As the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s torture program was specifically developed, and who, after John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee wrote and approved the notorious torture memos of August 1, 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, Zubaydah is pivotal to any assessment of the CIA’s torture program, and what makes his story particularly poignant — while reflecting awfully on the Bush administration’s supposed intelligence — is the fact that it should have been clear from the very beginning to the CIA, and to senior Bush administration officials, up to and including the President, that Zubaydah was not , as touted, the number three in al-Qaeda, but was instead the mentally damaged gatekeeper of a military training camp — Khaldan — that was only tangentially associated with al-Qaeda, and was, in fact, closed down by the Taliban, after its emir, another notorious “ghost prisoner” named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to bring it under the command of Osama bin Laden.

In the wake of WikiLeaks’ recent release of classified military documents relating to the Guantánamo prisoners (the Detainee Assessment Briefs, or DABs), my friend and colleague Jason Leopold had an excellent story out yesterday on Truthout, which, in essence, analysed why, in the photo of Abu Zubaydah available in the documents, he is wearing an eye patch, when, in the few photos available from before his capture, he clearly had both his eyes.

The results of this investigation, which involved limited statements made by one of Zubaydah’s attorneys, Brent Mickum, who is prohibited through draconian classification procedures from discussing almost anything about his client, are cross-posted below, and they provide, I believe, another chilling example of the manner in which physical mutilation — as found, for example, in the unnecessary amputations of various Guantánamo prisoners’ limbs — as well as physical experimentation in general (which has been admirably chronicled by Jason and the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye — see here and here), played a major part in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and must, one day, be regarded as part of the process whereby the Bush administration was knowingly involved in crimes against humanity.

Why Did US Medical Personnel Remove High-Value Detainee Abu Zubaydah’s Eye?
By Jason Leopold, Truthout, May 18, 2011

Shortly after he was captured in March 2002 at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, following an early morning raid jointly conducted by the CIA, FBI, Pakistani police and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Abu Zubaydah woke up at a black site prison in Thailand and discovered that his left eye had been surgically removed.

Zubaydah, who is wearing an eye patch in a photograph included in his Guantánamo threat assessment file released by WikiLeaks last month, apparently never consented to the medical procedure and to this day has no idea why it was done, according to one of Zubaydah’s attorneys.

“I can tell you that Abu Zubaydah has no explanation for the loss of his eye,” said Brent Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2007. “He continually wants me to make inquiries to try and determine the circumstances for which he lost his eye, but no one has been forthcoming.”

Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured in the “war on terror” whom the Bush administration had falsely claimed helped plan the 9/11 attacks and was the “No. 3″ person in al-Qaeda, was shot in the leg, groin and stomach with an AK-47 during the March 28, 2002, raid. He allegedly attempted to evade capture by trying to jump from the rooftop of his safe house to the roof of a neighboring house. But the wounds he sustained did not include injuries to his eyes, face or head, according to intelligence officials and photographs of Zubaydah taken as he lay unconscious in a pool of blood, teetering on the brink of death, following the raid.

Retired CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was the head of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and led the team involved in Zubaydah’s capture, told Truthout recently that Zubaydah “had both eyes” when the suspected terrorist was escorted from a Pakistani hospital to a Gulf Stream jet a day or so after the raid where a trauma surgeon from Johns Hopkins University the CIA tapped to perform surgery on the suspected terrorist was waiting.

So, what happened?

A US counterterrorism official, responding to a query from Truthout, said, “Zubaydah had a preexisting eye condition when he was captured” and “American medical personnel treated the condition, [but] he ultimately lost the eye.”

The revelation stands as the first piece of new medical information related to Zubaydah’s case to surface in years.

But Mickum doesn’t believe the government is being truthful.

“It is patently false to state Zubaydah lost his eye due to a preexisting condition and that is belied by the evidence that I have from [Zubaydah], which I can’t discuss due to the government’s protective order,” said Mickum. “My client had two good eyes before he was seized. I’m aware of no information from my client, the government or any other source that he had a ‘preexisting eye condition.’”

The counterterrorism official did not respond to follow-up questions about what Zubaydah’s pre-existing condition was, when the surgery to remove his eye took place, who performed it and where it was done, whether officials at the CIA signed off on the procedure, whether measures were taken to try and save Zubaydah’s eye and whether the CIA or any other intelligence official told Zubaydah why his eye was being removed.

Evisceration or Enucleation?

Dr. Jonathan Macy, who runs the Macy Eye Center in Los Angeles and is an associate clinical professor of ophthalmology at UCLA and the University of Southern California, said the “indications for removal of an eye include trauma, infection, pain, tumor and sympathetic ophthalmia,” where a piercing injury to one eye results in inflammation of the uninjured eye.

“If the eye is removed primarily at the time of trauma, the indication is a blind eye that cannot be put back together,” Macy said. “An alternative scenario would involve primary repair of the ruptured globe and the subsequent development of infection or pain in a blind eye.”

Macy added that “removal of eyes is done with either evisceration or enucleation.”

“Evisceration is usually the preferred procedure,” Macy said. “With evisceration, the contents of the globe are removed, but the outer wall, or sclera of the eye in retained. A silicone ball implant is inserted within the sclera to create volume. The volume within the orbit allows proper fitting of a prosthesis. When the whole globe must be removed, that is an enucleation.”

But Macy said it is unknown which procedure Zubaydah underwent because the counterterrorism official would only say that “he ultimately lost the eye.”

A 1998 passport picture of Zubaydah, which for years was the only photograph available, shows him wearing a pair of glasses and what appears to be a shadow or scar over his left eye, possibly the result of a shrapnel wound he suffered a decade prior to his capture.

Macy said in that photograph Zubaydah’s “left orbit may have already contained a prosthesis,” but Macy did not take a position as to whether that was the case.

“When one eye is normal and the other eye has a prosthesis, they rarely appear symmetrical,” he said. Zubaydah’s “eyes look slightly different from one another, but not to any marked degree.”

Macy also viewed the photograph of Zubaydah lying unconscious that was taken immediately following the raid and said Zubaydah’s eyes appears to be “fine.”

“I do not see any see any cuts or big lacerations and no cuts around the face or nose,” Macy said.

Regarding the counterterrorism official’s account about Zubaydah’s pre-existing eye condition and the circumstances that led to his left eye being removed, Macy said the scenario is conceivable.

“If the eye had suffered significant direct trauma, there are usually signs of injury to the surrounding skin,” Macy said. “The photos don’t show collateral damage. Therefore, the official explanation is very plausible.”

“Rather than perforation causing infection, an infection of the cornea may lead to perforation of the globe,” Macy added. “In this case, as there is a claim of a preexisting condition, [Zubaydah] may have suffered a previous corneal ulcer that thinned and weakened the globe. He may have had a bacterial infection or herpes of the cornea. This is almost always a unilateral process. Such infections may be severe enough to perforate the eye, rendering it blind. The offending agent must be removed, leading to evisceration or enucleation.”

Zubaydah’s medical records would likely explain the pre-existing eye condition, but those files are classified. The government has refused to share Zubaydah’s medical files with his legal team, all of whom have top secret clearance, because it contends that doing so would amount to a violation of the detainee’s privacy rights, an assertion that Mickum said is “so ludicrous that it is not even laughable at this stage.”

Mickum said Zubaydah now wears a prosthetic eye, but it sometimes irritates him so he takes it out and instead wears the eye patch.

Shrapnel Wound

The only known pre-existing condition that may have affected Zubaydah’s eye was the shrapnel wound to his head he suffered from a mortar attack while “on the front lines” in Afghanistan fighting Soviet forces a decade prior to his capture, according to the government’s classified Detainee Assessment Brief released by WikiLeaks.

That file says Zubaydah “stated he had to relearn fundamentals such as walking, talking and writing; as such, he was therefore considered worthless to al-Qaida.”

Last year, the government finally admitted in court documents [PDF] that Zubaydah’s diaries seized during the raid of the safe house “indicate that he suffered cognitive impairment from a shrapnel injury for a number of years.”

But when former Justice Department attorney John Yoo prepared one of the August 2002 torture memos, authorizing the CIA to subject Zubaydah to ten brutal torture techniques, which included waterboarding and repeatedly slamming him into a wall, Yoo wrote: “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from your proposed interrogation methods.”

“Through reading his diaries and interviewing him, you [CIA] have found no history of mood disturbance or other psychiatric pathology … ‘thought disorder’ … enduring mood or mental health problems,” Yoo wrote.

One of the interrogation memos Yoo drafted for the Department of Defense (DoD) that was used by military personnel and contractors conducting interrogations at Guantánamo and other prison facilities operated by the DoD stated that “gouging” a prisoner’s eyes out was arguably legal under the president’s executive powers unless “specific intent” to harm the prisoner could be proven [See Part One (PDF) and Part Two (PDF) of that memo].

“Infected Eye”

Details about Zubaydah’s eye appear to have first surfaced in a 2008 FBI Inspector General’s Report [PDF] that contained details of his interrogation conducted by CIA contractors, which former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, identified in the report by the pseudonym “Thomas,” said amounted to “borderline torture.”

In the report, the then-FBI Inspector General Glenn Fine said Soufan’s colleague, FBI special agent Steve Gaudin, identified by the pseudonym “Gibson,” disclosed to his fiancé in 2002 or 2003 that he accompanied Soufan to the black site prison in Thailand to “interview a notorious terrorist.”

Soufan had interrogated Zubaydah at the CIA’s black site prison in Thailand in April 2002, before CIA contractors took over, and had tended to his wounds.

Gaudin’s fiancé at the time, identified in the report as “Morehead,” “stated the terrorist was missing an eye. [Gaudin] told [the FBI during an interview into the matter] that Zubaydah had an infected eye, sometimes wore an eye patch and eventually got a glass eye,” which seems to indicate that Zubaydah’s eye may have already been removed by the time both agents arrived at the black site in April 2002.

Truthout tried to reach Gaudin’s ex-fiancée to determine if Gaudin disclosed additional information to her about Zubaydah’s eye and his medical condition in general, but she did not return emails or voice mail messages left on her cell phone.

Daniel Freedman, who works as director of strategy for policy and analysis at Soufan’s consulting firm, The Soufan Group, said Soufan confirmed that Zubaydah had a “preexisting eye condition.”

“I checked with [Soufan] and the [counterterrorism official's] account is correct,” Freedman told Truthout in an email.

Neither Freedman nor Soufan elaborated.

Kiriakou, who wrote a book about his tenure at the CIA and the capture of Zubaydah, said, “I now recall that when [Zubaydah] first opened his eyes, his left eye was cloudy, like it had a significant cataracts film over it.”

“Zubaydah spent most of the time with his eyes closed and I just forgot about it,” said Kiriakou, who was surprised to learn Zubaydah’s eye had been removed. “It looked like a really bad cataract. I was with him about 48 hours when the plane came. I do not recall the Pakistani doctors paying any attention at all to his eye. They were so focused on his wounds that they didn’t pay any attention to anything else.”

Zubaydah Blames Interrogators

Zubaydah seems to be under the impression that he lost his eye as a result of abusive treatment.

During his Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing, Zubaydah said the interrogators subjected him to “months of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries that they inflicted to my eye, to my stomach, to my bladder and my left thigh and my reproductive organs.”

The counterterrorism official also said that any suggestion that Zubaydah “lost the eye while being captured or as a result of interrogation would be flat wrong.”

But other detainees’ claimed there were attempts to gouge out their eyes.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Omar Deghayes said a Guantánamo guard “pushed his fingers inside my eyes” and blinded him in his right eye.

“I didn’t realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers,” Deghayes told the Guardian, explaining that the incident took place when he protested a policy that called for detainees to walk around without pants. “Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes.”

Shaker Aamer, the last British detainee who remains imprisoned at Guantánamo, told his attorney he also experienced similar treatment. Aamer said naval military police brutally tortured him for two and a half hours on June 9, 2006, “gouged his eyes” and “held his eyes open and shined a Maglite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat,” during a brutal two-and-a-half hour beating on June 9, 2006, after he refused to provide his captors with a retina scan and fingerprints [Note: This was the same night that three other prisoners reportedly died by committing suicide, a questionable event that was analyzed by Scott Horton, based on new information from former soldiers, in an award-winning article for Harper's Magazine last year].

Mickum said the loss of Zubaydah’s eye and the government’s rationale that it was the result of a “preexisting eye condition” only raises additional questions about Zubaydah’s treatment.

“The only way to rule out that anything nefarious took place is to look at Zubaydah’s medical records,” Mickum said. “Until that occurs, the jury is way out and the government is not entitled to any credibility. They’ve lied consistently starting with the fact that they said Zubaydah was never tortured. The only inference one can draw is that he lost his eye as a result of mistreatment by the government and that he received poor medical treatment in the aftermath of his injury.”

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.

The research article, as the editors explain, “adds solid, specific evidence of both human rights abuses at Guantánamo Bay and the apparent complicity of medical personnel in the abuse,” documenting Ithe torture techniques, including “sleep deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes, serious threats, forced positions, beatings, and forced nudity,” that were prevalent during the worst period of abuse between 2002 and 2004. “In addition,” the editors add, “each of the nine detainees reported being subjected to severe beatings, sexual assault and/or the threat of rape, mock execution, mock disappearance, and being choked.”

Crucially, the researchers estabished that, “although some of the physical injuries sustained by detainees that were consistent with allegations of torture were documented by medical personnel in the camp, causes of injury were not investigated by those personnel. Furthermore, mental health practitioners in the camp recorded symptoms characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in seven of nine detainees, but failed to investigate the causes of the symptoms or to diagnose or treat the detainees’ PTSD.”

The authors’ conclusion is stark:

Medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the US Department of Defense neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm. The full extent of medical complicity in US torture practices will not be known until there is a thorough, impartial investigation including relevant classified information. We believe that, until such time as such an investigation is undertaken, and those responsible for torture are held accountable, the ethical integrity of medical and other healing professions remains compromised.

In an AFP article that followed publication of the article, a shocking example of indifference was cited. A clinician with the Defense Department’s Behavorial Health Service, after noting a detainee’s suicidal thoughts, memory lapses and nightmares, prescribed him antidepressants, and stated, “[You] need to relax when the guards are being more aggressive.”

AFP also explained that, although “[r]eports of alleged complicity by CIA doctors and psychologists and DoD behavioral consultants, described by the US government as ‘non-clinical’ experts who were present during the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, have already come to light,” Vincent Iacopino pointed out that this new study “focuses on Defense Department medical personnel — doctors and psychologists — who directly cared for Guantánamo inmates and whose role has been largely obscured.”

Speaking to AFP, he said, “There has been no information to date on the role of those health professionals in turning a blind eye, as the paper has indicated, until this time.”

Yesterday evening, I spoke to Press TV about the new report. A recording of that interview is available here, and a transcript of the interview is below:

Press TV: Does this report come as a surprise to you at all?

Andy Worthington: Well, no it doesn’t. These kinds of stories have come out of Guantánamo for years. It’s something I’m glad to see is still being reported, because of course when it comes to medical personnel and psychologists and psychiatrists being involved in the kinds of procedures that took place in Guantánamo for many years, it’s absolutely disgusting that that’s happened.

These are people who really should have said no, and gone home and resigned from the military rather than taking any part in these things, and of course some of the people that were involved were outside contractors.

The whole process invoving playing on people’s phobias, and what were perceived as people’s weaknesses was designed by psychologists who had been working, actually, in US military schools teaching US personnel how to resist torture if they were captured abroad. It was reverse engineered and used at Guantánamo in real life on prisoners, which was a really shocking thing to do.

But these are the kinds of things that have happened, and over the years the prisoners at Guantánamo — released prisoners — have spoken about medical abuse under the Bush administration. So when people were ill they would not receive treatment unless they cooperated with interrogators.

