between September 2001 and February 2003, and another was rendered to Egypt from the Syrian Arab Republic, where he had been seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

• Abdel Hakim Khafargy, an Egyptian-born, Munich-based publisher, was allegedly seized in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 September 2001, and rendered to Egypt a few weeks later, after being held by United States forces at its base in Tuzla. He was returned to Germany two months later [PDF].

• Mamdouh Habib, an Australian seized in Pakistan in November 2001, was rendered to Egypt three weeks later and held for six months. Transferred to Guantanamo in June 2002, he was released in January 2005. He claims to have been tortured throughout his time in Egypt [For recent developments, see this article].

• Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani-Egyptian national, was seized by the Indonesian authorities in Jakarta on 9 January 2002, flown first to Egypt and then to Bagram, where he was held for 11 months. He arrived in Guantanamo on 23 March 2003 and was released in August 2008. Mr. Madni indicated that, during his detention in Cairo, he was subjected to ill-treatment, including electroshocks applied to his head and knees and, on several occasions, he was hung from metal hooks and beaten. Furthermore, he reported that was denied medical treatment for the blood in his urine [Interview with Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni (annex II, case 15)].

• As confirmed by the Government of Sweden in its response to a letter sent by the experts, following a decision made by the Government to refuse asylum in Sweden to the Egyptian citizens Mohammed Alzery and Ahmed Agiza and to expel them, they were deported to Egypt by the Swedish Security Police with the assistance of the United States authorities (CIA). Both have said that they were tortured in Egyptian custody [Agiza v Sweden, communication 233/2003 (CAT/C/34/D/233/2003); and Alzery v Sweden, communication 1416/2006 (CCPR/C/88/D/1416/2005)]. Alzery was released on 12 October 2003 without charge or trial, but was placed under police surveillance. Ahmed Agiza had already been tried and sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian military court at the time of the decision by the Government of Sweden to deport him. In April 2004, the court’s decision was confirmed and Agiza was convicted on terrorism charges following a trial monitored by Human Rights Watch, which described it as “flagrantly unfair”.

• Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan, an emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, was seized by Pakistani officials in late 2001 while fleeing Afghanistan and was rendered to Egypt where, under torture, he claimed that there were links between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, which were used by the United States administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. Also held in secret CIA detention sites in Afghanistan, and possibly in other countries, he was returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006, where he reportedly died by committing suicide in May 2009.

• Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian, was kidnapped in Milan on 17 February 2003, and rendered to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released [For more details on this case, in particular with regard to the abduction of Abu Omar in Milan and the ensuing judicial proceedings in Italy, see the section on Italian complicity in the renditions programme below]. Allegations of ill-treatment in Egyptian detention include being hung upside down and having had electric shocks applied to his testicles [PDF, p, 4].

The eighth man, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, a Canadian-Egyptian national, was seized at Damascus airport on his arrival from Toronto on 11 November 2001. He was held in the Far Falestin prison in the Syrian Arab Republic until 25 January 2002, when he was transferred to Egyptian custody, where he remained in various detention sites (including in secret detention until August 2002) until his release on 7 March 2004. During the initial period of his detention in Egypt, he was subjected to heavy beatings and threats of rape against his sister. At a later stage during the secret detention phase, he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back practically continuously for 45 days in a solitary confinement cell, which he described as being very painful and which made it hard to use the toilet and wash. He was also subjected to sleep deprivation [Internal inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, pursuant to an Order in Council dated 11 December 2006.  See also Commission of inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Maher Arar, report of the fact finder of 14 October 2005].

3.  Syrian Arab Republic

147. At least nine detainees were rendered by the CIA to the Syrian Arab Republic between December 2001 and October 2002, and held in Far Falestin, run by Syrian Military Intelligence. All those able to speak about their experiences explained that they were tortured. As in the case of Egypt (see para. 146 above), other men were seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

• Muhammad Haydar Zammar, a German national, was seized in Morocco on 8 December 2001, and rendered by the CIA to Far Falestin on 22 December 2001. In October 2004, he was moved to an “unknown location”; in February 2007, he received a 12-year sentence from the Higher State Security Court. He was convicted of being a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a crime punishable by death in the Syrian Arab Republic [See A/HRC/7/4/Add.1., this Amnesty International appeal, and CAT/C/49/Add.4]. In its reply for the present study, the Government of Morocco indicated that the police had arrested Mr. Zammar following information that he had been implicated in the events of 11 September 2001. The Government also stated that Mr. Zammar had not been subjected to secret or arbitrary detention in Morocco, and that he had been transferred to the Syrian Arab Republic on 30 December 2001, in the presence of the Syrian Ambassador accredited to Morocco.

• Three detainees were rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 14 May 2002: Abdul Halim Dahak, a student seized in Pakistan in November 2001, Omar Ghramesh and an unnamed teenager, the latter being seized with Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002 [Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Rendition Programme, Hurst & Co., 2006), pp. 4, 54 and 284]. All had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

• Noor al-Deen, a Syrian teenager, was captured with Abu Zubaydah and rendered to Morocco, then to the Syrian Arab Republic. His current whereabouts are unknown.

• According to Abdullah Almalki (see para. 148 below), two other prisoners, Barah Abdul Latif and Bahaa Mustafa Jaghel, were also transferred from Pakistan to the Syrian Arab Republic, the first in February/March 2002, the second in May 2002. Both had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

• Yasser Tinawi, a Syrian national seized in Somalia on 17 July 2002, was flown to Ethiopia by United States agents, who interrogated him for three months. On 26 October, he was flown to Egypt; on 29 October 2002, he arrived in the Syrian Arab Republic. In March 2003, he received a two-year sentence from a military court.

• Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian national, was seized at John F. Kennedy airport in New York on 26 September 2002, held for 11 days in the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Manhattan, then rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 8 October, via Jordan [A/HRC/4/33/Add.3, paras. 33, 43-45, footnote 11], where he was held in secret detention at Far Falestin until later that month. Jordan alleged that Mr. Arar had arrived in Amman as an ordinary passenger, but was asked to leave the country because his name was on a list of wanted terrorists, and given a choice of destination. It also alleged that he had asked to be voluntarily taken by car to the Syrian Arab Republic. During his period at Far Falestin, he was severely beaten with a black cable and threatened with electric shocks: “The pattern was for Mr. Arar to receive three or four lashes with the cable then to be questioned, and then for the beating to begin again.” The torture allegations were found to be completely consistent with the results of the forensic examinations conducted in Canada. On 14 August 2003, Mr. Arar was moved to Sednaya prison and released on 29 September. The official inquiry in the Arar case also stressed the catastrophic impact of the described events in terms of his and his family’s economic situation and his family life in general.

148. When Ahmad Abou El-Maati (see para. 146) was held in Far Falestin in the Syrian Arab Republic, he was held in solitary confinement in poor conditions and subjected to ill-treatment, including blindfolding, forced to remove almost all his clothes, beaten with cables, forcible shaving and had ice-cold water poured on him. Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian-Syrian national, also spent time in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Jamahiriya, in Far Falestin, from 3 May to 7 July 2002, when he received a family visit. On 25 August 2003, he was sent to Sednaya prison. He was released on 10 March 2004. He returned to Canada on 25 July 2004 after being acquitted of all charges by the Syrian State Supreme Security court [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38] .

149. Another Canadian, Muayyed Nureddin, an Iraqi-born geologist, was detained on the border of the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq on 11 December 2002, when he returned from a family visit in northern Iraq. He was secretly detained for a month in Far Falestin, then released on 13 January 2003 [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38].

150. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic stated that the country had no secret prisons or detention centres. There were no cases of secret detention, and no individuals had been arrested without the knowledge of the competent authorities. No authorization had been granted to the security service of any foreign State to establish secret detention facilities in the Syrian Arab Republic. A number of foreign individuals had been arrested in the country at the request of other States, and had been informed of the legal basis for the arrests and their places of detention. The above-mentioned States were also informed of whether the individuals concerned had been brought before the Courts or transferred outside of the country. Individuals belonging to different terrorist groups had been prosecuted and detained in public prisons, in compliance with relevant international standards. They would be judged by the competent judicial authorities. Court proceedings would be public and be held in the presence of defence lawyers, families, human rights activists and foreign diplomats. Some would be publicized through the media. The Interpol branch within the Security Service of the Ministry of the Interior was cooperating with international Interpol branches with regard to suspected terrorist and other criminal activities.

4.  Morocco

151. At least three detainees were rendered to Morocco by the CIA between May and July 2002, and held in Temara prison, including the following:

• Abou Elkassim Britel, of Moroccan origin and an Italian citizen through marriage and naturalization, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 10 March 2002. He stated that he was tortured in Pakistani custody. On 23 May 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held in secret detention until February 2003, and where he alleged he was also tortured. He was released in February 2003, but in May 2003 was seized again, held for another four months in Temara, then sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was reduced to nine years on appeal [Interview with Khadija Anna L. Pighizzini, wife of Abou Elkassim Britel (annex II, case 7)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Morocco stated that Mr. Britel had not been subjected to “arbitrary detention or torture” between May 2002 and February 2003, or between May and September 2003.

• Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was seized in Karachi, Pakistan, on 10 April 2002. He was held for approximately three months, during which time he was subjected to torture. On 21 July 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months in three different unknown facilities. During that period, he was allegedly threatened, subjected to particularly severe torture and other forms of ill-treatment; deprived from sleep for up to 48 hours at a time; and his prayers were interrupted by turning up the volume of pornographic movies. In January 2004, he was flown to the CIA “dark prison” in Kabul, and in May he was moved to Bagram. He was flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004, and was released in February 2009 [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18); see also the finding of two British High Court judges that the treatment to which he had been subjected presented an “arguable case of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (PDF)] [The third prisoner is Noor al-Deen (see para. 147), who was moved to the Syrian Arab Republic in 2003].

5.  Pakistan

152. From December 2001 until the summer of 2002, when the majority of the detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were seized, detention facilities in Pakistan, where several hundred detainees were held before being transferred to Kandahar or Bagram, were a crucial component of what was then, exclusively, a secret detention programme. Many of these men, seized near the Pakistani border, or while crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, were held in prisons in Kohat and Peshawar, but others were held in what appear to be impromptu facilities, which were established across the country in numerous locations. The then President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, stated that:

Since shortly after 9/11, when many Al-Qaida members fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan, we have played multiple games of cat and mouse with them. The biggest of them all, Osama bin Laden, is still at large at the time of this writing, but we have caught many, many others. Some are known to the world, some are not. We have captured 672 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars [Pervez Musharraf, In The Line Of Fire: A Memoir, Free Press, 2006].

153. Two former prisoners, Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes, described their experiences of secret detention in Pakistan to the experts:

Omar Deghayes, a Libyan national and British resident, was arrested in April 2002 at his home in Lahore after a hundred people in black tracksuits surrounded the house. In the presence of an American officer, he was then taken, handcuffed and hooded, to a police station and, shortly afterwards, to an old fortress outside Lahore, where he was held with other men from Palestine, Tunisia, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Egypt, and beaten and kicked, and heard electroshocks and people screaming. According to his account, “the place was run by Pakistanis and appeared to be a maximum security prison for extremist opponents that were traded with different States such as Libya and the United States.” He also stated that he was tortured for a month without any contact with the external world, and that the ill-treatment included punching, beating, kicking, stripping, being hit in the back with wooden sticks, and stress positions for up to three days and three nights. In mid-May, two Americans in plain clothes visited, took photographs and asked questions. He was then moved to a place in Islamabad, which looked like a barracks, where he was held incommunicado for one month without access to a lawyer or ICRC, and was interrogated in a nearby house by American officers, who identified themselves as CIA, and, on one occasion, by a British agent from MI6. He said that torture took place in the barracks but not during the interrogations, and that he was subjected to drowning and stress positions, and recalled a room full of caged snakes that guards threatened to open if he did not speak about what he had done in Afghanistan. He then met with British and American officers, who finally “acquired” him with other detainees, and took him to Bagram, where he was heavily tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers. He was flown to Guantanamo in August 2002, and released in December 2007 [Interview with Omar Deghayes (annex II, case 8)].

