Mohammed was horribly abused in US custody, and was never held separately from the adult prisoners, even though that is a requirement of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified a year after his capture. The Optional Protocol also requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” and not to punish them — but in fact just three of the 22 confirmed juvenile prisoners held at Guantánamo (those under 18 when their alleged crimes took place) were ever held separately from the rest of the prisoners, and treated humanely.

Mohammed’s fortunes only finally turned in January 2009, when Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W Bush in the District Court in Washington D.C., granted his habeas corpus petition and ordered his release, after finding that the government’s claims — primarily, that he had traveled to Afghanistan for jihad — were based on statements made by a mentally unstable prisoner who had provided demonstrably false information against numerous other prisoners, confirming what I and other researchers had discovered in the files made available to the public, and preempting what has been made even more obvious in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in April (on which I worked as a media partner). Mohammed had also been subjected to one of the most idiotic allegations of all, which Judge Leon also recognized as idiotic — namely, that, was a member of an al-Qaeda cell in London in 1998, when he was just 11 years old. As his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, explained in his book, The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice In Guantánamo Bay, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Since the release of the WikiLeaks files, I have been analyzing them in depth for an ongoing 70-part, million-word series entitled, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” which confirms that Guantánamo is a house of cards, built on the dubious statements of the prisoners themselves, or their fellow prisoners, either in Guantánamo or in secret prisons run by the CIA, in which the use torture, coercion and bribery was rife.

Following Mohammed’s court victory, he was released in Chad in June 2009, although he was imprisoned on his return, and was then effectively abandoned, as I reported here, here and here.

Now, however, the London Review of Books has published an extraordinary article based on interviews with Mohammed (described as Mohammed el-Gorani) conducted by Jérôme Tubiana, who has reported regularly from Chad, Sudan and Rwanda, and whose book Chroniques du Darfour was published last year. I’m cross-posting the article below, and I do hope that anyone interested in Guantánamo can find the time to read it, as Mohammed is a compelling interviewee — articulate, often funny, and sharp to comprehend the scale of the injustice to which he and the other Guantánamo prisoners were subjected.

Unflinchingly, he speaks of the hardship of his life as a foreign national in Saudi Arabia, the random nature of his capture in Pakistan, the unexpected brutality of his American captors on his transfer to Afghanistan, and the ways in which he and others fought back against this violence and tyranny in Guantánamo. He also speaks frankly about the difficulties of life after Guantánamo, and his brief escape to Sudan, which I had not heard mentioned before, and the article ends with notification that he has now left Chad for good, despite an agreement between the US and Chad which is supposed to guarantee that this poor young man, who was cleared of all wrongdoing by a US judge, is never allowed to leave the country.

I wish him the utmost success in his endeavors to find a new life.

Diary
By Mohammed el Gorani and Jérôme Tubiana, London Review of Books, December 15, 2011

We met every afternoon for two weeks in N’Djamena. After the midday prayer, I would pick him up in a taxi at the shop he hoped to turn into a laundry. We ate fish and rice in my hotel room — he would have been recognised outside — and he just talked, beginning at the beginning.

I was born in 1986 in Saudi Arabia, in Medina, the Prophet’s city. My parents came from North Chad — I don’t know exactly where. They left Chad for Saudi because they believe that if you live in a holy place, it’s easier to go to paradise. They were nomads, from the Gorare tribe. When they arrived in Medina, they took the tribe’s name as our family name, so I’m called Mohammed el Gorani, ‘the Goran’. My parents were camel herders and always had to keep moving to find grass. But when they arrived in Medina, my father did a lot of different jobs: washing cars, working in a shop belonging to a Saudi — you can’t have a shop if you’re not Saudi. There’s a lot of stupid rules about foreigners in Saudi Arabia. When my parents tried to send me to school, they said: ‘Is he Saudi?’

‘No, Chadian.’

‘There are no places left. Come back next month …’

When I was eight, I went to a school run by a man from Chad. He taught anyone who couldn’t go to a Saudi school. I was there four years until my father got ill. Then my brother and I, we had to start working. We washed cars and sold in the street cold water, prayer mats and beads — you can make good money during the Pilgrimage and the Ramadan. I went every month to Mecca with kids from Sudan and Pakistan to sell to the pilgrims. If the police came, we ran away. We had to be careful. If they capture you, they take your money and your stuff. Sometimes they take you to prison and your father had to come and sign a paper. Thus we paid for hiring our house, for the electricity. We changed house seven or eight times, but we always had electricity and tap water. Not like here in Chad.

He became friends with a Pakistani boy who lived near him. We called him Ali.

When I got 14, Ali asked me: ‘How long are you going to keep washing cars?’ He knew I wanted to be a dentist. All my friends had teeth problems, but there wasn’t a good dentist for non-Saudis — they just pull your teeth out. Also foreigners have no way to study after high school. Ali had taught me some Urdu, his mother tongue: numbers, words you need for selling, anything that’s useful with Pakistani pilgrims. Ali told me: ‘You’re good at languages. If you could speak English, you could work in a hotel in Mecca.’ His brother spoke English and had a good job in a hotel. Ali told me about English and computer lessons in Pakistan. ‘Go to Karachi. My uncles and cousins will welcome you, you just need to pay the lessons.’ I told my parents, they refused. My uncles said, ‘You’re crazy!’ but they knew if I decided something I would do it. My goal when I went to Pakistan was to help my family — life was getting difficult.

Without telling anyone, I went to Jeddah to ask for a passport at the Chadian Consulate. The consulate guy told me: ‘You need to change your name and lie on your age.’ I needed to be 18 and I was only 14 or 15. ‘And you need to pay me baksheesh.’ I had enough money. Every day I gave a part of my earnings to my family and saved the rest in a powdered milk tin that I buried in front of the house. On my last day in Medina, I went to see my Uncle Abderahman. I couldn’t say goodbye openly, but in my heart it was goodbye. It was 1 a.m., not a normal time to visit, as I was planning to leave the same night. I took his hands in mine and kissed his head, like we do in our tradition. In the morning, he told my mum I must have left.

‘Maybe he went to Jeddah, like he does usually,’ she said.

‘No, this time he’ll go far away.’

I took a plane to Karachi. Even Ali was surprised. I called his cousins and they came to the airport. Ali’s uncle taught in his house: the lessons lasted six months, three months of English lessons, and three months of English and computer lessons. I planned to go home after those six months. But two months after my arrival, there was 9/11. I didn’t pay attention — I was very busy with my lessons. Every day, I woke up, went to school, ate lunch, played football with the neighbourhood kids, studied, prayed. Every Friday, I went to pray in a big mosque not far from the house. Most of the people praying there were Arabs, because the imam was Saudi and spoke a good Arabic. One Friday, at the beginning of the sermon, we saw a lot of soldiers surrounding the mosque. After the prayers, they started questioning the people. They were looking for Arabs. They asked me: ‘Saudi?’

‘No, Chadian.’

‘Don’t lie, you’re Saudi!’ It must have been because of my accent. They put me on a truck and covered my head with a plastic bag. They took me to a prison, and they started questioning me about al-Qaida and the Talibans. I had never heard those words.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘Listen, Americans are going to interrogate you. Just say you’re from al-Qaida, you went with al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and they’ll send you home with some money.’

‘Why would I lie?’

They hung me by my arms and beat me. Two white Americans, in their forties, arrived. They were wearing normal clothes. They asked: ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘You’re fucking with us? You’re al-Qaida, yes!’ They kept using the F-word.

I didn’t understand this word but I knew they were getting angry. A Pakistani was in the room, behind the Americans. When they asked if I was from al-Qaida, he nodded, to tell me to say yes. I wasn’t doing it, so he got mad. The Americans said: ‘Take him back!’ The Pakistani was furious: ‘They’re looking for al-Qaida, you have to say you’re al-Qaida!’ Then they put the electrodes on my toes. For ten days I had them on my feet. Every day there was torture. Some of them tortured me with electricity, others just signed a paper saying they had done it. One Pakistani officer was a good guy. He said: ‘The Pakistani government just want to sell you to the Americans.’ Some of us panicked, but I was kind of happy. I loved to watch old cowboy movies and believed that Americans were good people, like in the movies, it would be better with them than with the Pakistanis, we’d have lawyers. Maybe they’d allow me to study in the US, then send me back to my parents.

They started taking detainees away every night, by groups of twenty. We didn’t know where they were going to, but we thought the US. One day, it was my group’s turn. The Pakistanis took away our chains and gave us handcuffs ‘made in the USA’. I told the other detainees: ‘Look, we’re going to the US!’ I thought the Americans would understand that the Pakistanis had cheated them, and send me back to Saudi.

So my hands were tied in the back and a guard held me by a chain. We were twenty, with maybe fifteen guards. They covered our eyes and ears, so I couldn’t see much. When they took off our masks, we were at an airport, with big helicopters. Then the movie started. Americans shouted: ‘You’re under arrest, UNDER CUSTODY OF THE US ARMY! DON’T TALK, DON’T MOVE OR WE’LL SHOOT YOU!’ An interpreter was translating into Arabic. Then they started beating us — I couldn’t see with what but something hard. People were bleeding and crying. We had almost passed out when they put us in a helicopter.

We landed at another airstrip. It was night. Americans shouted: ‘Terrorists, criminals, we’re going to kill you!’ Two soldiers took me by my arms and started running. My legs were dragging on the ground. They were laughing, telling me: ‘Fucking nigger!’ I didn’t know what that meant, I learned it later. They took off my mask and I saw many tents on the airstrip. They put me inside one. There was an Egyptian (I recognised his Arabic) wearing a US uniform. He started by asking me: ‘When was the last time you saw Osama bin Laden?’ ‘Who?’ He took me by my shirt collar and they beat me again. During all my time at Bagram, I was beaten. Once it was like a movie — they came inside the tent with guns, shouting: WE CAUGHT THE TERRORISTS! And they put us in handcuffs. ‘Here are their guns!’ And they threw some Kalashnikovs onto the ground. ‘We’ve been fighting them, they killed a lot of people!’ All that was for cameras, which were held by men in uniforms. I was lying on the ground with the other prisoners. They brought dogs to scare us.

One day they started moving prisoners again. They picked you from your tent, put you naked, shaved your head and beard (I was too young to have a beard), then beat you. They dressed you with orange clothes, handcuffed you, and put gloves with no fingers on you, so you couldn’t open the handcuffs. ‘You guys are going to a place where there is no sun, no moon, no freedom, and you’re going to live there for ever,’ the guards told us, and laughed. They put you in completely black glasses and headphones, so that you couldn’t see or hear. With those on, you don’t feel the time. But I could hear when they were changing the guards, probably every hour. I must have spent five hours sitting on a bench, with another detainee in my back.

Then they put us in a plane — I don’t know what kind because I couldn’t see. As soon as you moved or talked, they beat you. They were shouting: IF YOU DON’T FOLLOW OUR ORDERS, WE’LL KILL YOU! I passed out. We had no water and no food. I woke up hearing voices shouting at me in different languages. They took me to my cell. I saw soldiers everywhere, and guns, like if it was war. There were big metal fences everywhere. We were in Guantánamo, in Camp X-Ray. It’s a prison without walls, without roofs — only fences. Nothing to protect you from the sun or the rain.

The sky was blue. Except for sky you couldn’t see anything. Later, when I was moved to Camp Delta, I could look by the windows. The camp was ringed with a green plastic sheet, but there were holes and I could see trees. And even the sea. I saw it even better, years later, when I was moved to Camp Iguana, where they put you before release. Through the plastic sheet, I saw the ocean, big ships and the guards swimming. Only in Iguana can you touch the sand.

In Camp Five as well, there was a window in my cell, but it was covered with brown tape. One day I was sitting, mad, sad, angry, and a woodpecker came and knocked, knocked until it broke the tape — a hole big as a coin. It did this to a lot of windows. It started doing it every day and the guards had to put new tape every day. Sometimes, they left the holes. I could see the cars, the soldiers, the sky, the sun, the life outside. We called the bird Woody Woodpecker.