One of the things that I hope people are noticing in these WikiLeaks disclosures of the Guantánamo documents is how many false statements are made by people, that getting people to cooperate with interrogators was not necessarily to tell the truth, it was getting them to make any kind of statement that could be used. As we’re seeing in these documents, there are a number of alarming informants in Guantánamo’s history who have repeatedly made statements from their fellow prisoners which have subsequently turned out to be untrue.

Press TV: Obviously, you mentioned you were glad that this sort of thing was being reported and coming out. But these sorts of things were being reported for quite a while now, especially since Obama promised to close Guantánamo. Do such reports make any difference or further the case of anyone being held responsible for torture in Guantánamo?

Andy Worthington: The primary aspect of the WikiLeaks documents is the military’s own assessment of how significant the prisoners are. So there is going to be very little in there about the torture of prisoners.

What I think it’s important is that what we’re seeing in some cases in these documents is the first confirmation on the part of the US military that certain prisoners were, for example, sent to other countries to be tortured before they were sent to Guantánamo. This is something that’s been very obvious from research over the years, but it’s not something that the Bush administration ever accepted had happened.

What I’ve seen already in a few of the files is mentions of prisoners being sent to Jordan where the Jordanians operated a secret torture prison on behalf of the CIA, and also to Egypt.

For those people who are concerned about holding senior Bush administration officials accountable for what they did in the war on terror, these provide other small pieces of evidence that will be useful for ongoing attempts to hold people accountable, but of course it’s very difficult because there’s no willingness within the United States to go ahead with anything. We seem to be relying on other countries trying to pursue cases against senior Bush administration officials or lawyers, and the problem is that the United States isn’t cooperating. There is a recent case that was brought in Spain where a Spanish judge actually dropped a case in the end when the US Justice Department refused to cooperate at all.

But, you know, I don’t think people should give up. The crimes that were committed by the Bush administration need to be addressed properly. This may be something that takes a very long time but if that’s the case it has to be done. I don’t think there’s really any other option.

I think President Obama, by allowing this to go unchallenged, has actually helped to create a climate in the United States where the supporters of torture feel kind of reinforced in their belief that it’s justified and acceptable; whereas, of course, it’s not. It’s not only counter-productive, but it’s illegal.

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 I explained at the time, the panel discussion was one of the final events in “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and, appropriately, took place in Boalt Hall, the home of torture professor John Yoo. Jason and Jeff’s presentation focused on their discovery of a memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror,” and which followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

As I also explained, I cross-posted the article, because it deserved to be read as widely as possible, and its publication during “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week was a wonderful boost to the week’s events, adding, as I noted in an introduction to the cross-post of Leopold and Kaye’s article, to “a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.”

The seven videos of the panel discussion (and the ensuing Q&A) are posted below, and I’m delighted to post them at this particular time, to coincide with the publication of the second of two articles by Jason and Jeff, examining how, in the early days of Guantánamo, every single prisoner was forced to “take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called ‘pharmacologic waterboarding.’” That article is cross-posted here, and the previous article, published three weeks ago, is available here (and is cross-posted here).

Part One: Jason Leopold introduces the themes discussed in the article, “Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program,” which involved seven months’ research.

Part Two: Jason concludes his introduction, and Jeff explains his research and the background to the program, warning the audience that the human experimentation story is an “octopus” that has infected US institutions, reaching far beyond the military.

Part Three: Jason talks more about the program, including some worrying suggestions that it may not have been fully abandoned by the Obama administration.

Part Four: In response to criticism of former SERE intelligence officer Michael Kearns by an audience member (included at the end of Part Five), Andy Worthington spoke in his defense, and also ran through the catalog of reasons why torture must continue to be opposed (as discussed above), with a particular focus on the use of torture to manufacture false confessions about connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Part Five: In response to a question from the audience, Jeff Kaye explained the reasons why the American Psychological Association (APA) has been discredited for its involvement in the Bush administration’s torture program, plus other questions/comments from the audience, including misplaced criticism of Michael Kearns (see Part Four above).

Part Six: Further questions from the audience, including discussion of the crimes of Henry Kissinger.

Part Seven: The final round of questions from the audience, including a discussion of the use of electro-shock treatment.

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

In my introduction to that article, I noted how Jason and Jeff contributed significantly to a growing body of work demonstrating that the detention program in Guantánamo, and in the “high-value detainee” program in the CIA’s secret prisons, involved human experimentation, of which medical experiments like the antimalarial project were just a part. Much more remains to be uncovered, but their article was part of a number of reports this year which have begun to shed light on this disturbing aspect of the detainee program. Human experimentation first came to light prominently in “Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” a report published by Physicians for Human Rights in June, and another important part of the story emerged in October, when Jason and Jeff (who has spent many years placing the “War on Terror” detention and interrogation policies in the wider context of CIA experimentation since the 1950s) published an article on Truthout entitled, “Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program,” revealing how the program had been given the green light by Cheney’s deputy in March 2002.

In this latest article, cross-posted below, Jason and Jeff focus on the role played by Capt. Albert J. Shimkus, “the former commanding officer and chief surgeon for both the Naval Hospital at Guantánamo Bay and Joint Task Force 160, which administered health care to detainees,” in approving the “mass presumptive treatment” policy, which reveals some dubious claims about Cuban fears of an malaria epidemic and the prevailing rate of malarial infection in Afghanistan at the time Guantánamo opened, and also reveals many examples of how US government concerns about the anti-malarial drug never made it to Guantánamo — or were, perhaps, deliberately ignored.

Key to this article is the discovery of a January 23, 2002, “Infection Control” Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which “called for the mass presumptive treatment of malaria using mefloquine.” As Jason and Jeff explain:

The “Infection Control” SOP, which was signed by Shimkus and has not been previously released, says, “detainees are native to a region plagued by a number of infectious diseases. It is estimated that a number of these detainees will carry one or more of these illnesses upon arrival … Empiric therapies will include … mefloquine 1250 mg.”

Medical literature usually describes “empiric therapy,” or presumptive treatment for malaria, as the administration or self-administration of antimalarial drugs for symptomatic individuals, or occasionally groups of at-risk patients, who do not have access to laboratories or medical facilities and in whom malaria cannot be formally diagnosed.

At Guantánamo, however, all detainees, whether they had symptoms or not, were given laboratory tests to determine if they had malaria, and doctors were accessible “24/7″ in the event symptoms started to surface, Shimkus said, calling into question the rationale for mass presumptive treatment.

Ex-Guantánamo Official Was Told Not to Discuss Policy Surrounding Antimalarial Drug Used on Detainees
By Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, December 20, 2010

Military officials were instructed not to publicly discuss a decision made in January 2002 to presumptively treat all Guantánamo detainees with a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug that has been directly linked to suicide, hallucinations, seizures and other severe neuropsychological side effects, according to a retired Navy captain who signed the policy directive.

Capt. Albert J. Shimkus, the former commanding officer and chief surgeon for both the Naval Hospital at Guantánamo Bay and Joint Task Force 160, which administered health care to detainees, defended the unprecedented practice, first reported by Truthout earlier this month, to administer 1250 mg of the drug mefloquine to all “war on terror” detainees transferred to the prison facility within the first 24 hours after their arrival, regardless of whether they had malaria or not.

The 1250 mg dosage is what is used to treat individuals who have malaria and is five times higher than the prophylactic dose given to individuals to prevent the disease. One tropical disease expert has said there is absolutely no “medical justification” to support the military’s decision to presumptively treat all Guantánamo detainees for malaria with high doses of mefloquine.

Mefloquine is also known by its brand name Lariam. It was researched by the US Army in the 1970s during the Vietnam War and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1989. Since its introduction, it has been directly linked to serious adverse effects, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, confusion, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores, hallucinations and homicidal and suicidal thoughts.

Although there were two media reports in 2002 that quoted Shimkus saying “war on terror” detainees were given antimalarial medication, neither he nor any other military or Pentagon official ever disclosed to lawmakers or military personnel who raised questions about the efficacy of mefloquine, that mass presumptive treatment was the policy in place at Guantánamo.

“There were certain issues we were advised not to talk about,” Shimkus told Truthout in an interview, explaining the reason the policy was never publicly disclosed. He could not recall who told him not to discuss the issue.

Shimkus, who is now an associate professor of national security studies at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, said officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Navy Environmental Health Center (NEHC) and the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which is part of the Defense Intelligence Agency, were all involved in the discussions that resulted in the issuance of a January 23, 2002, “Infection Control” Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that called for the mass presumptive treatment of malaria using mefloquine.

Detainees started arriving at Guantánamo two weeks earlier and were held in a detention center known as Camp X-Ray.

The “Infection Control” SOP, which was signed by Shimkus and has not been previously released, says, “detainees are native to a region plagued by a number of infectious diseases. It is estimated that a number of these detainees will carry one or more of these illnesses upon arrival … Empiric therapies will include … mefloquine 1250 mg.”

Medical literature usually describes “empiric therapy,” or presumptive treatment for malaria, as the administration or self-administration of antimalarial drugs for symptomatic individuals, or occasionally groups of at-risk patients, who do not have access to laboratories or medical facilities and in whom malaria cannot be formally diagnosed.

At Guantánamo, however, all detainees, whether they had symptoms or not, were given laboratory tests to determine if they had malaria, and doctors were accessible “24/7″ in the event symptoms started to surface, Shimkus said, calling into question the rationale for mass presumptive treatment.

Shimkus said the NEHC bore the primary responsibility for recommending that mefloquine be administered to all detainees in treatment doses, but there was consensus among the various government agencies about using the drug in this way.

“There was no one that said, ‘Captain, this is not the way to go,’” Shimkus said. “I did not do anything in isolation. Any policy would have been approved by a higher authority” up the medical chain of command.

Shimkus could not recall the names of the officials from the various government agencies who agreed with and signed off on the policy. Nor could he identify his immediate medical supervisor, a colonel at United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which is responsible for contingency planning and operations in Cuba, who Shimkus said would have also been involved in the decision.

Cuban Government Concerns

Shimkus said one of the reasons that factored into the decision to presumptively treat war on terror detainees with mefloquine was concerns raised by the Cuban government.

In an interview with Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg in February 2002, Shimkus said he and other medical officers stationed at Guantanamo met with Cuban doctors and government officials on February 8, 2002, to “reassure the government that suspected terrorist prisoners are not introducing malaria into” Cuba, “which has been free of the mosquito-borne disease for 50 years.”

Rosenberg reported on February 22, 2002, that steps taken to prevent the spread of malaria at Guantánamo included “impregnating the uniforms of both prisoners and troops who handle prisoners with mefloquin [sic] and other agents to kill the parasite.” The Herald‘s February 22, 2002, report was the first and only time mefloquine use at Guantánamo has ever been mentioned. But Rosenberg’s report did not state that Shimkus had already signed a policy directive authorizing mass presumptive treatment.

Shimkus told Truthout he could not recall specific details of his discussions with the Cubans. He did not respond to follow-up questions about Rosenberg’s characterization regarding the use of mefloquine.

Just three days prior to the publication of the Herald‘s report, Navy Capt. Alan “Jeff” Yund appeared before the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB) and was queried about malaria at Guantánamo.

But Yund, the Navy’s liaison officer to AFEB, did not disclose that mefloquine was being administered to detainees. He said he believed detainees who were infected with the disease would be treated on a case-by-case basis with a different antimalarial drug known as primaquine, and that other steps would be taken to protect against mosquitoes.

Yund told Truthout via email that he did not refer to mefloquine during the AFEB briefing because, “I do not recall being involved in any consultations regarding the use of mefloquine at Guantánamo and do not recall being aware that it was being used there.”

Yund declined to comment further.

Shimkus could not say why Yund was unaware that mefloquine was being used as a form of mass presumptive treatment at Guantánamo.

The use of mefloquine at Guantánamo was not mentioned during numerous other AFEB briefings, particularly one held in May 2003, where concerns were raised by members of the board about the drug’s severe neuropsychiatric side effects, which US military personnel who had taken mefloquine in 250 mg prophylactic doses had been complaining about.

Red Flags Raised

Shimkus said he was aware of the alternatives and noted that at one point the antibiotic drug doxycycline and Malarone were under consideration, but the latter had only been approved by the Department of Defense in 2000 and had not been in widespread use yet. Mefloquine, Shimkus said, was considered efficient and effective.

But at an April 16, 2002, meeting of the Interagency Working Group for Antimalarial Chemotherapy, which included Defense Department representatives, participants concluded that study designs on mefloquine were flawed or biased and based on “sensational or [at] best marketed information.”

The Working Group, which included representatives from the State Department, the CDC and FDA, stated, “Sufficient evidence exists to raise the question whether the neuropsychiatric adverse events of mefloquine are frequent enough and severe enough to warrant limiting its use.” The group called for additional research, and warned, “Other treatment regimes should be carefully considered before mefloquine is used at the doses required for treatment.”

Additionally, in October 2002, William Winkenwerder, the assistant secretary for defense, admitted that “recent press articles and scientific studies have raised concerns regarding the adverse effects associated with mefloquine use.”

Winkenwerder’s admission was made in a letter written in response to questions raised by John McHugh, then chair of the subcommittee on military affairs for the House Armed Services Committee. The letter said, “recent peer-review reports” showing adverse events levels associated with mefloquine are “much higher than previously reported.” Winkenwerder told McHugh, now secretary of the Army, that the CDC had initiated a review in 2001, which was then still underway, of all chemoprophylactic drugs, including mefloquine.

Shimkus said he did not believe Winkenwerder was part of the consulting team who signed off on administering treatment doses of mefloquine to detainees. But Shimkus said the policy was “well-known in the [military] medical community.” Winkenwerder did not respond to calls for comment.

The use of mefloquine as a mass presumptive treatment at Guantánamo continued until at least July 2005, despite the presence of ongoing warnings.

In June 2004, the CDC issued a new set of guidelines on malaria treatment, which warned that mefloquine “is associated with a higher rate of severe neuropsychiatric reactions when used at treatment doses,” and recommended that mefloquine be used “only when … [other] options cannot be used.”

As far back as 1990, the CDC warned in a set of recommendations for malaria prevention for travelers that mefloquine should not be used for presumptive self-treatment “because of the frequency of side effects, especially dizziness, which has been associated with therapeutic dosages of mefloquine.”

“This was a one time treatment only [for detainees],” Shimkus said. “My focus on mefloquine was specifically for preventing malaria from occurring.”

However, other Guantánamo documents obtained by Truthout say that on February 28, 2002, 59 detainees allegedly refused to take medication, including antimalarial drugs, and noted that the “series must start over.” It is unclear whether this included readministration of mefloquine, or whether the “series” described included further antimalarial doses of primaquine or cholorquine, also administered to the detainees.

Maj. Remington Nevin, an Army public health physician, who formerly worked at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and has written extensively about mefloquine, previously told Truthout the decision to administer high doses of the drug, even as a one-time treatment “is, at best, an egregious malpractice.”

Nevin added, “many dozens of detainees, possibly hundreds” likely experienced side effects “as severe as those intended through the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’”

Truthout was unable to locate a single malaria expert who was willing to go on the record to defend the government’s policy of mass presumptive treatment of the disease using mefloquine or any other antimalarial drug.

Shimkus told Truthout that, “clinically,” he could not recall if any detainees experienced any side effects associated with taking mefloquine, but if they did, that data would have been noted in their medical records.

“We have robust medical records,” Shimkus said. “If anything occurred that was a cause for concern it would have been documented in their medical records.”

But the government has refused to release Guantánamo detainees’ medical records to the media or to their attorneys citing, among other reasons, privacy concerns.