Moazzam Begg, a British citizen, moved to Kabul, with his wife and three children, to become a teacher and a charity worker in 2001. After leaving Afghanistan in the wake of the United States-led invasion, on 31 January 2002, he was abducted from a house in Islamabad, where he was living with his family, and taken to a place in Islamabad (not an official detention facility), where those who held him were not uniformed officers and there were people held in isolation. Held for three weeks, he was moved to a different venue for interviews with American and British intelligence officers, but his wife did not know where he had been taken, and he was denied access to a lawyer or consular services. He was then taken to a military airport near Islamabad and handed over to American officers. He was held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo for three years, and was released in January 2005 [Interview with Moazzam Begg (annex II, case 6)].

6.  Ethiopia

154. The Government of Ethiopia served as the detaining authority for foreign nationals of interest to United States and possibly other foreign intelligence officers between 30 December 2006 and February 2007 [For allegations in interviews conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, see for example the case of Meshal vs Higgenbotham. See also Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?: the 2007 Horn of Africa renditions and the fate of those still missing” (PDF)]. On 2 May 2007, a number of special procedures addressed the Government of Ethiopia, adding the following details:

In December 2006, the conflict between the militias of the Council of Somali Islamic Courts and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by armed forces of Ethiopia, caused a large flow of refugees seeking to cross the border from Somalia into Kenya. On 2 January 2007, Kenyan authorities announced the closure of the border for security reasons. Since then, it is reported that the Kenyan security forces have been patrolling the border and have arrested a number of those seeking to cross it. Kenya has deported at least 84 of those arrested back to Somalia, from where they were taken to Ethiopia [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71].

155. The experts interviewed two of those captured between December 2006 and February 2007: Bashir Ahmed Makhtal (mentioned in the Special Rapporteur’s communication) and Mohamed Ezzoueck. The latter, a British national, was detained on 20 January 2007 in Kiunga village, Kenya, after crossing the Somali-Kenyan border and then transferred to Nairobi, where he was held in three different locations. Mr. Ezzoueck reported having been detained in Kenya for about three weeks and then transferred to Somalia, where he was held for a few days before being transferred, via Nairobi, back to London. According to his testimony, he was interrogated by a Kenyan army major and Kenyan intelligence service officers, FBI officers and British security services officers, and repeatedly asked about his involvement with terrorist groups, including Al Qaida [Interview with Mohamed Ezzouek (annex II, case 10)]. Mr. Makhtal, an Ethiopian-born Canadian, was arrested on the border between Kenya and Somalia on 30 December 2006 by intelligence agents and held at a police detention centre. He was subsequently transferred by car to a prison cell in Gigiri police station in Nairobi. On 21 January 2007, the Kenyan authorities sent him to Mogadishu. On the following day, he was taken to Addis Ababa by an Ethiopian military plane. He was then held for approximately 18 months incommunicado in Mekalawi federal prison, often in solitary confinement and in poor conditions, then ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment by the High Court of Ethiopia [Interview with Bashir Makhtal (annex II, case 16)].

156. In a letter dated 23 May 2007, the Government of Ethiopia informed the relevant special procedures mandate holders that the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia had handed over to Ethiopia 41 individuals captured in the course of the conflict in Somalia; most of these detainees had been released. Only eight of the detainees remained in custody by order of the court. The Government also noted that “the allegation that there are more than seventy others in addition to those named in the communication is false, as are the allegations that the detainees are held incommunicado, and that they might be at risk of torture” [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71]. However, in September 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report stating that at least 10 detainees were still in Ethiopian custody, and the whereabouts of others were unknown [PDF].

7.  Djibouti

157. The experts received information proving that a detainee in the CIA secret detention programme, Mohammed al-Asad, had been transferred by Tanzanian officials by plane to Djibouti on 27 December 2003 [High Court of Tanzania at Dar es Salaam, criminal application No. 23 of 2004, Abdullah Salehe Mohsen al-Asad vs. Director of Immigration Services ex parte Mohamed Abdullah Salehe Mohsen Al-Asaad counter affidavit, 30 June 2004]. In Djibouti, Mr. al-Asad was detained for two weeks in secret detention, where he was interrogated by a white English-speaking woman and a male interpreter, mostly on his connections to the al-Haramain foundation. The woman identified herself as American. Mr. al-Asad’s own recollection is consistent with his having been held in Djibouti. One of his guards told him that he was in Djibouti and there was a photograph of President Guelleh on the wall of the detention facility. After approximately two weeks, Mr. al-Asad was taken to an airport in Djibouti, where a team of individuals dressed entirely in black stripped him, inserted an object in his rectum, diapered and photographed him, and strapped him down in a plane. The detention site may have been in Camp Lemonier, which allegedly has been used on a short-term or transitory basis for several detainees being transferred to secret detention elsewhere.

8.  Uzbekistan

158. No confirmation has ever been provided by either the Government of the United States or that of Uzbekistan that detainees were rendered to proxy prisons in Uzbekistan. In May 2005, however, the New York Times spoke to “a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States” who stated that the United States had sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation. A United States intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens. The New York Times also obtained flight logs, showing that at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan from early 2002 to late 2003” by two planes associated with the CIA rendition programme (a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737), and noted that, on 21 September 2003, both planes had arrived at Tashkent. According to the newspaper, the flight logs showed that “the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic”. On 14 August 2009, the BBC interviewed Ikrom Yakubov, an Uzbek intelligence officer who has been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom, who stated that the United States had rendered terrorist suspects for questioning to Uzbekistan, but added, “I don’t want to talk about it as there might be serious concerns for my life in the future to discuss renditions.” On 22 August 2009, the story resurfaced once more, when Der Spiegel reported that, in an arrangement between the private security firm Blackwater and the CIA, Blackwater and its subsidiaries had been commissioned “to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan”.