For months, I didn’t know where I was. Some brothers said Europe. No, others told: ‘It’s the weather of Oman.’ Others told Brazil, also because of the weather. We arrived in February, but it was so hot in comparison to Kandahar. There we shivered night and day, especially when we were naked. After a few months, an interrogator told me: ‘We’re in Cuba.’ It was the first time I heard this name. ‘An island in the middle of the ocean. Nobody can run away from here and you’ll be here for ever.’ The older detainees knew of Cuba, but didn’t know there was an American base. I’d seen a lot of American movies, and arrested people always said: ‘I have the right to a lawyer!’ The interrogators laughed at me: ‘Not here in Guantánamo! You got no rights here!’

The night I arrived, I was still tired from the flight, I had a first interrogation. The old man started by saying: ‘We have two faces, one nice and one ugly. We don’t want to show you the ugly one.’ He carried on with questions: ‘What were you doing in Afghanistan? Are you from al-Qaida? Are you a Taliban? Have you been in training camps?’ My answers were just: no, no, no! He started to shout and he sent me back to my cell. I was tired and scared. Prisoners were tortured somewhere. When you heard them crying, you were really scared — you thought you’d be next.

In the beginning there were interrogations every night. They tortured me with electricity, mostly on the toes. The nails of my big toes fell off. Sometimes they hung you up like a chicken and hit your back. Sometimes they chained you, with your head on the ground. You couldn’t move for 16 or 17 hours. You peed on yourself.’

Suddenly he stopped. ‘I don’t see the benefit of telling you all that,’ he said. We had been talking for several days and he was tired. I called a taxi to take him home. ‘We are in the middle of our work,’ I said as he left, ‘it would be a pity to stop now.’ The next day, he agreed to carry on.

Sometimes they showed you the ugly face: torturing, torturing without asking questions. Sometimes I said, ‘Yes, whatever you ask, I’ll say yes,’ because I just wanted torture to stop. But the next day, I said: ‘No, I said yes yesterday because of torture.’ My first or second interrogator said to me: ‘Mohammed, I know you’re innocent but I’m doing my job. I have children to feed. I don’t want to lose my job.’

‘This is no job,’ I said, ‘this is criminal. Sooner or later you’re going to pay for this. Even in afterlife.’

‘I’m a machine — I ask you the questions they told me to ask, I bring them your answers. Whatever they are, I don’t care.’

Another guy told me: ‘We know you were doing bad stuff in Sudan.’

‘I’ve never been there.’

‘I know. But if you co-operate, I’ll bring you pizzas and McDonald’s. I know the food is bad here.’

Another one: ‘We know you were in London, working with al-Qaida, in 1993.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

He showed me a paper. ‘Look: ’93.’

‘You should be smart and say ’98 or ’99. In ’93, I was six.’ He laughed.

In the cells there were other kinds of torture. Above all they prevent you to sleep. They brought big vacuum cleaners to make a lot of noise. They put on music — I understood the words were bad words. At night, they switched on lights everywhere. If they saw you sleeping, they came shouting: WAKE UP! GET UP! Sometimes they put a sign on your door: NO SLEEP. Others had NO FOOD, NO EXERCISE, NO TALKING. In Camp Delta, they prevented you to sleep by moving you from your cell every hour. Every time, they came with handcuffs: DETAINEE, MOVE! It was bad, but thanks to the moving I was learning more English. I was picking up words from the guards and asked their meaning to the detainees who spoke English. But when the guards saw somebody was teaching me words, they would move one of us. I started stealing soap to write English words on the walls. I was hiding it under the door or in my shoes.

Mohammed often used words like ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ and immediately apologised. ‘I learned soldiers’ English,’ he said.

I had even a song, a song I made in English. It’s called ‘Number Two’. At the beginning, they gave us a bucket to piss and shit. They told us to call ‘Number One’ or ‘Number Two’, and they would take out the bucket. We started to throw buckets of shit on the guards through the fence. It was quite easy. So we called any bad thing made to a guard a Number Two.

And when I sang it, every detainee in the corridor used to sing with me. And even some good guards.

Number Two, Number Two!
I will never regret what I do!
You will never forget it, Number Two!
If you treat us as human, human beings,
We will treat you as human, human beings!
If you treat us as animals, so will we,
We will treat you as animals!
Number Two, Number Two, Number Two!

When the guards disrespected us, I told them: ‘Don’t make me sing “Number Two”.’

Did I tell you I was a bad boy in Guantánamo? They called me a troublemaker. There was a big sign on my door: NO CONVERSATION WITH 269. 269 was my number, but I didn’t like to be called 269. ‘Call me by my name!’ They started calling me Chris Tucker. Have you seen the movie Rush Hour, with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, a black actor? I bought it in the N’Djamena market after I was released. Everyone had a nickname in Guantánamo, even the guards, because most covered up their name on their uniform. When I asked their name, they said: ‘Don’t worry about it!’ I used to ask the good guards the names of the bad guards. When I knew the name of a bad guard, I started to call him it. I remember one, with blond hair, blue eyes, in his twenties — it was the first time I was seeing so many people with blond hair and blue eyes. ‘I know your name and I know where you’re from,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to get out someday and I’m gonna kick your ass!’ He looked at his name on his uniform — had he forgotten the tape to cover it? No.

‘How could you know my name?’

‘I know your name is …’ I don’t remember it today, but let’s say he was called Smith.

‘Don’t say that aloud!’

‘I know your city, I know your family, I know details!’ Actually, all I knew was his name and his city.

‘Who told you this?’

‘I won’t say. But one day I’m gonna go home and then you’ll see.’

He started walking in the block. I don’t think he slept that night. The next day he came back: ‘Brother!’

‘Oh, I’m a brother now …’ Normally, it’s the prisoners who called each other ‘brother’.

‘I know, I’ve been bad. I’ve got a lot of problems at home. But I don’t hate you.’

I learned in Guantánamo that there are really racist people. The guards were often calling me or other black people with the N-word. ‘Fucking nigger!’ One of the guards who called me so, I gave him a headbutt and I broke him a tooth. He was very young, between 20 and 25, as most of the guards. I did nothing the day he actually insulted me. But days after, I started joking with the guards. I wanted the one who had insulted me to trust me. There were two windows in the door, one up, to shackle your hands, the other down to shackle your feet. They didn’t open the door — we were so dangerous! I wanted the guard who had insulted me to come to the door and open the upper window. I called him: ‘Hey man, long time no see you!’

‘What do you want? You’re not angry anymore?’

‘No, come, let’s chat, open the window.’ He was an idiot. He opened. ‘See this!’ I said, and I knocked his nose. He was bleeding, I was laughing. The other guards sprayed me with pepper spray, something they used very often. It burns and makes it hard to breathe. It’s not the only guard I knocked on his face. I pissed on their faces too. I was a bad boy in Guantánamo.

Once, in 2005, one of our brothers was badly beaten in front of us. I sat in my room not speaking to anyone all day. During night shift, one of the good guards, a black guy from Louisiana, came to me. We called him Mike Tyson because he was a boxer. He used to bump my fist through the bars: ‘Wassup, Chris?’

‘If at least we’d done something bad, I could understand …’

‘Brother, look at my face!’ he said. ‘How long you’ve been here with Americans?’

‘Four years.’

‘I’ve been suffering 27 years, man! I know what it is. They put my brother in jail for no reason, instead of a white guy.’ Most of the people in jail in US are blacks, he told me. ‘My grandfather and my great-grandfather were in the situation you’re in now.’ He meant they were slaves, shackled like us.

He asked me a lot of questions about Islam. ‘Before I came to Guantánamo, the media told me Muslims hate us because of our way of life, our democracy.’ But when he came here, he saw that we Muslims respect each other and have no hate for people of other religions. He saw me reading the Quran and calling everyone to prayer. ‘You’re the youngest and the only black guy, and they listen to you! There’s no racism between you!’

We talked during one year. One night, I was asleep when I felt someone was hitting me with something. It was Tyson, with an ice cream. Sometimes he brought ice cream, chocolate or chips — he could be fired for that. He was laughing. I was happy to see him. ‘Man, I’m leaving tonight.’

‘Where?’

‘America! But as soon as I get to the US, I’m going to convert to Islam and leave the army.’ He shook my hand. ‘Good luck, my brother!’ He was the best of all the guards.

When the bad guards saw us sad and sick, they were happy. And I didn’t want that. Since I was little, I was always laughing, smiling, joking and I kept going in Guantánamo. They were telling me: ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘I’m happy!’

‘How can you be happy? You’re in jail.’

In fact he tried to kill himself several times. Once he cut his wrists on the metal door. Another time he tried to hang himself with clothes tied together.

Many detainees tried to commit suicide, but I don’t think they succeeded. Six died. I knew them — it’s so hard to believe that those six, especially, committed suicide. One day, an interrogator told me one brother died because he took more than a hundred pills. I was angry: ‘You’re the terrorists now,’ I said. ‘Why are you killing people?’

‘He took pills,’ the interrogator said.

‘You’re doing searches every day. How could he get those pills? Where could he hide them?’ He shut up. I was more and more angry. He asked the guard to handcuff me.

At the end of 2006, beginning of 2007, they opened a new camp — Camp Six. The guards told us: ‘You’ll have a big rec yard, football, TV. You’re going to be chillin’ like a villain!’ But there were a lot of lies. I was one of the first transferred there. The A/C was very very cold. I called the guard, politely: ‘Can I have a few words with you?’

After 30 minutes, he came: ‘’Bout what?’

‘The A/C is too cold.’

‘It’s cold out here too. It’s snowing.’

I said: ‘Brothers! This piece of shit wants to cause problems today.’

‘What? What do you call me now?’

One of my brothers said: ‘Let’s cover the A/C with paper.’ One hour a day, we were allowed to see our legal documents and to have paper to write letters. We had toothpaste — small and stinky, so we didn’t use it. I told my brothers: ‘Let’s paste paper on the A/C with toothpaste and water.’

We were 17 to do it. The A/C was blocked. The guard ordered: ‘269, TAKE IT DOWN!’ He was getting red from kicking the door. ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘It’s bad for your heart! It’s snowing outside, and we don’t want the snow to get in.’

He radioed: ‘Control, it’s Foxtrot One!’

‘Go ahead, Foxtrot One!’

‘Cell 103 covering A/C!’

‘Not only me,’ I said. ‘102, 104, 105, 106.’ He repeated all the cell numbers.

A lieutenant came: ‘269!’

‘My name is Mohammed!’

‘Why are you covering the A/C?’

We knew that their rules said the temperature should be 78°. ‘Listen, your own book says it’s supposed to be 78°.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve been here six years. I know the rules, it’s the same shit ever since we’ve been here.’

‘Same what? Don’t say shit!’

‘I’m speaking like you.’

BRING THE TEAM!

The team. Six guards wearing helmets, elbow pads, knee pads and gloves, like the riot police you see on TV. The first one carried a plastic shield. DETAINEE! LIE DOWN! CROSS YOUR FEET! DON’T RESIST THE TEAM! They want you on the belly, hands and feet crossed behind.

They hit me with the shield. I took one guy’s helmet and punched his face. They put me on the floor, beat me badly and shackled me. HANDS AND LEGS SECURE! I repeated: HANDS AND LEGS SECURE! I heard people laughing, even guards. DETAINEE! STOP TALKING! STOP RESISTING! It’s always like that: the team leader holds your head, and there’s one guard for each arm, and another for each leg. TEAM LIFT! They lift your body. TEAM PREPARE TO MOVE … TEAM MOVE! I was repeating everything. Someone said: ‘Come on, don’t make me laugh!’ Everything is filmed and they can be punished.

Once you’re out of your cell, they put you face down on the ground. PREPARING TO SEARCH! SEARCH RIGHT! They search the right side of your body. SEARCH LEFT! Then they searched my cell and pulled the paper off the A/C. The colonel arrived. I called him: ‘Come to see why we made trouble? See the temperature, it’s very cold. Believe me!’ It was night-time. In the morning they switched off the A/C. And we went to sleep. Two weeks later, my lawyer told me: ‘All your brothers in the camp learned what you did and thank you.’