As first documented in a separate report on mefloquine use at Guantánamo published earlier this month by Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research, medical files for detainee 693 [Salah al-Salami], released by the Defense Department in connection with his alleged suicide at the prison facility in June 2006, contradict Shimkus’s assertions. Those records show that two weeks after the detainee was given mefloquine in June 2002, he was interviewed by Guantánamo medical personnel and reported that he was suffering from nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety, auditory and visual hallucinations, sleep loss and suicidal thoughts.

A Guantánamo medical officer who interviewed the detainee, however, did not state that the detainee may have been experiencing mefloquine-related side effects in notes he took evaluating the detainee’s condition.

Shimkus dismissed the significance of the medical officer’s failure to connect the detainee’s psychological state to the possible side effects resulting from mefloquine, stating that the medical officer may have been unaware “the patient had taken [the drug], because there was a lot of turnover of staff at that point.”

Scott Allen and Vince Iacopino, medical doctors affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights, a doctors’ organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said, “the questionable use of mefloquine for malaria prevention at Guantánamo underscore the need for transparency of detention policies and procedures” at the prison facility.

“Benefits Outweighed Risks”

Shimkus, who is a nurse by training, acknowledged that the mass presumptive treatment of malaria using mefloquin was unprecedented. However, he said the “benefits outweighed the risks.”

When asked, Shimkus did not indicate that contraindications for the use of mefloquine, such as pre-existing cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, seizures, or other mental illness, which would have heightened mefloquine’s side effects, were ever pursued for the individual detainees. He simply reiterated that the benefits of administering treatment doses of mefloquine outweighed the risks.

Yet, when told that the Defense Department took a radically different approach a decade earlier, when thousands of Haitian refugees housed at Guantánamo were first tested to determine if they had malaria and, only then, were given a treatment dosage of a different medication, chloroquine, if they had the disease, Shimkus said war on terror detainees “were a different cohort of individuals.”

“You have to remember that this was in the context of February 2002,” Shimkus said. “The detainees came from Afghanistan and other areas that may have been chloroquine resistant.”

Moreover, in two articles published in 2002, Shimkus claimed statistics showed that 40 percent of Afghanistan’s population was infected with malaria. But according to figures from the World Health Organization, in 2002, the number infected in Afghanistan was about 13 percent.

Shimkus also indicated that malaria cases at Guantánamo could have led to a public health crisis at the base, and reintroduction of malaria into Cuba. Once an outbreak begins, Shimkus told Truthout, one “loses control” of the situation and there is an epidemic.

However, when the CDC examined the influx of tens of thousands of refugees to the United States from hyper-epidemic sub-Saharan Africa, where the falciparum form of malaria kills more than a million people yearly, they concluded that “sustained malaria transmission” in a nonmalarial endemic country, like the US, from this population “would be unlikely.”

Still, the CDC called for mass presumptive treatment (with a drug other than mefloquine) of these refugees before they came to the US — mainly because they feared many US doctors wouldn’t recognize malaria symptoms — but noted that such mass presumptive treatment from other parts of the world, including Afghanistan, was not recommended, because “the risk and cost of post-arrival presumptive treatment currently outweighs the potential benefits.”

Of the more than 700 detainees held at Guantánamo, only four tested positive for malaria, all in January and February 2002.

But Shimkus still defended the mass administration of mefloquine, saying, “One [infection] is too many.” Shimkus said he believes he and other military officials “made the right policy decisions based on the information we had to prevent the introduction of malaria” in Cuba and protect the health of the detainees.

Shimkus said after he retired from the military he became involved with the Open Society Institute, funded by the Soros Foundation, and has since taken a role in the work the organization has done to raise awareness about abusive interrogation measures contained in the Army Field Manual.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), 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 has been clear for many years, since prisoners and former prisoners began speaking about the conditions of their confinement, medical and psychiatric personnel were intimately involved in a regime that involved withholding medical treatment for those who refused to “cooperate” with their interrogators — in other words, by providing false confessions — and the entire interrogation program — the one based on torture and coercion rather than the one favored by the law enforcement agencies, who stuck to non-violent rapport-building techniques — was directed by psychologists from the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) taught in US military schools, which involved using torture techniques to train military personnel to resist interrogation if captured, and which was reverse-engineered for use in the “War on Terror.”

These techniques — and the chilling theory of “learned helplessness” that underpinned it, which was designed to destroy the minds of prisoners so thoroughly that they became utterly dependent on their jailers — were intended to “break” prisoners so that they would confess, but it should also have been obvious that they would most effectively secure false confessions, rather than anything resembling the truth. For some involved in the program, this was not obvious — and this blindness to reality remains a problem that afflicts all those who still argue that the use of torture is a valuable tool — but for others the production of false confessions was very useful indeed.

This can be seen in particular in a false confession extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of an Afghan training camp, who was rendered to Egypt, where he was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein had met al-Qaeda representatives to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi later retracted his false confession — before he was eventually flown back to Libya, where, last May, he died, allegedly by committing suicide in prison — but this was of no concern to Dick Cheney, who used his tortured lies to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Beyond this specific example of the use of torture to extract false confessions to justify an illegal war, it has also become apparent that the detention program in Guantánamo, and in the “high-value detainee” program in the CIA’s secret prisons, involved human experimentation. This came to light prominently in “Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” a report published by Physicians for Human Rights last June, and another important part of the story emerged in October, when the journalist Jason Leopold and the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye (who has spent many years placing the “War on Terror” detention and interrogation policies in the wider context of CIA experimentation since the 1950s) published an article on Truthout entitled, “Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program,” revealing how the program had been given the green light by Cheney’s deputy in March 2002.

Jason and Jeff have just published another exposé for Truthout, demonstrating how every single prisoner at Guantánamo was forced to “take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called ‘pharmacologic waterboarding.’” The article reveals another chilling aspect of Guantánamo as a laboratory for human experimentation, and also confirms what former prisoners have been stating for many years, although without the detailed evidence unearthed by Kaye and Leopold. In my book The Guantánamo Files, for example, I included the following passages, which will undoubtedly resonate with those who read the cross-posted article that follows:

Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed [three British citizens commonly known as "the Tipton Three"] described an incident in August 2002 when medical staff toured the cell blocks asking the prisoners if they wanted an injection, “although they wouldn’t say what it was for.” They said that most of the prisoners refused, but the medical staff then returned with an ERF team who forced them to have the injections anyway. Ahmed said that the drug made him feel “very drowsy,” and added, “I have no idea why they were giving us these injections. It happened perhaps a dozen times altogether and I believe it still goes on at the camp. You are not allowed to refuse it and you don’t know what it is for.”

Abdullah al-Noaimi [from Bahrain] told his lawyers that within his first few days at Guantánamo he “was injected with an unknown substance which made him depressed and despondent. He was unable to control his thoughts and his mind raced. He was also unable to control his body and fell to the floor.” He was then placed in isolation for three days, where medical staff administered an unknown medicine “that made him feel drunk,’ until he refused to take it any more, and on another occasion was given pills which “caused him to hear voices.” When he told his interrogators that he “felt like he was losing his mind,” their only response was, “Yeah, we know.”

Controversial Drug Given to All Guantánamo Detainees Akin to “Pharmacologic Waterboarding”
By Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, December 1, 2010

The Defense Department forced all “war on terror” detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called “pharmacologic waterboarding.”

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government’s investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantánamo detainees.

Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantánamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees’ medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees’ deaths for nearly four years.

Interviews with mefloquine and malaria experts and a review of peer-reviewed journals and government documents show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.

All detainees arriving at Guantánamo in January 2002 were first given a treatment dosage of 1,250 mg of mefloquine, before laboratory tests were conducted to determine if they actually had the disease, according to a section of the DoD documents entitled “Standard Inprocessing Orders For Detainees.” The 1,250 mg dosage is what would be given if the detainees actually had malaria. That dosage is five times higher than the prophylactic dose given to individuals to prevent the disease.

Maj. Remington Nevin, an Army public health physician, who formerly worked at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and has written extensively about mefloquine, said in an interview the use of mefloquine “in this manner … is, at best, an egregious malpractice.”

The government has exposed detainees “to unacceptably high risks of potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide,” said Nevin, who was not speaking in an official capacity, but offering opinions as a board-certified, preventive medicine physician. “These side effects could be as severe as those intended through the application of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’”

Mefloquine is also known by its brand name Lariam. It was researched by the US Army in the 1970s and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1989. Since its introduction, it has been directly linked to serious adverse effects, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, confusion, hallucinations, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores and homicidal and suicidal thoughts. It belongs to a class of drugs known as quinolines, which were part of a 1956 human experiment study to investigate “toxic cerebral states,” as part of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program.

The Army tapped the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) to develop mefloquine and it was later licensed to the Swiss pharmaceutical company F. Hoffman-La Roche. The first human trials of mefloquine were conducted in the mid-1970s on prisoners, who were deliberately inoculated with malaria at Stateville Correctional prison near Joliet, Illinois, the site of controversial antimalarial experimentation in the early 1940s.

The drug was administered to Guantánamo detainees without regard for their medical or psychological history, despite its considerable risk of exacerbating pre-existing conditions. Mefloquine is also known to have serious side effects among individuals under treatment for depression or other serious mental health disorders, which numerous detainees were said to have been treated for, according to their attorneys and published reports.

In 2002, when the prison was established and mefloquine first administered, there were dozens of suicide attempts at Guantánamo. That same year, the DoD stopped reporting attempted suicides.

By February 2002, there were at least 459 detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo. In March of that year, according to the book, “Saving Grace at Guantánamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior,” by Montgomery Granger, “the situation” at the prison began “deteriorating rapidly.”

“There is more and more psychosis becoming evident in detainees,” wrote Granger, an Army Reserve major and medic who was stationed at Guantánamo in 2002. “We already have probably a dozen or so detainees who are psychiatric cases. The number is growing.”

“Presumptively Treating” Malaria

Though malaria is nonexistent in Cuba, DoD spokeswoman Maj. Tanya Bradsher told Truthout that the US government was concerned that the disease would be reintroduced into the country as detainees were transferred to the prison facility in January 2002.

A “decision was made,” Bradsher said in an email, to “presumptively treat each arriving Guantánamo detainee for malaria to prevent the possibility of having mosquito-borne [malaria] spread from an infected individual to uninfected individuals in the Guantánamo population, the guard force, the population at the Naval base or the broader Cuban population.”

But Granger wrote in his book that a Navy entomologist was present at Guantánamo in January and February 2002 and during that time only identified insects that were nuisances and did not identify any insects that were carriers of a disease, such as malaria.

Nevertheless, Bradsher said the “mefloquine dosage [given to detainees] was entirely for public health purposes … and not for any other purpose” and “is completely appropriate.”

“The risks and benefits to the health of the detainees were central considerations,” she added.

But a September 13, 2002, DoD memo governing the operational use of mefloquine said, “Malaria is not a threat in Guantánamo Bay.” Indeed, there have only been two to three reported cases of malaria at Guantánamo.

The DoD memo, signed by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs William Winkenwerder, was sent to then-Rep. John McHugh, the Republican chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Military Personnel. McHugh is now Secretary of the Army.

A Senate staff member told Truthout the Senate Armed Services Committee was never briefed about malaria concerns at Guantánamo nor was the committee made aware of “any issue related to the use of mefloquine or any other anti-malarial drug” related to “the treatment of detainees.”

When questions were raised at a February 19, 2002 meeting of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (AFEB) about what measures the military was taking to address malaria concerns at Guantánamo, Navy Capt. Alan J. Lund did not disclose that mefloquine was being administered to detainees as a form of presumptive treatment.

Yund said the military gave detainees a different anti-malarial drug known as primaquine and noted that “informed consent” was “absolutely practiced” prior to administering drugs to detainees, an assertion that contradicts claims made by numerous prisoners who said they were forced to take drugs even if they protested. Yund did not return calls for comment.

Bradsher declined to respond to a follow-up question about who made the decision to presumptively treat detainees with mefloquine.

An April 16, 2002, meeting of the Interagency Working Group for Antimalarial Chemotherapy, which DoD, along with other federal government agencies, is a part of, was specifically dedicated to investigating mefloquine’s use and the drug’s side effects. The group concluded that study designs on mefloquine up to that point were flawed or biased and criticized DoD medical policy for disregarding scientific fact and basing itself more on “sensational or best marketed information.”

The Working Group called for additional research, and warned, “other treatment regimes should be carefully considered before mefloquine is used at the doses required for treatment.”

Still, despite the red flags that pointed to mefloquine as a high-risk drug, the DoD’s mefloquine program proceeded.

In fact, a June 2004 set of guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says mefloquine should only be used when other standard drugs were not available, as it “is associated with a higher rate of severe neuropsychiatric reactions when used at treatment doses.”

According to the CDC, “‘presumptive treatment’ without the benefit of laboratory confirmation should be reserved for extreme circumstances (strong clinical suspicion, severe disease, impossibility of obtaining prompt laboratory confirmation).”

A CDC spokesman refused to comment about the “presumptive treatment” of malaria at Guantanamo and referred questions to the DoD.

Nevin said, if “mass presumptive treatment has been given consistently, many dozens of detainees, possibly hundreds, would almost certainly have suffered such disabling adverse events.”

“It appears that for years, senior Defense health leaders have condoned the medically indefensible practice of using high doses of mefloquine ostensibly for mass presumptive treatment of malaria among detainees from the Middle East and Asia lacking any evidence of disease,” Nevin said. “This is a use for which there is no precedent in the medical literature and which is specifically discouraged among refugees by malaria experts at the Centers for Disease Control.”

Even proponents of limited mefloquine usage are seriously questioning the logic behind the DoD’s actions. Professor James McCarthy, chair of the Infectious Diseases Division of the Queensland Institute of Medicine in Australia, who is an advocate of the safe use of mefloquine under proper safeguards, and takes it himself when traveling, told Truthout he was unaware of the use of mefloquine for mass presumptive treatment as described by the DoD, but could imagine it under certain circumstances.

However, when informed that lab tests were available and the detainees were screened for the blood product G6PD, used to determine the suitability of certain antimalarial drugs, McCarthy found the DoD’s use of mefloquine at Guantánamo difficult to understand and “hard to support on pure clinical grounds as an antimalarial.”

Treatment, Torture or an Experiment?

Another striking point about the DoD’s decision to presumptively treat mostly Muslim detainees with mefloquine beginning in 2002 is that it is the exact opposite of how the DoD responded to malaria concerns among the Haitian refugees who were held at Guantánamo a decade earlier.

Between 1991 and 1992, more than 14,000 Haitian refugees were held in temporary camps set up at Guantánamo. A large number of Haitian refugees — 235 during a four-month period — were diagnosed with malaria. But instead of presumptively treating the refugee population at Guantánamo, the DoD conducted laboratory tests first and only the individuals who were found to be malaria carriers were administered chloroquine.

Another example of how the DoD approached malaria treatment differently for other subjects is in the case of Army Rangers who returned from malarial areas of Afghanistan between June and September 2002 and were infected with the disease at an attack rate of 52.4 cases per 1,000 soldiers.

However, the Rangers did not receive mass presumptive treatment of mefloquine. They were given other standard drugs after laboratory tests, according to documents obtained by Truthout.

Nevin said the DoD’s treatment of Haitian refugees represented “a situation that arguably presented a much higher risk of disease and secondary transmission, but one which US medical experts stated at the time could be safely managed through more conservative and focused measures.”

Why did the government use the “conservative and focused” approach in treating Haitian refugees and the Army rangers, but then revert to presumptive mefloquine treatment in the case of the Guantánamo detainees, who — a month after the prison facility opened in January 2002 — were stripped of their protections under the Geneva Conventions?