D.  Complicity in the practice of secret detention

159. After September 2006, the direct role of the CIA in secret detentions seemed to have shrunk significantly, with “current and former American Government officials” explaining in May 2009 to the New York Times that, in the last two years of the Bush administration, the Government of the United States had started to rely heavily on the foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the newspaper, “in the past 10 months, … about a half-dozen mid-level financiers and logistics experts working with Al-Qaida have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services”. Instead of actively detaining persons in secret, the United States — and many other countries — became complicit in the practice of secret detention. For the purposes of the present study, the experts state that a country is complicit in the secret detention of a person in the following cases:

(a) When a State has asked another State to secretly detain a person (covering all cases mentioned in paras. 141-158 above);

(b) When a State knowingly takes advantage of the situation of secret detention by sending questions to the State detaining the person or by soliciting or receiving information from persons who are being kept in secret detention. This includes at least the following States:

• The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18)], Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed and Rashid Rauf [PDF]. In its submission for the present study, the British Government referred to ongoing and concluded judicial assessment of the cases and stressed the work of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, as well as its policy of clear opposition to secret detention [According to the Government of the United Kingdom, the judge in Mr Ahmed’s case stated, “I specifically reject the allegations that the British authorities were outsourcing torture”. The judge examined Mr. Amin’s allegations and found that there was no evidence to suggest that the British authorities had been complicit in his unlawful detention or ill-treatment in Pakistan];

• Germany, in the case of Muhammad Haydar Zammar, who was reportedly interrogated on at least one occasion, on 20 November 2002, by agents of German security agencies while he was secretly held in the Syrian Arab Republic [See “Kanzleramt dealte mit Syriens Geheimdienst”, Der Spiegel, 19 November 2005]. The Government reported having been  informed about four cases of renditions or enforced disappearances concerning the Federal Republic of Germany: the cases of Khaled El-Masri, Murat Kurnaz, Muhammad Haydar Zammar and Abdel Halim Khafagy, which occurred between September 2001 and the end of 2005. However, the German authorities did not directly or indirectly participate in arresting these persons or in rendering them for imprisonment. In the cases of El-Masri and Khafagy, the German missions responsible for consular assistance had no knowledge of their imprisonment and were therefore unable to ensure that their rights were observed or guarantee consular protection; in the cases of Zammar and Kurnaz, the German authorities worked intensively to guarantee consular protection. However, they were denied access to the detainees and were thereby prevented from effectively exercising consular protection [Response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, 30 September 2009]. In a letter dated 9 December 2009, the German Federal Ministry of Justice further reported that it had become aware of the case of Mr. Kurnaz on 26 February 2002, when the Chief Federal Prosecutor informed the Ministry that it would not take over a preliminary investigation pending before the Prosecution of the Land of Bremen. The Office of the Chief Federal Prosecutor had received a report from the Federal Criminal Police Office on 31 January 2002 that, according to information by the Federal Intelligence Service, Mr. Kurnaz had been arrested by United States officials in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the case of Mr. El-Masri, on 8 June 2004, the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Foreign Office received a letter from his lawyer that Mr. El-Masri had been abducted in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, presumably transferred to Afghanistan and kept there against his will until his return to Germany on 29 May 2004. The Federal Ministry of Justice was informed about these facts on 18 June 2004. The experts note, however, that according to the final report of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, the Government became aware of the case of Mr. El-Masri on 31 May 2004, when the Ambassador of the United States informed the Federal Minister for the Interior of Germany [PDF];

• Canada, for providing intelligence to the Syrian Arab Republic in the cases of Maher Arar, Ahmad el-Maati, Abdullah Almaki and Muayyed Nureddin. In its submission for the present study, the Government denied that any of the named individuals was detained or seized by a State at the request of Canada. The experts welcome the fact that all the above-mentioned cases have been the subject of extensive independent inquiry processes within Canada and that, in the case of Mr. Arar, substantive reparations has been provided to the victims;

• Australia, for providing intelligence to interrogators in the case of the secret detention of Mamdouh Habib. Mr Habib also alleges that an Australian official was present during at least one of his interrogation sessions in Egypt. The experts understand that Mr. Habib is currently suing the Government of Australia, arguing that it was complicit in his kidnapping and subsequent transfer to Egypt. In its submission for the present study, the Government denies that any Australian officer, servant and/or agent was involved in any dealings with or mistreatment of Mr. Habib, and refers to ongoing litigation;

(c) When a State has actively participated in the arrest and/or transfer of a person when it knew, or ought to have known, that the person would disappear in a secret detention facility or otherwise be detained outside the legally regulated detention system. This includes at least the following States:

• Italy, for its role in the abduction and rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian kidnapped by CIA agents on a street in Milan in broad daylight on 17 February 2003. He was transferred from Milan to the NATO military base at Aviano by car, and then flown, via the NATO military base of Ramstein in Germany, to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released. The European Parliament considered it “very likely, in view of the involvement of its secret services, that the Italian Government of the day was aware of the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar from within its territory” [European Parliament Committee report, paras. 50 and 54]. Prosecutors opened an investigation and charged 26 United States citizens (mostly CIA agents) with abduction, as well as members of the Italian military secret services (SISMI) with complicity in the abduction, among them the head of SISMI [Reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (see annex I)]. The Italian Ministry of Justice, however, refused to forward the judiciary’s requests for extradition of the CIA agents to the Government of the United States; as a result, the United States citizens were tried in absentia. On 4 November 2009, the court found 23 of them guilty. The court also convicted two SISMI agents and sentenced them to three years imprisonment for their involvement in the abduction. The then commander of SISMI and his deputy, however, were not convicted, the court having dismissed the cases against them on the grounds that the relevant evidence was covered by State secret [The executive branch of the Government of Italy successfully raised the issue of State secret before the Constitutional Court; see the reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (annex I)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Italy notes that the case is continuing at the appeal level, which prevents it from drawing any conclusions prior to a definitive verdict;

• Kenya, for detaining 84 persons in various secret locations in Nairobi before transferring them on three charter flights between 20 January and 10 February 2007 to Somalia. They were subsequently transferred to Ethiopia, where they were kept in secret detention. They were not provided with an opportunity to challenge their forcible physical removal at any stage (see also paras. 154-156 above) [See also Meshal vs Higgenbotham; Redress and Reprieve report, “Kenya and counter terrorism: a time for change”, February 2009 (PDF), and Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?” (PDF). The experts have received allegations of cooperation with United States intelligence that dates back to 2003; see interview with Suleiman Abdallah (annex II, case 2)].

