Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was defense secretary for George W. Bush’s father, has served as the Convening Authority for the Commissions since February 2007. In the interview, with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, she explained why, last May, she had decided in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi accused of trying and failing to become one of the 9/11 operatives, that she would not refer his case for prosecution.

“We tortured Qahtani,” she told Woodward. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”

The admission was extraordinary for a number of reasons, not least because it was the first time that a senior official in the administration had admitted that a prisoner had been tortured at Guantánamo (or anywhere else, for that matter). Last February, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in a Senate hearing that three “high-value detainees” — the supposedly senior al-Qaeda operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri — had been waterboarded in secret CIA custody, but although lawyers and torture experts are well aware that use of the technique — a form of controlled drowning — is torture, and that the Spanish Inquisition had explicitly referred to it as “tortura del agua,” senior government officials either equivocated or continued to deny that US forces had ever engaged in torture.

For the outgoing administration, Susan Crawford’s confession means that equivocations and denials are no longer feasible, and for Barack Obama’s new government it is difficult to see how criminal proceedings can be avoided. As Dahlia Lithwick and Philippe Sands explained in an article for Slate, under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture (to which the United States is a signatory), all 146 countries who have signed up to the treaty

are under an obligation to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.” These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Gen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.

They added, “For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed,” and any lingering doubts that this is the case should have been dispelled two days after Crawford’s interview was published, when, at his Senate confirmation hearing, Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s choice for Attorney General, stated unambiguously, “Waterboarding is torture” (reiterating the position Obama had taken on ABC News on January 11), and proceeded to explain that it had been used as a torture technique during the Spanish Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, adding, “We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam.”

However, despite Eric Holder’s decisive contribution to the torture debate, the impact of Crawford’s confession does not end with its application to the torture of one particular prisoner or to the use of waterboarding. Although the administration attempted to redefine torture, in its notorious “Torture Memo” of August 2002, as the infliction of pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” Crawford was clearly more inclined to support the definition in the Torture Convention, which declares torture to be “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”

In describing al-Qahtani’s treatment as torture, for example, Crawford did not object to the use of waterboarding (to which, as far as we know, al-Qahtani was not subjected), but to “a combination” of other interrogation techniques, “their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health,” as she explained to Woodward.

“The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent,” she said. “You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge,” and to conclude that it was torture.

Al-Qahtani’s treatment was severe, of course. As Time magazine revealed in an interrogation log (PDF) that was made available in 2005, he was interrogated for 20 hours a day over a 50-day period in late 2002 and early 2003, when he was also subjected to extreme sexual humiliation, threatened by a dog, strip-searched and made to stand naked, and made to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists. On one occasion he was subjected to a “fake rendition,” in which he was tranquilized, flown off the island, revived, flown back to Guantánamo, and told that he was in a country that allowed torture.

In addition, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files,

The sessions were so intense that the interrogators worried that the cumulative lack of sleep and constant interrogation posed a risk to his health. Medical staff checked his health frequently — sometimes as often as three times a day — and on one occasion, in early December, the punishing routine was suspended for a day when, as a result of refusing to drink, he became seriously dehydrated and his heart rate dropped to 35 beats a minute. While a doctor came to see him in the booth, however, loud music was played to prevent him from sleeping.

However, although the techniques that were applied to al-Qahtani were specifically approved for use on him by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after senior officers at Guantánamo had requested approval for the use of harsher interrogation techniques, it’s clear that at least two other prisoners at Guantánamo were singled out for particularly abusive treatment: Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan regarded as one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, who (before his unexplained release from Guantánamo) was repeatedly prevented from seeing representatives of the International Red Cross due to “military necessity,” and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who had met the 9/11 hijackers in Germany, whose torture (which was arguably even more severe than that endured by al-Qahtani) was most recently reported in an article in Der Spiegel.

Moreover, as was made clear in a Senate Armed Services Committee report published last month (PDF), the techniques to which al-Qahtani, Tabarak and Slahi were subjected — which included “stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures” — were not techniques reserved solely for use on a handful of supposedly significant prisoners.

Instead, they were part of a deliberate policy of reverse engineering techniques taught to US military personnel “to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions,” and “based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions,” which effectively became part of Guantánamo’s standard operating procedure during 2003 and 2004. According to a former interrogator who spoke to the New York Times for an article that was published in January 2005,

While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures …The interrogator said that when new interrogators arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.

To get some sense of perspective, the maximum number of prisoners that Guantánamo held at any one time was around 660, which means that, according to the former interrogator’s estimate, around 110 prisoners were subjected to these techniques. And while they may not have been applied quite as harshly as they were to al-Qahtani (although the many accounts I report in The Guantánamo Files are almost as harrowing), what Susan Crawford’s confession makes abundantly clear is that, when examining the use of torture, it is not appropriate simply to look at the application of each technique in isolation (when they may not have crossed the torture threshold), but to consider that in most cases their use was combined, as it was with al-Qahtani.