According to Sean Camoni, a Seton Hall University law school research fellow, “there is no legitimate medical purpose for treating malaria in this way” and the drug’s severe side effects may actually have been the DoD’s intended impact in calling for the drug’s usage.

Camoni and several other Seton Hall law school students have been working on a report about mefloquine use on Guantánamo detainees. Their work was conducted independently of Truthout’s investigation.

A copy of the newly-published Seton Hall report, “Drug Abuse? An Exploration of the Government’s Use of Mefloquine at Guantánamo,” says mefloquine’s extreme side effects may have violated a provision in the antitorture statute related to the use of “mind altering substances or other procedures” that “profoundly disrupts the senses or the personality.”

Legal memos prepared in August 2002 by former DoJ attorneys Jay Bybee and John Yoo for the CIA’s torture program permitted the use of drugs for interrogations. The authority was also contained in a legal memo Yoo prepared for the DoD less than a year later after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld convened a working group to address “policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques.”

In September, Truthout reported that the DoD’s inspector general (IG) conducted an investigation into allegations that detainees in custody of the US military were drugged. The IG’s report, which remains classified, was completed a year ago and was shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for the Armed Services Committee, told Truthout at the time that the IG report did not substantiate allegations of drugging of prisoners for the “purposes of interrogation.”

The medical files for detainee 693 [Salah al-Salami, one of the three men who died in June 2006] released in 2008 shows that, two weeks after he first started taking mefloquine in June 2002, he was interviewed by Guantánamo medical personnel and reported he was suffering from nightmares, hallucinations, anxiety auditory and visual hallucinations, anxiety, sleep loss and suicidal thoughts.

The detainee said he had previously been treated for anxiety and had a family history of mental illness. He was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, according to the DoD documents. Guantánamo medical staff who interviewed the detainee did not state that he may have been experiencing mefloquine-related side effects in an evaluation of his condition.

Mark Denbeaux, the director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, who conducted an independent investigation into the 2006 deaths of the three Guantánamo detainees, said in an interview “almost every remaining question here would be solved if the [detainees'] full medical records were released.”

The government has refused to release Guantánamo detainees’ medical records, citing privacy concerns in some cases, and assertions that they are “protected” or “classified” in other instances. The few medical records that have been released have been heavily redacted.

“A crucial issue is dosage” Denbeaux said. “Giving detainees toxic doses of mefloquine has mind-altering consequences that may be permanent. Without access to medical records, which the government refuses to release, the use of mefloquine in this manner appears to be grotesque malpractice at best, if not human experimentation or ‘enhanced interrogation.’ The question is where are the doctors who approved this practice and where are the medical records?”

Bradsher did not respond to questions about whether the government kept data about the adverse effects mefloquine had on detainees.

An absolute prohibition against experiments on prisoners of war is contained in the Geneva Conventions, but President George W. Bush stripped war on terror detainees of those protections. Some of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” also had an experimental quality.

At the same time detainees were given high doses of mefloquine, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz issued a directive changing the rules on human subject protections for DoD experiments, allowing for a waiver of informed consent when necessary for developing a “medical product” for the armed services. Bush also granted unprecedented authority to the secretary of Health and Human Services to classify information as secret.

Briefings on Side Effects

As the DoD was administering mefloquine to Guantánamo prisoners, senior Pentagon officials were being briefed about the drug’s dangerous side effects. During one such briefing, questions arose about what steps the military was taking to address malaria concerns among detainees sent to Guantánamo.

Internal documents from Roche, obtained by UPI in 2002, indicated that the pharmaceutical company had been tracking suicidal reactions to Lariam going back to the early 1990s.

In September 2002, Roche sent a letter to physicians and pharmacists stating that the company changed its warning labels for mefloquine.

Roche further said in one of two new warning paragraphs that some of the symptoms associated with mefloquine use included suicidal thoughts and suicide and also “may cause psychiatric symptoms in a number of patients, ranging from anxiety, paranoia, and depression to hallucination and psychotic behavior,” which “have been reported to continue long after mefloquine has been stopped.”

Military Struggles

Cmdr. William Manofsky, who is retired from the US Navy and currently on disability due to post-traumatic stress disorder and side effects from mefloquine, said those are some of the symptoms he initially suffered from after taking the drug for several months beginning in November 2002 after he was deployed to the Middle East to work on two Naval projects.

In March 2003, “I became violently ill during a night live-fire exercise with the [Navy] SEALS,” Manofsky said. “I felt like I was air sick. All the flashing lights from the tracers and rockets … targeting device made me really sick. I threw up for an hour straight before being medevac’d back to the Special Forces compound where I had my first ever panic attack.”

For three years, he had to walk with a cane due to a loss of equilibrium. Numerous other accounts like Manofsky’s can be found on the web site lariaminfo.org.

In 2008, Dr. Nevin published a study detailing a high prevalence of mental health contraindications to the safe use of mefloquine in soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. Responding in part to concerns raised by the mefloquine-associated suicide of Army Spc. Juan Torres, internal Army presentations confirmed that the drug had been widely misprescribed to soldiers with contraindications, including to many on antidepressants.

A formal policy memo in February 2009 from Army Surgeon General Eric Schoomaker removed mefloquine as a “first-line” agent, and changed the policy so that mefloquine would not be prescribed to Army personnel unless they had contraindications to the preferred drug, the antibiotic doxycycline. Nor could mefloquine be prescribed to any personnel with a history of traumatic brain injury or mental illness.

By September 2009, the policy was extended throughout the DoD.

New prisoners are no longer arriving at Guantánamo and the prison population has been in decline in recent years as detainees are released or transferred to other countries. Currently, the detainee population at Guantánamo is 174.

But Nevin said the justification the Pentagon offered for using mefloquine to presumptively treat detainees transferred to the prison beginning in 2002 “betrays a profound ignorance of basic principles of tropical medicine and suggests extremely poor, and arguably incompetent, medical oversight that demands further investigation.”

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

In an article following the ruling, “Barbaric: 86-Year Sentence for Aafia Siddiqui,” I presented the outline of Dr. Siddiqui’s story, and how the sentence hinted at a cynical cover-up by the US authorities, as follows:

Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn’t make sense. Moreover, the sentencing overlooks claims by her lawyers that her fingerprints were not even on the gun that she allegedly fired, and, even more significantly, hints at a chilling cover-up, mentioned everywhere except at Aafia’s trial earlier this year. Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret US detention — possibly in the US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan — where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.

More of Aafia Siddiqui’s story can be found in my earlier articles here and here, and also, of course, on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition. Post-sentencing, she is now held in the Federal Medical Facility in Carswell, Texas, a notorious establishment described in an article by Yvonne Ridley for Cageprisoners as the “Hospital of horror.” Please visit this JFAC page for details about how to send letters of support.

I’m pleased to report that videos of my interview with Shafiq and Ruhal are now available, via YouTube, and are posted below. I thank Maryam Hassan for encouraging me to do my first ever live interview in the host’s chair, rather than as an interviewee, and also for preparing an excellent list of questions, which I modified and expanded on, to encourage Shafiq and Ruhal not only to talk about their experiences in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, which are harrowing enough on their own terms, but also to help the audience to imagine the brutality to which Aafia Siddiqui would have been subjected, the effects of isolation and torture, the establishment of a climate of cruelty and despair in which false confessions can be extracted, and the effects of isolation from one’s family — in Aafia Siddiqui’s case, her three young children.

In the first of the three videos, I asked Shafiq and Ruhal about the brutal conditions in the US prison at Kandahar airport, where they were taken following their capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, after they had survived a notorious massacre of prisoners in container trucks and a stay in the Northern Alliance’s brutal and overcrowded Sheberghan prison. I also asked them what they knew about the US prison at Bagram airbase, where Aafia Siddiqui was held, and asked them about the isolating effect of not only being prohibited from receiving any visitors, but of not even receiving letters from their family — or only receiving letters that were heavily censored.

In the second video, Shafiq and Ruhal talked about the despair they felt in Guantánamo when it became clear that the British government had no intention of helping them. I also spoke about how torture is both illegal and counter-productive, and asked Shafiq and Ruhal to explain how the use of torture can lead to false confessions, which allowed them to explain how, in Guantánamo, they eventually made false confessions after being subjected to the “frequent flier program,” a program of prolonged sleep deprivation that involved being moved from cell to cell every few hours, being held in isolation for five months, where they were given very little food, being short-shackled in painful stress position for two to three days at a time, when they were obliged to urinate and defecate on themselves, and being subjected to extremely loud music.

In the third video, Shafiq and Rasul explained how their treatment in Guantánamo led them to think of committing suicide, and, following up on how they were forced into making false confessions, I noted how false confessions don’t necessarily lead to prisoners being released from Guantánamo. I also asked Shafiq and Ruhal to explain more about the circumstances that led to their release, and Shafiq explained how, on the date that they were supposedly filmed at a training camp with Osama bin Laden, he was attending university in the UK (although he also explained that British agents suggested that he might have traveled on a false passport).

I also asked Shafiq and Ruhal to discuss how receiving medical treatment at Guantánamo was entirely dependent on cooperation with the interrogators (in other words, making false confessions). This allowed them to explain how Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 years old when he was seized (and who was recently convicted in a trial by Military Commission), was one of the many prisoners deprived of medical treatment because he would not make false confessions, even though his wounds were “horrific,” and they couldn’t understand how he was still alive. They explained that they regularly heard him crying in an isolation cell, and also explained that he had been subjected to the “frequent flier program,” adding that, although he is now 24 years old, he “still has that child mentality,” In a moving finale, Ruhal reflected on the barbarity of separating Aafia Siddiqui from her children, and on how they may have been used in an attempt to secure her compliance, as the authorities at Guantánamo had no qualms about abusing child prisoners.

I do hope that you have the time to watch the videos below, and to circulate them if you find Shafiq and Ruhal’s testimony to be as powerful as I did. I’m honored that they agreed to take part in the event, and grateful that we also had some time to hang out and have a meal together, away from the ghosts of Guantánamo and Kandahar that are still with them, five and a half years after they were released.

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

On arrival, however, they were taken to a deportation centre, where, according to reports, conditions were little better than in Guantánamo, and after five months they embarked on a hunger strike to protest about the Slovakian government’s failure to clarify their status and arrange for them to be rehoused. They were subsequently given a home in a small town in central Slovakia where, two weeks ago, Cageprisoners director and former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg met up with them and interviewed Adel el-Gazzar about his extraordinarily harrowing story of torture, abuse, amputation, courage and hope. This is a remarkable interview with a clearly remarkable man, and I’m delighted to cross-post it below, as Adel’s story is one that leapt out at me while I was researching The Guantánamo Files, in that it so obviously involved incompetence and injustice, and also involved a very articulate individual.

Moazzam Begg: Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem, can you please introduce yourself?

Adel el-Gazzar: My name is Adel Fattough Ali el-Gazzar. I am from Egypt. I was born in 1965, in Cairo. I am a father of four. I used to work as an accountant in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia. 

Moazzam Begg: How did you come to be captured by the Americans?

Adel el-Gazzar: I was captured in 2001 after the September 11 attacks. I had been working in Quetta, Pakistan with the Saudi Red Crescent. I was helping the refugees who, after the American attack in Afghanistan, numbered hundreds of thousands escaping from war. Their lives were very miserable; no clean water, no medicine, no food, no tents, no blankets. I was helping to provide them with food, medicine and basic necessities. I was in Chaman, a small border town between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A night raid was launched by the Americans and they hit the refugee camp, our camp.

Moazzam Begg: They attacked with helicopters and with military vehicles?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes we actually couldn’t see the helicopters and vehicles, we were just hearing the sounds of exploding shells.

Moazzam Begg: Were there many casualties?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, several, and I was injured myself. I sustained a deep injury to my left leg and fell on the ground. Within two or three minutes I was unconscious and when I woke I found myself in a small hospital with some other injured. Some may have been killed too. I remember one kid aged eight or nine with us in the hospital. I spent about two hours or three hours in this hospital then we were moved to the main hospital in Quetta.

Moazzam Begg: You were still in Pakistani custody at this time?

Adel el-Gazzar: Actually I didn’t know exactly where I was, just that I was in hospital. Many doctors came to see me and check my situation. They told me that I needed some instant surgery so I went to the operating room. I went four or five times, I think, I’m not sure, but it was not custody, it was a hospital. But there were some officials who came and questioned me — I believe from Pakistani intelligence — taking basic details about me. After a couple of weeks I started to notice some Americans in the hospital.

Moazzam Begg: You received severe injuries to your leg. Can you describe what had happened?

Adel el-Gazzar: I asked the doctor exactly what happened to me. He said that it was shrapnel from a rocket that shattered my leg; it destroyed the tibia completely. Then they put an external clamp to help join the bone together.

Moazzam Begg: Where did you go to next after this hospital?

Adel el-Gazzar: I spent seven days in this hospital. Then I was transferred to Makkah hospital, which belonged to the Saudi Red Crescent. The treatment was very, very good. Many doctors from different branches came to visit me and treat my injuries. I remained in the hospital for over a month.

Moazzam Begg: At what point did you know the Americans were involved?

Adel el-Gazzar: One week before that time a CIA agent came to the hospital to question me but I refused to answer. I had done nothing wrong, but I began to feel that maybe I will get transferred to the Americans. We had begun to hear that they were looking for Arabs.

Moazzam Begg: How did you imagine the Americans might treat you?

Adel el-Gazzar: I knew something about their history so I was under no illusions. I started to hear on the radio about what they are doing in Guantánamo, but I didn’t imagine for a second that I would be sent there.

Moazzam Begg: You had already heard about Guantánamo?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, I saw some pictures and reports about it, but as I said, thoughts of that place were far from my head. To be honest at this time the treatment on the Pakistani side was really very good. Even the governor of Quetta used to visit us, sometimes twice a day, and he was showing his sympathy. Not only him, I received hundreds of visitors within these thirty-five days — people I don’t know. They just came and tried to help, gave me money, clothes and food every day. The Pakistani visitors were very kind.

Moazzam Begg: Some non-Pakistanis who later ended up in Guantánamo also stated that they were treated similarly in Pakistan. Why then do you think the Pakistanis handed you over to the Americans?

Adel el-Gazzar: It was out of their [ordinary people’s] control. A young man from Pakistani intelligence started to visit us from time to time. He never asked any questions, he just apparently wanted to offer his help. Then one evening he came crying tears, saying that it was my last night in Pakistan. At this point the surgeons were still trying to see if they could save my leg; an operation was due the next day. But the man said I was going to leave today. I asked him where I was going and he said he couldn’t tell me. I felt something bad was about to happen.

Moazzam Begg: Did you think it was the Americans at the time?

Adel el-Gazzar: I started to suspect something but there was no reason to believe it. The governor came and said he had had a meeting and they had decided that as this hospital didn’t have enough facilities for the operation I was to be moved to another hospital also in Quetta.

Moazzam Begg: Were you by yourself or was anyone with you?

Adel el-Gazzar: There were four others with me. All were injured. We were taken to Quetta airport and we saw the Americans. They took us out of the ambulance on stretchers and the Americans came wearing gloves.

Moazzam Begg: What did the Pakistanis say to you?

Adel el-Gazzar: This time they were very bad in the ambulance. They kicked me and put a hood on my head. Their behaviour had completely changed. I started to shout and protest, saying we were all Muslims. They said, “Shut up, don’t talk, you are a terrorist!” Then the Americans came, searched me and put me onto the aeroplane. Unbelievably they taped me all around my body to the stretcher and put a hood over my face.

Moazzam Begg: What was going through your mind as you were handed over to the Americans?