At the end of 2004, civilian lawyers were finally allowed to visit the detainees. Among them was Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of Reprieve. Because Mohammed was a minor, he chose him as one of his first clients, but his trial didn’t take place until four years later. Sitting in a room with a big white phone, Mohammed heard Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington DC order his release.

He hoped to go home, to Medina, but the Saudi government didn’t want him back. Chad agreed to have him. In June 2009, a military plane dropped him at N’Djamena airport. He was jailed for eight days. When he was released, he was celebrated. ‘El Gorani Exults with His Relatives’ was the headline in the government daily ‘Le Progrès’. The picture shows him with uncles and cousins who had come from the desert to meet him. Then they went back to their camels.

He had no family in N’Djamena and shared a flat with seven other Gorans, all born in Saudi Arabia. He spent his days in front of a laptop, listening to ‘English for You’ or playing ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ Sometimes he played football, but his back and stomach hurt, and he had problems with his vision. He needed medical treatment that wasn’t available in Chad. After months in N’Djamena, he wanted to leave. But the Chadians refused to give him a passport. In early 2010, after seven years, Chad and Sudan reopened their common border and he was able to leave.

As soon as the border opened, Sudanese brothers who had been released from Guantánamo called me: ‘Come, come!’ In April or May, I took a small bag, the court papers saying I was innocent and a few clothes. I gave all the rest to friends. I thought I’d never go back to Chad.

In Darfur, I found a space in a lorries convoy to Khartoum. Each lorry had maybe fifteen persons on the roof. Because of my back, I paid to sit in the cabin. We were over six hundred trucks. There were soldiers’ cars in front and next to the convoy, and helicopters above. There were checkpoints with armed men. I saw burned houses, broken trees, displaced people camps. The driver liked to talk: ‘I’ve been driving for 18 years, I know all the roads.’ He said it was a paradise before the war. We passed villages where nobody was living now. ‘That would have been a good place for a break, but it’s not safe. Without an escort, we would be killed.’ We met another convoy, as big as ours, coming the other way. In the evening, we learned it had been attacked by rebels.

When we got to Khartoum, I called my brothers Walid and Adel. They told me: ‘Your room is ready.’ A good room, with A/C, a bed, magazines, books. Soon after my arrival, Adel took me to hospital and paid for everything. They checked my eyes and told me I would need an operation, because of the coloured lights they put in my eyes during the interrogations in Guantánamo. They made me nice small square glasses. They did X-ray for my back, and I had an appointment to see the doctor later. But then …

He crossed his hands as if handcuffed. One evening, as he was going home, two Sudanese security agents picked him up in a car and held a gun to his head.

‘Why are you here?’

I showed them my stomach pills. ‘Medical care. Look.’

‘We know, but we were told to take you to jail.’ It was better than Guantánamo, but it was still a prison. I was with another prisoner, a man from Darfur — they accused him of being a rebel but he told me he wasn’t.

In the morning, I took all my pills and I passed out. They took me to hospital. In the evening, I asked to go to the toilets and I escaped by the window. I ran all night. I was bare feet, my feet were bleeding. They had taken everything — my shoes, my new glasses. I came to a big market. I found people from my tribe and told them everything had been stolen from me. They helped me get back to Chad. My trip to Sudan had been useless.

His parents came to visit him from Saudi Arabia and brought him new glasses. He married the daughter of a friend of his uncle. And finally, a few months ago, he got out of Chad.

When he was still in N’Djamena, talking to me, I asked the US Embassy if they kept tabs on him. Official reply: ‘We asked the Chadian government to treat him according to international human rights standards.’ But a US diplomat told me in confidence that he was the object of a ‘classified agreement between the governments of the US and Chad’. The US asked Chad not to let him leave the country, and to inform them if he ever did. ‘Twenty-five per cent of the detainees released from Guantánamo have contacted or re-contacted Islamist networks,’ the diplomat said.

We were almost a thousand in Guantánamo. Now less than two hundred remain. Where did they all go, if they’re all terrorists, if they’re all killers? They’re free, most of them back in their country. If I ever leave Chad, I’d like to go to court against the US.

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

In November 2008, the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas published a report, “Guantánamo’s Children: Military and Diplomatic Testimonies,” presenting evidence that 12 juveniles had been held, and this was then officially acknowledged by the Pentagon.

The next week, however, I produced another report, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” providing evidence that at least 22 juvenile prisoners had been held, and drawing on the Pentagon’s own documents, or on additional statements made by the Pentagon, to confirm my claims.

Two and a half years later, I stand by that report, and am only prepared to concede that up to three of the prisoners I identified as juveniles may have been 18 at the time of their capture. In the meantime, I have identified three more juvenile prisoners, and possibly three others, bringing the total back to 22, and possibly as many as 28.

My new research coincides with a new report by the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, “Guantánamo’s Children: The WikiLeaked Testimonies,” drawing on the recent release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents shedding new light on the prisoners, identifying 15 juveniles, and suggesting that six others, born in 1984 or 1985, and arriving at Guantánamo in 2002 or 2003, may have been under 18, depending on when exactly they were born (which is unknown, as it is in the cases of numerous Guantánamo prisoners).

However, crucially, the UC Davis report chose to make its assessments based on the prisoners’ dates of arrival in Guantánamo, which was often up to six months after their capture, whereas I have focused on their capture date, thereby demonstrating that at least 22 of the 28 prisoners identified in my research were indeed under 18 at the time of their capture.

Of course, to be strictly correct, this analysis should go further, dealing not with the dates of capture, but with the dates when the prisoners’ alleged crimes took place. However, I simply do not have the time at present to go through every file, and, while such research would undoubtedly yield more juvenile prisoners, I am content for now to have reinforced the claims that I made in November 2008, and to have made a case for there having been at least 22, and as many as 28 juveniles held in Guantánamo.

Just three of these former child prisoners are still held, but the US position has always been a disgrace. Notoriously, in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference, “This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children,” while Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said:

I would say, despite their age, these are very, very dangerous people. They are people that have been vetted mainly in Afghanistan and gone through a thorough process to determine what their involvement was. Some have killed. Some have stated they’re going to kill again. So they may be juveniles, but they’re not on a little-league team anywhere, they’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team. And they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason — for our safety, for your safety.

Moreover, in May 2006, when the Independent reported on “The Children of Guantánamo Bay,” a senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said that the DoD “rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantánamo detainees,” as the Independent put it. In Gordon’s own words, “There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations … Age is not a determining factor in detention [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us.”

This was nonsense, because, under the terms of Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified on December 23, 2002, signatory nations are required to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” and not to punish them by imprisoning them alongside adult prisoners in an experimental prison devoted to coercive interrogation and — at its worst — torture.

Despite its obligations, however, only three of the juveniles held at Guantánamo were ever treated differently to the adults — three Afghan boys, Asadullah, Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismail, who were held in a separate camp until their release in January 2004. For the rest, however, there was, or has been no “physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration” whatsoever, and, instead, they have been subjected to torture and abuse, as described by many of these prisoners, “extraordinary rendition” to a torture prison in Jordan in the case of one of the juveniles, Hassan bin Attash, and, in the case of Omar Khadr, a war crimes trial, based on charges invented by Congress. In order to secure an eight-year sentence, Khadr was obliged to agree to a disgraceful plea bargain in which he claimed responsibility for his actions aged 15, during the firefight that led to his capture (and the death of a US soldier), when he was not, in fact, responsible for his actions. He was also obliged to admit that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” who was not allowed, under any circumstances, to be engaged with US forces in combat.

It remains disgraceful that so many juveniles were held at Guantánamo — and that three former child prisoners are still held — but it is just as disgusting that, under President Obama, one of these former child prisoners was obliged to accept that, in modern-day America, lawmakers and the executive branch, without a murmur of dissent from the judiciary, have arranged for opponents of the US military in wartime to be criminalized, their actions regarded incorrectly as war crimes, and their very existence declared illegal. This is effectively no different than it was under President Bush, when the twisted ideologues who surrounded the President, under the aegis of his dark assistant Dick Cheney, created the concept of “illegal enemy combatants,” people without any rights whatsoever, who could be held forever and tortured with impunity.

The 22 juveniles held at Guantánamo

(i) The three still held

1. Ali Yahya al-Raimi (ISN 167, Yemen) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17). As WikiLeaks revealed, he was approved for transfer from Guantánamo in October 2004, but is still held over six and half years later. As I explained in my article, “Abandoned in Guantánamo: WikiLeaks Reveals the Yemenis Cleared for Release for Up to Seven Years,” the WikiLeaks files reveal 19 Yemeni prisoners approved for transfer between 2004 and 2007 who, disgracefully, are still held.

2. Omar Khadr (ISN 766, Canada) Born 19 September 1986, seized 19 July 2002 (aged 15). After well-chronicled abuse in Bagram and Guantánamo, Khadr, seized after a firefight in Afghanistan, accepted a plea deal in his trial by Military Commission last October, to secure an eight-year sentence, agreeing that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who was not allowed, under any circumstances, to engage in combat with US forces. The US (under Bush and Obama) and the Canadian government have all behaved appallingly towards him.

3. Hassan bin Attash (ISN 1456, Saudi Arabia) Born 1985, seized 11 September 2002 (aged 16/17). Despite his age at the time of his capture, he was rendered on his capture to a torture prison on Jordan. He was seized with the “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh and is the younger brother of the “high-value detainee” Walid bin Attash (both allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks), but there is, of course, no excuse for subjecting juveniles to torture because of their family ties.

(ii) The Afghans

4. Faris Muslim al-Ansari (ISN 253, Afghanistan/Yemen) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17), released December 2007. Seized crossing the Pakistani border, he explained that his family had left Yemen when he was a child, and had moved to Afghanistan, where his father had fought the Russians. He was assessed as being “a probable member of the Taliban.”

5. Shams Ullah (ISN 783, Afghanistan) Born 1986, arrived in Guantánamo October 2002 (aged 16/17), released October 2006. Described by his uncle, Bostan Karim (who is still held), as having “a mental problem,” he was shot after US forces raided the compound where he lived, suspecting that it contained insurgents.

6. Mohamed Jawad (ISN 900, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized December 2002 (aged 16/17, although his family said he was 12 at the time of his detention), released August 2009. Put forward for a trial by Military Commission in October 2007, for allegedly throwing a grenade at US forces in a Kabul marketplace, his Commission trial essentially collapsed when his judge ruled that his confessions had been extracted through torture, and his prosecutor resigned, and he then won his habeas corpus petition in July 2009.

7. Abdul Samad (ISN 911, Afghanistan) Born 1986, seized December 2002 (aged 15/16), released September 2004. One of three (or possibly four) juveniles seized in a raid on a compound owned and run by a warlord named Samoud, who was not captured in the raid (see below for the other two confirmed juveniles). All were treated brutally in a US base in Gardez and at Bagram, where, according to another released prisoner, Habib Rahman, they were abused until they admitted attacking US forces.

8. Asadullah (ISN 912, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized December 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

9. Naqibullah (ISN 913, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized December 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

10. Abdul Qudus (ISN 929, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized late 2002 (aged 13/14), released April 2005. He said that he was sold to US forces by opportunistic Afghan soldiers, along with Mohammed Ismail (see below), although he was assessed as having been radicalised by local imams.

11. Mohammed Ismail (ISN 930, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized in late 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

(iii) The Pakistanis

12. Khalil Rahman Hafez (ISN 301, Pakistan) Born 20 January 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 17), released September 2004. Like many Pakistanis, he had been recruited for jihad against the Northern Alliance and the US in his home country.

13. Mohammed Omar (ISN 540, Pakistan) Born 1986, seized December 2001 (aged 14/15), released September 2004. Despite traveling to Afghanistan with a friend for military training, it appears that he spent most of his time waiting around, before being captured by Afghans.

14. Saji Ur Rahman (ISN 545, Pakistan) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17, although Rahman himself said he was 15 when captured), released July 2003. He said that he traveled to Afghanistan with two friends to visit shrines in October 2001, but was then captured by Afghans. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no indication that the US authorities didn’t believe his story.