(d) A specific form of complicity in this context are these cases where a State holds a person shortly in secret detention before handing them over to another State where that person will be put in secret detention for a longer period. This includes at least the following countries:

• The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, for its role in the case of Khaled El-Masri [Interview with Khaled el-Masri (annex II, case 9)];

• Malawi, for allegedly holding Laid Saidi in secret detention for a week;

• The Gambia: during an interview with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi reported that, on 8 November 2002, he was arrested upon arrival at Banjul airport by the Gambian Intelligence Agency, then taken to an office and later to a house located in a Banjul residential place before he was handed over to the CIA and rendered to Afghanistan.

(e) When a State has failed to take measures to identify persons or airplanes passing through its airports or airspace after information of the CIA programme involving secret detention had already been revealed. The issue of rendition flights was, and still is, the subject of many separate investigations at the national or regional level. Therefore, the experts decided to refrain from going into the details of this issue [See, inter alia, the European Parliament Committee report, 18 June 2009 (PDF); the statement of the Foreign Secretary to the House of Commons on United States rendition flights, 21 February 2008, and Dick Marty,”Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report” (PDF)].

E.  Secret detention and the Obama administration

160. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the United States stated that:

The Obama Administration has adopted the following specific measures:

• Instructed the CIA to close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operated as of January 22, 2009 and ordered that the CIA shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.

• Ordered that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed as soon as practicable.

• Required the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to be given notice and timely access to any individual detained in any armed conflict in the custody or under the effective control of the United States Government, consistent with Department of Defense regulations and policies.

• Ordered a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to detention of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.

• Reaffirmed that all persons in U.S. custody must be treated humanely as a matter of law.

• Mandated that detention at Guantanamo conform to all applicable laws governing conditions of confinement, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and directed a review of detention conditions at Guantanamo to ensure such compliance.

• Ordered a review of U.S. transfer policies to ensure that they do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control. The resulting Task Force on transfer practices recommended to the President in August that (1) the State Department be involved in evaluating all diplomatic assurances; (2) the Inspectors General of the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security prepare an annual report on all transfers relying on assurances; and (3) mechanisms for monitoring treatment in the receiving country be incorporated into assurances.

• Announced the transfer of at least 7 detainees from military custody to U.S. criminal law enforcement proceedings, and transferred 25 detainees to date to third-countries for repatriation or resettlement.

• Worked with Congress to revise U.S. laws governing military commissions to enhance their procedural protections, including prohibiting introduction of evidence obtained as a result of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

• Expanded the review procedures for detainees held by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan in order to enhance the transparency and fairness of U.S. detention practices. Detainees are permitted an opportunity to challenge the evidence that is the basis for their detention, to call reasonably available witnesses, and to have the assistance of personal representatives who have access to all reasonably available relevant information (including classified information). Proceedings generally shall be open, including to representatives of the ICRC, and possibly to non-governmental organizations.

• Established more tailored standards and rigorous procedures for evaluating assertions of the State secrets privilege, including establishing an internal accountability mechanism, ensuring that the privilege is never asserted to avoid embarrassment or conceal violations of law, and creating a referral mechanism to the Office of Inspector General where the privilege is asserted but there is credible evidence of a violation of law. These standards and procedures were established in order to strike a better balance between open government and the need to protect vital national security information.

• The Department of Justice initiated a preliminary criminal investigation into the interrogation of certain detainees.

These measures cumulatively seek to reaffirm the importance of compliance with the rule of law in U.S. detention practices, to ensure U.S. adherence to its international legal obligations, and to promote accountability and transparency in this important area of national security policy.

161. The experts welcome the above commitments. They believe, however, that clarification is required as to whether detainees were held in CIA “black sites” in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time. Also, the experts are concerned that the executive order instructing the CIA “to close any detention facilities that it currently operates” does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on “a short-term transitory basis”. The order also does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by the Joint Special Operation Command.

162. The experts also welcome in particular the new policy implemented in August 2009, under which the military must notify ICRC of detainees’ names and identification number within two weeks of capture. Nevertheless, there is no legal justification for this two-week period of secret detention. According to article 70 of the Third Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are to be documented, and their whereabouts and health conditions made available to family members and to the country of origin of the prisoner within one week. Article 106 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (governing the treatment of civilians) establishes virtually identical procedures for the documentation and disclosure of information concerning civilian detainees. Furthermore, it is obvious that this unacknowledged detention for one week can only be applied to persons who have been captured on the battlefield in a situation of armed conflict. This is an important observation, as the experts noted with concern news reports quoting current Government officials saying that “the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention”.

163. The situation at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility remains of great concern. In March 2009, United States district Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted to the Guantanamo detainees by the Supreme Court in June 2008 extended to non-Afghan detainees who had been seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same”, and because the review process established at the prison “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo”. The four petitioners were among the 94 prisoners that Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury admitted were held in CIA custody between 2001 and 2005. Judge Bates found that, in holding detainees at Bagram not as prisoners of war but as “unlawful enemy combatants”, the Bush administration had put in place a review process, the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board, in which “detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an ‘enemy combatant’ designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence”.

164. The above-mentioned ruling has been appealed by the current United States administration, even though Judge Bates noted that habeas rights extend neither to Afghan detainees held at Bagram, nor to Afghans seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram. In its appeal against Judge Bates’ ruling, the United States administration notified the court that it was introducing a new review process at Bagram, “modifying the procedures for reviewing the status of aliens held by the Department of Defense at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility” [PDF]. However, the experts are concerned that the new review system fails to address the fact that detainees in an active war zone should be held according to the Geneva Conventions, screened close to the time and place of capture if there is any doubt about their status, and not be subjected to reviews at some point after their capture to determine whether they should continue to be held. The experts are also concerned that the system appears to aim specifically to prevent United States courts from having access to foreign detainees captured in other countries and rendered to Bagram. While the experts welcome the fact that the names of 645 detainees at Bagram are now known, they urge the Government of the United States to provide information on the citizenship, length of detention and place of capture of all detainees currently held at Bagram Air Base.