Adel el-Gazzar: I was thinking that it was the end of my life or I will face a very bad time in the future.

Moazzam Begg: And your family had no idea what was going to happen?

Adel el-Gazzar: Nothing, I had been on the phone talking to my wife earlier from the hospital, crying, saying to her I’m sorry, forgive me, I think this is the last time in my life I will speak to her, please pray for me. And she was crying, saying, “What’s happening, what’s happening?” And then they took the phone from me.

Moazzam Begg: What kind of “welcome” did you receive in Kandahar?

Adel el-Gazzar: It was a terrible night.  We reached Kandahar around midnight. It was very, very cold and raining heavily. Then they took me from the plane and put me into a tent. The tent had some holes in the top so the rain was pouring on to my face. I couldn’t see much but the constant roar of the engines meant that flights were coming in day and night. Then medics came and cut off all my clothes and bandages on my injury with scissors and left me naked. They were screaming at me that I deserved what was happening to me, and that I am about to die as a terrorist.

Moazzam Begg: How long did you remain in this state?

Adel el-Gazzar: About 24 hours. I was completely naked. Without a blanket, without anything. I felt I was about to die just from the cold. Then they moved me from this tent to another. Once I reached the second tent they started to beat me, on my head, my stomach, my back, my hands and legs. They kicked my injured leg and I was screaming in agony but they just laughed and danced like it was a joke. The following day they gave me some clothes and then the interrogations began properly.

Moazzam Begg: What were they asking you?

Adel el-Gazzar: About basic details in the beginning, but this was the first of many. The second one was long: they asked me why I came to Pakistan, how they captured me, al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, the Taliban. Things I couldn’t answer. They mentioned some names I didn’t even know.

Moazzam Begg: What was the feeling you got from the other prisoners about the future?

Adel el-Gazzar: Nothing, we were just talking and laughing with each another — despite the hardships. We were not thinking about Guantánamo, because they came to us many times and said in just a few days everybody will go home. Even when they took us on the plane to Guantánamo we thought that they were taking us home

Moazzam Begg: Did the Americans give you any idea that they were in fact sending everybody to Guantánamo?

Adel el-Gazzar: No idea. I was more concerned about my leg, because I had severe pain and the environment was dirty, so I was worried that it might get infected. The American doctors were telling me it had to be amputated. I resisted, arguing with them about what the Pakistani surgeons had said, that they could save my leg. I even showed them the X-rays that I had kept. The Americans just laughed and said the Pakistanis didn’t know anything about medicine and treatments. In the end one of them admitted that they could save my leg but the operation would costs thousands of dollars and that America was a “poor country.” It was amputation or nothing.

Moazzam Begg: What was the journey to Guantánamo like?

Adel el-Gazzar: It took about 20 hours or more. I was on a stretcher with my face covered and my body taped, as before. I was trying to sleep because that was the best option, but of course it was very difficult. The pain and discomfort was excruciating. I pleaded with a medic for a sedative, which I got. I woke up in Guantánamo.

Moazzam Begg: What is your first memory of Guantánamo?

Adel el-Gazzar: I remember being thirsty, and I asked for water. It was a sunny day, very sunny. Then I was forcibly stripped naked again while they washed my body.

Moazzam Begg: You remained in Camp X-Ray on the stretcher in the cell?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, I spent 25 days in X-Ray. I was taken to the hospital for amputation.

Moazzam Begg: How did you respond to this?

Adel el-Gazzar: Of course I refused in the beginning. The doctor said it was up to me but that they couldn’t do anything to save my leg but amputate it. I explained what I’d been told in Pakistan but I got the same as answer as I’d had in Kandahar: Pakistanis didn’t know anything, the leg had to go. As the days passed the pain increased and the colour of my leg started to turn grey — almost black. I asked them to clean the wound, and to change the dressing every day and night but they wouldn’t do it. When I asked them in the morning for a new dressing they said they will do it in the afternoon, and in the afternoon they said they will do it in the morning, like that.

Moazzam Begg: So you would go through days without having it cleaned?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, but worse than that. The wound was open and big — without any kind of treatment besides basic dressings. They forced us to take showers so the wound got wet many times. The pain became almost unbearable. One day I remember I was crying terribly from the pain. A doctor turned up with painkillers but he said, “I will give you the medication, and your pain will be gone within 10 minutes, but first you need to sign a confession that you’re a member of al-Qaeda.” I told him I’m not a member of al-Qaeda and cannot confess to a lie. He put the medication in his pocket and walked off. However, most of the other prisoners advised me correctly that I had no option but to accept the amputation as it had passed the stage of being saved and had become gangrenous and could spread higher up the leg the longer it was left. I finally gave in. Ten days later a doctor came with consent papers for me to sign. The next day I was taken to the hospital.

Moazzam Begg: How did you feel knowing your leg was gone?

Adel el-Gazzar: After the anaesthesia wore off I looked at my leg, but couldn’t find it. I started to cry. The doctor came to me and he was trying to be sympathetic, saying, “Its fine, don’t worry, you’ll have an artificial leg one day and you’ll be able to walk, don’t worry.”

Moazzam Begg: So you spent all this time waiting for an artificial leg living in a wheelchair?

Adel el-Gazzar: They gave me crutches. I spent about 70 days in hospital after the amputation because the leg got infected. I was put on a long term of antibiotics, to make sure the gangrene didn’t spread. I returned to the hospital many times.

Moazzam Begg: How long after you the amputation were you given a prosthetic leg?

Adel el-Gazzar: About six months later.

Moazzam Begg: Are you aware of how many other prisoners received amputations whilst they were in Guantánamo?

Adel el-Gazzar: There were 13 people. All were legs except one guy from Morocco, he lost his left hand. There was also a brother from Saudi Arabia [Abdullah al-Anazi, released in September 2007]. He lost both legs.

Moazzam Begg: Do you think that this number of amputations happened because the wounds were so bad or because the medical treatment was inadequate?

Adel el-Gazzar: Most of the wounds were not so bad. There were some that were very bad, but, for example, I remember there was a man from Turkistan [Uighur], his name was Ahmad [Abdulahad, released in Palau in October 2009], who had just a very small wound, no broken bones or anything, and they told him the only solution was to amputate his leg. I was pleading with him not to accept it but they were trying to show us that it is a hopeless case and that there is no treatment. And the treatment in the hospital was very bad, not from the doctors, but from the MPs [military police]. They would sing and dance in front of us while we were in pain. We were constantly shackled to the cots and were not allowed to talk or even look in a particular direction. Despite our pain and condition we were expected to sleep at fixed times.

Moazzam Begg: What would they do if you contravened these rules?

Adel el-Gazzar: They would kick you in the head, take your blanket, withhold food, threaten you with more abuse and threaten to withhold our treatment if we failed to comply.

Moazzam Begg: After all that you had endured, especially the amputation, how did you manage to keep your faith strong?

Adel el-Gazzar: First I believed that everything was qadr [fate], so that put everything before the will of God. I am sure that He never does anything wrong to his slaves, He is always doing the best for them. I believed it was best for me to be amputated. Perhaps if I still had two legs I might have used them to do something wrong. So I pray Allah protects me not to do any bad in the future.  In the beginning I was sorry about losing a limb, especially when I started to suffer physically, going to the bathroom, walking, doing any physical activity. I thought to myself it would be a difficult time in the future — for the rest of my life. But, subhan Allah [Glory be to God], after a few days I was completely satisfied and I started to deal with the new situation happily, and now I’m okay, I put on my [prosthetic] leg like it’s no big deal.

Moazzam Begg: During this time did you manage to get any letters to or from your family?

Adel el-Gazzar: No. For the whole first year I never got anything. The first letter I received was in August 2003. It was via the Red Cross, from my father and my wife. They told me that they know I’m in Guantánamo and they were trying to give me some solace: to be strong and patient and not to worry about them. My father passed away in 2007 — while I was still in prison.

Moazzam Begg: Did your family know that your leg had been amputated by this time?

Adel el-Gazzar: I didn’t have it in me to tell them, for several years.

Moazzam Begg: The interrogators wanted to break the prisoners but you say in fact you were “rebuilt” there. Did the Americans not achieve what they wanted?

Adel el-Gazzar: They failed. I found that the Muslims can be very, very strong if they believe in God and His power. And the Americans are nothing against the Muslims united as a nation. It was a struggle between us and them — not a struggle of weapons but a struggle, a battle of wills. An example of this could be seen every day at maghrib [sunset] when their national anthem collided with our athaan [call to prayer.] But I believe they lost. They followed orders — we followed our hearts. I left Guantánamo stronger in my faith and perseverance than ever before.

Moazzam Begg: You saw many brothers from different parts of the world going through similar hardships, very young and very old people. How did it make you feel about yourself?

Adel el-Gazzar: There were some people in very bad situations compared to me but we were like one family. Like the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) said, “The example of the believers in the compassion to one another is like that of one body. If one part is harmed, the entire body is affected.” We were like that. The moment we heard that a brother is suffering in a different camp, we did not ask about his nationality, race, culture, education, school of thought or age. We just care that he is a Muslim and we need to support him, and this is a part of our religion. We were really one man. This is what we are trying to inform the nation: just to be one body. We have One God, one Quran, one shari’ah. So we should not be divided.

Moazzam Begg: As a group, what did you do to try and challenge the abuses and lack of human rights afforded to you?

Adel el-Gazzar: We were always on strikes, not only hunger strikes, but resisting all the rules, even if we were told to hang the towel on one side or the other [of the cell]. The Americans at first were really surprised.

Moazzam Begg: Would you say that the prisoners there were organised? How did they manage to sustain this resistance?

Adel el-Gazzar: The suffering made us, the detention made us. We were not organised. We were just one body, one heart, but it was from God

Moazzam Begg: The Americans have maintained that this is strategy taught from the Al-Qaeda training manual on how to resist. How would you respond?

Adel el-Gazzar: This is a big lie, they were lying to themselves and they were trying to lie to the others. It was not like that. I think that there are no members of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban over there. And as I told you they made a big mistake by capturing us. They told all the other nations that “we destroyed the mujahideen” and there will be no more al-Qaeda, no more Taliban in the future, and then they told themselves that it was a mistake and they couldn’t fix it.

Moazzam Begg: In Guantánamo there was a large variety of people from many countries. How did you all communicate?

Adel el-Gazzar: We tried to learn each other’s languages and even if we couldn’t we have a language in common. We still have faith, and it doesn’t matter where you are from or what language you speak as long as you are Muslims together and we are one together. So because of this I never had any communication problems.

Moazzam Begg: There are still 174 prisoners left in Guantánamo, after almost nine years without charge or trial. What do you think is the solution for them?

Adel el-Gazzar: Most of the people would like to go back to their countries — about 90 from Yemen, 10 from Saudi Arabia, 10 from Algeria and so forth. There are a handful of course who cannot return home and they should be provided for at all levels. But I don’t know why they don’t want to send these people back. There is something “under the table,” as I said, but they should close the place down and send the people who can return back to their homes.

Moazzam Begg: At the beginning of this year you and two other men were released and sent here to Slovakia. What were your feelings when you were informed that you were about to be released?

Adel el-Gazzar: The first thing I did was I cried like a [new] born baby. And I was really very, very happy that I was going to leave Guantánamo, but I was also very sad that I was going to leave my brothers behind in such a place. And I was wondering about how I was going to live in another country, start a new life with an uncertain future.

Moazzam Begg: Did you know you were coming to Slovakia?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, but I didn’t know anything about Slovakia. It is the first time I’ve ever been in Europe. I was thinking about my family — would I be able to bring them here or not? I was also wondering whether I would be able to adapt to a new life in Europe, as it is completely different to my life in Egypt. I had mixed feelings — between happiness and sadness: because I’m leaving [Guantánamo] and because I’m leaving my brothers. Generally though, I was happy.

Moazzam Begg: One thing that’s common amongst former prisoners is that in addition to their families they are constantly concerned about the affairs of other prisoners — or former prisoners. Why do you think this is the case?

Adel el-Gazzar: We already lived together for many years. I lived with my brothers in Guantánamo more than I lived with my own wife and children. So we really became a big family. Some of the brothers are older than me — some are younger. I saw the older ones equivalent to my father and the younger ones like my brothers or sons. Imagine a family that consists of 800 or so — everyone tries to take care of one another. We had the same feelings; we suffered under the same circumstances and troubles — good or bad.

Moazzam Begg: Prisoners have recently been resettled to countries all over Europe. Some are of course better than others. Do you think the Americans thought this process through properly?

Adel el-Gazzar: As I said, I am thankful for having been released, but I know they don’t care; they just send us to these countries to somehow uphold the reputation of America as a kind nation, especially when everyone knows how much they have been involved in torture around the world. Also, so the European countries will control them more than the original countries of the prisoners. The most difficult thing for me returning to a foreign county, not that of my own origin, is that in Guantánamo I was with my family (the Muslim prisoners), but here in Slovakia I have no family, no wife, no kids and no Muslims. There are no mosques here and only a couple of Muslims around. Every Friday for prayers I have to travel four hours to the capital and four hours back.

Moazzam Begg: You say your faith was the most important thing back in Guantánamo. Are you now weaker than you were there?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, but I am compensating for it by trying to be closer to Allah by praying, reading Quran more and also reading useful books. I am also able to contact my family and friends abroad so it decreases the loneliness a little.

Moazzam Begg: What advice would you give to the relatives of prisoners facing similar trials?

Adel el-Gazzar: Look at things from an optimistic viewpoint not a pessimistic one; look at it like a test from God to see how patient you are and just remain close to God, as He is the only one who can take you through all the way to the finish and protect you. If you are going through the hardships read Quran, fast, pray and remain faithful. As long as your heart is free, they can arrest your body but not your soul.

Moazzam Begg: What is the thing you miss the most from life before Guantánamo?

Adel el-Gazzar: I miss the mosques and going there five times a day and the Muslim community who helped and protected you. I also miss my family. It is very hard to talk to my kids as they are teenagers but we love each other even though we do not know each other.

Moazzam Begg: What could the Americans have done to make it easier with your family?

Adel el-Gazzar: I don’t expect anything from the Americans, but I do from the Muslim community. They should practice helping people in a bad situation. But I am not expecting anything from the Muslim countries [leadership] as they are all the same, following the Americans, just the community by itself.

Moazzam Begg: Did you come across any guards who were decent and treated you like humans. If so, what advice would you give them?

Adel el-Gazzar: Yes, I met some very nice and sympathetic guards. My advice to any young soldiers who went to the army believing they were doing a good thing is don’t listen to the media in your country, search for the real facts. My advice for people who want to help but don’t would be that asking from God is a strong weapon but also you need to use tools such as doing something practical and achieving your goals by actually getting up and helping.

Moazzam Begg: Looking back, what is the most memorable part of your experience?

Adel el-Gazzar: The most beautiful days? Actually, I don’t know if you will believe me but the whole eight years was a very nice time, it was real. If I had the choice to go back to Guantánamo I will go. It is really a very big experience for me: first I learned more about myself — both good and bad. Before Guantánamo I did not recognise this. I was able to rebuild myself again there. And I was very close to God and able to memorize the whole Quran in 27 days.

Moazzam Begg: What do you think ordinary people should be doing to help relieve the suffering of the prisoners?

Adel el-Gazzar: Everyone released from Guantánamo is looking for the support of the people, not only financial but moral support. Life outside Guantánamo is cold — very, very cold. Therefore we need to feel warmth [from people]. We are all duty bound to help relieve the suffering of the oppressed — even if we were once oppressed ourselves, especially if we were. But as we are still struggling to stand up our help is sought by our brothers who are in a worse situation. And there are always people in a worse situation.

Moazzam Begg: Brother Adel, may Allah reward you with the best for all you have endured and ease your hardships with sustenance and tranquility.