(iv) The Saudis

15. Abdulrazzaq al-Sharekh (ISN 67, Saudi Arabia) Born 18 January 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released September 2007. He was assessed as an al-Qaeda member just a month before his release, although he may, like the majority of those accused of involvement with al-Qaeda because of their attendance at a training camp, have been nothing more than a soldier, recruited to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance.

16. Yasser Talal al-Zahrani (ISN 93, Saudi Arabia) Born 22 September 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), died in Guantánamo June 2006. A survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan, he died under mysterious circumstances on the night of 9 June 2006, with two other prisoners, as Scott Horton reported last year for Harper’s Magazine (and see my report and updates here, here and here).

17. Yousef al-Shehri ISN 114, Saudi Arabia) Born 8 September 1985, seized November 2001 (aged 16), released November 2007. Seized in northern Afghanistan like his cousin Yousef (see below), he was held in hideously overcrowded conditions in Sheberghan prison, belonging to the US-allied warlord General Dostum, and probably survived a massacre in container trucks, known as the “convoy of death,” before being transferred to US custody.

18. Abdulsalam al-Shehri (ISN 132, Saudi Arabia) Born 14 December 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released June 2006. Like Yasser al-Zahrani, he was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, and, with his cousin, was then held in Sheberghan before ending up in US custody.

19. Ibrahim al-Umar (ISN 585, Saudi Arabia) Born 1985, seized 28 February 2002 (aged 16/17), released May 2003. A student at a religious school in Pakistan, he was encouraged to leave the country after the US-led invasion, but was seized at a checkpoint, held by Pakistan’s notorious ISI (Inter Services Intelligence directorate), and then handed over to US forces.

(v) The others

20. Mohammed El-Gharani (ISN 269, Chad) Born 1986, seized October 2001 (aged 14/15), released June 2009. Seized in a raid on mosque in Karachi, he was treated brutally at Guantánamo, but was finally freed after winning his habeas corpus petition in January 2009.

21. Haji Mohammed Ayub ISN 279, China) Born 15 April 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 17), released May 2006 in Albania. One of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who were detained by mistake, as they never had any affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and were solely opposed to the Chinese government. For further information, see this McClatchy Newspapers interview from 2008.

22. Rasul Kudayev (ISN 82, Russia) Born 23 January 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released February 2004. A former wrestling champion from the Russian territory of Kabardino-Balkaria, north of Georgia, who also survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, he was rearrested in October 2005, after gunmen attacked government buildings in his hometown, and was tortured in police custody, despite protesting his innocence. The latest report, in 2008, indicated that he was still imprisoned.

The six additional prisoners who may have been under 18 at the time of their capture

23. Qari Esmhatulla (ISN 591, Afghanistan) Born 1984, seized 10 March 2002 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released October 2006. After telling a story in which he claimed to have been set up by Afghan soldiers while returning from a shrine, he was assessed as being “a low-level Taliban recruit.”

24. Hezbullah (ISN 666, Afghanistan) Born 1984, seized April 2002 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released November 2003. A Pakistani by birth who was listed as an Afghan “because that was where he had been living since 1990 and [he] considered that his home,” he was seized with his cousin after he had helped US forces locate and remove suspect items from the home of a suspected insurgent leader.

25. Peta Mohammed (ISN 908, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized December 2002 (aged 16/17), released March 2004. Do note, however, that, in the documents released by WikiLeaks, his date of birth was recorded as 1984, which, if correct, would mean that he was almost certainly 18 at the time of his capture. If he was under 18, he was one of four juveniles seized in a raid on the compound owned and run by a warlord named Samoud (see Abdul Samad, ISN 911, above).

26. Mahbub Rahman (ISN 1052, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized 1 June 2003 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released August 2008. He was assessed in April 2008 as  being “a member of an Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) cell” located in Khost province, having been captured after a firefight with coalition forces, and as a “high risk” prisoner, who was “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies.” Nevertheless, he was transferred back to Afghanistan just four months later.

27. Sultan Ahmad (ISN 842, Pakistan) Born 1 November 1984, probably seized before November 2002 (aged 17), released September 2004. Regarded as deceptive, he said that he was seized after traveling through Afghanistan to try to reach Turkey. The authorities in Guantánamo suspected that he was “an extremist recruit” in his assessment in November 2003, although he was released 10 months later.

28. Shakrukh Hamiduva (ISN 22, Uzbekistan) Born on 13 December 1983, probably seized in November 2001 (aged 17), released September 2009 in Ireland. He stated that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, lived in a refugee camp in Tajikistan for 18 months, and was then taken to Afghanistan with other refugees, where he eventually worked as a taxi driver, which is what he was doing when he was seized. The US authorities, in contrast, regarded him as a Taliban-affiliated fighter with the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan/Uzbekistan.

In addition, there is a remote possibility that four others were under 18 at the time of their capture. The first is Mohammed Ishaq (ISN 20), a Pakistani. Born in 1983, he and a friend traveled to Afghanistan at the start of November 2001 to find his friend’s brother, who had gone to Afghanistan to fight against the Northern Alliance. Sometime in November 2001, he was seized by Northern Alliance forces in Kunduz, but he would only have been 17 at the time of his capture if he was born in late November or December 1983. Similarly, three Saudis — Ali Mohammed Nasir Mohammed (ISN 172), Tariq al-Harbi (ISN 265) and Abdul Khaliq al-Baidhani (ISN 553) — were also born in 1983 and were probably seized in mid-December 2001, meaning that they would only have been under 18 at the time of their capture of they were born in the second half of December 1983.

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

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

Since May 2007, I have been writing articles on a regular basis dealing exclusively with the horrors of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s torture program, explaining how few of the prisoners held at Guantánamo had any involvement with terrorism, how many innocent men and boys were seized by mistake or sold to US forces for bounty payments by the military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, and how the “War on Terror” initiated by the Bush administration was an abomination.

This was because Bush’s “war” — essentially maintained by the Obama administration — involved confusing terrorists with soldiers, and attempting to do away with the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, as well as other traditions more specifically associated with the United States — the Constitution and the separation of powers, for example, sidelined by an executive branch that sought unfettered executive power.

In addition, Bush’s “war” led directly to the situation exposed most clearly in the recently released documents: the persistent attempts by interrogators to ramp up the significance of the innocents, the nobodies and the insignificant Taliban foot soldiers in their possession through the only source available to them — the prisoners themselves.

Whether in Guantánamo or in secret CIA prisons, the prisoners — through repeated exposure to what were described as “family albums” of photos — were prevailed upon to provide statements or confessions about other prisoners. If the prisoners did not willingly provide information, either because they knew nothing, or were unwilling to do so, they were persuaded through the use of torture or other forms of coercion, or through bribery — the promise of better living conditions, or of otherwise restricted “comfort items.”

The results are plain to see in the number of allegations, masquerading as evidence, which are attributed to “high-value detainees” like Abu Zubaydah, for whom the torture program under Bush was specifically developed (leading to his torture by waterboarding on 83 occasions in August 2002), and other notorious informants who, in exchange for preferential treatment, told lies about their fellow prisoners.

Although these false confessions were relied upon by the US military (and, on many occasions, by the Justice Department and by the President’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force), they have been exposed, on an infrequent basis, in the mainstream media, and, more often, by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., who have repeatedly refused to accept their statements as evidence in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.

Until now, however, they were never gathered together in one place for discerning readers to be able to piece together the extent to which Guantánamo is — and was — a house of cards built on torture, bribery and lies. However, while it is reassuring that the prevalence of these statements by tortured prisoners and other unreliable witnesses has been recognized in the US media in the last week (see the McClatchy article, “Eight Guantánamo detainees testified against 255“), the coverage by other media outlets has not necessarily been as rigorous as those who have been studying Guantánamo for many years were hoping for.

The academic and blogger Chris Floyd, for example, had harsh but just words for the New York Times in his article, “Normalizing Evil,” which dealt with the distortions apparent in the Times‘ articles, “Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees” and “Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence.” Floyd might also have mentioned, “As Acts of War or Despair, Suicides Rattle a Prison,” which examined the three deaths at the prison in June 2006 without mentioning US soldiers’ claims, aired in Harper’s Magazine last year, indicating that the official suicide story was a cover-up.

Elsewhere, the Times‘ coverage provided the basis for a bizarre article in The New Republic by Jeffrey Rosen, who tried to use the Times to score points against WikiLeaks, declaring:

Unlike the Times’s story, which was accompanied by seven carefully selected detainee assessments, WikiLeaks’s decision to publish all 779 of the raw assessments is a reckless act that can only harm the detainees themselves — making it harder for the Obama administration to release those it would like to free. As has long been known, the detainee assessments are a messy grab-bag of unsubstantiated fictions, hearsay about individual detainees, and tentative assessments of their genuine danger. The United States is in the middle of delicate negotiations with a variety of countries to accept some of the detainees for repatriation, and, now, every time a particular case comes up, the foreign governments the US are asking to accept the detainees will find it politically harder to do so because of charges in the reports that may or may not be true.

Apart from the description of the supposed intelligence as “a messy grab-bag of unsubstantiated fictions, hearsay about individual detainees, and tentative assessments of their genuine danger,” this was nonsense, not only because the Times had published more than seven profiles in its “Guantánamo Docket” database (“about 20,” as stated in an article, “Answers to Readers’ Questions” on April 25), but also because of the entirely unjustified claim that publishing the files would damage the US government’s “delicate negotiations” with other countries.

Back in September 2009, when the Swiss government was considering taking a handful of prisoners from Guantánamo, I briefed a Swiss journalist on the background to the Guantánamo stories, noting, in a description that is not out of place a year and a half later, “how prisoners had ended up in Guantánamo without anyone really knowing who they were — because the majority were handed over by the Americans’ Afghan or Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments for ‘al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects’ were widespread, and also because, once they ended up in US custody, they were never adequately screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants,” and also “how much of the supposed ‘evidence’ against the prisoners was extracted from other prisoners, or from the prisoners themselves, under dubious circumstances (involving, on the one hand, coercion or torture, and, on the other, bribery; in other words, ‘confessions’ in exchange for better living conditions).”

What I did not explain at the time, because it appeared to be spectacularly sensitive information, which could jeopardize the release of prisoners in the future, was that, when Swiss officials traveled to Guantánamo to see the files of the prisoners whose settlement they were being encouraged to pursue by the US State Department, they were not shown responsible assessments of the prisoners’ status, but were, instead, shown documents which alleged that the men they had been asked to take were “low risk,” “medium risk” and “high risk.”

At the time, I was appalled that the Obama administration was allowing such exaggerated and irresponsible assessments to be shown to the representatives of countries who were being asked to help the United States by taking in prisoners who could not be repatriated because they faced the risk of torture. I was also appalled to discover that the “low risk” prisoner was a Uighur, a Muslim from China’s Xinjiang province, whose habeas corpus petition had been granted by a US judge in October 2008 after the Bush administration had dropped all pretense that he and 16 of his compatriots were “enemy combatants,” and who was, therefore, not “low risk” but absolutely no risk at all.

Finally, however, with the release of these documents by WikiLeaks, I understand that these are the documents that were shown to prospective host countries. I also understand that the risk assessments almost all betray the kind of exaggeration that plagued the Uighurs’ files, with innocent men and unwilling Taliban conscripts joining the Uighurs as “low risk” prisoners, and similar exaggerations infecting many of the other assessments, resulting in other innocent men and Taliban foot soldiers being labeled as “medium risk” or even as “high risk” prisoners — like the former child prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani, for example, who was just 14 years old when seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan.

El-Gharani was labeled as a “high risk” prisoner, but Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, ordered his release in January 2009, when he realized that some of the informants mentioned above were responsible for the supposed evidence against him, which, amongst other outlandish fantasies, contained a claim that, at the age of 11, when El-Gharani had been with his parents in Saudi Arabia, he had been part of an al-Qaeda cell in London.

This story was discussed in an article in the New York Times last week, which was worthy of Jeffrey Rosen’s appreciation, but he spectacularly missed the point by trying to blame WikiLeaks for damaging the prisoners’ chances of release. As I hope to have demonstrated, WikiLeaks’ release of all the files will actually help to shine a light on injustices that would otherwise remain hidden — and on perversities like the one I discussed above.