Nor is this the end of the story. In response to a question from Woodward about whether she believed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks were tortured, Crawford stated, “I assume torture,” even though, as Woodward explained, she “declined to say whether she considers waterboarding … to be torture.” She then attempted to explain that she “let the charges go forward” in the 9/11 trial “because the FBI satisfied her that they gathered information without using harsh techniques,” using so-called “clean teams” who gained fresh confessions without using torture.

However, although she also attempted to make a distinction between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohammed al-Qahtani by stating that “Mohammed has acknowledged his Sept. 11 role in court, whereas Qahtani has recanted his self-incriminating statements,” it is, frankly, disingenuous to claim that torture can be magically written off if a tortured prisoner apparently confesses of his own free will at a later date.

As a result, it is also apparent that Crawford’s confession infects the majority of the 19 cases currently scheduled for trial by Military Commission, and, moreover, that it has disturbing implications for the rest of the administration’s detention policies over the last seven years, including the widespread torture of prisoners in the US prisons at Kandahar and Bagram, before they were transferred to Guantánamo, the dozens of prisoners who were tortured in the “Dark Prison” and the “Salt Pit” (two secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan), the rest of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, and the unknown number of other prisoners held in secret prisons run by the CIA or rendered for torture to prisons in third countries (PDF).

As if this were not enough, Crawford’s confession also affects the many thousands of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, who have endured wartime detention policies in which the Geneva Conventions were replaced by the reverse engineering of “Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions,” and, of course, has disturbing ramifications for investigations into the as-yet unknown number of prisoners who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq (PDF) and in secret prisons as a result of the unfettered exercise of these techniques.

As the implications of all this percolate slowly through the nation’s consciousness, the only outstanding question that remains unanswered is why Susan Crawford chose to make her confession to Bob Woodward just days before the Bush administration leaves office, having never granted an interview before.

As a protégée of Vice President Dick Cheney, and a close friend of Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington (the prime architects, with Rumsfeld, of the Bush administration’s torture regime), it seems unlikely that she would have had some kind of Damascene conversion, but her interview was peppered with statements that appear, both on the surface and on closer inspection, to constitute a genuine confession. “I sympathize with the intelligence gatherers in those days after 9/11, not knowing what was coming next and trying to gain information to keep us safe,” she explained. “But there still has to be a line that we should not cross. And unfortunately what this has done, I think, has tainted everything going forward.”

If Crawford had an ulterior motive, it is not readily apparent. Elsewhere in the interview, for example, she complained that the Military Commissions should not have been empowered to accept coerced testimony, and complained about how “unprepared” the prosecutors were to bring cases to trial, and how she had had to force them to provide exculpatory evidence to the defense. She also complained about Donald Rumsfeld’s role in authorizing torture, and complained that the torture of al-Qahtani directly endangered US forces abroad. “It did shock me,” she said. “I was upset by it. I was embarrassed by it. If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”

She also said that, although she believed that President Bush was “right to create a system to try unlawful enemy combatants captured in the war on terrorism,” the implementation of the policy was flawed. “I think he hurt his own effort,” she explained. “I think someone should acknowledge that mistakes were made and that they hurt the effort and take responsibility for it. We learn as children it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission. I think the buck stops in the Oval Office.”

And although she called al-Qahtani “a very dangerous man,” pointedly asked, “What do you do with him now if you don’t charge him and try him?” and handed the responsibility for dealing with him over to Barack Obama, this would have happened anyway. Perhaps — though this may be a naïve interpretation, and is certainly not meant to excuse her demonstrably poor performance as the Commissions’ Convening Authority — she had looked to the future and was establishing her position accordingly, in case, one day, a Special Prosecutor for war crimes comes knocking.

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.

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

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials (June 2009).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison, Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here) (all May 2009), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009).

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009).

Although a few news outlets have briefly mentioned some of the other men released with Sami — two of his compatriots, a Moroccan and five Afghans — their stories remain largely unknown. However, as a result of the research I undertook for my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, I’m able to shine some light on their stories, which otherwise are unlikely to receive much coverage — if at all — outside their home countries.

While none have the extraordinary impact of Sami’s story — which, I note, has the Pentagon so scared that three officials told ABC News on Friday that he was “a manipulator and a propagandist,” who produced a “constant drumbeat of allegations” about the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo — they do nothing to support the administration’s constantly unraveling claim that the prisoners are “the worst of the worst.” This claim, made by Rear Admiral John D. Stufflebeem on January 28, 2002, has been parroted at the highest levels of government in the years since, even though 501 prisoners have now been released, and the administration has stated that it only intends to try between 60 to 80 of the 273 prisoners who remain in Guantánamo.