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

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The article is cross-posted below (and I’ve added some additional links).

Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program
By Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, October 14, 2010

In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating “war on terror” detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.

Wolfowitz issued a little-known directive on March 25, 2002, about a month after President George W. Bush stripped the detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions [PDF]. Bush labeled them “unlawful enemy combatants” and authorized the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.

Despite its title — “Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research” (PDF) — the Wolfowitz directive weakened protections that had been in place for decades by limiting the safeguards to “prisoners of war.”

“We’re dealing with a special breed of person here,” Wolfowitz said about the war on terror detainees only four days before signing the new directive.

One former Pentagon official, who worked closely with the DoD’s ex-general counsel William Haynes, said the Wolfowitz directive provided legal cover for a top-secret Special Access Program at the Guantánamo Bay prison, which experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling subjects and to achieve “deception detection.”

“A dozen [high-value detainees] were subjected to interrogation methods in order to evaluate their reaction to those methods and the subsequent levels of stress that would result,” said the official.

A July 16, 2004 Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) report obtained by Truthout shows that between April and July 2003, a “physiological warfare specialist” attached to the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program was present at Guantánamo. The CID report says the instructor was assigned to a top-secret Special Access Program.

In his book The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said Wolfowitz was “put in charge of questions regarding detainees” at Guantánamo. Goldsmith also previously worked with Haynes at the Pentagon.

It has been known since 2009, when President Barack Obama declassified some of the Bush administration’s legal memoranda regarding the interrogation program, that there were experimental elements to the brutal treatment of detainees, including the sequencing and duration of the torture and other harsh tactics.

However, the Wolfowitz directive also suggests that the Bush administration was concerned about whether its actions might violate Geneva Conventions rules that were put in place after World War II when grisly Nazi human experimentation was discovered. Those legal restrictions were expanded in the 1970s after revelations about the CIA testing drugs on unsuspecting human subjects and conducting other mind-control experiments.

For its part, the DoD insists that it “has never condoned nor authorized the use of human research testing on any detainee in our custody,” according to spokeswoman Wendy Snyder.

However, from the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration employed nontraditional methods for designing interrogation protocols, including the reverse engineering of training given to American troops trapped behind enemy lines, called the SERE techniques. For instance, the controlled-drowning technique of waterboarding was lifted from SERE manuals.

Shielding Rumsfeld

Retired US Air Force Capt. Michael Shawn Kearns, a former SERE intelligence officer, said the Wolfowitz directive appears to be a clear attempt to shield then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from the legal consequences of “any dubious research practices associated with the interrogation program.”

Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert, noted Wolfowitz’s specific reference to “prisoners of war” as protected under the directive, as opposed to referring more generally to detainees or people under the government’s control:

“At the time that Wolfowitz was issuing this directive, the Bush administration was taking the adamant position that prisoners taken in the’ war on terror’ were not ‘prisoners of war’ under the Geneva Conventions and were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, it called those protections ‘privileges’ that were available only to ‘lawful combatants.’ So the statement [in the directive] that ‘prisoners of war’ cannot be subjects of human experimentation … raises some concerns — why was the more restrictive term ‘prisoners of war’ used instead of ‘prisoners,’ for instance?”

The Wolfowitz directive also changed other rules regarding waivers of informed consent. After the scandals over the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and the Tuskegee experiments on African-Americans suffering from syphilis, Congress passed legislation known as the Common Rule to provide protections to human research subjects.

The Common Rule “requires a review of proposed research by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), the informed consent of research subjects, and institutional assurances of compliance with the regulations.”

Individuals who lack the capacity to provide “informed consent” must have an IRB determine if they would benefit from the proposed research. In certain cases, that decision could also be made by the subject’s “legal representative.”

However, according to the Wolfowitz directive, waivers of informed consent could be granted by the heads of DoD divisions.

Professor Alexander M. Capron, who oversees human rights and health law at the World Health Organization, said the delegation of the power to waive informed consent procedures to Pentagon officials is “controversial both because it involves a waiver of the normal requirements and because the grounds for that waiver are so open-ended.”

The Wolfowitz directive also changes language that had required DoD researchers to strictly adhere to the Nuremberg Directives for Human Experimentation and other precedents when conducting human subject research.

The Nuremberg Code, which was a response to the Nazi atrocities, made “the voluntary consent of the human subject … absolutely essential.” However, the Wolfowitz directive softened a requirement of strict compliance to this code, instructing researchers simply to be “familiar” with its contents.

“Why are DoD-funded investigators just required to be ‘familiar’ with the Nuremberg Code rather than required to comply with them?” asked Stephen Soldz, director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

Soldz also wondered why “enforcement was moved from the Army Surgeon General or someone else in the medical chain of command to the Director of Defense Research and Engineering” and why “this directive changed at this time, as the ‘war on terror’ was getting going.”

Soldz is co-author of a report published in June by the international doctors’ organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which found that high-value detainees who were subjected to brutal torture techniques by the CIA were used as “guinea pigs” to gauge the effectiveness of the various “enhanced interrogation” methods. PHR told Truthout it first examined the Wolfowitz directive and changes Congress made to 10 USC 980, the law that governs how the Defense Department spends federal funds on human experimentation, in 2008 while preparing its report, but did not cite either because the group could not explain its significance.

Treating Soldiers

The original impetus for the changes seems to have related more to the use of experimental therapies on US soldiers facing potential biological and other dangers in war zones.

The House Armed Services Committee proposed amending 10 USC 980 prior to the 9/11 attacks. But the Bush administration pressed for the changes after 9/11 as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan and new medical products might be needed for soldiers on the battlefield without their consent, said two former officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Yet, there were concerns about the changes even among Bush administration officials. In a September 24, 2001 memo to lawmakers, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the “administration is concerned with the provision allowing research to be conducted on human subjects without their informed consent in order to advance the development of a medical product necessary to the armed forces.”

The OMB memo said the Bush administration understood that the DoD had a “legitimate need” for “waiver authority for emergency research,” but “the provision as drafted may jeopardize existing protections for human subjects in research, and must be significantly narrowed.”

However, the broader language moved forward, as did planning for the new war on terror interrogation procedures.

In December 2001, Pentagon general counsel Haynes and other agency officials contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which runs SERE schools for teaching US soldiers to resist interrogation and torture if captured by an outlaw regime. The officials wanted a list of interrogation techniques that could be used for detainee “exploitation,” according to a report released last year by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF).

These techniques, as they were later implemented by the CIA and the Pentagon, were widely discussed as “experimental” in nature.

Back in Congress, the concerns from the OMB about loose terminology were brushed aside and the law was amended to give the DoD greater leeway regarding experimentation on human subjects.

A paragraph to the law, which had not been changed since it was first enacted in 1972, was added authorizing the defense secretary to waive “informed consent” for human subject research and experimentation. It was included in the 2002 Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress in December 2001. The Wolfowitz directive implemented the legislative changes Congress made to 10 USC 980 when it was issued three months later.

The changes to the “informed consent” section of the law were in direct contradiction to presidential and DoD memoranda issued in the 1990s that prohibited such waivers related to classified research. A memo signed in 1999 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen called for the prohibitions on “informed consent” waivers to be added to the Common Rule regulations covering DoD research, but DoD never implemented it.

Congressional Assistance

As planning for the highly classified Special Access Program began to take shape, most officials in Congress appear to have averted their eyes, with some even lending a hand.

The ex-DIA officials said the Pentagon briefed top lawmakers on the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee in November and December 2001, including the panel’s chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and his chief of staff Patrick DeLeon, about experimentation and research involving detainee interrogations that centered on “deception detection.”

To get a Special Access Program like this off the ground, the Pentagon needed DeLeon’s help, given his long-standing ties to the American Psychological Association (APA), where he served as president in 2000, the sources said.

According to former APA official Bryant Welch, DeLeon’s role proved crucial.

“For significant periods of time DeLeon has literally directed APA staff on federal policy matters and has dominated the APA governance on political matters,” Welch wrote. “For over twenty-five years, relationships between the APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon … When the military needed a mental health professional to help implement its interrogation procedures, and the other professions subsequently refused to comply, the military had a friend in Senator Inouye’s office, one that could reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.”

John Bray, a spokesman for Inuoye, said in late August he would look into questions posed by Truthout about the Wolfowitz directive and the meetings involving DeLeon and Inuoye. But Bray never responded nor did he return follow-up phone calls and emails. DeLeon did not return messages left with his assistant.

Legal Word Games

Meanwhile, in January 2002, President Bush was receiving memos from then-Justice Department attorneys Jay Bybee and John Yoo as well as from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Bush’s White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, advising Bush to deny members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions.

Also, about a month before the Wolfowitz directive was issued, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) asked Joint Forces Command if they could get a “crash course” on interrogation for the next interrogation team headed out to Guantánamo, according to the Armed Services Committee’s report. That request was sent to Brig. Gen. Thomas Moore and was approved.

Bruce Jessen, the chief psychologist of the SERE program, and Joseph Witsch, a JPRA instructor, led the instructional seminar held in early March 2002.

The seminar included a discussion of al-Qaeda’s presumed methods of resisting interrogation and recommended specific methods interrogators should use to defeat al-Qaeda’s resistance. According to the Armed Services Committee report, the presentation provided instructions on how interrogations should be conducted and on how to manage the “long term exploitation” of detainees.

There was a slide show, focusing on four primary methods of treatment: “isolation and degradation,” “sensory deprivation,” “physiological pressures” and “psychological pressures.”

According to Jessen and Witsch’s instructor’s guide, isolation was the “main building block of the exploitation process,” giving the captor “total control” over the prisoner’s “inputs.” Examples were provided on how to implement “degradation,” by taking away a prisoner’s personal dignity. Methods of sensory deprivation were also discussed as part of the training.

Jessen and Witsch denied that “physical pressures,” which later found their way into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, were taught at the March meeting.

However, Jessen, along with Christopher Wirts, chief of JPRA’s Operational Support Office, wrote a memo for Southern Command’s Directorate of Operations (J3), entitled “Prisoner Handling Recommendations,” which urged Guantánamo authorities to take punishment beyond “base line rules.”

So, by late March 2002, the pieces were in place for a strategy of behavior modification designed to break down the will of the detainees and extract information from them. Still, to make the procedures “legal,” some reinterpretations of existing laws and regulation were needed.

For instance, attorneys Bybee and Yoo would narrow the definition of “torture” to circumvent laws prohibiting the brutal interrogation of detainees.

“Vulnerable” Individuals

In his directive, Wolfowitz also made subtle, but significant, word changes. While retaining the blanket prohibition against experimenting on prisoners of war, Wolfowitz softened the language for other types of prisoners, using a version of rules about “vulnerable” classes of individuals taken from regulations meant for civilian research by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

This research and experimentation examined physiological markers of stress, such as cortisol, and involved psychologists under contract to the CIA and the military who were experts in the field, the ex-DIA officials said.

One study, called “The War Fighter’s Stress Response,” was conducted between 2002 and 2003 and examined physiological measurements of mock torture subjects drawn from the SERE program and other high-stress military personnel, such as Special Forces Combat Divers.

Researchers measured cortisol and other hormone levels via salivary swabbing and blood samples, a process that also was reportedly done to war on terror detainees.

Three weeks after the Wolfowitz directive was signed, SERE psychologist Jessen produced a Draft Exploitation Plan for use at Guantánamo. According to the Armed Services Committee’s report, JPRA was offering its services for “oversight, training, analysis, research, and [tactics, techniques, and procedures] development” to Joint Forces Command Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. Robert Wagner. (Emphasis added.)

There were other indications that research was an important component of JPRA services to the DoD and CIA interrogation programs. When three JPRA personnel were sent to a Special Mission Unit associated with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in August 2003 for what was believed to be special training in interrogation, one of the three was JPRA’s manager for research and development.

Three former top military officials interviewed by the Armed Services Committee have described Guantánamo as a “battle lab.”

According to Col. Britt Mallow, the commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), he was uncomfortable when Guantánamo officials Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller used the term “battle lab,” meaning “that interrogations and other procedures there were to some degree experimental, and their lessons would benefit DoD in other places.”

CITF’s deputy commander told the Senate investigators, “there were many risks associated with this concept … and the perception that detainees were used for some ‘experimentation’ of new unproven techniques had negative connotations.”

In May 2005, a former military officer who attended a SERE training facility sent an email to Middle East scholar Juan Cole stating that “Gitmo must be being used as a ‘laboratory’ for all these psychological techniques by the [counter-intelligence] guys.”

The Al-Qahtani Experiment

One of the high-value detainees imprisoned at Guantánamo who appears to have been a victim of human experimentation was Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in January 2002.

A sworn statement filed by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, al-Qahtani’s attorney, said Secretary Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of al-Qahtani and spoke “weekly” with Major General Miller, commander at Guantánamo, about the status of the interrogations between late 2002 and early 2003.

The treatment of al-Qahtani was cataloged in an 84-page “torture log” (PDF) that was leaked in 2006. The torture log shows that, beginning in November 2002 and continuing well into January 2003, al-Qahtani was subjected to sleep deprivation, interrogated in 20-hour stretches, poked with IVs and left to urinate on himself.

Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents al-Qahtani, had said in a sworn declaration that her client was subjected to months of torture based on verbal and written authorizations from Rumsfeld.

“At Guantánamo, Mr. al-Qahtani was subjected to a regime of aggressive interrogation techniques, known as the ‘First Special Interrogation Plan,’” Gutierrez said. “These methods included, but were not limited to, 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation, and threats with military dogs.”

In addition, the Senate Armed Services Committee report said al-Qahtani’s treatment was viewed as a potential model for other interrogations.

In his book Oath Betrayed, Dr. Steven Miles wrote that the meticulously recorded logs of al-Qahtani’s interrogation and torture focus “on the emotions and interactions of the prisoner, rather than on the questions that were asked and the information that was obtained.”

The uncertainty surrounding these experimental techniques resulted in the presence of medical personnel on site, and frequent and consistent medical checks of the detainee. The results of the monitoring, which likely included vital signs and other stress markers, would also become data that could be analyzed to understand how the new interrogation techniques worked.

In January 2004, the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) initiated a DoD-wide review of human subjects protection policies. A Navy slide presentation at DoD Training Day on November 14, 2006, hinted strongly at the serious issues behind the entire review.

The Navy presentation framed the problem in the light of the history of US governmental “non-compliance” with human subjects research protections, including “US Government Mind Control Experiments — LSD, MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA (1950-1970s)”; a 90-day national “stand down” in 2003 for all human subject research and development activities “ordered in response to the death of subjects”; as well as use of “unqualified researchers.”

The Training Day presentation said the review found the Navy “not in full compliance with Federal policies on human subjects protection.” Furthermore, DDR&E found the Navy had “no single point of accountability for human subject protections.”

DoD refused to respond to questions regarding the 2004 review. Maj. Gen. Ronald Sega, who at the time was the DDR&E, did not return calls for comment.

Ongoing Research

Meanwhile, the end of the Bush administration has not resulted in a total abandonment of the research regarding interrogation program.

Last February, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recently resigned, disclosed that the Obama administration’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) planned on conducting “scientific research” to determine “if there are better ways to get information from people that are consistent with our values.”

“It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area,” Blair said during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. He did not provide additional details as to what the “scientific research” entailed.

As for the Wolfowitz directive, Pentagon spokeswoman Snyder said it did not open the door to human experimentation on war on terror detainees.

“There is no detainee policy, directive or instruction — or exceptions to such — that would permit performing human research testing on DoD detainees,” Snyder said. “Moreover, none of the numerous investigations into allegations of misconduct by interrogators or the guard force found any evidence of such activities.”