These revelations may, in the end, not bring about the closure of Guantánamo, although they should, but if that is the case it will be because of the actions of the administration, Congress, the judiciary and the mainstream media, and not because of WikiLeaks.

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

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

With the release date of the project brought forward unexpectedly, the files — profiles of nearly all of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo, compiled by the Joint Task Force responsible for running the prison and known as Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) — have begun to be made available on WikiLeaks’ website, accompanied by an article that I wrote introducing them, and offering a first attempt to indicate their importance — both in what they hide and what they reveal — along with a guide to how to read them.

Needless to say, there will be much more analysis in the days and weeks to come, but for now I hope you enjoy my explanation, cross-posted below, which is borne of five years of research and writing about Guantánamo, filtered through a careful analysis of JTF-GTMO’s compromised and compromising cache of documents, which, as I explain, constitutes “the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.”

WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners
By Andy Worthington, WikiLeaks, April 24, 2011

In its latest release of classified US documents, WikiLeaks is shining the light of truth on a notorious icon of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002, and remains open under President Obama, despite his promise to close the much-criticized facility within a year of taking office.

In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008 and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantánamo — 765 out of 779 in total — are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs).

These memoranda, which contain JTF-GTMO’s recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held, or should be released (transferred to their home governments, or to other governments) contain a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 172 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever).

They also include information on the first 201 prisoners released from the prison, between 2002 and 2004, which, unlike information on the rest of the prisoners (summaries of evidence and tribunal transcripts, released as the result of a lawsuit filed by media groups in 2006), has never been made public before. Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantánamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake (or because the US was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects), and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Beyond these previously unknown cases, the documents also reveal stories of the 399 other prisoners released from September 2004 to the present day, and of the seven men who have died at the prison.

The memos are signed by the commander of Guantánamo at the time, and describe whether the prisoners in question are regarded as low, medium or high risk. Although they were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a higher level, they represent not only the opinions of JTF-GTMO, but also the Criminal Investigation Task Force, created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the “War on Terror,” and the BSCTs, the behavioral science teams consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the “exploitation” of prisoners in interrogation.

Crucially, the files also contain detailed explanations of the supposed intelligence used to justify the prisoners’ detention. For many readers, these will be the most fascinating sections of the documents, as they seem to offer an extraordinary insight into the workings of US intelligence, but although many of the documents appear to promise proof of prisoners’ association with al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, extreme caution is required.

The documents draw on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

Regular appearances throughout these documents by witnesses whose words should be regarded as untrustworthy include the following “high-value detainees” or “ghost prisoners.” Please note that “ISN” and the numbers in brackets following the prisoners’ names refer to the short “Internment Serial Numbers” by which the prisoners are identified in US custody:

Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), the supposed “high-value detainee” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, who spent four and a half years in secret CIA prisons, including facilities in Thailand and Poland. Subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, on 83 occasions in CIA custody in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was moved to Guantánamo with 13 other “high-value detainees” in September 2006.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (ISN 212), the emir of a military training camp for which Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper, who, despite having his camp closed by the Taliban in 2000, because he refused to allow it to be taken over by al-Qaeda, is described in these documents as Osama bin Laden’s military commander in Tora Bora. Soon after his capture in December 2001, al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted this particular lie, but it was nevertheless used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi was never sent to Guantánamo, although at some point, probably in 2006, the CIA sent him back to Libya, where he was imprisoned, and where he died, allegedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.

Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457), a Yemeni, also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, who was seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002, and is described as “an al-Qaeda facilitator.” After his capture, he was transferred to a torture prison in Jordan run on behalf of the CIA, where he was held for nearly two years, and was then held for six months in US facilities in Afghanistan. He was flown to Guantánamo in September 2004.

Sanad Yislam al-Kazimi (ISN 1453), a Yemeni, who was seized in the UAE in January 2003, and then held in three secret prisons, including the “Dark Prison” near Kabul and a secret facility within the US prison at Bagram airbase. In February 2010, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted the habeas corpus petition of a Yemeni prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, largely because he refused to accept testimony produced by either Sharqawi al-Hajj or Sanad al-Kazimi. As he stated, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi becasue 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.”

Others include Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (ISN 10012) and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014), two more of the “high-value detainees” transferred into Guantánamo in September 2006, after being held in secret CIA prisons.

Other unreliable witnesses, held at Guantánamo throughout their detention, include:

Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as a notorious liar. As the Washington Post reported in February 2009, he was given preferential treatment in Guantánamo after becoming what some officials regarded as a significant informant, although there were many reasons to be doubtful. As the Post noted, “military officials … expressed reservations about the credibility of their star witness since 2004,” and in 2006, in an article for the National Journal, Corine Hegland described how, after a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at which a prisoner had taken exception to information provided by Basardah, placing him at a training camp before he had even arrived in Afghanistan, his personal representative (a military official assigned instead of a lawyer) investigated Basardah’s file, and found that he had made similar claims against 60 other prisoners. In January 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) excluded Basardah’s statements while granting the habeas corpus petition of Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. Judge Leon noted that the government had “specifically cautioned against relying on his statements without independent corroboration,” and in other habeas cases that followed, other judges relied on this precedent, discrediting the “star witness” stlll further.

Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 063), a Saudi regarded as the planned 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, was subjected to a specific torture program at Guantánamo, approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This consisted of 20-hour interrogations every day, over a period of several months, and various other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which severely endangered his health. Variations of these techniques then migrated to other prisoners in Guantánamo (and to Abu Ghraib), and in January 2009, just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, a retired judge and a close friend of Dick Cheney and David Addington, who was appointed to oversee the military commissions at Guantánamo as the convening authority, told Bob Woodward that she had refused to press charges against al-Qahtani, because, as she said, “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.” As a result, his numerous statements about other prisoners must be regarded as worthless.

Abd al-Hakim Bukhari (ISN 493), a Saudi imprisoned by al-Qaeda as a spy, who was liberated by US forces from a Taliban jail before being sent, inexplicably, to Guantánamo (along with four other men liberated from the jail) is regarded in the files as a member of al-Qaeda, and a trustworthy witness.

Abd al-Rahim Janko (ISN 489), a Syrian Kurd, tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy and then imprisoned by the Taliban along with Abd al-Hakim Bukhari, above, is also used as a witness, even though he was mentally unstable. As his assessment in June 2008 stated, “Detainee is on a list of high-risk detainees from a health perspective … He has several chronic medical problems. He has a psychiatric history of substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, and prior suicide attempt for which he is followed by behavioral health for treatment.”

These are just some of the most obvious cases, but alert readers will notice that they are cited repeatedly in what purports to be the government’s evidence, and it should, as a result, be difficult not to conclude that the entire edifice constructed by the government is fundamentally unsound, and that what the Guantánamo Files reveal, primarily, is that only a few dozen prisoners are genuinely accused of involvement in terrorism.

The rest, these documents reveal on close inspection, were either innocent men and boys, seized by mistake, or Taliban foot soldiers, unconnected to terrorism. Moreover, many of these prisoners were actually sold to US forces, who were offering bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies — a policy that led ex-President Musharraf to state, in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, the Pakistani government “earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Uncomfortable facts like these are not revealed in the deliberations of the Joint Task Force, but they are crucial to understanding why what can appear to be a collection of documents confirming the government’s scaremongering rhetoric about Guantánamo — the same rhetoric that has paralyzed President Obama, and revived the politics of fear in Congress –  is actually the opposite: the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.

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.

In the Guardian‘s Comment is free yesterday, Cortney Busch of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 of the remaining 173 prisoners in Guantánamo, encouraged Guardian readers to write to prisoners who might be losing hope because of the failure of the Obama administration to close the prison as promised — and as I described in my recent articles, Guantánamo Forever? and The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

Writing to the prisoners is an excellent idea, and one that I last helped promote last June, when some Facebook friends and activists took it upon themselves to encourage people to write to all the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. I’m also pleased to have helped to encourage people to write to prisoners through my involvement in the creation of a short film of former prisoner Omar Deghayes showing cards and letters he received while in Guantánamo, and speaking about what they meant to him and to the other prisoners, which was filmed as part of the making of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and is included in the promotion for Amnesty International’s letter-writing campaign.

I’m pleased, therefore, to cross-post Cortney’s article below — and am also pleased that she specifically mentioned Younous Chekkouri, described as “one of the most peaceful and cooperative” prisoners, whose calmness and intelligence struck me when I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files five years ago, and trawling through the publicly available documents released (after a lawsuit) by the Pentagon.

I was delighted to hear that Younous “comes to each attorney meeting with a stack of pictures of roses to distribute to [Cortney's] Reprieve colleagues as tokens of thanks,” and also to discover that he is a Sufi — something that, in all these years, I had never discovered. However, I also fear that, despite his formidable inner peace, and his valid explanations for being in Afghanistan (available here), Younous is regarded as one of the 48 prisoners that the Obama administration intends to hold indefinitely without charge or trial.

Pen pals can give hope to Guantánamo prisoners
Cortney Busch, The Guardian, January 18, 2011

The latest US legislation is causing dozens held at Guantánamo Bay to lose hope — but you can make a difference

When Reprieve attorney Cori Crider met her youngest client, 19-year-old Mohammed el Gharani, before his release from Guantánamo Bay in 2009, he made an unexpected request. He asked if she knew how he could get hold of some books, ideally on history or politics, to help him prepare himself for the outside world.

Mohammed had been sold to the US for a bounty when he was just 14, and spent his school years in Guantánamo’s military prison. He was worried that he would appear ignorant when he emerged. Reprieve put out a call and was quickly inundated with donated books, which Mohammed received with delight. But what encouraged him most were the hundreds of notes scrawled inside the covers — messages of humanity and kindness that Guantánamo prisoners rarely, if ever, receive.

Today Mohammed is a free man, and working hard at setting up his own laundrette in Chad. But many of his fellow detainees remain imprisoned — and have just been dealt a fresh and crushing blow. The National Defense Authorization Act 2011, recently signed into US law, bans the use of military funds to bring Guantánamo prisoners before US civilian courts — and makes releasing the 89 men who are already cleared to leave much more difficult. President Obama has criticised these provisions, promising to repeal them or to mitigate their effects. But for the moment the mood among Guantánamo’s prisoners is distinctly gloomy. This is why Reprieve is now asking people to take the unusual step of writing them letters of support.

A Guantánamo pen pal may seem a daunting prospect, but from my trips to the island prison over the past year I can personally recommend Younous Chekkouri, widely regarded as one of the most peaceful and cooperative detainees. He bears no ill will towards Americans and comes to each attorney meeting with a stack of pictures of roses to distribute to my Reprieve colleagues as tokens of thanks. Far from being a violent jihadi, Younous is a Sufi — a strikingly benign strand of Islam that values love and peace above all.

So how did such a person end up in Guantánamo? Much like Mohammed el Gharani, Younous was “sold” to the Americans. When the US declared war on Afghanistan in 2001, Younous and his wife fled Kabul for Pakistan, only to find that men of Arabic descent had become precious commodities. American forces were offering bounties of $5,000 (£3,125) per head to anyone who handed over a “terrorist”. The fliers offering the money promised schools, doctors, housing and unimaginable wealth for the reader and the community. Hundreds of people were rounded up, arrested en masse and sold to the US, and Younous found himself caught up in one of these sweeps and ultimately transferred to Guantánamo Bay.

Almost nine years later, Younous, like dozens of other men still held at Guantánamo, has never been charged with a crime or given the chance to clear his name. In fact, his challenge to his detention has only just reached the courtroom. As a member of Younous’s legal team, I know we have a good case that should soon, by rights, set him free. But I also know that Younous, like the other 172 men left in Guantánamo, is now beginning to despair of ever being released.

For many of these men, the last eight or nine years have been spent hundreds of miles from family and friends, without compassion and very little hope. Yet these are perhaps their darkest days yet. Please consider writing one of them a letter. As with the messages scrawled in Mohammed’s books, even the smallest word of encouragement lets them know they are not forgotten.