On the cargo plane containing Sami al-Haj that landed in Khartoum in the early hours of May 2 were Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali, who, like Sami, were bound like beasts for their journey despite finally being transported to freedom. Both had also been held for over six years without charge or trial, but unlike Sami, whose plight was widely publicized by al-Jazeera, by his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, and by groups campaigning for the rights of journalists, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières, both of these men had barely registered on the media’s radar.

Amir Yacoub al-Amir, great-grandson of Sudan’s Caliph

36-year old Amir Yacoub al-Amir was one of at least 120 prisoners (around 15 percent of Guantánamo’s entire population), who were captured not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, without ever having been anywhere near the battlefields of Afghanistan. In his tribunal at Guantánamo (one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals convened in 2004 and 2005 to assess whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants” without rights), al-Amir strenuously denied an allegation that he was associated with al-Qaeda, saying, “I disagree with al-Qaeda on everything,” and also denied being associated with the Taliban.

Seized from a car in Peshawar in March 2002, while visiting Pakistan, al-Amir’s story echoes reports by numerous other innocent men seized in Pakistan, who said that they were captured and sold for money, a situation that was confirmed at the highest levels in 2006, when, in his autobiography, President Musharraf boasted that in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (who were mostly transferred to Guantánamo), “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.” In Guantánamo, al-Amir explained that he was seized because the Pakistani government “was capturing any Arab and giving them to the United States as terrorists.”

Like Sami al-Haj, al-Amir was represented by Reprieve, and in 2007 Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, traveled to Sudan to meet his family, where he discovered that his great-grandfather, a cousin of the Khalifa (Caliph), had, with numerous other relatives, been captured and imprisoned by the British army, after the fall of General Gordon’s regime in 1885, in conditions that were remarkable similar to those prevailing at Guantánamo. In a New Statesman article, Stafford Smith described how the prisoners were “dispatched (or, in modern terms, rendered)” to Egypt, where conditions were so brutal that al-Amir’s great-grandfather died, and noted that, during his visit, members of the government, and other relatives of the Khalifa, “expressed concern that Amir Yacoub had been illegally rendered, and was now being held, like his great-grandfather, by the hyperpower of the day, in a brutal and lawless prison far from home.”

Walid Ali, survivor of an Afghan massacre

33-year old Walid Ali (on the left in the photo, with al-Amir), whose story has only ever been reported in The Guantánamo Files, explained in 2005 to his Administrative Review Board — convened to assess whether the prisoners were still regarded as a threat to the United States or as an ongoing source of intelligence — that he had traveled to Pakistan to teach the Koran, but had then been drawn to the conflict in Afghanistan, where he joined the Taliban, serving as a guard for 25 to 30 days.

Like several other prisoners, Ali told the Board that he had been inspired to help the Taliban fight the Russians, which was not as far-fetched as it sounds, as General Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance’s pre-eminent Uzbek commander, had served with the Russians throughout the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, before repeatedly switching his allegiance during the chaos of the 1990s. In his hearing, Ali appeared genuinely bewildered that Dostum had become an ally of the United States, and that he was therefore accused of fighting Americans.

Ali was one of at least 50 Guantánamo prisoners to survive a massacre at the Qala-i-Janghi fort (and improvised prison) in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. They, along with the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, were the only survivors out of up to 400 foreign Taliban fighters — mainly from the Gulf countries, North Africa, Pakistan and Uzbekistan — who had left the city of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last outpost in the north of Afghanistan, after a surrender was negotiated between senior Taliban leaders and the Northern Alliance.

Tricked into believing that they would be allowed to return home after giving up their weapons, some of the men responded to the betrayal — and fears that they were to be executed — by starting an uprising (in which a CIA agent, Johnny “Mike” Spann, was killed), which was savagely put down by US bombers, representatives of the US and British Special Forces, and Alliance soldiers. The survivors — many of whom had their hands tied behind their backs when the fighting started, and were subsequently wounded — hid in a basement while the battle raged, and it’s probable, therefore, that most did not actually have anything to do with the uprising. After seven days, in which they were shot at and bombed, and finally flooded out, the survivors were transferred to General Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan, and were then taken to Guantánamo via the US prison at Kandahar airport.