Snyder added that DoD is in the process of updating the Wolfowitz directive and it will be “completed for review next year.”

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

Cross-posted on Cageprisoners, Another World Is Possible and Uruknet.

The 20 prisoners listed below were the first group of prisoners seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. They have been identified as the “Dirty Thirty,” because of allegations that they served as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, although these allegations have long been challenged by the prisoners and their attorneys, and by those who have studied the stories in detail, for three reasons: firstly, because the majority of the men had been in Afghanistan for such a short amount of time that it is inconceivable that they would have been trusted with such an important role; secondly, because one source of the allegations is Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063, see below), who was tortured at Guantánamo, and who later withdrew his false allegations; and thirdly, because two other sources of the allegations are Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali al-Kazimi (ISN 1457 and ISN 1453), whose false confessions were recently exposed in a US court, in the habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman (ISN 027, see below).

Moreover, as the figures indicate, ten of the “Dirty Thirty” have already been released, and although some were Saudis, there are no indications that any of them have returned to militant activity (unlike others — 11 in total — who, according to reports in February 2009, had “left the country and joined terrorist groups abroad”). In fact, the most significant story, out of all the released prisoners, seems to be that of Farouq Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni released in December 2009, who maintained throughout his detention that he was a missionary, despite counter-claims that he was a bodyguard for bin Laden, and that he had been seen at Osama bin Laden’s private airport in Kandahar, where he was “wearing camouflage and carrying an AK-47.”

As I explained in 2007, this particular allegation proved so intolerable to Ahmed that his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to the prisoners in place of a lawyer during the tribunals at Guantánamo in 2004-05) investigated his files, and submitted a written protest, in which he stated that the government’s sole evidence that Ahmed had been at bin Laden’s airport was the statement of another prisoner, who, according to an FBI memo that he presented to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According to the FBI, he “had lied, not only about Farouq, but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at times and in places where they simply could not have been.” As the Personal representative discovered, after cross-referencing the detainees’ files, this particular man had made false allegations against 60 of his fellow prisoners.

Bearing this in mind, an analysis of the 20 remaining members of the so-called “Dirty Thirty” reveals that only three have been subjected to any kind of serious allegations relating to their involvement with al-Qaeda, although it is certain that, of the rest, some are among the 26 Yemenis that, in January, the Obama administration’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

ISN 026 Ghazi, Fahed (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Ghazi, who was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush, was just 19 years old at the time of his capture, according to US military records, and was apparently at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in Afghanistan, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) for just nine days before the camp closed. According to Human Rights Watch, he was just 17 years old when he was seized. Human Rights Watch also noted, “His daughter, who was two months old at the time of Ghazi’s arrest, is now eight years old. The two reportedly send drawings back and forth to each other regularly.” Also see this letter that he submitted to his military review board in September 2006.

ISN 027 Uthman, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed (Yemen)
Uthman, who “said that he had traveled between Kabul and Khost teaching the Koran from March to December 2001.” won his habeas corpus petition in February 2010, when Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ruled that the main allegation against him — that he had “acted as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden” — came from unreliable statements made by two other prisoners, Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457) and Sanad Yislam Ali al-Kazimi (ISN 1453). Judge Kennedy stated, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.” The government has appealed the ruling.

ISN 028 Al Alawi, Muaz (Yemen)
Al-Alawi lost his habeas corpus petition in January 2009, when Judge Richard Leon ruled that he “was part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” because he “stayed at guest houses associated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda … received military training at two separate camps closely associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and supported Taliban fighting forces on two different fronts in the Taliban’s war against the Northern Alliance.” Although none of the allegations above related to “hostilities against the US or its coalition partners,” and Judge Leon acknowledged that al-Alawi was in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks, and was fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, he endorsed the government’s additional claim that, “rather than leave his Taliban unit in the aftermath of September 11, 2001,” al-Alawi “stayed with it until after the United States initiated Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001; fleeing to Khost and then to Pakistan only after his unit was subjected to two-to-three US bombing runs.”

ISN 029 Al Ansi, Muhammad (Yemen)
Al-Ansi has stated that he and some friends taught the Koran in a village outside Khost, although the authorities claim, via allegations made by unidentified individuals, by an “al-Qaeda commander,” and by an “al-Qaeda operative,” that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, that he was present at Tora Bora, and that he also guarded bin Laden at his airport in Kandahar. Al-Ansi was so disturbed by the allegations against him that he told his review board, “All of the prisoners here are trying to leave this place. All the prisoners are telling lies about other prisoners just to get out of here. All these allegations are lies and I want the truth.”

ISN 030 Al Hikimi, Ahmed (Yemen)
Al-Hikimi has stated that, after selling his taxi business, he traveled to Khost, where he met a local student with whom he spent about eight months teaching in various villages, and then returned to the Yemen, traveling again in February 2001, when, he said, he hooked up with the student once more and resumed teaching. In contrast to these claims, he was subjected to allegations similar to those leveled against Muhammad al-Ansi. An “al-Qaeda operative” claimed to have seen him at the al-Farouq camp and in Kabul in 1999, and said that he “would drive from the front line to the mountains once a week to supply food to the brothers.” Other unnamed sources also identified him as a driver, and “an escort for Osama bin Laden and his family” said that he saw him fighting on the front lines against the Northern Alliance. Crucially, another anonymous source identified him “as an associate of the Kandahar Airport Group” — the same false allegation that was leveled against Farouq Ali Ahmed.

ISN 031 Al Mujahid, Mahmoud (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Mujahid stated that he was inspired to visit Afghanistan to teach the Koran by a sheikh at whose institute he was studying. In contrast, the US authorities alleged that he was a bodyguard for bin Laden, that he was “seen on the front lines,” and that he was “seen with Osama bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan (April 2001) and Tora Bora (November 2001).” In November 2007, he attended a military review board, in which he declared that he had made up the story about the sheikh, when he was first interrogated in US custody in Pakistan, and added that he wanted to explain this to the board, as it had been on his mind for five years, but he had been unable to discuss it with his interrogators, because they were “stupid” and only gave him “bad treatment.” In the hearing, he admitted that he had arrived in Afghanistan in July 2000, but “strongly denied” knowing anything about the 9/11 attacks or any other terrorists attacks, and also dismissed as ridiculous the notion that he could have been become a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

ISN 034 Al Yafi, Al Khadr Abdallah (Yemen)
Al-Yafi, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, is a farmer who has stated that, after hearing a sermon, he “decided to return home and sell his sheep so that he could travel to Afghanistan to teach.” In contrast, the US authorities have drawn on what I described as an “array of unsubstantiated allegations, which appear to have involved the exploitation of several ‘high-value detainees’”: a “senior al-Qaeda commander” apparently “recognized the detainee’s face as a Yemeni he saw at the Kabul guest house, probably in the 1999-2000 time frame”; another, a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” stated less confidently that he “recalled possibly seeing the detainee at the al-Zubayr guest house” before 9/11; and an alleged “bodyguard of Osama bin Laden stated he saw the detainee (circa 1999) at an Arab compound in Kandahar.” It was also stated, without any additional explanation whatsoever, that he “was seen at Tora Bora.”

ISN 035 Qader Idris, Idris (Yemen)
Idris has stated that he taught the Koran in Kabul for approximately eight months. Set against his story are just two allegations: that the individual who facilitated his travel to Afghanistan from Yemen “has been identified by a known al-Qaeda member as a fund collector and recruiter for al-Qaeda,” and that the group of 30 Arabs that he joined as he fled Afghanistan for Pakistan was “organized” by Mohammed Annas, a “known alias” of Ali Hamza Ismail (aka Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, see ISN 039, below).

ISN 036 Idris, Ibrahim (Sudan/Yemen)
Idris, sometimes listed as a Yemeni, and sometimes as Sudanese, is accused of attending al-Farouq and of fighting with the Taliban for two years. In December 2007, he attended a military review board and stated that he had actually been seized in Pakistan, where he had traveled for 40 days to work as a missionary. “No disrespect to the interrogators,” he explained. “I said what I had to say, and they made me say things that weren’t true.”

ISN 037 Al Rahabi, Abd Al Malik (Yemen)
Al-Rahabi (also identified as Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahab) has stated that he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan with his wife and his young daughter, although the US authorities allege that he “was very close to Osama bin Laden, and had been with him a long time. He was a known Osama bin Laden guard and errand boy and was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden’s side.” As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, he told his lawyer that he had made false confessions, stating that he was “tortured by beatings” in Kandahar, that his thumb was broken by American interrogators, and that he was “threatened with being held underground and deprived of sunlight until he confessed.” According to his lawyers, around September 2000, he “traveled with his wife to Pakistan in order to study the Koran. Their daughter was born while they were together in Pakistan. In November 2001, his wife returned to Yemen. Al-Rahabi intended to return as well, but he was arrested while in Pakistan.”

ISN 038 Al Yazidi, Ridah (Tunisia)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, it is alleged that he traveled to Afghanistan from Italy in 1999, that he attended the Khaldan training camp, and that he fought on the Taliban front lines in 2001. There is little publicly available information about al-Yazidi’s response to the allegations, although he refuted additional claims that he was involved with the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (the GIA, or Groupe Islamique Armé), and also apparently “stated that he did not engage in any significant combat during the entire time he was on the front lines.”

ISN 039 Al Bahlul, Ali Hamza (Yemen)
Widely described as Osama bin Laden’s “press secretary,” al-Bahlul produced a propaganda video for al-Qaeda and was first put forward for trial by Military Commission in February 2004. He was formally charged in June 2004. At a pre-trial hearing in August 2004, he declared, “I am an al-Qaeda member,” and asked the judge, “Am I allowed to represent myself?” and at another hearing in January 2006, he decided to withdraw from the proceedings, waving a sign that read “boycott” in Arabic, He was charged for a second time in February 2008, after the first version of the Commissions was ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court in June 2006, and in May 2008 he again decided to boycott pre-trial hearings, explaining, “I am responsible for my own actions in this world and the afterworld. I don’t consider it to be a crime.” His trial took place in October 2008, and he was convicted of conspiracy, solicitation of murder, and providing material support to terrorism after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense. He received a life sentence, which he is serving in solitary confinement in Guantánamo, away from all the other prisoners, but his lawyers are currently appealing the sentence, on the basis that providing material support to terrorism is “a fabricated war crime that was not traditionally triable in a military commission as of the time of Mr. al-Bahlul’s affiliation with al-Qaeda” (as his former military defense attorney, Lt. Col. David Frakt, explained), and also on the basis that his trial was unfair because he was denied the right to represent himself.

ISN 040 Al Mudafari, Abdel Qadir (Yemen)
Al-Mudafari (aka al-Mudhaffari) apparently “stated that he wanted a struggle or jihad and chose to travel to Afghanistan rather than Palestine,” but was subjected to several dubious allegations (beyond the most obvious — that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden). It was also alleged that he was “identified as a trainer” at al-Farouq, and was also stated that he was identified by “an al-Qaeda operative” as being “a friend of Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary,” and was also “identified as being at a Taliban Supreme Leader’s [sic] compound.” Confusing matters were notes that he had received instruction in Yemen from Sheikh Muqbil al-Wadi (who was actually opposed to bin Laden), his own claims that he traveled to teach the Koran, and a claim by another unidentified source, who “stated that he did not think that the detainee ever fought with the Taliban because he was against the Taliban.”

ISN 041 Ahmad, Majid (Yemen)
Ahmad, who was 21 years old when seized, apparently admitted that he “first learned of jihad in Afghanistan” at an institute in the Yemen, “and then wanted to fight along with the Taliban.” He added that he “prayed and fell in love with the idea of dying for the sake of God,” and after being given a fatwa by a sheikh, who told him during a telephone call that “it was a good thing for Muslims to go fight jihad,” traveled to Afghanistan and “fought for the Taliban the two years he was in Kabul.” Nevertheless, as with the majority of the so-called “Dirty Thirty,” there appears to be no basis for the claim that he “was an Osama bin Laden bodyguard and was usually by his side.” He has repeatedly stated that he never met bin Laden and has also stated that “the attack on the World Trade Center was wrong because Islam did not permit people to kill innocent people.”

ISN 042 Shalabi, Abdul Rahman (Saudi Arabia)
According to an unidentified source cited at Guantánamo, Shalabi “was teaching at a madrassa” in Kandahar, and, moreover, he “taught over 300 men” and was “very well known.” In contrast, the US authorities have drawn on various claims about him being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden that appear to be as unreliable as those leveled against the majority of the “Dirty Thirty.” According to one source, he “came to Afghanistan around 1997 and became a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden after 1998,” and according to another, he was “related to a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.” Other unidentified sources said that they saw him in Kabul and Jalalabad “approximately ten times with Osama bin Laden in the latter part of 2001 and identified him as Osama bin Laden’s security guard,” that they saw him “speaking directly with Osama bin Laden” and that he “was with him at all times while in Tora Bora.” In Guantánamo, he has been a long-term hunger striker, and has been on a hunger strike since August 2005, when the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history took place. He weighed 124 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo in January 2002, but weighed just 100 pounds in November 2005. In September 2009, after four years of being force-fed daily, he weighed just 108 pounds, and wrote a distressing letter to his lawyers, in which he stated, “I am a human who is being treated like an animal.” In November 2009, when his letter was included in a court submission, one of his lawyers, Julia Tarver Mason, stated, “He’s two pounds away from organ failure and death.”

ISN 043 Moqbel, Samir (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Moqbel (also identified as Samir Mukbel) stated that he was tricked by a friend, who told him he would find a job in Afghanistan. “He told me I would like it in Afghanistan and I could live a better life than in Yemen,” he said in a hearing at Guantánamo. “I thought Afghanistan was a rich country but when I got there I found out different … it was all destroyed with poverty and destruction. I found there was no basis for getting a job there.” His lawyers at Reprieve explained that he “is the eldest son of seven brothers and five sisters, and as the eldest son, is the family breadwinner,” and added that he was enticed by the false prospect of “more jobs and better salaries” in Afghanistan because, at the time, he “was working in a factory in Yemen earning just $50 a month.” In Guantánamo, in response to allegations that he was a bodyguard for bin Laden, and that he fought with the Taliban in various locations, he stated, “These accusations make you laugh. These accusations are like a movie. Me, a bodyguard for bin Laden, then do operations against Americans and Afghanis and make trips in Afghanistan? I don’t believe any human being could do all these things … This is me? I have watched a lot of American movies like Rambo and Superman, but I believe that I am better than them. I went to Pakistan and Afghanistan a month before the Americans got there … How can a person do all these operations in only a month?”

ISN 044 Ghanim, Mohammed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Ghanim was accused of having “participated in jihad activities” in Bosnia and of taking part in the Yemeni civil war, and of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. In response, he has apparently stated that he fought only with the Taliban. In a report from a former prisoner published by Cageprisoners, it was stated that Ghanim was subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation in Guantánamo, as part of what was euphemistically termed “the frequent flier program,” and was also denied medical treatment: “Every two hours he would get moved from cell to cell, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes cell to cell, sometimes block to block, over a period of eight months. He was deprived of sleep because of this and he was also deprived of medical attention. He had lost a lot of weight. He had a painful medical problem, haemorrhoids, and that treatment was refused unless he cooperated. He said he would cooperate and had an operation. However, the operation was not performed correctly and he still had problems. He would not cooperate. [H]e was [then] put in Romeo Block where the prisoners would be made to stand naked. It was then left to the discretion of the interrogators whether a prisoner was allowed clothes or not.”