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

See here for the Bagram prisoner list. For a sequence of articles discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two) (April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009), WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 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), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

Reprieve’s director, Clive Stafford Smith, had been planning to unveil the report at a meeting of the Commons Committee on Foreign Affairs two weeks ago, but when the government pulled the plug on the meeting (as I reported here and here), because Stafford Smith also intended to talk about former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed and the recently disclosed evidence that a British spy had visited him while he was being held by the CIA’s proxy torturers in Morocco, his revelation about the identity of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni was also shelved.

This was a shame, because Madni’s story also deserves to be thoroughly aired in public. Like Mohamed’s, it involves cover-ups on both sides of the Atlantic, as both the US and UK governments continue to try to hide the full extent of their involvement in a global network of secret torture prisons, in which “ghost prisoners” were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” via a secretive fleet of planes run by the CIA.

How the British government provided the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle

Until last year, claims that prisoners in the “War on Terror” had been rendered through Diego Garcia — leased to the US for a military base that has been described as the United States’ “single most important military facility” — had been flatly denied by the British government. However, on February 21, 2008, the British foreign secretary David Miliband finally admitted that two rendition flights carrying US prisoners had stopped on Diego Garcia in January and September 2002. In a statement to Parliament, Miliband said,

Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred. An error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light. In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.

On the same day, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, also supplied an apology. “The refuelling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time,” he wrote, adding, “But it happened. That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and learn from them … Our government had told the British that there had been no rendition flights involving their soil or airspace since 9/11. That information, supplied in good faith, turned out to be wrong.”

At the time, I stated that I thought these concessions reeked of damage limitation, and were designed to curtail further inquiries into the use of Diego Garcia, but Reprieve noticed that an additional comment made by David Miliband in fact raised more questions than answers. “The House will want to know what has become of the two individuals in question,” he said, adding, “There is a limit to what I can say, but I can tell the House the following. The US government has told us that neither man was a British national or a British resident. One is currently in Guantánamo Bay. The other has been released.”

The next piece of the jigsaw puzzle appeared on February 12, 2009, when, in response to a parliamentary question by Andrew Tyrie MP asking about the fate of the prisoner who, in February 2008, was still at Guantánamo, Miliband said, “Both of the individuals rendered through Diego Garcia in 2002 have been returned to their countries of nationality.”

Reprieve then set about working out, from flight logs in its possession, and from the dates when prisoners were released from Guantánamo, the identity of the prisoner who was released between February 2008 and February 2009, and discovered, by a neat process of elimination, that it could only have been Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni.

The story of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni

As I reported after Madni’s release, his case “deserves to be more than a mere footnote in the history of the Bush administration’s vile and unprincipled policies of “extraordinary rendition” and torture,” as the suffering inflicted on the 24-year old Islamic scholar — which involved three months of torture in Egypt, followed by eleven months in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and over five years in Guantánamo — was based not on detailed evidence that he was a terrorist, but on a single ill-advised comment picked up by the Indonesian intelligence services (which, Madni has stated since his release, was not even made by him).

A renowned Islamic scholar, fluent in nine languages and from a wealthy and influential family, Madni maintained throughout his imprisonment that he was betrayed by one of four would-be jihadists whom he met by accident on a trip to Indonesia in November 2001 to sort out family business after his father’s death. “After I went to Indonesia, I got introduced to some people who were not good,” he told his tribunal in Guantánamo, adding, “They were bad people. Maybe I can say they were terrorists. When someone gets introduced to someone, it is not written on their foreheads that they are bad or good.”

In fact, Madni had not been betrayed by one of these men, but had been seized by the CIA after the Indonesian intelligence services, who were monitoring the men he had met — members of the Islamic Defenders Front, an organization that espoused anti-Americanism, but had not been involved in any terrorist attacks — heard him say that bombs could be hidden in shoes, and handed the information on to the CIA.

Although a US intelligence official told Ray Bonner of the New York Times in 2005 that Madni was nothing more than a “blowhard,” who “wanted us to believe he was more important than he was,” and another thought that he would be held for a few days, “then booted out of jail,” more senior officials, in a heightened state of fear following the capture of the inept and mentally troubled British shoe-bomber Richard Reid, demonstrated how casual the Bush administration’s use of “extraordinary rendition” was by rendering him to Egypt, presumably under the mistaken belief that torture would reveal the truth, one way or another.

More recent details of Madni’s rendition and torture

Since Madni’s release, Reprieve has been in touch with him, and he was also featured in a New York Times article in January, which added gruesome details to what was already known of his experiences. Madni explained that he had first suffered physical abuse at the airport in Jakarta, before his rendition flight took off. “One person from Egyptian intelligence, he come and he punch me here, very hard,” Madni said, hitting his chest to make his point, “and he grab me like this and he throw me against the wall.”

On the flight, Madni said, he was “bleeding from his nose, mouth and ears,” and on arrival in Cairo “they make me naked, they torture me.” Locked up in an underground cell like “a grave,” he said that he was held for 92 days, and was interrogated on three occasions soon after his arrival, for 12 to 15 hours at a time. He told the Times that his interrogators were Egyptian, but that “there were other men in the room whose faces were covered and who did not speak, but who passed notes with questions to the Egyptians.” When he refused to concede that he had traveled to Afghanistan and had met Osama bin Laden, he said that the Egyptians tortured him with electric shocks. “I cry and I yell,” he explained, adding, “they gave me brain electric shocks,” and that they also gave him drug-laced drinks “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”

Transferred to Bagram in early April, Madni confirmed that the abuse continued. He explained that a CIA agent told him, “We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden,” but that despite his refusal to confess, and even though he took several polygraph tests, which showed that he was telling the truth, he was subjected to sleep deprivation for six months, moved from cell to cell every few hours as part of a program that, when it surfaced in Guantánamo, was known euphemistically as the “frequent flier program.”

After his arrival at Guantánamo, on March 23, 2003, Madni was so depressed that, according to Mamdouh Habib, an Australian prisoner, released in January 2005, who had also been rendered for torture in Egypt, “he tried to hang himself twice, and went on three hunger strikes.“ By the time of his release, as the Times described it, “he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.”