In a written statement to his ARB, Ali told one of the most complete stories of being caught in the crossfire and suffering in the basement:

“They handcuffed us so tightly that the circulation was cut off, and I became unconscious. What happened after is … all I know is they were firing bullets at us while we were handcuffed and American airplanes came and started firing at us and killed a lot of us. I was handcuffed and wounded in my back with a bullet and it went to my belly where it is now. And I feel the pain of it … While I was on the ground an American airplane fired a bomb and shrapnel hit my head and it is still there in my head. And then I went unconscious and I did not feel anything until I woke up in a room underground … Of course, they used all [kinds of] different weapons in order to kill us. They even used water and electricity. And they threw a bomb on us. And a lot of times they opened water on us to the point [that] we had water up to our necks. Of course, the wounded ones couldn’t stand up and they were killed in the water.”

Said al-Boujaadia, cleared for 18 months

Some time after the plane carrying Sami al-Haj and his compatriots touched down in Khartoum, it dropped off another prisoner in Morocco. 39-year old Said al-Boujaadia, also represented by Reprieve, had surfaced briefly in the media last December, but his story was largely unknown until last month, when I wrote an article that focused on his particular route to Guantánamo.

In 2001, al-Boujaadia traveled to Afghanistan with his Afghan wife, whom he had met and married on a previous visit, and their three children. Like many others, his life fell apart after the 9/11 attacks, and the US-led invasion that began in October. Although he managed to secure the safe escape of his family, he, like almost a third of the Guantánamo prisoners — a mixture of missionaries, charity workers, migrants and Taliban foot soldiers — was captured as he attempted to help another family cross the Pakistani border to safety.

Although he was cleared for release in late 2006, when his review board decided that he did not pose a threat to the United States, his planned departure, in March 2007, never took place, because he was requested as a witness at the trial by military commission of another prisoner, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had been a driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan’s defense counsel offered alternatives that would have allowed al-Boujaadia to be released — including videotaping a statement from him, or allowing him to testify from Morocco — but these options were turned down by the military authorities, who continued to hold him without even offering him an explanation.

On December 6, 2007, over a year after he was cleared for release, al-Boujaadia finally testified on Hamdan’s behalf. His testimony was apparently required because he was seized on the same day as Hamdan, but although he recalled seeing Hamdan lying face down on the floor in the makeshift Afghan prison he was taken to after his capture, he had no other information to offer. Even so, it took the authorities another five months to release him.

Imprisoned on his return, al-Boujaadia is happy to submit to any investigations that the Moroccan government thinks appropriate, as Clive Stafford Smith reported during a visit to Morocco in March. As Stafford Smith added on Friday, however, “We respectfully request that the Government of Morocco complete any investigation of Mr. al-Boujaadia quickly, so he may be swiftly reunited with his wife, his children and his elderly mother.”

In a second article to follow, Andy looks at the stories of the Afghans released with Sami al-Haj, Amir Yacoub al-Amir, Walid Ali and Said al-Boujaadia.

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

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Anti-war.com and AlterNet.

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers (and variations on the spelling of their names) are as follows:

ISN 720: Amir Yacoub al-Amir (Yacoub Mahmoud) (Sudan)
ISN 81: Walid Ali (Sudan)
ISN 150: Said al-Boujaadia (Morocco)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

There are, at conservative estimates, at least 50 prisoners in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release by military review boards from 2005 to the present day, but who are still held in appalling isolation. The majority are held in Camp VI, a maximum-security cell block, completed in December 2006, where they remain for 22 to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in metal cells without windows. They have no opportunity to socialize with other cleared prisoners, have extremely limited opportunities for education or entertainment (no TV, no radio, and limited access to books), and their ability to communicate with their families by letter is subject to the whims of the authorities, who frequently delay the delivery of letters or misplace them altogether.

In the cases of dozens of these prisoners — from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan — they continue to be held because the Bush administration (which is usually more than willing to shred its international obligations) has, for the most part, agreed to be bound by international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture, although there are notable exceptions.

Last year, in an attempt to bypass its obligations, the US administration signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the government of Tunisia, which purported to guarantee the humane treatment of cleared prisoners released from Guantánamo, even though Tunisia is regularly condemned for endemic human rights abuses by the US State Department. When two men — Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar (aka Abdullah al-Hajji) — were returned to Tunisia from Guantánamo, they were reportedly subjected to ill-treatment in Tunisian custody, and were then convicted and imprisoned after trials that were regarded by observers as woefully inadequate. A US District judge then intervened to prevent the return of a third cleared Tunisian, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, and another court recently intervened to prevent the return of another cleared prisoner, Ahmed Belbacha, to Algeria, another country with which the administration has been pursuing dubious “diplomatic assurances” of humane treatment.

While these cases account for the majority of the cleared prisoners who are still held in Guantánamo, others have been overlooked for other reasons, and one of these men is Moroccan national Said al-Boujaadia.