ISN 045 Al Rahizi, Ali Ahmad (Yemen)
Al-Rahizi (also identified as al-Rezehi) has stated that he “went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran because the Imam at his mosque told him that the Afghans were using magic and were not following the teachings of Islam.” In contrast, the US authorities allege that he attended al-Farouq and was one of bin Laden’s bodyguards. Al-Rahizi has specifically stated that he “taught the Koran to Afghan children at the Abu Bakur al-Sadiq mosque in Shurandam” (in Kandahar province), where he “worked directly for the mosque Imam,” and that it was the Imam who told him about the US-led invasion of October 2001, and advised him to return home. In the clearest indication that the group of men seized together had picked up stragglers along the way, he stated that he traveled to Khost, via Ghazni, “and then traveled by foot for two days to a small town,” where he “joined approximately 30 other Arabs … who had assembled to flee Afghanistan,” and who subsequently traveled together for eight days before being arrested on the Pakistani border by the Pakistani authorities.

ISN 054 Al Qosi, Ibrahim (Sudan)
Subjected, over the years, to a variety of allegations, including claims that he served as the accountant for a company run by Osama bin Laden in Sudan from 1992 onwards, that he visited Chechnya to fight in 1995, with bin Laden’s support and permission, that he served as a bodyguard, cook and driver for bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1996 onwards, and that he fought in Afghanistan as part of a mortar crew, al-Qosi was first put forward for a trial by Military Commission in February 2004 (along with Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, ISN 039), and was formally charged in June 2004. At a hearing in August 2004, his military defense lawyer, Air Force Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, complained that she was not being provided with the information she needed to defend al-Qosi, and also complained that al-Qosi had told her that the translators in court were so poor that he couldn’t understand what was happening. When the Commissions were revived, al-Qosi was charged, for a second time, with al-Bahlul in February 2008, and took part in several inconclusive hearings. In November 2009, he was charged for the third time, after President Obama decided to revive the Commissions, and last month he accepted a plea bargain, making a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy and one count of providing material support to terrorism, in a decision that was widely seen as providing his best opportunity to be released from Guantánamo. A military jury sentenced him to 14 years’ imprisonment on August 11, but was not told the details of his plea deal, and it is therefore thought that the jury was being used to deliver what appears to be a public vindication of the Commissions’ ability to deliver tough sentences, even though, by all accounts, al-Qosi will be held for just two more years before being released.

ISN 063 Al Qahtani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
Despite allegations that he was intended to be the 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, al-Qahtani is not expected to face a trial of any kind. He was originally put forward for a trial by Military Commission (with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks) in February 2008, but the charges were subsequently dropped by Susan Crawford, the Convening Authority for the Commissions, responsible for pressing charges, because, as she explained to Bob Woodward in January 2009, “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.” A harrowing log recording the details of al-Qahtani’s torture from November 2002 to January 2003, in a program approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was made publicly available in June 2005 (PDF).

Note: The courtroom sketch of Ibrahim al-Qosi, by Janet Hamlin, is courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, the World Can’t Wait, Uruknet, Blog from Middle East and New Left Project. mentioned on No Lies Radio, Portland Indymedia and Dhafir Trial.

The judges’ unclassified opinions are not yet available, so their reasoning is not yet known, but the rulings prompt three immediate responses: firstly, that Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, whose suicide attempts and mental illness have been apparent for many years, should be released immediately; secondly, that this is unlikely, given the Obama administration’s unjustifiable moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners, even those who have won their habeas petitions; and thirdly, that the ruling in Abdul Rahman Sulayman’s case can only be construed as a victory for the government when viewed through very narrow parameters.

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a mentally troubled Yemeni, wins his habeas petition

For Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, Judge Kennedy’s ruling appears to vindicate what his lawyers have maintained for years: that he is an innocent man who had sought medical treatment in Afghanistan. As one of his lawyers, David Remes, explained after the ruling, “This is a mentally disturbed man who has said from the beginning that he went to Afghanistan seeking medical care because he was too poor to pay for it. Finally, a court has recognized that he’s been telling the truth, and ordered his release.”

This was how I described his story in one of the online chapters supplementing the information contained in my book The Guantánamo Files:

26-year old Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif (identified by the Pentagon Ab Aljallil Allal or Allal Ab Aljallil Abd Al Rahman Abd) stated that he had sustained a serious head injury in an automobile accident in 1994, and had spent years trying to find affordable medical treatment. After being told about the health-care office of a Pakistani aid worker in Afghanistan who would treat him, he said that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, and explained that, when the US-led invasion began, he fled to the border town of Khost and then made his way into Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani forces, along with about 30 other Arabic-looking men. He told his lawyer, Marc Falkoff, that he later learned that each of them had been turned over to the US military for a bounty of $5000.

In his tribunal at Guantánamo, Latif appeared bewildered, refuting what he believed was an allegation that he came from a place called al-Qaeda by saying, “I am from Orday City in Yemen, not a city in al-Qaeda. My city is very far away from the city of al-Qaeda,” which perhaps reinforces his claim that he had traveled to Afghanistan to receive treatment for a fractured skull.

In an analysis of his client’s case in 2007, Marc Falkoff pointed out that the authorities alleged, in the unclassified summary of evidence against Latif, that he was “an al-Qaeda fighter,” that in 2000 he “reportedly traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan” and “reportedly received training at the al-Farouq training camp,” and that in April 2001 he “reportedly returned to Afghanistan” and “reportedly went to the front lines in Kabul.” He added, “[W]hen I first saw the accusations, I thought they looked serious [but] when I looked at the government’s evidence, I was amazed. There was nothing there. Nothing at all trustworthy. Nothing that could be admitted into evidence in a court of law. Nothing that was remotely persuasive, even leaving legal niceties aside.” At most, he added, “there was incredibly unreliable hearsay, often taken from other detainees who were — in the words of a military representative — ‘known liars,’ or else whom we now know to have been tortured.”

Despite this, the authorities in Guantánamo attempted — initially, at least — to portray Latif as a devious al-Qaeda operative who had been trained to resist interrogation (as they did, to be honest, with numerous other men seized in a random manner, many of whom were innocent). Prior to his tribunal hearing at Guantánamo in 2004, convened to confirm that he had been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant” who could be held without charge or trial, his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned in place of a lawyer) noted that he “[r]ambles for long periods and does not answer questions” and “[h]as clearly been taught to ramble as a resistance technique.”

Latif’s suicide attempts and probable schizophrenia

In fact, as later became apparent, Latif was unwell. In August 2008, Marc Falkoff filed an “Emergency Motion to Compel Access to Medical Records of Petitioner Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif and for Other Miscellaneous Relief” (PDF). The motion was triggered because Latif had been prevented from having a blanket and a mattress in his cell, even though he was in a very poor state, and Falkoff wrote that he “visited with Mr. Latif yesterday at the Guantánamo Bay military prison and fears that Mr. Latif — whose body weight has dropped in the last six weeks from 145 to approximately 107 pounds — is near death.” He added, “Mr. Latif is not on a hunger strike, and the cause of his alarming weight drop appears to be unknown,” and also stated, “Mr. Latif is also manifesting signs of schizophrenia, for which he is apparently not being treated.” Falkoff reinforced this observation elsewhere in the motion when he declared that the government had “been aware for years that Mr. Latif suffers from serious psychological problems, apparently including schizophrenia.”

Even so, the authorities were reluctant to abandon their portrayal of Latif as a conscious troublemaker, as is demonstrated by the following notes in the summary of evidence for his military review board in March 2005: “Detainee’s overall behavior has been non-compliant and aggressive. Detainee does not comply with guards instruction. Detainee continues to talk between the blocks. Detainee also has multiple occurrences of causing damage in his cell. Detainee has shown by his actions that he has little regard for the rules of the cellblock and does not respect his fellow man.”

In fact, far from demonstrating deliberate non-compliance, Latif was in such a precarious mental state that he attempted to commit suicide on a number of occasions. In an appeal issued in May 2009, Amnesty International noted that he had “attempted suicide several times since September 2008,” and that he “told his lawyer that on one occasion in November 2008, he tried to hang himself twice in one day.” The Amnesty report added, “At least one of these attempts was confirmed to his lawyer by an official at Guantánamo.”

Amnesty’s appeal was triggered in particular by a suicide attempt that took place on May 10, 2009, when he cut one of his wrists during a meeting with David Remes. After the incident, Remes explained that Latif “chipped off a piece of the stiff veneer on the underside of our conference table and used it to saw into a vein in his left wrist … As he sawed, he drained his blood into a plastic container and, shortly before it was time for me to leave, he hurled the blood at me from the container.” As Amnesty also explained, “A spokesman at Guantánamo confirmed the incident took place but said it could not be classified as a suicide attempt.”

Amnesty also noted that Latif had been “held in solitary confinement in the psychiatric ward at Guantánamo since at least November 2008,” and that he told his lawyers that “when he is awake he sees ghosts in the darkness, hears frightening voices and suffers from nightmares when he is asleep.” He also told his lawyers that he had “ingested all sorts of materials including garbage bags, urine cups, prayer beads, a water bottle and a screw,” that he had “eaten his own excrement and smeared it on his body” and that he had “used his own excrement to cover the walls of his cell door, the camera on the ceiling of his cell and the air vent in his cell.”

In addition, Amnesty noted that Latif reportedly suffered from “a number of physical health problems, including a fractured cheekbone, a shattered eardrum, blindness in one eye, a dislocated shoulder blade, and a possibly dislocated knee.” Latif also said that he suffered “constant throat and stomach pain which [made] it difficult for him to eat,” but that, instead of dealing with this in an appropriate manner, the authorities strapped him in a restraint chair and force-fed him up to three times a day through a tube pushed up his nose into his stomach.

Just two months ago, Amnesty International issued another appeal, and noted little improvement in the intervening 12 months, stating that Latif was “held in isolation,” and that in March this year he told his lawyer that he “continues to be subjected to ill-treatment and indicated that he feels suicidal.” At the time, Latif was held in isolation in Camp 5, which, as Amnesty explained, “holds the few remaining hunger strikers at Guantánamo” and others, like Latif, who had once been on hunger strike but had abandoned that particular response to the conditions in which they were held. Amnesty noted that the majority of the remaining prisoners were living in communal conditions in Camps 1, 4, and 6, but that, although Latif’s lawyers had asked the authorities to move him to one of the other camps, they had had no response.

In a letter to his lawyers in March 2010, Latif stated that he was regularly subjected to violent assaults by the Immediate Response Force (IRF), a group of guards who punish even the most minor transgressions with disproportionate violence. “IRF teams enter my cell on [a] regular basis,” he wrote in his letter. “They throw me and drag me on the floor … two days before writing this letter [the IRF team] strangled me and pressed hard behind my ears … I lost consciousness for more than an hour.” He added that the circumstances in which he was living “makes death more desirable than living … I find no taste for life, sleep or rest.”

Abdul Rahman Sulayman, a minor Taliban recruit, loses his habeas petition

From the publicly available information about Abdul Rahman Sulayman, whose habeas petition was denied by Judge Reggie Walton, it appears that he was one of several Guantánamo prisoners recruited by Ibrahim Baalawi (also known as Abu Khulud), allegedly a facilitator for Osama bin Laden, who, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “escaped from Tora Bora and would clearly have been a much bigger catch than any of the foot soldiers rounded up instead.”

In Guantánamo, Sulayman claimed that Baalawi recruited him under false pretences with tales of the good life in Afghanistan. He “promised me that I’d be able to get married in Afghanistan. He may have had different intentions for me other than the marriage, but I didn’t know,” he told his tribunal, adding that he was also told, “you can go to certain counties and they’ll give you a house, even if it’s an old house, and some financial assistance to get married. That’s without having to contribute anything at all. It’s a charity type of thing from these people. If you put yourself in my shoes, what would you do?”

This was not the whole story, as Sulayman also conceded that, after arriving in Afghanistan in March 2001, he stayed in Kabul for seven months, and then, when given the opportunity to go to the front lines or the second lines or to return home, he went to the second lines because he didn’t want to fight but he also didn’t want to return home. It was there, he said, that he received some weapons training, and later, after the US-led invasion began, he fled to Pakistan in the company of men that he didn’t know, where he was seized and handed over to US forces.

This, presumably, was enough for Judge Walton to conclude that he had been “part of” al-Qaeda or the Taliban, which is all that is required for the prisoners to lose their habeas petitions, even though much of the other supposed evidence was demonstrably false, and almost certainly produced by unreliable witnesses, either in Guantánamo or in other US-run prisons. These included ludicrous allegations that he was identified as a mortar instructor from a video made in the Tarnak Farms training camp in 2000 (before he arrived in Afghanistan), that he “was identified as an al-Qaeda spokesman and was part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage … during the escape from Tora Bora,” and that he was identified as a Taliban prison guard “who used torture techniques on inmates under his control.”

No escape from Guantánamo for either man

While Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif’s successful habeas corpus petition should lead to his immediate repatriation from Guantánamo, this is unlikely given the moratorium on releasing any prisoners to Yemen — even mentally ill prisoners whose release has been ordered by a US court — that was announced by President Obama in January, following the discovery that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

As I have maintained ever since the moratorium was announced, this was a cowardly and unjust move on Obama’s part, conceived and executed in response to sustained hysteria from lawmakers and the media, when what was actually required was a leader prepared to stand up to his critics, and to point out that refusing to repatriate Yemenis in Guantánamo — even if they had been cleared for release by President Bush, by Obama’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, and/or by a US court — only sent out one message: that everyone in Yemen was a potential terrorist, and that guilt by nationality was an acceptable reason for refusing to release any of these men.

In the Obama administration’s compromised, pragmatic world, the absurdity of continuing to hold 59 Yemenis cleared for release by the Task Force (including some or all of the other three men who won their habeas petitions, but are still held) apparently means nothing, even when, as has become apparent in the last few months, the moratorium has obliged the Justice Department to challenge the habeas corpus petitions of prisoners whom the administration has already conceded it has no reason to hold.

The only exception, to date, has been Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized in Pakistan, whose wrongful arrest was so blindingly obvious that the administration was unable to contemplate holding him any longer. Distressingly, the administration also attempted to justify his release by noting that he came from a good family, and as a result Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif may have to reflect that, despite his victory, he will only be released if his story causes the mainstream media to pay attention, and if he comes from a good family.

As for Abdul Rahman Sulayman, he joins the small group of other prisoners (14 at present), who have lost their habeas petitions, and are consigned to endless detention at Guantánamo on an apparently legal basis, even though he and the majority of those 13 men were minor players in a military conflict that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or other acts of international terrorism, and who should, therefore, have been held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, rather than being held as a unique category of human being in an experimental prison established to hold “the worst of the worst.”

In Sulayman’s case, it would appear that his ability to challenge his detention has come to an end until someone in authority decides that the legislation justifying his detention — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — is inappropriate, and that the men held at Guantánamo are either soldiers, or criminal suspects involved in terrorist activities, rather then the “enemy combatants” conjured up by the Bush administration. He has the right to appeal, of course, but as recent rulings by the D.C. Circuit Court have shown, the majority of judges dealing with the prisoners’ appeals are not only unconcerned by these questions, but are actually dedicating themselves to eroding the District Court’s ability to grant prisoners’ habeas petitions by attempting to lower the already low burden of proof required by the government to win its cases in the first place.

With the Circuit Court in such aggressive form, not only does Abdul Rahman Sulayman stand little chance of winning an appeal, even though there is no evidence that he ever raised arms against US forces, but even Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif’s successful habeas petition could be overturned, consigning a mentally ill man to the kind of ongoing detention that would make Obama’s unprincipled moratorium irrelevant.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Guantánamo: A Mentally Ill Yemeni and a Minor Taliban Recruit.” Cross-posted on Cageprisoners, Eurasia Review, The Public Record and Uruknet.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part One) (July 2010), Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part Two) (July 2010).