Everything about Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni’s treatment at the hands of US forces — and their willing accomplices in Egypt — should be a source of profound shame, and it is no wonder that Madni told the New York Times, “It’s easy for the United States to say no charges were found, but who is responsible for the seven years of my life?” and that his lawyer, Richard L. Cys, said he planned to sue the US government for his client’s unlawful detention, and has filed a lawsuit in the federal courts in the hope of gaining access to his medical records from Guantánamo, which, he hopes, will confirm his account of his torture in Egypt.

The complicity of the UK government

However, Reprieve is also concerned about the complicity of the British government in Madni’s rendition, noting that “the 1976 Exchange of Notes between the UK and US governments in relation to Diego Garcia clearly requires that the UK must be informed of all intended movements of US ships and aircraft on or through” Diego Garcia, and that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has also “stated that the United States would need to ask permission of the UK should it bring any ‘unlawful combatants’ onto the island.”

Reprieve also pointed out that, in response to questions about why it had taken so long for evidence of the two rendition flights through Diego Garcia to come to light, former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett told the BBC, “It was very difficult for the government … to go back and look at what had happened on previous occasions … [T]here was not a clear, simple trace of record keeping. That may, I don’t know, that may have been the case in the United States also.” Asking why this should have been so, Reprieve noted that “more than one independent source has since suggested that there had been logs of flights through Diego Garcia but the logs had been destroyed.”

That said, Reprieve also provided another explanation of why it may have been “difficult” to source the records, which, while tending to validate the British government’s claims about record keeping, demonstrates instead that approval for the activities of US agents must have come from the highest levels of the British government, through a rather devious arrangement whereby the Bush administration sought approval for its actions from cooperating governments, without necessarily providing them with any details of its activities.

A detailed examination of flights conducted by a well-known CIA rendition plane, a Gulfstream V turbojet identified by its tailfin number N379P, has indicated that it “routinely operated under various ‘special status designators’” (STS), including the designation “STS/STATE,” for which, as Reprieve notes, “the operators were claiming an official status for N379P as an aircraft on state duty, only one category below the aircraft that carry Heads of State [STS/HEAD].”

Moreover, Reprieve has also established, after studying four rendition cases, that “the operators of N379P also declared the plane to have the special status ‘ATFMEXEMPT,’” an even more limited STS designator, which “allows deviations from planned routes and other exemptions.” As Reprieve stated, this “effectively allowed N379P to fly wherever it liked, whenever it liked, without having to file new flight plans.”

Crucially, however, this special status is only granted when “specifically authorized by the relevant national authority,” and is taken very seriously by European air traffic controllers, indicating that approval must have come from the highest levels of the governments involved. As Council of Europe Senator Dick Marty has explained, based on his detailed investigations into “extraordinary rendition,” “Both of these ‘special status’ designations … vouch for the prior knowledge and collaborative planning input of the states whose territory or airspace was being traversed, because such exemptions ‘shall only be used with the proper authority.’”

While these investigations indicate that approval for the passage of US rendition flights through other countries’ airspace required high-level consultations with the governments involved, it should be noted that Reprieve also uncovered evidence indicating that the US may, in fact, have been given blanket approval to conduct “operations against terrorism” without having to provide cooperating governments with any specific details of these operations, using a “military travel order,” approved as part of a largely classified NATO agreement signed on October 4, 2001, in which NATO allies “agreed — at the request of the United States — to take eight measures, individually and collectively, to expand the options available in the campaign against terrorism.”

As Reprieve explained, only two of these measures have been made publicly available, but they certainly seem to provide all the approval the United States would have needed to conduct rendition operations while keeping its allies ignorant of the details. One provides “Blanket overflight clearances for the United States’ and other Allies’ aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism,” and the other provides “Blanket access to ports and airfields on NATO territory, including for refuelling, for United States and other Allies for operations against terrorism.”

What about the secret prison?

By revealing the identity of one of the prisoners rendered through Diego Garcia — and, perhaps more importantly, through its investigations of the types of government approval required for rendition flights — Reprieve’s report should renew pressure not only on the British government, but on other cooperating governments, to explain what special measures were adopted after the 9/11 attacks to facilitate “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and, I believe, to open up a debate about both their legality and the fact that they are presumably still in effect, should the Obama administration — or any other NATO member — feel that further renditions are required.

What also needs noting, however, is that, behind the revelation of one man’s identity — and the ongoing question of the identity of the other man rendered through Diego Garcia — is an even more thorny question that has more profound implications for both the British and American governments: whether a secret “War on Terror” prison has existed on the island, or on a ship (or ships) moored in its territorial waters.

This question has been raised since July 2002, when TIME, “quoting a source familiar with the operation,” reported that the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had been transferred to a prison on Diego Garcia from a US naval ship, and has been reinforced in the years since by other reports, in the US and Spanish media, claiming that other “high-value detainees” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Bali bombing suspect Hambali and two of his alleged associates, and Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the only one of the six who was not eventually transferred to Guantánamo — were also held on the island, as I reported in a detailed article last summer.

Both Dick Marty and Manfred Novak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Terrorism, have stated their belief that prisoners have been held on Diego Garcia. In March 2008, Novak said that he had “received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003,” and, after consultation with senior CIA officials and other knowledgeable sources, Marty told the Council of Europe, following the publication of a report into “Alleged secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states” in June 2006 (PDF), “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees. It is true that the UK government has readily accepted ‘assurances’ from US authorities to the contrary, without ever independently or transparently inquiring into the allegations itself, or accounting to the public in a sufficiently thorough manner.”

Moreover, confirmation has also come from two sources within the Bush administration. Last summer, a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, told Adam Zagorin of TIME that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island,” and in two interviews with National Public Radio, Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip that Diego Garcia had been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

In conclusion, it is ten months since the scandal of Diego Garcia’s secret prison last surfaced, and I can only hope that the ordeal of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni — and the painstaking research undertaken by Reprieve — will once more give this sordid story to the prominence it deserves.