A father of three, al-Boujaadia, who is 39 years old, is from Casablanca. In 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan with his Afghan wife, whom he had met and married on a previous visit, and their three children. In the chaos that followed the US-led invasion in October 2001, he managed to secure the safe escape of his family, but was himself captured, as he attempted to help another family cross the Pakistani border to safety.

Hundreds of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay were seized at this time in a similar manner, and it has since become apparent that many were then sold by their Afghan captors to US forces, who were offering bounty rewards, averaging $5,000 a head, for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects. When offered these rewards, many of the Americans’ allies seized stray foreigners, in the knowledge that they could be packaged as “terror suspects” and sold.

Al-Boujaadia was cleared for release from Guantánamo in late 2006, when a military review board decided that he did not pose a threat to the United States or its allies — including Morocco. He was reportedly scheduled to leave Guantánamo in April 2007, with another cleared prisoner, Ahmed Errachidi. At the last minute, however, while Errachidi was flown to Morocco to be reunited with his family, the US military decided to keep al-Boujaadia at the prison, not because of anything he had done, but because he had been requested as a witness at the trial by military commission of another prisoner, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had been a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Hamdan’s defense counsel offered alternatives that would have allowed al-Boujaadia to be released. These included videotaping a statement from him, or allowing him to testify from Morocco, but these options were all refused. The authorities continued to hold al-Boujaadia and failed even to explain to his lawyers, or to al-Boujaadia himself, that he was being held because he was required as a witness.

On December 6, 2007, al-Boujaadia finally testified on Hamdan’s behalf. Despite an eight-month wait, it was clear that he had little to offer, and that Hamdan’s defense counsel had acted correctly in trying to find ways to allow him to make a statement without having to remain in Guantánamo. Although he was seized on the same day as Hamdan, al-Boujaadia recalled only that the first time he saw Hamdan was when he was taken to a makeshift Afghan prison and found Hamdan lying face down on the floor. In response to further questioning, he explained that he had no idea whether Hamdan was an al-Qaeda member, and that he had not seen his car, which allegedly contained a number of rockets.

Since he has already given his testimony, there has been no reason for the US authorities to continue holding Said al-Boujaadia, but four months later he remains in Guantánamo, still separated from his family, and with no indication of when, if ever, he will finally be released.

In an attempt to address this oversight, lawyers from Reprieve (including the charity’s director, Clive Stafford Smith) recently traveled to Morocco to raise his plight with the Moroccan government. In meetings with government representatives, and at a well-attended press conference in Rabat, Stafford Smith urged the government and the media to take action on Said al-Boujaadia’s behalf. He noted that ten Moroccan prisoners had already returned home from Guantánamo Bay, and that each had been dealt with in a just and appropriate manner.

The lawyers also asked the government to assist the US authorities in their stated aim of closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay by making representations on behalf of two other Moroccan prisoners, Younis Chekkouri and Abdullatif Nasser, who have not yet been cleared for release.

Younis Chekkouri, who is 39 years old, traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after many years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education. The couple lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. Chekkouri has repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden. In his military tribunal in Guantánamo, he described bin Laden as “a crazy person,” adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

Abdullatif Nasser, who is 43 years old, had worked as a small-scale businessman in Libya and Sudan, and had also spent time in Yemen and Pakistan. He was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, and has explained that he was attracted to the country because of its Islamic scholars and its piety. In Guantánamo, he has experienced particularly harsh treatment, because he stands up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, and refuses to keep silent in the face of injustice.

All three men are represented by Reprieve, and Clive Stafford Smith made it clear, both in public, and in representations to the King and the government, that they are all happy to submit to any investigations that the Moroccan government thinks appropriate. “The men are perfectly willing to stand trial to face any charges your government feels are warranted,” he explained to Moroccan officials. “They have been asking for a trial, after all, for six years. These men merely seek justice — justice denied them for far too long by the American government.”

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

As published on the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

Note: Said al-Boujaadia was released from Guantánamo and transferred to Moroccan custody in May 2007.

As the men landed on British soil, there was no reason to suspect that their return would involve anything more than a cursory police investigation. El-Banna had been cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in May this year –- as close to an admission of innocence as the notoriously unapologetic US administration ever gets –- and the US authorities had also agreed to the return of Deghayes and Sameur, as requested by the British government in August, while refusing to release another British resident, Binyam Mohamed, whose current parlous state was reported here.