For details on how to write to one of Guantánamo’s “forgotten” prisoners, please visit this page on Reprieve’s website.

Note: Reprieve’s initiative contains the names and brief stories of some of the 173 men still held, and the following instructions for those planning to write:

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name
Detainee ISN
Guantánamo Bay
P.O. Box 160
Washington, D.C. 20053
United States of America

Include a return address on the envelope.

Further information about prisoners to whom readers might want to write is available on the page I compiled last June for a similar project, Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo, and more detailed information about the men still held can be found in my nine-part series profiling the men still held, available via the following page: Introducing the Definitive List of the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo.

And finally, the short video below is of Mohammed El-Gharani thanking supporters for the many books that they sent him after Reprieve launched a campaign to help him:

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

Please support my work!

NOTE: This list has now been superseded by a dedicated page, “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List,” which will be used to monitor the ongoing habeas rulings.

As part of my series, “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and expanded, on April 23, to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), it’s my pleasure to present a list of the 47 habeas corpus rulings made to date, with links to the articles I have written over the last 19 months analyzing the judges’ rulings.

As I explained in the introduction to this series, I remain impressed that the judges involved have ruled in the prisoners’ favor in 34 of the 47 cases, particularly because they have revealed the alarming flimsiness of most of the material presented by the government as evidence — primarily, confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries.

However, as I also explained, I remain deeply troubled about the justification for continuing to hold the majority of the prisoners who lost their habeas petitions, because the basis for doing so — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and maintained as a justification by President Obama — was, and is a deeply flawed document, which fails to distinguish between a small group of genuine terrorists (al-Qaeda) and a considerably larger group of men (and boys) associated with the Taliban. The result is that men continue to be consigned to indefinite detention, on an apparently sound legal basis, even though they were only peripherally involved with the military conflict in Afghanistan to secure the fall of the Taliban, and should, all along, have been held (if at all) as prisoners of war, and protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Please note that, although 23 of the prisoners who won their habeas petitions have been released, eleven are still held. With the exception of the Uighurs, the government has appealed the rulings (or appears intent on appealing). In the cases of prisoners who lost their habeas petitions, a number of appeals have also been filed. See the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Habeas Scorecard for further information on the status of the various appeals.

The 47 Guantánamo Habeas Corpus Results

October 2008

1 WON: Abdul Helil Mamut (aka Abdul Khalil Manut, Abdul Nasser, Abdulnassir) (Uighur, ISN 278)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
2 WON: Abdullah Abdulquadirakhun (aka Abdulla Abdulqadir, Jalal Jalaladin) (Uighur, ISN 285)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
3 WON: Emam Abdulahat (aka Salahidin Abdulahad, Abdul Semet) (Uighur, ISN 295)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
4 WON: Huzaifa Parhat (aka Hozaifa Parhat, Ablikim Turahun) (Uighur, ISN 320)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
5 WON: Nag Mohammed (aka Edham Mamet) (Uighur, ISN 102)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
6 WON: Ahmad Tourson (Uighur, ISN 201)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
7 WON: Anwar Hassan (aka Hassan Anvar) (Uighur, ISN 250)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
8 WON: Abdulghappar Abdul Rahman (Uighur, ISN 281)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
9 WON: Dawut Abdurehim (Uighur, ISN 289)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
10 WON: Adel Noori (Uighur, ISN 584)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
11 WON: Arkin Mahmud (Uighur, ISN 103)
Released in Switzerland, March 2010.
12 WON: Bahtiyar Mahnut (Uighur, ISN 277)
Released in Switzerland, March 2010.
13 WON: Abdul Razak (Uighur, ISN 219)
Still held.
14 WON: Yusef Abbas (Uighur, ISN 275)
Still held.
15 WON: Saidullah Khalik (Uighur, ISN 280)
Still held.
16 WON: Hajiakbar Abdulghupur (Uighur, ISN 282)
Still held.
17 WON: Ahmed Mohamed (Uighur, ISN 328)
Still held.

For my analysis of the ruling, see: From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs.
For Judge Ricardo Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.
For the releases in Bermuda, see: Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda?
For the releases in Palau, see: Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau?
For the releases in Switzerland, see: More Dark Truths from Guantánamo, as Five Innocent Men Released.
For the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the case of the last five Uighurs held, see: Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo.

November 2008

18 WON: Mohammed Nechle (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10003)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
19 WON: Mustafa Ait Idr (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10004)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
20 WON: Boudella al-Haj (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10006)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
21 WON: Lakhdar Boumediene (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10005)
Released in France, May 2009.
22 WON: Sabir Lahmar (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10002)
Released in France, November 2009.
1 LOST: Belkacem Bensayah (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10001)
Still held.

For my analysis of the ruling, see: After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims.
For Judge Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For the releases in Bosnia, see: Freed Bosnian Calls Guantánamo the “worst place in the world”.
For the release of Boumediene in France, see: Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government.
For the release of Lahmar in France, see: Four Men Leave Guantánamo; Two Face Ill-Defined Trials In Italy.
For Bensayah’s appeal, see: First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling. And also see this New York Times article examining conflict within the Obama administration on prisoner cases, including that of Bensayah.

December 2008

2 LOST: Hisham Sliti (Tunisia, ISN 174)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

January 2009

3 LOST: Muaz al-Alawi (aka Moath al-Alwi) (Yemen, ISN 28)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

23 WON: Mohammed El-Gharani (Chad, ISN 269)
Released June 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For El-Gharani’s release, see: Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner Released To Chad.

4 LOST: Ghaleb al-Bihani (Yemen, ISN 128)
Still held.
Al-Bihani appealed, and lost his appeal in January 2010.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For my analysis of the verdict in the appeal, see: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights.
For the Circuit Court’s unclassified opinion, see here.

March 2009

24 WON: Yasim Basardah (aka Yasin Basardh) (Yemen, ISN 252)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame.
For Judge Ellen Huvelle’s unclassified opinion, see here.

April 2009

5 LOST: Hedi Hammamy (aka Abdulhadi bin Haddidi) (Tunisia, ISN 717)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

May 2009

25 WON: Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed (Yemen, ISN 692)
Released September 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses.
Also see: Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For Ali Ahmed’s release, see: Three Prisoners Released From Guantánamo: Two To Ireland, One To Yemen.

June 2009

26 WON: Abdul Rahim al-Ginco (aka Abdul Rahim Janko) (Syria, ISN 489)
Released.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Why Did It Take So Long To Order The Release From Guantánamo Of An Al-Qaeda Torture Victim?
Also see: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now!
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

July 2009

27 WON: Khalid al-Mutairi (Kuwait, ISN 213)
Released October 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker.
Also see: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For al-Mutairi’s release, see: Two More Guantánamo Prisoners Released: To Kuwait And Belgium.

28 WON: Mohamed Jawad (Afghanistan, ISN 900)
Released August 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat.
Also see: How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case.
For Judge Ellen Huvelle’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.
For Jawad’s release, see: Reflections On Mohamed Jawad’s Release From Guantánamo.

August 2009

6 LOST: Adham Ali Awad (Yemen, ISN 88)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see here.

29 WON: Mohammed al-Adahi (Yemen, ISN 33)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For my analysis of the government’s subsequent appeal, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s response to it, see: What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo?

7 LOST: Fawzi al-Odah (Kuwait, ISN 232)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.

September 2009

8 LOST: Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria, ISN 694)
Still held.
For information about Barhoumi, see:
Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged.
For the 2-page ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer, see here. The unclassified opinion has not been released.

30 WON: Fouad al-Rabiah (Kuwait, ISN 551)
Released December 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For al-Rabiah’s release, see: Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait.

November 2009

31 WON: Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed (Algeria, ISN 311)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere).
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For an analysis of the significance of Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling with reference to statements made by torture victim Binyam Mohamed, see: Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court.

December 2009

9 LOST: Musa’ab al-Madhwani (Yemen, ISN 839)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition.
For Judge Thomas Hogan’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.

32 WON: Saeed Hatim (Yemen, ISN 255)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit.
For Judge Ricardo Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see: Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo.

February 2010

10 LOST: Suleiman al-Nahdi (Yemen, ISN 511)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Gladys Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion.

11 LOST: Fahmi al-Assani (Yemen, ISN 554)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Gladys Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion.

33 WON: Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman (Yemen, ISN 27)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s unclassified opinion (March 2010), see here.
For Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s revised unclassified opinion (April 2010), see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kennedy’s unclassified opinion, see: Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture.

March 2010

34 WON: Mohamedou Ould Slahi (aka Salahi) (Mauritania, ISN 760)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit.
For Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see: Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims.

12 LOST: Mukhtar al-Warafi (Yemen, ISN 117)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit.
For Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Lamberth’s unclassified opinion, see: With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic.

April 2010

13 LOST: Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail (Yemen, ISN 522)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition.
Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s unclassified opinion is not yet available.

(‘’)

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

The introduction to “Guantánamo Habeas Week” was discussed in detail by Jeff Kaye on Firedoglake and Invictus, by Kelly Vlahos at Antiwar.com, which also posted a link on its front page, and by Jeff Farias, and was cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, The World Can’t Wait, War Criminals Watch, Campaign for Liberty, Global Research, The Lift: Legal Issues in the Fight against Terrorism, Uruknet, Cageprisoners, New Left Project, Political Theatrics, Countercurrents, Zinmag Chronicle and The Ruthless Truth. It was also mentioned in a round-up of news on Foreign Policy’s website, by Reprieve, and on Democratic Underground. In addition, the full list was cross-posted on The Public Record, The World Can’t Wait, New Left Project and War Criminals Watch, and was linked to in a banner headline on Cageprisoners’ front page.

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).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (February 2010).

Once Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner (out of at least 22 juveniles held in the prison), Mohammed El-Gharani was seized in Pakistan at the age of 14, and was horribly abused in US custody — both in Afghanistan and Guantánamo — until his release, which finally took place five months after District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that the government had failed to establish a case against him, having relied on demonstrably unreliable witnesses whose lack of credibility had been noted by its own representatives.

El-Gharani was raised in Saudi Arabia, where his parents still live, but the Saudi authorities refused to accept him, and Reprieve has revealed that the Chadian government has refused to issue him a passport, so that he is unable to be reunited with his family, and is also unable to seek medical attention for “a crippling spine injury” caused by his long years of abuse in US custody. As Reprieve explained in a statement, the Chadian government’s position has ensured that El-Gharani “remains impoverished and emotionally isolated.”

Reprieve is not the only organization to take an interest in El-Gharani’s plight. Manfred Novak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has urged the Chadian government to provide him “with a passport and to permit his travelling abroad for receiving appropriate medical and psychological torture rehabilitation treatment.” Novak added, “I am particularly concerned about the fate of Gharani, who began his captivity as a teenager, was still a child when transferred to Guantánamo and who has lost some of his most important years of adolescence in illegal detention.”

In a telephone interview with the Associated Press, El-Gharani explained that he relied on “handouts from friends” to support himself. “I’m still not free,” he said. “I have no job. I have a hard time to find somewhere to live.” He added, poignantly, “I’m innocent. I have done nothing to anyone. I should be able go to see my family.”

A week after El-Gharani’s release from Guantánamo, as I reported at the time,

Chris Chang, an investigator with Reprieve, and Ahmed Ghappour, an attorney, returned yesterday from a trip to Chad in which they had hoped to celebrate Mohammed’s freedom, but were “dismayed and disappointed” to discover that he is now a prisoner of the Chadian authorities, “sleeping on a cot in a police station while his family waits anxiously outside.” They added, “Mohammed cannot leave the main police headquarters without authorization from the Head of the Judicial Police, and even after obtaining that permission he is accompanied by a police officer wherever he goes. He has asked on several occasions to be released and reunited with his family but continues to be told, ‘Just another night, Mohammed.’” They also said that there has been no public announcement in Chad regarding his return and that he has been forbidden from speaking to the media.

Perhaps due to pressure from Reprieve, he was then released, and handed over to his uncle, but as the AP reported, without a passport or an identity card, it was impossible for him even to enrol in a class to study English. He was then mugged by a group of armed men who, ironically, thought that he had received “a multi-million dollar settlement as compensation for his imprisonment.”