Note: The description of Diego Garcia as the United States’ “single most important military facility” was made by John Pike, who runs the website GlobalSecurity.org, to David Vine, author of the newly-published book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press). For Dick Marty’s second report on “Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states” (published in June 2007) see here.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

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

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

In a busy week for former Guantánamo detainees, Der Spiegel reports that the sole German ex-detainee, Murat Kurnaz –- born in Bremen but ignored by the German government until Angela Merkel came to power, because he was the son of Turkish immigrant workers (gastarbeiter) –- is making headway with his long-standing claim, which he made following his release from Guantánamo in August 2006, that, as well as being tortured and abused by US forces in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, he was also beaten by soldiers from Germany’s Special Forces Command (KSK) at the US base at Kandahar airport.

Kurnaz described in detail how the Americans called him to a fence one evening, where two German soldiers were waiting. One of the soldiers, he claims, called out to him, “It looks like you picked the wrong side.” He was then taken behind a truck and ordered to lie on the ground, he says. The two Germans were prepared –- and “were wearing camouflage uniforms.” One of them, Kurnaz claims, grabbed him by the hair and shouted at him, “Do you know who we are? We’re the German force, the KSK.” According to Kurnaz, the German soldier then pushed his face onto the dry desert floor and kicked him in the side before leaving. The soldiers laughed, says Kurnaz. “They thought it was funny.”

Although the KSK has persistently denied Kurnaz’s claims, Der Spiegel reports that three American witnesses –- including Major Matthew W. Donald of the 108th Military Police Company, who now teaches military history at the University of Ohio –- have corroborated his claims, adding that German investigators believe that his account is “credible.”

Mamdouh Habib

Over in Australia, meanwhile, the Australian reports that “Holes have emerged in the evidence Australian intelligence agencies have relied on to paint former Guantánamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib as a national security threat.” Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen, was released from Guantánamo in January 2005, but only after he was rendered for torture in Egypt and was then treated with appalling brutality in Guantánamo. The case against him –- such as it was, before he was released lest details of his “extraordinary rendition” and torture emerged to shame the US administration –- hinged on his alleged connections, established during a visit to the United States, with followers of “the Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted and sentenced in the US for his part in terror plots including Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center. A key part of this “evidence” –- calls allegedly made to Habib “from a New Jersey phone number linked to another convicted terrorist, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny” –- have now been revealed as groundless, following the discovery that, at the time the calls were made, El-Gabrowny had already been in US custody for three weeks.

As the Australian described it, the latest revelations about the phone records came about after one of the men arrested with Habib in Pakistan –- Ibrahim Diab, who was “arrested but quickly released” –- came forward “to corroborate [Habib’s] claims that he was held in the Australian High Commission in the capital Islamabad and interrogated by an Australian diplomat.” Diab’s testimony also backs up claims made by Mr Habib that the calls from New Jersey were actually “faxes about fundraising activities sent to him by other members of the New Jersey Muslim community with access to the same phone.” Habib, who turned out on Saturday at a huge protest rally against President Bush’s visit to Australia, where he told reporters, “George Bush is a great evil –- he should get out of this country,” continues to maintain his innocence, in an attempt to clear his name, to retrieve his passport from the Australian authorities, and to secure damages from the federal government over his detention in Egypt and at Guantánamo.

Diab’s testimony will presumably bolster Habib’s case against his own government, which has persistently maintained that it had nothing to do with the activities of the Americans. Habib, on the other hand, has repeatedly insisted that “the Australian government was complicit in the treatment he received,” asserting that “Australia’s spy agency ASIO was aware at the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that he knew many of the members of the Muslim community in New Jersey, including some of the men convicted over the bombings,” and that the agency had asked him to spy on the New Jersey Muslims, but he had refused. I wonder whether, as with Jamil El-Banna in the UK, that refusal to work as an informer may not have blighted the rest of his life.

Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost

And finally, to Pakistan, where Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, an Afghan writer and businessman, who was sold to the Americans by Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, has been allowed to speak publicly for the first time in almost a year. Betrayed by the ISI because both he and his brother Badruzzaman Badr (also held in Guantánamo and then released) had published articles that were critical of the ISI, Muslim Dost was freed from Guantánamo in April 2005, but then proceeded to write a book about Guantánamo, with his brother, that was, again, critical of the ISI. Da Guantánamo Matay Zolanay (The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo) was published last July, and two months later, on 29 September, Muslim Dost was seized by Pakistani police as he left a mosque in Peshawar, his home since the 1970s. Ranking as one of Pakistan’s many “disappeared” for several months, he was eventually located in his adoptive country’s sprawling and unaccountable prison system, and was recently transferred to the Central Prison in Peshawar, where, farcically, he has been charged with “violating visa rules and illegal stay in Pakistan.”

Speaking to the Pakistan Daily Times this week, Muslim Dost ran through his recent history, explaining that, after his arrest, “agency personnel drove him handcuffed and blindfolded to their office near the Army Stadium. ‘I was already familiar with the detention centre, as I had spent some time there before I was shifted to Guantánamo Bay in 2001,’ he added. He said an intelligence official, in his mid-30s, questioned him about the book. ‘I explicitly told him that I had co-authored the book and would write another one once I was released.’”

Muslim Dost went on to explain that he was held for six months in a secret prison located somewhere between Gora Qabristan and Peshawar airport, which held between 35 and 40 people, and accused the authorities of running a prison that was even more vile than Guantánamo. “Detention cells at Guantánamo Bay are far better than those I witnessed in Peshawar, being run by the intelligence agencies,” he told the Daily Times, adding, “Most of the inmates were suffering from tuberculosis without any healthcare facilities available to them,” and explaining that he was not even allowed writing materials, as he had been in Guantánamo, where he wrote 25,000 lines of poetry, some of which appears in the recent book Poems From Guantánamo, even though it was almost all confiscated by the authorities and not returned to him on his release. He also explained that one of his fellow detainees had been “brutally tortured” at the prison.

While his transfer from this secret prison to Peshawar perhaps indicates that the much-wronged poet will soon be released outright, he will clearly never be cowed by threats and intimidation from powerful people whom he regards, implacably, as corrupt. “If the authorities consider publication of my book written on wrongdoings and injustices by the agencies with innocent detainees [to be a mistake],” he said, “then I will make this mistake time and again.”

Note: For more on Kurnaz, see here, and for more on the stories of all three men see my book 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.