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who represented the men and met with them at Guantánamo during their long imprisonment without charge or trial, pointed out that they had all agreed to unspecified voluntary security arrangements required by the UK authorities, and, on arrival, as Sean O’Neill described it in the Times, El-Banna “was detained under port and border controls –- a signal that Britain does not regard him as posing any serious security threat.” Deghayes and Sameur, meanwhile, were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and were held for questioning at Paddington Green police station in west London, a move that served only to indicate, in O’Neill’s words, “that Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command wants to be certain they pose no threat to Britain before releasing them.” He added, “Most of the previous returnees from Camp Delta have been through the same process and none have been involved in any trouble since they came back.”

Even more significant were comments made by William Nye, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence at the Home Office, following discussions with the US government about the return of the British residents, which had first taken place in June 2006, and which were revealed in the Guardian last October. At the time, the British government, which, until that point, had refused to press for the release of any of the British residents, was reluctantly discussing the return of just one of the British residents, Bisher al-Rawi (who was released in March this year). Both al-Rawi and El-Banna had been kidnapped by CIA agents in the Gambia, where they had travelled to set up a mobile peanut-processing plant, after an inexplicable tip-off from MI5, and had been transferred to Guantánamo via a secret CIA-run prison in Afghanistan. Scandalously, the discussions about the repatriation of al-Rawi –- but not of El-Banna –- were based solely on the fact that al-Rawi’s lawyers had embarrassed the government by pointing out that he had actually been working for MI5, keeping tabs on the radical cleric Abu Qatada.

Describing what had happened during the meeting with the Americans, William Nye explained that the Americans had requested that the British take back all the residents –- not just al-Rawi –- but that the British representatives had balked at the conditions that the US government had attempted to impose, which included an insistence that they “cannot legally leave the UK, engage with known extremists or engage in, support, promote, plan or advocate extremist or violent activity,” and that the British government would put surveillance in place “to know immediately of any attempt to engage in any such activity.” Nye declared, “I am not satisfied it would be proportionate to impose … the kind of obligations which might be necessary to satisfy the US administration,” explaining that the measures demanded by the Americans would have to be enforced by MI5 and would divert vital resources away from countering more dangerous terrorist suspects. “The use of such resources … could not be justified and would damage the protection of the UK’s national security,” he wrote, adding, in the most crucial passage, that the detainees “do not pose a sufficient threat to justify the devotion of the high level of resources” the US would require.

It was genuinely shocking, therefore, when the Spanish government lodged its extradition request on the men’s return. As Sean O’Neill described it, the Spanish alleged that El-Banna had links with a Madrid al-Qaeda cell, which was purportedly responsible for recruiting young men and sending them for jihad training, and which was also “said to have had ties to the German-based al-Qaeda unit that plotted the September 11 atrocities.” He added, “What has motivated Spain to act now is something of a mystery. America has had Mr. El-Banna in custody for five years and interrogated him repeatedly in brutal conditions. It laid no charges against him and deemed him fit to be freed. Spain made no attempt to extradite him from or question him while he was in US custody.” He concluded that the Spanish government’s action “seems inhumane and its evidence rather thin.”

Clive Stafford Smith added more detail, explaining that he had tried to encourage a Spanish extradition request as a means of getting the men out of Guantánamo, but that the authorities in Madrid had never showed any interest. “It is very dismaying,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight. “For quite a long time, we tried to get the Spanish to demand their release because we thought it was an elegant way to get them out of Guantánamo. The Spanish weren’t interested … The idea now that they want to use this evidence we have proved to be false to take them for further detention is very worrying.”

Under the terms of the European Arrest Warrant, an EU-wide agreement introduced in 2004 and intended to simplify extradition procedures between member states by removing potential political interference and ensuring “faster and simpler surrender procedures,” the British government had no choice but to comply with the Spanish request, even though William Nye had made it clear that none of the men were regarded as a “sufficient threat” to warrant 24/7 surveillance, and, as Sean O’Neill pointed out, the British “had no intention of putting [El-Banna] on trial as a terrorist when he returned here.”

On the morning of December 20, while the Metropolitan Police were preparing to release Abdulnour Sameur without charge, Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes were duly transported to Westminster Magistrates’ Court –- just a few hundred yards from Parliament –- where Melanie Cumberland, representing the Spanish government, resurrected the claims against the men, first formulated by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in December 2003 (when he also requested the extradition of two other Guantánamo detainees, a Moroccan and a Spaniard), that El-Banna had been a member of a Madrid-based organization known as the Islamic Alliance, and that he was an associate of Imad Yarkas, who is serving 12 years in a Spanish prison for terrorism offences. Cumberland relayed the Spanish authorities’ claim that both El-Banna and Deghayes belonged to a cell that provided recruits for military training in Afghanistan and Indonesia, which was also alleged to have raised funds for terrorism and to have spread al-Qaeda propaganda.