Chris Chang, who has returned to Chad in an effort to help El-Gharani, explained that he was recently given an identity card, but added that the government was “still resisting calls” to issue him with a passport. This was disputed by Youssouf Takane, Chad’s deputy ambassador to the United States, who told Reuters that he would be issued with a passport in due course. “The Chadian government cannot deprive Gharani of his citizenship or his rights of citizenship,” he said, adding, “It is maybe a question of time. There are a few minor security matters to be addressed. The authorities will accelerate this issue.”

In Chris Chang’s opinion, however, the truth may be rather darker. “It stinks somewhat of an agreement between the Chadians and the Americans to restrict his movements,” he told the AP by telephone from the Chadian capital N’Djamena, as he prepared to visit the passport office to exert pressure on officials.

This is not the first time that Mohammed El-Gharani’s plight has been noted since his release from police custody in June. In July, at the launch of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, a project established by former prisoners, one of whose aims is to “assist former prisoners to reintegrate into society in a positive and peaceable manner, many of them in countries with limited available resources, and with governments hostile to human rights,” former prisoner Binyam Mohamed stated that he had recently spoken on the phone to El-Gharani, and explained that he was now “sleeping on the streets, rejected by his family, branded as a terrorist although he was released by the US and cleared of any wrong-doing.” He added, “I realized that he can not talk to others, like his lawyers, as he can to me, so I have to speak out for him here.”

To support the Guantánamo Justice Centre, please visit their website.

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

Echoing the position taken by the Bush administration, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is pursuing patently indefensible cases that should have been dropped before being presented to a judge, and is also engaged in what appears to be a systematic policy of delays when it comes to providing exculpatory material to the prisoners’ defense teams (in other words, material that tends to disprove the government’s case), or, in fact, any other material that is vital to mounting a proper defense. Moreover, when given the option to defend a judge’s right to order the release of prisoners against whom no case could be proved, the Justice Department sided with a notoriously pro-Bush judge in the Court of Appeals, who ruled that, although a District Court judge could demolish the government’s case against a Guantánamo prisoner, he or she was powerless to actually order the prisoner’s release.

When Barack Obama came to power, one of his first acts was to issue a number of Executive Orders to tackle some of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” The new President banned the use of torture and promised to close Guantánamo within a year, and to this end established an inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force to review the prisoners’ cases, and to work out what to do with them. Whilst it was understandable that the Obama administration wanted to conduct its own review, to understand who was actually being held at Guantánamo, I had misgivings from the beginning about how this would mesh with the ongoing District Court reviews of the prisoners’ cases, which had been triggered last June when the Supreme Court ruled, in Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights.

In the months since, I have not been reassured that two layers of review — one by the Executive, and one by the judiciary — is the most effective way of dealing with the prisoners’ cases, and these misgivings have been exacerbated by the Justice Department’s obstruction, delays and imitation of Bush-era policies outlined above, to the extent that I can only conclude that the administration is either attempting to sideline the courts, and believes that the only valid review process is the one being undertaken by its own inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force, or that Eric Holder is not in charge of his own staff.

Both conclusions are disturbing; the first because sidelining the judiciary in favor of an essentially secretive Executive review is so uncomfortably reminiscent of the ways in which the Bush administration operated, and the second because, on a topic as important as Guantánamo, the Attorney General’s seeming inability to direct the operations of those working on the Guantánamo habeas cases reveals that the DoJ is still full of employees who maintain allegiance to Bush-era policies, that Holder himself holds those views, or, as above, that he is concerned only with the findings of the Guantánamo Task Force, and is unconcerned by the prisoners’ long legal struggle to test the basis of the allegations against them in a court of law.

With the Justice Department recently humiliated in two habeas reviews — of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni, and of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a Syrian who was tortured by al-Qaeda before he ended up in US custody — and almost certainly about to face another humiliation in the case of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan whose story I have been reporting since October 2007 (see here, here, here and here), I have decided to take this opportunity to present a three-part overview of the habeas cases over the last 13 months.

In this first part, I examine the history of the habeas cases under the Bush administration, and in the second and third parts I bring the story up to date by looking in detail at the many failures of the Obama administration, as outlined above. Bear in mind throughout that, of the 31 cases decided by the courts, 26 have ended in defeat for the government, an 84 percent success rate for the prisoners that both justifies campaigners’ claims that the prison has largely held men (and boys) with no connection to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group, and shows up the prison’s defenders (former Vice President Dick Cheney and the politicians mentioned above) as, at best, deluded, and, at worst, outright liars.

The Guantánamo prisoners’ long struggle to secure rights

Thirteen months ago, the long quest of the men held at Guantánamo to secure the most fundamental right of a prisoner — to be brought before a judge to ask why he is being held — was granted by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush (named after the Algerian prisoner, Lakhdar Boumediene, who was finally released from Guantánamo in May).

It was not the first time that the Guantánamo prisoners had been granted habeas corpus rights. Four years before, on June 29, 2004, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that they had habeas corpus rights, after concluding that Guantánamo — which was chosen as the location for the prison because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts — was “in every practical respect a United States territory,” and that therefore the 800-year old “Great Writ,” first conceived in England in the reign of King John, applied to the prisoners. As Justice John Paul Stevens declared,

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.

The Supreme Court had been stirred to this unusual ruling, granting habeas rights to foreigners detained in wartime, because of its grave concerns that the prisoners, held, uniquely, as “enemy combatants” — in other words, neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects, who would face a trial in federal courts — had never been adequately screened to determine whether they should be held, and were, literally, outside the law.

The ruling in Rasul shattered the secrecy necessary for Guantánamo’s existence as a lawless experiment in coercive interrogations to continue as it had for two and a half years, because lawyers began arriving at the prison, to draw up habeas petitions, and to hear — and then to transmit to the outside world — some of the prisoners’ horrendous stories of the abuse and torture to which they had been subjected.

In terms of the law, however, little else changed. The Bush administration ignored the thrust of the Supreme Court’s ruling — that the prisoners should be able to challenge their detention in federal courts — and instead introduced military review boards (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) to review their cases. Drawing on classified evidence that was not disclosed to the prisoners, who were prevented from having legal representation, these were dreadfully one-sided affairs, designed primarily to rubberstamp the prisoners’ automatic designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants,” as Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who served on the tribunals, explained in a series of shocking and deeply damaging revelations in 2007.

Nevertheless, the administration behaved at the time as though the tribunals were legitimate, and, moreover, set about gutting Rasul by persuading Congress to pass two hideously flawed pieces of legislation — the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF) — which, amongst other provisions, purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights granted in Rasul. These laws never prevented lawyers from visiting their clients in Guantánamo (although the Pentagon did all it could to be obstructive), but they did freeze the habeas cases, leaving the men to stew in a legal limbo that became all the more intolerable as the years dragged by.

This, then, was the main reason why Boumediene was so important, as, four years on from its first ruling, the Supreme Court was obliged to stamp its authority by ruling that Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it passed the habeas-stripping provisions in the DTA and the MCA, and to rule that this time around the prisoners’ habeas rights were constitutionally guaranteed, meaning that they could not once more be tampered with by somnambulant or otherwise incapacitated politicians, bent into unconstitutional shape by a bullying Executive branch.

A stunning early victory, followed by Justice Department obstruction

Two weeks after Boumediene, one of the cases that had been frozen for years was resuscitated in the Court of Appeals, with dire results for the government. The case, Parhat v. Gates, was brought by Huzaifa Parhat, one of the Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) who were finally freed from Guantánamo a month ago, and allowed to settle in Bermuda, and when the judges — two Conservatives and a Liberal, it should be noted — were free to act, they duly ruled that Parhat’s four-year old designation as an “enemy combatant” was “invalid.”

The court was unconvinced by the government’s claims that Parhat, who had fled Chinese oppression and had been living in a run-down settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains that was unconnected to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, was part of a Uighur separatist group, and lambasted the quality of the government’s evidence — in which an attempt to make a case was conjured up by citing from three separate classified government reports — as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding,” the judges wrote, “the fact the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”

Despite this early victory, the District Court’s attempt to swiftly implement habeas reviews, which was driven, in particular, by the Supreme Court’s admonition that, “While some delay in fashioning new procedures is unavoidable, the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody,” and its demand that “The detainees in these cases are entitled to a prompt habeas corpus hearing,” was stymied when the Justice Department almost immediately began dragging its heels.

On July 2, 2008, the District Court’s Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth announced that Senior Judge Thomas F. Hogan (photo, left) had been assigned “to coordinate and manage proceedings in all Guantánamo Bay cases so that these cases can be addressed as expeditiously as possible,” but when lawyers for the prisoners and DoJ representatives met Judge Hogan two weeks later, Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas “asked for two months to recruit lawyers and at least another two months to amend the existing returns [roughly 100 in total] and file 100 new ones.” He claimed, additionally, that the effort would strain the Justice Department’s resources “almost to the breaking point.”

As the Miami Herald explained in a pointed editorial, “the court was skeptical, to say the least. Judge Hogan said he could not fathom why evidence would suddenly have to be changed if it had been considered strong enough to warrant holding the detainees for periods of up to six years.” In Hogan’s own words, “If it wasn’t sufficient, then they shouldn’t have been picked up.”

In addition, as I explained in an article last July,

The government was no more fortunate when it came up against District Judge Richard Leon, who had decided not to transfer his cases — 12 in total, involving 35 prisoners — to Judge Hogan. “This is going to be moved as fast as possible,” Judge Leon told a similar gathering of Guantánamo lawyers and DoJ representatives. “These men have waited long enough to get a decision. The Supreme Court has spoken. They want this done. By God, we’ll get this done.”

Judge Leon also explained, as Reuters described it, that he “would not allow the Department of Defense or the CIA to delay the cases while reviewing classified information used to hold the prisoners as enemy combatants.” “Let there be no doubt that the Department of Defense and the CIA must be prepared to come to the courtroom and defend their decisions if we get any sense that there is an effort by those agencies to slow down the proceedings,” he said.

Judge Leon added that he wanted to decide the cases before the next President takes office in January 2009, and, although this was rather optimistic, the dogged determination with which he obeyed the Supreme Court’s order meant that he did indeed manage to review a number of cases before his self-imposed deadline, while other judges had not even gotten off the starting blocks.

To do this, however, he had to overcome more delaying tactics. As I reported last September, although judges had been appointed to review the 250 habeas cases in July, and the District Court “ordered the government to file factual returns at a rate of fifty per month, with the first fifty due by August 29, 2008,” the Justice Department waited until just before the deadline, and then, with only 22 returns filed, filed an “instant motion” begging for more time, pleading that it “simply did not appreciate the full extent of the challenges posed by the extensive need for classified information in these cases when [it] proposed to complete the first set of factual returns by the end of August,” and asking for an extension of 30 days.

Senior officials, including Daniel Dell’Orto, the Acting General Counsel for the Department of Defense, and Gen. Michael Hayden, the Director of the CIA, described “the substantial resources and efforts the government has devoted to preparing factual returns and the risk of harm to the national security involved in releasing classified information to persons outside the Executive Branch.”

Judge Hogan agreed to grant the government’s motion, noting that the cases were “not run of the mill; they involve significant amounts of sensitive, classified information concerning individuals whom the government alleges were part of or supporting the Taliban or al-Qaeda or other organizations against which the United States is engaged in armed conflict.” However, he added that he only agreed “reluctantly,” and was “disappointed in the government’s failure to meet the schedule the Court adopted based in part on the government’s assurances.” Citing statements in which the government claimed that it had “attempt[ed] to meet its goal” and that it would “continue to strive to meet the 50-per-month requirement,” Judge Hogan added, pointedly, that the Court was “not merely setting a ‘goal’ for which the government is to ‘strive,’” but was, rather, “ordering the government to produce at least fifty factual returns by month’s end, followed by at least another fifty more each month thereafter until production is complete.”