In response, Ed Fitzgerald QC, who represented both men, cited the discredited video as “the centrepiece” of the Spanish allegations, and accused the prosecutor of making wild accusations “for which there was no evidence,” adding that there was, instead, solid evidence that neither the US nor UK authorities considered the men to pose a significant danger.

Granting bail to both men –- set at £50,000 (much of which was paid by actress and human rights campaigner Vanessa Redgrave) –- the judge, Timothy Workman, dismissed prosecution claims that they would flee abroad or engage in terrorist acts, and declared, in El-Banna’s case, “The prosecution concerns about offences being committed are outweighed by the detailed review being carried out in the US.” He did, however, insist on tough bail conditions, including the imposition of a curfew, the use of electronic tagging and a prohibition on travelling abroad.

Jamil El-Banna on his release from custody. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, is on the right of the picture.

Outside the court, El-Banna, who appeared to have aged considerably during the five years of his imprisonment, made only a brief statement. “Thank you very much everybody, my solicitor, the British people, the British government for your help,” he said, adding, “I am tired, I want to go home and see my children,” before leaving in a car to be reunited with his wife and his five children. He has never seen his youngest child, who was born after his capture. His MP, Sarah Teather, who has campaigned assiduously for his release, said that “immense cruelty” had been inflicted on the family, who were only told at 8.30pm on Wednesday that he had been arrested and would not be coming home. “The children could not understand why he was not back and Sabah [his wife] was devastated,” she added. After meeting Mrs. El-Banna briefly outside the courtroom on Thursday morning, I can confirm that this was indeed the case.

Several hours later, Omar Deghayes also emerged from the court to be reunited with his family. Speaking later from his home in Brighton, he said, “I am very, very happy to be home. I am very grateful to everybody who has helped me. I would have been happier if everybody in Guantánamo were released and that ugly, bad place was closed down if not demolished.” He added, “I need some rest but I will be very happy to speak to everybody in the media to help other people to be released.”

Missing from the extradition discussions –- in the media, if not amongst the lawyers –- was the demonstrable weakness of the intelligence relating to the two other Guantánamo detainees whose extradition was requested by Judge Garzón in December 2003. Garzón’s motives were not in doubt. In an interview for Mother Jones in 2004, he explained to Tim Golden why he was stringently opposed to the Americans’ approach to the “War on Terror,” and why he favoured “a multinational, legal approach over what he describe[d] as a ‘militaristic’ strategy of intelligence gathering, extrajudicial arrests, and military detention.” “What frightens me is when people start going beyond the limits of the law,” he said. “Taking the right to a defense away from those who are detained at Guantánamo. Establishing a license to kill terrorists. In this country, we know what it means to use this heavy hand. We know that when the fight against terrorism moves outside the law, it becomes very dangerous.”

As an example of Garzón’s legal approach to the post-9/11 world, Tim Golden observed that an indictment of Osama bin Laden that was issued by Garzón in autumn 2003, which was the first such document to charge bin Laden in connection with the 9/11 attack, “echoed his insistence that even the most terrible criminals on earth should be dealt with in courts of law.” Garzón also defended his extradition request for the four Guantánamo detainees –- Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes, Moroccan-born Lahcen Ikassrien, and Hamed Abderrahman Ahmed, from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in north Africa –- “arguing pointedly that the only standing charges against them were those he had filed in Spain.”

Despite Garzón’s enthusiasm for the law, however, when Lahcen Ikassrien and Hamed Ahmed were extradited from Guantánamo to Spain, at his request, the cases against them collapsed.

Ahmed, transferred in February 2004, had the dubious distinction of being the first Guantánamo detainee to be handed over to a foreign country for prosecution. Released on bail in July 2004, he was later put on trial and was sentenced to six years in prison in October 2005, although Garzón’s claims did not even figure in his trial. Instead, he was convicted based on allegations by the prosecution that he had travelled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to fight for the Taliban government, and had received religious and military training. However, in a momentous decision by the Spanish Supreme Court in July 2006, his sentence was dismissed. The Supreme Court ordered his immediate release, and said that the High Court had not considered him “innocent until proven guilty,” and had used evidence collected at Guantánamo that “should be declared totally void and, as such, non-existent,” adding that the High Court was “entirely remiss in its role of providing evidence.”

Ikassrien, transferred in July 2005, was released on his return, but was ordered to report daily to the police, and was prohibited from leaving the country without permission. When his trial came around, he, like Hamed Ahmed, had his case dismissed by the Supreme Court, which concluded, in October 2006, that there was no evidence to back up charges he was a member of al-Qaeda, stating, “It has not been proved that the accused Lahcen Ikassrien was part of a terrorist organization of Islamic fundamentalist nature, and more specifically, the al-Qaeda network created by [Osama] bin Laden.” Significantly, the Supreme Court’s judgment followed another momentous decision, four months before, to quash the conviction of Imad Yarkas, the lynchpin of the whole case against Hamed Ahmed, Lahcen Ikassrien, Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes, for conspiracy to commit murder in the 9/11 attacks, although his conviction for belonging to a terrorist organization was upheld.

With only these examples of failed prosecutions to draw upon, the position taken by the Spanish government is, frankly, incomprehensible. As Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes attempt to rebuild their shattered lives in the bosom of their families, it is to be hoped that their lawyers can draw compelling arguments from these cases –- and from other examples of Spanish intelligence failures –- before the extradition hearings begin on January 9, 2008.

Jamil El-Banna reunited with his children, December 21, 2007.

For more on the stories of the British residents and Hamed Ahmed, see my newly released book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For more on Lahcen Ikassrien’s story, see the additional, online chapter here.

As published on Indymedia.

For the rest of the extradition story, see here, here and here.

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

This additional chapter complements Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 14 detainees not mentioned in the book, who were captured in the Tora Bora mountains, or in the city of Jalalabad, at the time of the US military’s much-hyped but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to kill or capture a significant group of al-Qaeda and senior Taliban leaders –- including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri –- who were holed up in the mountains in November and December 2001.

To mark the occasion of the book launch, I’d also like to thank the various organizations who have interviewed me over the last few weeks: in particular, the teams at the BBC World Service’s “The World Today” and “Outlook,” who interviewed me on October 10 and November 15, and Nihal and his young, enthusiastic crew at the BBC Asian Network, who welcomed me in Shepherd’s Bush on November 7. I’d also like to thank Press TV for their hospitality, and for familiarizing me on several occasions with the various traffic-choked routes to Ealing.

Thanks also to Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy for publicizing the book and the launch, Chris at ZNet for welcoming me on board, Mark Thwaite at the Book Depository for his review, in which he described the book as “shocking and vital,” the Canadian campaigning group Justice for Mohamed Harkat for highlighting the book’s publication, and Eleanor at the Care2 News Network for publicizing it to the network’s many readers. Thanks also to Marc Falkoff, editor of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, for mentioning me in a fascinating interview in the Pennsylvania Gazette, in which he talks at length about the plight of Abdul Farhan Abdul Latif, one of the 17 Yemeni detainees that he represents, and to Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and a savage critic of the cabal currently running the White House, who plugged The Guantánamo Files in a powerful article on CounterPunch, lamenting the decline of the United States.

Details of further promotional events for The Guantánamo Files –- in London, Glasgow, Cambridge and Sheffield –- will follow soon.

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

Those of you who visited this site in the first few months after I started writing articles about Guantánamo and related issues –- on May 31 this year, after the death of a fourth detainee in Guantánamo, a Saudi named Abdul Rahman al-Rami (posts here and here) –- may recall that, in the introduction to my website at the time, I promised not only that I would be posting articles on a regular basis (and I have now produced 100 full-length articles, opinion pieces and news reports in just over five months), but also that I would provide these additional chapters to coincide with the book’s publication, and I’m pleased to be able to honour my promise. The other chapters will follow, hopefully at regular intervals, over the next few months.

This first additional chapter complements Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of the detainees not mentioned in the book, who, after surrendering to the Northern Alliance in November 2001, during the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban-held city in northern Afghanistan, survived a massacre at the Qala-i-Janghi fort in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

To mark these two occasions (the book publication, and my 100th post), I’d also like to thank the websites –- in particular, CounterPunch, the Huffington Post, and Antiwar.com –- who have been publishing my articles over the last five months and helping to bring some of my particular concerns to a wider public. These include the rampant injustice of the Bush administration, the corrosive influence of Dick Cheney and David Addington, the ongoing saga of the Guantánamo whistleblowers, the significance of the illegal detention of the US “enemy combatants” Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, the stumbling progress of the Stalinesque show trials known as Military Commissions, the stories of the 64 detainees released since June 2007, and attempts by the US and UK administrations to return prisoners to countries where they face the risk of torture.

I’d also like to thanks others who have been extremely supportive, especially Cageprisoners, who have publicized almost my entire output, Mike Otterman, who invited me to post articles on American Torture, and Index on Censorship, who published an article and excerpts from the book in their latest issue. I’m also grateful to Indymedia, whose open publishing policy has provided an additional forum. Others who have shown more than a passing interest include The Talking Dog, Candace Gorman’s Guantánamo Blog, Nth Position, and Dhafir Trial (highlighting the plight of the wrongly imprisoned US charity fundraiser, Dr. Rafil Dhafir). Thanks are also due to Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, and a host of lawyers, activists and journalists whose support and advice has been invaluable. You know who you 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.