As I also explained in September,

In conclusion, while Judge Hogan recognized the government’s explanation that, since the Supreme Court ruling, its “[a]ttorneys and others from multiple agencies have worked long and hard, nights and weekends,” he reminded the executive that “the government has detained many of these petitioners for more than six years, and the time has come to provide them with the opportunity to fully test the legality of such detention in a prompt, meaningful manner.”

He added, with a hint of irritation about the administration’s sidelining of the judiciary, that the decision to grant the prisoners habeas rights was “no bolt out of the blue,” as the government contended, because the Supreme Court had ruled, four years before (in Rasul v. Bush), that they had this right.

Court victories for the Uighurs and five Bosnian Algerians

In October, when, after Parhat, the government conceded defeat in the case of the Uighurs and abandoned all pretense that any of the 17 men were “enemy combatants,” Judge Ricardo Urbina, reviewing their habeas cases in the District Court in Washington D.C., ordered all 17 men to be released to the care of communities in the capital, and in Tallahassee, Florida, who had prepared detailed plans for their resettlement, because it was unsafe for them to return to China, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina stated in his landmark decision, adding, “Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful. Because separation-of-powers concerns do not trump the very principle upon which this nation was founded — the unalienable right to liberty — the court orders the government to release the [men] into the United States.”

Sadly for the Uighurs (and for the cause of justice, so shamefully disdained at Guantánamo), the government fought back, launching an immediate appeal to prevent a judge from actually ordering the release of men into the United States against the wishes of the Executive. Shamelessly resuscitating its own long-discredited claims that the Uighurs were “a danger to the public,” who had “admitted receiving weapons training at a military training camp” (even though it had failed to challenge the Uighurs’ cases before Judge Urbina), the government requested a stay on Judge Urbina’s ruling, and this was granted by a three-judge panel in the Court of Appeals, which included Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who, notoriously, voted for every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

This was an enormous disappointment, of course, but while the Uighurs awaited a full ruling by the Court of Appeals, Judge Leon then hit his stride, launching the first full habeas reviews since Guantánamo opened six years and ten months previously by demolishing the cases against five out of six Algerians who had been kidnapped in Bosnia (where they had been living and working for many years) and flown to Guantánamo in January 2002.

Notoriously, the men had been seized in connection with an alleged plot to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo, but the plot had never been mentioned during their detention at Guantánamo, and when the habeas reviews came round, five of the six men were, instead, accused of intending to travel to Afghanistan to take up arms against US forces.

In his ruling, on November 20, when he was called upon to determine whether the prisoners could continue to be held as “enemy combatants” because they were “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the US or its coalition partners” — or because they had “committed a belligerent act or ha[d] directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces” — Judge Leon authorized the habeas claims of five of the six men, explaining that the government had relied “exclusively on the information contained in a classified document from an unnamed source,” but stressing that this information — “the only evidence in the record directly supporting each detainee’s alleged knowledge of, or commitment to, this supposed plan” — was inadequate, because, although the government had “provided some information about the source’s credibility and reliability,” it had not “provided the Court with enough information to adequately evaluate the credibility and reliability of this source’s information.”

Three disturbing victories for the government

There was some consolation for the government, in that Judge Leon (photo, left) ruled that the sixth man, Belkacem Bansayah, could continue to be held as an “enemy combatant,” because the government had provided “credible and reliable evidence,” from a number of sources, “linking Mr. Bensayah to al-Qaeda and, more specifically, to a senior al-Qaeda facilitator.” Leon also stated, “There can be no question that facilitating the travel of others to join the fight against the United States in Afghanistan constitutes direct support to al-Qaeda in furtherance of its objectives and that this amounts to ‘support’ within the meaning of the ‘enemy combatant’ definition governing this case.”

Judge Leon’s ruling in Bensayah’s case raised a new set of problems for lawyers, as did his ruling in two further cases on December 30, when he turned down the habeas petitions of two other prisoners — Muaz al-Alawi, a Yemeni, and Hisham Sliti, a Tunisian — on the basis that Sliti was associated with al-Qaeda, and al-Alawi “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.”

As I explained in an article at the time, the problem with all these decisions was that the Supreme Court had not empowered the lower courts to question whether the very definition of an “enemy combatant” was sufficient to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial if a plausible case was established that they had somehow been involved with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The most fundamental difficulty was with rulings relating to involvement with the Taliban, as this harked back to the initial mistakes that were made when the Taliban (a government, however despised) was equated with al-Qaeda (a small terrorist group), and this was made clear in the case of Muaz al-Alawi.

Although al-Alawi was in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks, and was fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, Judge Leon ruled that he was an “enemy combatant” because he endorsed the government’s 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 Khowst and then to Pakistan only after his unit was subjected to two-to-three US bombing runs.” As I put it at the time,

In other words, Judge Leon ruled that Muaz al-Alawi can be held indefinitely without charge or trial because, despite traveling to Afghanistan to fight other Muslims before September 11, 2001, “contend[ing] that he had no association with al-Qaeda,” and stating that “his support for and association with the Taliban was minimal and not directed at US or coalition forces,” he was still in Afghanistan when that conflict morphed into a different war following the US-led invasion in October 2001. As Leon admitted in his ruling, “Although there is no evidence of petitioner actually using arms against US or coalition forces, the Government does not need to prove such facts in order for petitioner to be classified as an enemy combatant under the definition adopted by the Court.”

While this suggests to me that Muaz al-Alawi should, at best, have been held as a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Conventions (so that we would now be discussing whether it was appropriate to hold PoWs forever, when the specific conflict in which they were seized — toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan — was achieved seven years ago), the cases of Belkacem Bensayah and Hisham Sliti are rather more complicated. In Bensayah’s case, the problem is that his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda centered on his purported relationship with Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee,” who, as has been demonstrated in detail over the last few years, was not actually a member of al-Qaeda at all, and in Sliti’s case, Judge Leon’s ruling essentially involved guilt by association. As I explained in January,

He may well have been connected with others who were involved in or interested in terrorism, but his own trajectory is that of a junkie rather than a jihadist, or, if you prefer, a tourist rather than a terrorist. Judge Leon disregarded Sliti’s own claim that he went to Afghanistan “to kick a long-standing drug habit and to find a wife,” but it was certainly true that he had been a drug addict in Europe (where he had been imprisoned in various countries on several occasions), and, as his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has explained, he has a worldly cynicism that is fundamentally at odds with the fanatical rigor of al-Qaeda.

Victory for Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner

As the Bush administration left office, these fundamental problems had not been addressed, leading me to conclude that, although Judge Leon was observing the law, it was both cruel and unjust, “as the three men in question continue to be held with less rights than those afforded to the most murderous individuals imprisoned on the US mainland, even though none of them is alleged to have harmed a single US citizen.”

However, the tally of verdicts — 22 habeas appeals granted in 25 cases — indicated that the habeas reviews had triumphantly demonstrated the necessity of providing the Guantánamo prisoners with a means to challenge the basis of their detention, and these odds improved on January 14, when Judge Leon delivered his final ruling under the Bush administration, delivering a last resounding blow to Guantánamo’s credibility by granting the habeas petition of Mohammed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident (and Chadian national) who was just 14 years old when he was seized in a random raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had traveled in the hope of furthering his education.

In spite of this, the government claimed that El-Gharani “arrived in Afghanistan at some unspecified time in 2001,” and was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” for a variety of reasons, including claims that he received military training at an al-Qaeda-affiliated military training camp, fought against US and allied forces at the battle of Tora Bora, and was a member of an al-Qaeda cell based in London.

Noting that the government’s supposed evidence against El-Gharani consisted of statements made by two other prisoners at Guantánamo, and that, moreover, these statements were “either exclusively, or jointly, the only evidence offered by the Government to substantiate the majority of their allegations,” Judge Leon stated that “the credibility and reliability of the detainees being relied upon by the Government has either been directly called into question by Government personnel or has been characterized by Government personnel as undermined,” and dismissed all the claims, reserving particular criticism for the claim that El-Gharani had been a member of a London-based al-Qaeda cell. As I wrote in January,

This was, indeed, the most extraordinary allegation, as El-Gharani was just 11 years old at the time, and, as his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, explained in his book The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, “he must have been beamed over to the al-Qaeda meetings by the Starship Enterprise, since he never left Saudi Arabia by conventional means.”

Leon’s verdict was marginally less colorful, but no less devastating. “Putting aside the obvious and unanswered questions as to how a Saudi minor from a very poor family could have even become a member of a London-based cell,” he wrote, “the Government simply advances no corroborating evidence for these statements it believes to be reliable from a fellow detainee, the basis of whose knowledge is — at best — unknown.”

This was a high point in the litigation on behalf of the Guantánamo prisoners, and as Barack Obama swept into office, there was a widespread anticipation that the obstruction of the Bush years would come to an end, and that Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder would move swiftly to facilitate the swift passage of the remaining habeas cases.

As I demonstrate in Part Two and Part Three of this article, however, in its first six months in office, the Obama administration has behaved as though George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are still in the White House, pressing ahead with cases that are as worthless and unprincipled as those against the Uighurs, the Bosnian Algerians and Mohammed El-Gharani, indulging in the same obstruction that disappointed Judge Hogan last August, and refusing — ever — to tell the American public what it really needs to know: that the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” was such a disaster that, when the Guantánamo prisoners have had an opportunity to challenge the basis of their detention in a US court, 84 percent of the cases considered have led to a humiliating defeat for the government, whether that government was led by George W. Bush, or by Barack Obama.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record and uruknet.

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), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009). Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009).

The interview, via YouTube, is available below:

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

Chris Chang, an investigator with Reprieve, and Ahmed Ghappour, an attorney, returned yesterday from a trip to Chad in which they had hoped to celebrate Mohammed’s freedom, but were “dismayed and disappointed” to discover that he is now a prisoner of the Chadian authorities, “sleeping on a cot in a police station while his family waits anxiously outside.” They added, “Mohammed cannot leave the main police headquarters without authorization from the Head of the Judicial Police, and even after obtaining that permission he is accompanied by a police officer wherever he goes. He has asked on several occasions to be released and reunited with his family but continues to be told, ‘Just another night, Mohammed.’” They also said that there has been no public announcement in Chad regarding his return and that he has been forbidden from speaking to the media.

In a press release, Chris Chang stated, “For over two years the Chadian government has worked with Reprieve to fight for Mohammed’s freedom and resettlement in his native Chad. It is appalling that he continues to be held. This is not freedom.” Ahmed Ghappour added, “Mohammed’s detention defies even Chadian law, where you cannot be held longer than 48 hours without being charged with a crime. What is disturbing about this ordeal is the Chadian government’s insistence that Mohammed is not a prisoner, mirroring the doublespeak used by the US towards the end of Mohammed’s term. He was designated a ‘freed detainee’ for months before his transfer to Chad.”

In spite of the media ban, Reprieve managed to secure a single poignant comment from El-Gharani, after asking him what his hopes are for the future. “I just want to be free,” he said.

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, added, “Enough is enough. Mohammed has suffered seven years of abuse and illegal imprisonment from the age of 14. Our lawyers have proved his innocence and it is disgraceful that he is still not free. We call on the Chad government to show compassion to Mohammed and his family and release him immediately.”

UPDATE 7 pm: AFP reports that El-Gharani has now been freed. National police chief General Youssouf Chakir told the agency, “He was freed at 4:30 pm (1530 GMT). He was handed over to his uncle to return to his home.” He added that he was “not charged with any crime.” AFP also reported that Interior Minister Ahmat Mahamat Bashir said before his release that El-Gharani was subject to “our own investigations and verification of his Chadian nationality.” He added, “We were sent someone without any documents, no papers on him, not even a legal paper. We don’t know on what judicial basis he was freed.”

This explanation seems highly unlikely, as Reprieve had been working closely with the government of Chad for many years, to establish who El-Gharani was, and why the basis for his detention was groundless. This suggests that his detention for a week was perhaps related to internal politics, and that his sudden release this afternoon, just hours after Reprieve issued its press release, came about because the Chadian government was unwilling to put itself in a position where it faced scrutiny from outside the country, which would not have reflected well on its reluctance to send El-Gharani back to his family.

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